Mary Sues, and getting what you want

[owlectomy]

We got to talking about Mary Sues in writer chat. And I got to thinking.

I'm not sure it's possible for fiction to have nothing to do with wish fulfillment.

You want to be an elven vampire with lavender eyes. You want to be the world's youngest, sexiest, and most competent airship pilot. You want to save the world and have everybody love you for it, or maybe they don't love you for it and you can treasure your martyr complex.

Or, you want to be broken and traumatized and have everyone pity you and take care of you. Or you want to die prettily so that everyone can realize how much they wronged you. There's other kinds of Mary Sue besides perfect-and-competent.

As we get older, and certainly as we read these same kinds of stories over and over and over, those wishes start to seem naive and embarrassing and over-revealing, and the stories where it's too convenient and too easy don't work any more.

But I don't know that we can fully get away from wish-fulfillment. Because even if you don't want to be an elven vampire with lavender eyes, you want. To believe that justice and true love win out, to believe that people are good at heart, to believe that there is meaning in the universe and that there is closure to the open wounds and emotional loose ends of your life, to believe that someday this pain will be useful to you. Or maybe you convince yourself that you don't want any of that, or don't believe in it, and you read Chuck Pahlaniuk to convince yourself how macho you are.

Take a book like "Paper Towns," by John Green. Thematically, it's about how people are never the images of themselves that we build in our heads, and people are never the people we want them to be. Quentin doesn't get the girl. He doesn't get to rescue the girl. Instead of his friends supporting his noble quest, they think he's kind of a jerk about his weird obsession. But still - he gets emotional closure. And reading the end of that book, the sense of bittersweet yearning is at least on the same level as being an elven vampire with lavender eyes.

I can say that stories work better for me when the protagonist gets not what she wants, but what she needs; when she's thwarted, often severely, by her own realistic not-cute faults and weaknesses; when writers don't fall back on the loudest, oldest ways of showing you how special their characters are. But we're not going to outrun wish fulfillment. And if the alternative is unrelenting bleakness, do we even want to?

Comments

[raanve]

I love this entry. I think you've really hit on something.

I've had that fear that the character I'm writing is just another Mary Sue. I so don't want her to be that, but I think it's hard to get away from (at least in the first draft stage of things). Still, it's my hope that even if I can't escape it entirely, there will still be someone who identifies with her and wants to read about her.

And yeah... in so many ways, I think that this is what fiction is for. (Well, this and Understanding Each Other.)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I sometimes wonder if the derision of Mary Sues is making writers back off from writing from a place of yearning and passion -

I think the trick is getting the yearning and passion and not the ego. Which is not an easy trick.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

For me, it's about the prose, not about whether author is having some wish fulfillment thought hir book. I don't care what the author's personal RL wishes are or whether hir book fulfills or addresses them; I only care whether the prose smacks of that, in a way that rises above the other elements of the book and smacks me in the face with obviousness.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

"Obviousness" was the wrong word for me to use because it implies that some kind of truth is being shown. Again, I don't care of the book is wish fulfillment for the author; I would call it a Mary Sue only if the prose smacks of author wish fulfillment, whether or not it's actually happening.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Right...

It makes me nervous when critics start trying to psychoanalyze an author based on their books, because really, it's not about the author or the author's ego or the author's psychological problems; it's about the book.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

Oh absolutely. I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked as a reviewer to surmise about an author's thoughts or feelings or intents, and I always refuse.

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

I think you're making an important distinction here. An author does need to feel the passion their protagonist feels, and that could very easily wander into MS territory (or be perceived as such). I compare it to live theatre: you have to really get inside your character's skin to think things through and understand how they're reacting.