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Dec. 2nd, 2007 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaSomething that's been nagging in the back of my mind.
DP: Besides, creating "Sue-like" qualities for my character was actually planned. She goes out into the world being a know it all, and soon finds out, "Oh, snap! Maybe I ain't so perfect after all!" And who doesn't want to see the "perfect" character get a harsh wake-up call?
DF: If the idea of all of this is to show a character who thinks she's perfect being knocked off her high horse, then you need to make it sound like it if you plan to make your readers keep reading beyond the first chapter or two. Most importantly, you should not make all the information about how great she is come from the emotionally detached but oddly biased narrator, but from Lisa herself. I'd have seen immense amounts of potential in this story if only you'd had the sense to write your first chapters in such a way that my first impression was not "Lisa is teh überawesome" but "Lisa thinks she is teh überawesome, seriously needs a slap in the face, and is probably going to get one"...
It is possible to write a character like Lisa right.
I see this, or something like this, a lot with the longer multichapter sues. There's no way, really, of knowing if the claims it's all part of the author's master plan are true, but judging by how it seems to work, I've constructed a theoretical timeline.
First chapters: My character is awesome.
First critical reviews: Why are people saying my character isn't awesome? She is!
Repeated use of term "mary sue": Wow, those characters are awful. I'm glad my character is, instead, awesome. ::point flies merrily over head::
More mentions of mary sue: My thoughts on how she is not a sue, let me show you them.
Middle chapters: Although my character is totally not a mary sue and all her traits are justified and made of awesome, maybe I shouldn't go with my first impulse this chapter to give her a rainbow mew, because people might think she is.
Positive reviews: Wow, they really liked that!
Less positive reviews about early chapters: You just don't know how awesome the later chapters are!
Squeeing review about how character is not a mary sue: Thanks! I'd love to read your story too!...Sweet Jesus, Crystal Rainbow Butterfly Serenity is awful. A total sue! I want to gouge my eyes out rather than finish reading!...why were you saying she reminded you of my character?
Reviews using the term "mary sue": She is not, bitch!
Reviews not using the term "mary sue" but pretty much saying it: I'll fix it, jeez.
Later chapters: Oh, fuck, I can't fix it.
Later chapters: And she's starting to remind me of Crystal Rainbow Butterfly Serenity, so much I'm starting to hate her.
Later chapters: But I've already written so much...
Later chapters: Oh god now everyone's going to think I'm a bad author, I wrote a sue...
Later reviews, still using the term "mary sue": Shut up it's deliberate! I meant to write a sue and then bitchslap her forty chapters in!
Anyway, there are a couple of things that bother me about this more generally.
1) Why write a story that spends its time building up a character just to knock it down two hundred pages in? Anyone who was reading up to that point won't appreciate it, and anyone who would won't read up to that point.
There are stories where this is a legitimate tactic, but simply making a character everyone will hate, dragging it out for five months, then killing them, isn't one of them.
The better sue parodies that follow this format make the focus on what the character's done wrong, or the illogic of the setting, not simply abusing the character. This is also why most of these are short. There's no point in building up the character or dragging out the story when you just meant to rebuke a particular plot device. And if you're just making a revenge fantasy strawman, then there's no point at all. Writing "A character with ridiculously colored hair is brutally dismembered" is not stellar writing. At least the average suefic has potential.
Longer stories in this style are really hard to pull off, and you can't just write a sue and decide midway through you hate her. If characters are fawning over the sue for twenty straight chapters, and then on the twenty-first, they say she's an evil bitch and abandon her, it's not any better.
2) There's the issue of internal verses external. Lucki worked largely because it was internal character flaws that cause her downfall. She doesn't deserve it because Flare can beat a water type, she deserves it because her response afterward is to chide him for collapsing.
If your character has no internal character flaws, and her sueishness is largely external – money, items, fame, skill – then there's no possible denouncement. "Oh, just because you're a child genius who succeeded at everything you tried, you thought you could be a trainer?"
That's not a wakeup call. That's changing the rules midway through and punishing the character to take attention off your screwup. If you have a character with the ability to fly, and midway through realize it's sueish, then have them jump off a building and fall to their death...that's not punishing them for being too perfect, any more than it'd be if you had a stroke that disabled your legs, and fell when you tried to get up. How dare you expect you could walk just because you could a few minutes ago, you know-it-all twit?
It doesn't matter how you handle this. Even taking Dragonfree's advice here, which in general is a good idea, the distinction between the narration saying "Sue graduated from medical school at the age of three before going back to Harvard to get a degree in quantum physics" and Sue saying the same is minuscule. If she's that great, there's nothing wrong with saying as much. The problem is she shouldn't be that great in the first place. Short of writing the character as completely deluded, if the objective narration agrees she really is that special, it doesn't matter who says it. The character isn't arrogant. She's not exaggerating her own abilities or thinking success in one area means she's perfect in all of them. She really is that absurdly great in those areas, and those areas really are broad enough to justify her confidence at everything else.
Why should Lisa get a slap in the face for being successful and rich? Because it's ridiculous? Well, it is, but it's also the objective truth. Sure, her fashion babble is tooth-grindingly awful, but that she can somehow successfully walk on dirt roads in high heels isn't her fault. She's not dumb for doing things that work in her world, even if they shouldn't.
Capitalist-style sueishness can't be fixed by punishing the character. It's not their fault they're rich and know three dozen fighting styles as well as being world chess champion and a famous model. You may irritate your readers to the point they want the character dead to make the specialness stop, but they probably don't distinguish between her dead and you dead so you'll stop writing the damn thing. And there's nothing much enjoyable about it – the reason they want the character punished is because you've annoyed them in the first place, and they'd be happier if they'd never read it.
Not all characters can be written properly. Sometimes, you really do need to sit down and accept that nothing short of a complete rewrite will fix the story.
Or, to put this in other terms... The whole Bleach/FMA/God-knows-what-other-anime plagiartastic fic made me tempted to write CCS with Pokemon and post it for the lulz.
Why don't I? Because the story itself needs to stand on its own. Lucki isn't simply a suefic that I end with "haha, got you, you idiots!", and Butterfly Wings isn't a sue that runs around while Sora fawns over her that I'll end with "LOL Sora was so out of character this whole time because there's no way he'd like her otherwise!" Copying something stupid and then saying it's dumb in the last chapter...what's the point of that?
DP: Besides, creating "Sue-like" qualities for my character was actually planned. She goes out into the world being a know it all, and soon finds out, "Oh, snap! Maybe I ain't so perfect after all!" And who doesn't want to see the "perfect" character get a harsh wake-up call?
DF: If the idea of all of this is to show a character who thinks she's perfect being knocked off her high horse, then you need to make it sound like it if you plan to make your readers keep reading beyond the first chapter or two. Most importantly, you should not make all the information about how great she is come from the emotionally detached but oddly biased narrator, but from Lisa herself. I'd have seen immense amounts of potential in this story if only you'd had the sense to write your first chapters in such a way that my first impression was not "Lisa is teh überawesome" but "Lisa thinks she is teh überawesome, seriously needs a slap in the face, and is probably going to get one"...
It is possible to write a character like Lisa right.
I see this, or something like this, a lot with the longer multichapter sues. There's no way, really, of knowing if the claims it's all part of the author's master plan are true, but judging by how it seems to work, I've constructed a theoretical timeline.
First chapters: My character is awesome.
First critical reviews: Why are people saying my character isn't awesome? She is!
Repeated use of term "mary sue": Wow, those characters are awful. I'm glad my character is, instead, awesome. ::point flies merrily over head::
More mentions of mary sue: My thoughts on how she is not a sue, let me show you them.
Middle chapters: Although my character is totally not a mary sue and all her traits are justified and made of awesome, maybe I shouldn't go with my first impulse this chapter to give her a rainbow mew, because people might think she is.
Positive reviews: Wow, they really liked that!
Less positive reviews about early chapters: You just don't know how awesome the later chapters are!
Squeeing review about how character is not a mary sue: Thanks! I'd love to read your story too!...Sweet Jesus, Crystal Rainbow Butterfly Serenity is awful. A total sue! I want to gouge my eyes out rather than finish reading!...why were you saying she reminded you of my character?
Reviews using the term "mary sue": She is not, bitch!
Reviews not using the term "mary sue" but pretty much saying it: I'll fix it, jeez.
Later chapters: Oh, fuck, I can't fix it.
Later chapters: And she's starting to remind me of Crystal Rainbow Butterfly Serenity, so much I'm starting to hate her.
Later chapters: But I've already written so much...
Later chapters: Oh god now everyone's going to think I'm a bad author, I wrote a sue...
Later reviews, still using the term "mary sue": Shut up it's deliberate! I meant to write a sue and then bitchslap her forty chapters in!
Anyway, there are a couple of things that bother me about this more generally.
1) Why write a story that spends its time building up a character just to knock it down two hundred pages in? Anyone who was reading up to that point won't appreciate it, and anyone who would won't read up to that point.
There are stories where this is a legitimate tactic, but simply making a character everyone will hate, dragging it out for five months, then killing them, isn't one of them.
The better sue parodies that follow this format make the focus on what the character's done wrong, or the illogic of the setting, not simply abusing the character. This is also why most of these are short. There's no point in building up the character or dragging out the story when you just meant to rebuke a particular plot device. And if you're just making a revenge fantasy strawman, then there's no point at all. Writing "A character with ridiculously colored hair is brutally dismembered" is not stellar writing. At least the average suefic has potential.
Longer stories in this style are really hard to pull off, and you can't just write a sue and decide midway through you hate her. If characters are fawning over the sue for twenty straight chapters, and then on the twenty-first, they say she's an evil bitch and abandon her, it's not any better.
2) There's the issue of internal verses external. Lucki worked largely because it was internal character flaws that cause her downfall. She doesn't deserve it because Flare can beat a water type, she deserves it because her response afterward is to chide him for collapsing.
If your character has no internal character flaws, and her sueishness is largely external – money, items, fame, skill – then there's no possible denouncement. "Oh, just because you're a child genius who succeeded at everything you tried, you thought you could be a trainer?"
That's not a wakeup call. That's changing the rules midway through and punishing the character to take attention off your screwup. If you have a character with the ability to fly, and midway through realize it's sueish, then have them jump off a building and fall to their death...that's not punishing them for being too perfect, any more than it'd be if you had a stroke that disabled your legs, and fell when you tried to get up. How dare you expect you could walk just because you could a few minutes ago, you know-it-all twit?
It doesn't matter how you handle this. Even taking Dragonfree's advice here, which in general is a good idea, the distinction between the narration saying "Sue graduated from medical school at the age of three before going back to Harvard to get a degree in quantum physics" and Sue saying the same is minuscule. If she's that great, there's nothing wrong with saying as much. The problem is she shouldn't be that great in the first place. Short of writing the character as completely deluded, if the objective narration agrees she really is that special, it doesn't matter who says it. The character isn't arrogant. She's not exaggerating her own abilities or thinking success in one area means she's perfect in all of them. She really is that absurdly great in those areas, and those areas really are broad enough to justify her confidence at everything else.
Why should Lisa get a slap in the face for being successful and rich? Because it's ridiculous? Well, it is, but it's also the objective truth. Sure, her fashion babble is tooth-grindingly awful, but that she can somehow successfully walk on dirt roads in high heels isn't her fault. She's not dumb for doing things that work in her world, even if they shouldn't.
Capitalist-style sueishness can't be fixed by punishing the character. It's not their fault they're rich and know three dozen fighting styles as well as being world chess champion and a famous model. You may irritate your readers to the point they want the character dead to make the specialness stop, but they probably don't distinguish between her dead and you dead so you'll stop writing the damn thing. And there's nothing much enjoyable about it – the reason they want the character punished is because you've annoyed them in the first place, and they'd be happier if they'd never read it.
Not all characters can be written properly. Sometimes, you really do need to sit down and accept that nothing short of a complete rewrite will fix the story.
Or, to put this in other terms... The whole Bleach/FMA/God-knows-what-other-anime plagiartastic fic made me tempted to write CCS with Pokemon and post it for the lulz.
Why don't I? Because the story itself needs to stand on its own. Lucki isn't simply a suefic that I end with "haha, got you, you idiots!", and Butterfly Wings isn't a sue that runs around while Sora fawns over her that I'll end with "LOL Sora was so out of character this whole time because there's no way he'd like her otherwise!" Copying something stupid and then saying it's dumb in the last chapter...what's the point of that?
