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"In the beginning forget about your feelings. When the inner conditions are prepared, and right, feelings will come to the surface of their own accord."
--Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

"It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."
--Andy Warhol

"[...] I'm secretly ashamed to be attracted to Pamela Anderson. Somehow, it makes me feel stupid. It's almost like desiring Pam Anderson is like admitting that--sexually--you have no creativity. [...] I would somehow feel smarter if what I wanted was [...] a model with a mantis-like skeleton body, like Kate Moss. I profoundly prefer to be turned on by any woman who looks vaguely fucked-up; that's much more intellectually satisfying. And I know dozens of men who have completely talked themselves into this way of thinking, so much so that they don't even realize they're overcompensating [...]. What I've come to realize is that a remarkably high percentage of everyday citizens [...] actively despise Pam Anderson. [...] But what they really hate is the modern world; what they hate is that Pamela Anderson is the incarnation of the perfect, idealized icon we all sort of concede is supposed to be impossible. We've established this unrealistic image of what we want from the human race, but it angers people to see that image in real life. It sort of shows why most Americans hate themselves."
--Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

"Has a cheer leading sqaud ew puke me out, such a mary-sue story your story WAS crappy to begin with but no it's getting unbearable to read any more of it, but I need to be amused so I'll read the rest of it. *Stabs Serena the ugly mary-sue bitch, DIE DIE DIE* (*Stabs the author also*)"
--"Nayla", review for Harry Potter fanfic Changes



I came across this Harry Potter fanfic a few months ago and it and its reviews made quite an impression on me. It is sixteen chapters long and has 175 reviews, a handful of which are bad like the one above but most of which are very positive. It's certainly not a great story...it's about Voldemort's daughter who gets a makeover and has a crush on Sirius and was obviously written by a teenage girl. But I genuinely enjoyed reading it and found it and the writer quite endearing because she clearly was genuinely enjoying writing it.

Then I looked at the reviews and like I said they were overwhelmingly positive. But there were two that really chafed my dish. The first was the one from "Nayla", quoted in its entirety above. I'm not opposed to bad reviews but I found this one quite disturbing. Why are people so violent about the "Mary Sue" concept? So it's bad writing, so what? Why do people hate the Mary Sue so much more passionately than the undeveloped plotline, the stilted dialogue, the clumsy denouement, the uninformed backstory? Is it because the Mary Sue is a person, and so it's easier to direct emotions at an athropomorphic representation of bad writing? At any rate, why do people care so much?

Full disclosure: I am not a compassionate person. I really, really am not. I don't like children, I hate chick flicks, I delete e-mails about the healing power of love, and I didn't like those cystic fibrosis sisters on America's Got Talent. But it pains my stunted misshapen heart to imagine a young girl having fun with a book she likes and then being told that she deserves to be stabbed. Seriously? I mean, I enjoy those snark communities but I don't see why some people take it so seriously. The universe is kind of a big place; Mary Sues are not actually a very big deal. It's like getting offended if a little kid draws a picture of a dog with five legs. Make fun of it, by all means, but you just look stupid if you get all intense about it...

SO THEN!

So then I read another review, from someone calling herself "Tea". This one was very long and aroused many different reactions in me.

"I absolutely can't stand these teenybopper stories," it began. "I would have liked [Serena, the main character] a lot more if you kept her the way she was, smart, shy, quiet and ordinary looking. Most readers like characters that they can relate to and I just can't relate to a perfect and popular girl."

Now this review was written seven years ago (!) so who can say what Tea thinks today, but my response to this is mainly, "so?" In a 675-word review this person said nothing that convinced me to care. Why should this story cater to her? If people like characters they relate to, and you relate to smart shy unattractive people, so what? What about the dumb outgoing good-looking people in the world? Maybe they like characters they relate to too. So what if you can't relate to a perfect popular girl? The writer of this story wrote it the way she did because that was the way she wanted to write it. Why should she write it a different way just to please you? Why is what you want better than what she wants?

"Maybe my opinion is slightly biased," Tea continues, "because my circle of friends and I are the quiet and studious type. And all the so-called 'popular' kids go to parties and get fake tans and almost everyone had blonde highlights, and if they ever make obnoxious comments in the class, they're not being bastards, they're being 'charming' and everyone loves them for it."

I'm really not sure why I feel so defensive of the girl who wrote this story. It's something quite new to me; I've read plenty of mediocre fanfiction in my time, and I've read plenty of lukewarm reviews, but I've never gotten so angry about it before. I've never met the writer, I didn't get emotionally invested in her story's outcome (lucky thing, since it was never completed), I don't even "see myself" in her, not to mention the fact that this happened almost a decade ago and she is actually older than I am. But let me tell you something I'm good at. I am awesome at hypocrisy. Various aspects of my personality combine in such a way that if someone says something that doesn't make sense, it sticks out to me right away. I see contradictions like Miss Cleo pretends to see the future and here there seemed to be an illustration of hypocritical injustice that really resonated with me...

"They think just because I'm introverted I can never achieve anything and that no 'cool' guy would ever want me. I must be stupid to think that because I'm not stunningly beautiful and because I'm shy that I could ever be happy."

BAM holy shit what the fuck was that. Honestly it seems to me like the self-labelled "unpopular misfits" create a lot of drama and ill will that is not actually there. People like to draw "the so-called 'popular' kids" as these inherently malicious creatures but uh...I think you're forgetting what "popular" means? Popular people would not be popular if people didn't like them...if people didn't like them, they would be UNpopular. Thank you. Let he who is without sin, glass houses, etc., but um it's kind of ridiculous to accuse people of making assumptions about you when you are making assumptions that they are making assumptions about you. You're lumping people into a group and labelling them as "people who lump people into groups and label them". You are effectively stereotyping people as stereotypers. It may be rather beautiful, in an ironic picture-of-a-picture-of-a-picture way, but you know what. IT'S IGNORANT.

"Popularity does not equal happiness. I wish that once, just once, I could actially find a movie or TV series that stared someone who didn't look great, didn't have guys chasing after her and who was, God forbid, shy."

Um...how about every other movie, ever? It seems to me like practically every young adult romance novel is about a girl like this. A slightly dweeby girl likes a popular boy who "doesn't know she exists" so she gets a makeover to attract his attention but in the end learns ostensibly to accept herself. It's a formula literally ENGINEERED so that these shy average girls can relate to the main character.

And you know what?

I never, ever related to her.

It's a very alienating experience, to realize that you can't relate to someone who is designed specifically so that the maximum number of people can relate to her.

This is a big reason why I came up with Delilah. Writing characters for relatability is essentially writing to indulge your audience and capitalize on their emotions. Not that there's anything wrong with that I guess...but I would hardly consider it a hallmark of fine literature. If you ask me a good character isn't necessarily a character you can relate to...I wouldn't even necessarily say that a good character is a flawed character...a good character is a character whose actions make sense, whose behavior is coherent. When you write a character, don't judge him...JUSTIFY him. People don't act on an arbitrary basis; the things they do make sense.

Self-inserts are often considered synonymous with Mary Sues...and I think that caused a lot of the bitterness directed toward the writer of this story. From her chatty author's notes you can ascertain that Serena is basically her. So what's wrong with that? Why shouldn't she write a character just like her, if it's okay for Tea to want a character just like her? The thing is, from a good writer, a self-insert--ANY self-insert--should always be a good character, because if a good character is a realistic character...what's more realistic than a real person?

"I hate how our culture is always telling us how shy and ugly are bad. It's true, that is how it is in real life, but you don't have to change yourself, especially your looks, in order to be happy."

In this our postmodern climate, I think that we are as a group very aware of clichés thanks to so much exposure to the media through the ubiquitous movies, books, television, etc., all to the point that today we have clichés ABOUT clichés. And I think this is one of the most pervasive, this idea that good-looking people are inferior because of so many important lessons about how "looks aren't everything" or "beauty is only skin-deep" or whatever. It becomes this idea that unattractive people are more special, or deeper, or superior in some way. And this seems to be especially true of men. There seem to be so many women who brag about how looks don't matter to them, how they don't care if guys are good-looking, some even going so far as to say they would NOT date model-attractive men on principle. There's this weird thing where attractive men are automatically judged as being vain and conceited...it's actually sexist in both directions that women aren't victims of the same prejudice. It's misandristic because it implies that men are only physically attractive if they care too much about the way they look, while women can be attractive and humble simultaneously...and it's misogynistic because it implies that it's only acceptable for women to be attractive, reducing them uniquely to sexual objects. It's saying that men have to choose between being attractive and being likable, but women can be both, that it's okay for women to be sexually appealing but not men, that being sexy is (or should be) a female trait.

At this point, with the cliché-cliché-cliché layer cake, I find myself wanting not to attack stereotypes, but to defend them, partly because I'm just contrary and partly because the very act of attacking clichés is a fucking cliché now, you've seen it a million fucking times, the "parodies" of Mary Sue stories that are sinfully unfunny. Calling out clichés isn't new, it isn't original, it isn't clever or subversive. It has been done. Repeatedly.

And yet people still do it. I think I figured out what it was I liked about this Harry Potter fanfic--the girl writing it was not trying to impress anybody. She wasn't writing to show off, to convince the readers of her own intelligence, to bathe in her own opinion of herself. It was a completely unpretentious act. I feel like with a lot of these Mary Sue parodies it's very self-indulgent in that the person writing it is doing so to reaffirm their own savviness. People are so afraid to look stupid. But what's wrong with stupid...?

To break up this post, here's something I made while messing around in Paint Shop Pro...



I used to love making these little dolls back when I was thirteenish...I'm kinda rusty now, but it looks better than anything I made in eighth grade, lol.

If you have anything you'd like to say about fanfiction, Mary Sues, stereotyping, etc., feel free to contribute your thoughts! :)