30 days of fanfiction meme (day 8)
Jul. 8th, 2011 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia8 – Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.
As someone who has, after all, won a fandom-wide Best Mary Sue award in the past, I think Mary Sue is way more of a bad word than it needs to be - symptom of systematized unconscious misogyny, the works. To build on my last post but one: faced with a canon with no female characters, or no good female characters, it's a natural goddamned reaction to want to redress the scale, give one's own (female) POV an avatar, a way into interacting with the universe. Not everyone solves the dilemma by learning (even preferring) to imagine themselves male.
Baby fans write the bulk of these stories, before they learn they're not supposed to, which admittedly creates quality issues in the aggregate. But it's baby fans who read them, too. There is and always will be an audience. Eventually, I suppose, everyone is meant to grow out of them and figure out less obvious and embarrassing ways of scratching one's id in public, and if one doesn't... time to break out the girl-on-girl shame stick! On the other hand, Stephanie Meyer snorkels in artificial lakes filled with $100 bills, so I'm not making a judgment call on who missed the boat.
From the perspective of someone who is indeed too old not to click the back button on Mary Sue, the worst thing about endemic Sue-phobia is that one has to worry about ridiculousness like "whether or not one's OC is a Mary Sue". For cripes' sake. If the story is longer than 10K words and is not set entirely in a private bedroom, a dreamscape, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland... you get my drift. Sometimes you're trying to make a point, like "there are 475 other people on this starship". Sometimes you invent an OC to make the plot work, and the ongoing canon later introduces a similar new character, because the creator(s) identified the same structural requirement you did. Sometimes, like dudes in real life, dudes in fiction are liable to encounter a beautiful, intelligent woman in the course of their lives. The constraint you do have is the one you would have in original fiction, i.e. tell this story with this protagonist, without either letting a supporting character (that you identify with more) take over, or reducing the supporting cast to ciphers meant to elicit action and emotion from the main character, without internal life of their own.
As someone who has, after all, won a fandom-wide Best Mary Sue award in the past, I think Mary Sue is way more of a bad word than it needs to be - symptom of systematized unconscious misogyny, the works. To build on my last post but one: faced with a canon with no female characters, or no good female characters, it's a natural goddamned reaction to want to redress the scale, give one's own (female) POV an avatar, a way into interacting with the universe. Not everyone solves the dilemma by learning (even preferring) to imagine themselves male.
Baby fans write the bulk of these stories, before they learn they're not supposed to, which admittedly creates quality issues in the aggregate. But it's baby fans who read them, too. There is and always will be an audience. Eventually, I suppose, everyone is meant to grow out of them and figure out less obvious and embarrassing ways of scratching one's id in public, and if one doesn't... time to break out the girl-on-girl shame stick! On the other hand, Stephanie Meyer snorkels in artificial lakes filled with $100 bills, so I'm not making a judgment call on who missed the boat.
From the perspective of someone who is indeed too old not to click the back button on Mary Sue, the worst thing about endemic Sue-phobia is that one has to worry about ridiculousness like "whether or not one's OC is a Mary Sue". For cripes' sake. If the story is longer than 10K words and is not set entirely in a private bedroom, a dreamscape, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland... you get my drift. Sometimes you're trying to make a point, like "there are 475 other people on this starship". Sometimes you invent an OC to make the plot work, and the ongoing canon later introduces a similar new character, because the creator(s) identified the same structural requirement you did. Sometimes, like dudes in real life, dudes in fiction are liable to encounter a beautiful, intelligent woman in the course of their lives. The constraint you do have is the one you would have in original fiction, i.e. tell this story with this protagonist, without either letting a supporting character (that you identify with more) take over, or reducing the supporting cast to ciphers meant to elicit action and emotion from the main character, without internal life of their own.
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Date: 2011-07-08 03:45 pm (UTC)Oh Sabina. :D
Enjoying these, keep it up!
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Date: 2011-07-08 05:09 pm (UTC)