Name: I Love You, Mary (I Love You, Mary )
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:06:36.000Z
Duration: 10 min 45 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

I'm Jill Bearup, this is History of Fanfic,
and gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky, there's

a joke going around Tumblr which reads
'What's the name for a male Mary Sue?

So today we're going to talk about this
most maligned of character tropes, because

she's emblematic of a certain kind of writing,
yes, but you know what?

There are two pretty loose definitions of
Mary Sue and we're going to need to disentangle

ONE: A Mary Sue is an idealised self-insert
character who appears in fanfiction and proceeds

to warp the canon around her in ways which
are detrimental to the quality of the story,

the internal consistency of the universe,
or both.

TWO: A Mary Sue is a (usually female) character
in any medium that the opinion-haver doesn't

like because of their perceived perfection.

By definition two, Rey could be a Mary Sue.

It doesn't actually matter, it's just
a shorthand way of saying 'this character's

wide-ranging skill set and/or personal qualities
are unrealistic TO ME'.

George Eliot was on record as hate hate HATING
this kind of character, the product of LADY

And if you're thinking wait, yes, you're
right, George Eliot was in fact, a lady herself.

But a middle-class one rather than a member
of the landed gentry.

George Eliot felt that she couldn't publish
under her own name because nobody took lady-fiction

AND WHY WOULD THEY, she lamented in an 1856
essay entitled SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS,

when lady novelists all write such perfect
simpering heroines who are Too Pure And Good

That literary pedigree aside, we're mostly
not going to be tackling that kind of Mary

Sue today, because at its worst it's basically
a meaningless phrase.

ANY original character could feel unrealistic
to ANY person and that's just too vague

So, idealised author-insert style character,
generally in fanfiction.

A TREKKIE'S TALE By Paula Smith was published
in 1973 in the fanzine Menagerie.

The story itself is pretty short, but it's
also immortal.

"Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky," thought Mary
Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise.

"Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the
fleet - only fifteen and a half years old."

Here, take over the ship for a minute while
I go get some coffee for us."

"What are you doing in the command seat, Lieutenant?"

I'm not going to read the whole thing, though
it's not terribly long.

But it is, as you might just have noticed,
a parody story about the kind of girl who

Lieutenant Mary Sue combined most of the common
character traits of such individuals:

all men instantly fall at her feet,
and may die tragically at the end as she is

Highly skilled, universally desired, brave,
heroic and selfless.

We're all used to male power fantasies in
media: men who are strong, brave, heroic,

suave, debonair and ruthless, or actually
kind of nerdy and inept at things but it turns

out their ONE THING they're good at is going
to save the world.

I mean to a lesser extent we're also used
to female power fantasy characters in media.

But since the original series of Star Trek
wasn't exactly overburdened with an abundance

of female characters, if you're writing fanfic
for it, creating your own original character...seems

And it is interesting to note that while the
fandoms which are most Mary Sue-heavy do tend

to have a younger audience, they also tend
to be...canonically somewhat dude-rich.

After all, fanfiction is the usually young
usually female id run riot, and what is more

empowering than writing yourself into your
favourite media?

The Mary Sue disdain is then compounded by
the fact that the younger you are, the less

experience you've had, so the worse you
tend to be at writing, and so the more obvious

Mary Sues aren't great at having flaws,
and all of the flaws that they do have (like

a bad temper is quite a common one) don't
actually serve to cause consequences or require

them to learn anything, they're just kind
of there to make them more badass and awesome.

But what really makes a Mary Sue for me is
that feeling you get when you read a story

and realise that none of the other characters
really feel real.

They're just cardboard props for you, Ebony
Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, to interact

[sigh] OK, yes, I'm sorry, we DO have to
talk about My Immortal, but I'm going to

My Immortal, presumably named after the Evanescence
song, is a Harry Potter fanfic, which was

published between 2006 and 2007, and is EITHER
the most perfectly unreadable satire of Mary

Sue ever,
OR some poor teenage writer's fanfic-based

Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven/Tara Way
is, in many ways, the epitome of Mary-Sueism.

The story in which she exists is incoherent,
rambling, not really structured...at all,