as small as a world and as large as alone

10:25am September 15, 2014

commanderbishoujo:

fyi

the term Mary Sue stems from an actual character named Mary Sue in a Star Trek fic way back in the stone age of the 70s that was written specifically to mock female Trek OCs for being badly written wish fulfillment vehicles for teenage girls

it was always specifically gendered and used to shit on female power fantasies in fanfiction

the fact that ppl can’t even agree on a comparable term for male characters (is it Gary Stu or Marty Stu?) should tell you something about its purpose

the types of legitimate criticisms we can make about these types of characters are not by any means restricted to them, nor are they restricted to female OCs

ergo why I always ask the question, “why do we need a specific, gendered term to describe a poorly written character?”

Replying to the tags:

#misogyny #I refuse to believe wish fulfillment writing is invalid to begin with #there’s obviously an audience for it #there’s like this weird ubermensch thing going on when people act like things written for personal reasons #can’t ever be legitimate ‘literature’ #even though writers have been doing it for centuries anyway #they’re just good at hiding it #or rather people give them the benefit of the doubt

…seriously.

My NaNoWriMo project is going to include a PoV character who is basically an alternate-universe me.  A me without what I call the gifts of Seshat, that allow me to write and read and understand language to the degree that I do.  She won’t really be me, she’ll have her own personality, but her form of autism is heavily based on me and her interests are heavily based on me and there’s no pretending that she’s not heavily autobiographical.

And I know people look down on that shit.

But I can’t bring myself to give a shit.  I am writing the story for a reason.  I badly want to turn it into a book.  I want to show certain things about human experiences that I can’t do in nonfiction.  And I’ve already got her a whole family planned out and everything.

I’ll write more in a separate post, I’m really excited about writing this story and nothing about how it’s “bad” to base characters on yourself can deter me from writing it because it really badly needs to be written.  I just hope NaNoWriMo will give me the structure and discipline needed to get a first draft written out.  I have high hopes, anyway – for some reason it just feels like this is the year I could do it, whereas I’ve never felt before like I could ever finish NaNoWriMo.

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