A week or so ago I did a post in which I compared contemporary iterations of Wonder Woman to Mary Sue. Mary Sue, for those not in the know, is the derogatory term given to an egregiously wonderful original character and/or author surrogate inserted into a piece of fan fiction. As many commenters noted in the comments to this post, the Mary Sue phenomena has many analogues in non-fan-fic texts, from D’artagnen to James Bond.
Anyway, everyone seemed to pretty much enjoy talking about Mary Sues, so we decided to do a roundtable on it. So I’m starting things off here.
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When I started thinking about Mary Sues in canon, one name that scuttled to mind was Snapper Carr. Who the hell is Snapper Carr, you ask? Well, as folks who have read way, way too many comics may or may not know, Snapper was a kind of mascot to the Justice League of America back in the titles early 1960s heydey under the creative team of (I believe) Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky. Anyway, Snapper was just some idiot kid who liked to snap his fingers, and who talked in a kind of bastardized, pseudo-hip patois, which sounded exactly as if it had been invented by clueless, middle-aged men trying desperately to connect with those darned kids. Nonetheless, despite his lack of powers, or skills, or, indeed, discernible brain activity, Snapper not only got to hang out with the Justice League, but actually helped them on their cases. Snapper’s debut occurred in a battle against Starro, the giant space starfish. If I remember correctly (and no, I’m not going to go reread the fucking comic. It was bad enough the first time.) Starro had mind-controlled much of a town, with only Snapper Carr unaffected, because he had no mind to control. No, actually, it was because he had been using lime on his lawn, and starfish don’t like lime. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is, for no real reason, Snapper held the key to defeating the intergalactic echinoderm, and so he got to be buddies with all the JLA’ers, and then he even stuck around for further adventures, until the inevitable happened and he was corrupted by Grant Morrison, given a short leather skirt and sent to destroy the JLA, at which point he was immediately annihilated becasue he STILL DIDN’T HAVE ANY FUCKING POWERS!
I don’t know, maybe that happened. Or not. (Actually, I think Snapper did get powers at some point in the 90s; something to do with super-powered snaps? No, really.) Anyway, here’s Wikipedia with a more sober analysis:
As the JLA could not have the sidekicks of all its members occasionally wandering through its secret headquarters, but needed a character to whom the reader could relate, the group needed a distinct character not associated with the home town of any of its members. In order to rationalize that an ordinary person could become an honorary member of the JLA, he had to be important to them at the moment of that group’s formation. The solution, devised by Gardner Fox: young Lucas — called “Snapper” for his penchant for snapping his fingers — is immune to Starro’s attacks, by the good fortune of his just having put lime on the lawn. It is Green Lantern who recalls that various sea invertebrates are susceptible to lime, and by these means, Starro is defeated.
The most pertinent part of that paragraph is the first sentence. Let’s repeat it, because, hey, what’s a few bytes between friends?
As the JLA could not have the sidekicks of all its members occasionally wandering through its secret headquarters, but needed a character to whom the reader could relate, the group needed a distinct character not associated with the home town of any of its members
Right; Snapper is there like the other sidekicks to give the juvenile readers someone to relate to; a young everyschmo who could buddy around with the super-heroes just like all the kiddies want to do. Since his point is gratuitous youth audience identification rather than gratuitous author identification, and since he’s just way-more-effective-than-he-should-be rather than actually the-most-effective-and-wonderful-person-in-the-world, he’s not exactly a Mary Sue, but he’s a kind of cousin, I think — a Snapper Sue, if you will.
Snapper Sues are kind of ubiquitous, in older comics especially — Speedy, Aqualad, Wonder Girl, and, of course, Robin all qualify. And they do show up in other venues as well; Wesley Crusher, for example, seems like a Snapper Sue, thrown in so kids can imagine how cool it would be if they were on the Enterprise with all those awesome heroic social workers.
The thing about Snapper Sues is…I mean, does anybody like this character? If you’re a kid, and you’re reading a super-hero comic, why do you need some Snapper Sue to identify with? Kids don’t in general seem to have any trouble pretending to be Batman, or Spider-Man, or Flash, often all within the space of a minute or two, if my own son is any indication. I mean, my kid likes Robin fine…but he doesn’t identify with him specially, or like him more than any other super-hero. And I can’t imagine him being at all interested in Snapper Carr — because, you know, the guy doesn’t have any powers. Where’s the fun in that? Similarly, I was fairly young (15) when Wesley Crusher first appeared…but, like everybody else, I didn’t identify with him; on the contrary, I loathed him. Or again, Zan and Jayna on the Super-friends — I never liked them; I was always like, what the hell are they doing there? Those aren’t real super-heroes; somebody please make them leave me alone.
In short, the whole phenomena just seems incredibly ill-conceived and confused, based on some bizarre idea that kids can’t’ identify with anyone older than they are. But, of course, kids prefer to identify with people older than they are. Kids like Batman; you don’t need Robin to sell the idea. And you certainly don’t need Snapper Carr. The more I think about stuff like this, the more I wonder…did those comic companies way back in the sixties even have marketing departments? And did the people in them drool and gibber, or did they mostly just drool?
There is at least one iteration of the Snapper Sue archetype that I think did actually work…or that, at least, seemed to make some kind of marginal marketing sense. That’s Kitty Pryde of X-Men fame. Kitty definitely fits the Snapper Sue model; she’s young, she seems clearly meant to be an object of identification, and she was, while not all powerful, definitely competent and resourceful to an extent that often started to seem like special pleading (saving all the other X-Men when she had barely started in the game; or turning into a super-ninja at the drop of a hat…I’m the only one that ever read any of that Kitty Pryde and Wolverine mini-series, aren’t I? Sorry; we will not speak of it again.)
Still, Kitty at least did have unique super-powers rather than just being a carbon-copy sidekick (Kid Colossus! Wolverboy! Storm Girl!) And, perhaps more to the point, she seemed to be an effort to pander to a demographic that could, in fact, stand to be pandered to. That is, Kitty seems aimed at tween girls. Tween girls have traditionally been something of a hard sell for super-hero comics. It therefore makes some kind of sense to try to reach out to them to expand your audience.
Again, I’m not saying Kitty Pryde was perfect. Giving her a name that sounds like a catfood brand seems like it was maybe a mistake, for example. And I honestly don’t have a sense of whether she was effective in appealing to young girls— though I will say that the X-Men of that era, with Storm and Phoenix and Kitty and later Rogue and others did seem to do relatively well in having a varied cast of female characters. But the point is, Snapper Carr couldn’t even in theory possibly appeal to anyone; Robin/Kid Flash/ad nauseum seem redundant, inasmuch as if they appealed to anyone, they’d appeal to the exact same people who were already identifying with the non-sidekick super-heroes anyway. Kitty at least seems like a Snapper Sue who you can look at and say, okay, I can see what they’re trying and why theyr’e trying it. She was never exactly my favorite character…but I never got the sense she was exactly appealing to me, and she didn’t make me hit my head and say, what the fuck? In comics, I think that qualifies her as an example of marketing genius.
Update:Tom on Michael Corleone, Miriam on definitions and me again.
Robin was very successful at the time, though. And if you read his original appearances- I highly recommend the first volume of Batman Chronicles- you can see why- he’s a kid who, however improbably, is out there kicking adult crooks’ asses in a dynamic way. He doesn’t even look so ridiculous, the way they draw him- he’s a tough-looking little kid, and there’s a lot of jagged, slashing black in that yellow cape.
Aside from that, it’s odd that you’re still not bringing up any Mary Sues. You admit, it’s not an attempt to create a surrogate for the audience, and it’s not an exercise in icon-polishing like that Wonder Woman story, it’s an author’s attempt to insert himself or herself into the story and have the characters satisfy his or her emotional needs. I’ve been reading these posts like the kid who’s dying to be called on in class: “Oh! Oh! I know! I know:” Steve Buscemi’s character in the Ghost World movie.
I maybe have some trouble sticking to assignments. I think other people will come through for you though.
I’ve tried to read the early Batman stories. I found them pretty boring, honestly. I never found Robin appealing myself, even as a kidl. I’m also not sure…how do you gauge Robin’s success? I don’t think they had anything but the most rudimentary marketing data at the time….
Oh…and I haven’t seen Ghost World, but…an important aspect of Mary Sue, as I understand it, is the characters status as paragon. I’m not sure Steve Buscemi quite qualifies in that regard, does he? Though maybe it could be seen as another related phenomena….
Yeah, the Buscemi character isn’t a paragon, he just does what the movie’s director would like to do, which is get it on with one of the disaffected young girls. So he is a surrogate and wish-fulfillment vehicle, but the wishes involved are a bit different from those involved in a Mary Sue. The obnoxiousness in question isn’t his character’s fraudulent wonderfulness (because he has no wonderfulness) but the fuss made over poor old Enid.
Side comment: I liked the comic book Ghost World a lot but hated the movie.
Interestingly, “Kitty Pryde” was the name of a real-life woman John Byrne knew.
And of course Robin is a Mary Sue. Here is Jules Feiffer’s famous take on sidekicks from his The Great Comic Book Heroes:
I couldn’t stand boy companions. If the theory behind Robin the Boy Wonder, Roy the Superboy, The Sandman’s Sandy, The Shield’s Rusty, The Human Torch’s Toro, The Green Arrow’s Speedy was to give young readers a character with whom to identify if failed dismally in my case. The super grownups were the ones I identified with. They were versions of me in the future. There was still time to prepare. But Robin the Boy Wonder was my own age. One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better, and live better—for while I lived in the east Bronx, Robin lived in a mansion, and while I was trying, somehow, to please my mother—and getting it all wrong—Robin was rescuing Batman and getting the gold medals…
He was obviously an ‘A’ student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd—God, how I hated him. You can imagine how pleased I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag.http://everydayislikewednesday.blogspot.com/2008/06/jules-feiffers-superheroes-week-on-boy.html
(That last reference was to Dr. Wertham’s homoerotic Batman and Robin.)
Rick Jones, initial sidekick to the Hulk, became Marvel’s analogue for Snapper in the early Avengers (why you would need an analogue for Snapper is a question best left unasked).
I believe his Snapper Sue-ishness reached its crescendo during the Kree-Skrull War when he saved the Earth through his innate awesomeness or something.
John and Richard, you all should be writing this blog. I can’t believe I missed Rick Jones…or that awesome Feiffer quote.
Rick Jones is plays a prominent role in the Marvel Adventures: Hulk book. Bad ideas never die; they just get shunted into al-ages titles.
I think there's a key difference between a Mary Sue & a Snapper Sue. MS is a stand-in for the writer, SS is a stand-in for the reader.
So back in c. 1940, Robin was an SS: an adult's idea of a kid's surrogate. (And yes, he was hugely successful. No marketing data except the deluge of kid sidekicks that ripped the concept off).
Rick Jones, in The Kree-Skrull War, is an MS. He saves the universe by imagining 1940s comic book heroes into modern existence. Which, not incidentally, was Roy Thomas' schtick. He's blatantly using his own surrogate in a cheap, fantastical plot twist.
But we should also distinguish between Mary Sues & better-developed authorial surrogates. Mary Sue is a cheap, one-dimensional placeholder for the author's fantasy. If a surrogate's written well, she takes on a life of her own w/in the story. What I'm trying to say is, all Mary Sues are authorial surrogates; not all authorial surrogates are Mary Sues.
Aaron, I’m not sure that a Mary Sue has to be an author surrogate necessarily…and I don’t think all Mary Sues have to necessarily be a bad thing. I’m hoping to post a little more about that first point today, and I think Tom and kinukitty are planning to address the second.
The thing about Robin is…I think the Batman comic was successful. Robin was in the Batman comic. Other folks could have ripped it off for that reason…but it doesn’t necessarily follow that Robin was actually hugely popular among kids. It’s like the question of whether Wonder Woman was popular with girls; there’s anecdotal evidence, but there’s no way to really be sure. Is there even anecdotal evidence that kids liked Robin? There’s Jules Feiffer saying he didn’t; is there anyone who says they did?
Kitty Pryde was/is the name of a real person. John Byrne knew her at art school, I think.
I'll be very curious to hear what you say on both those points. An MS isn't necessarily bad: neither is a deus ex machina. But both devices tend to be evidence of hackneyed, amateurish writing. As for the authorial surrogate, I understood that to be intrinsic to the definition of "Mary Sue." So, as I said, I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on that!
On Robin & sidekicks, I think the evidence of the bandwagon is fairly powerful in market-driven work like Golden Age comics, & outweighs one man's childhood anecdote. But also, Wikip. points us to Batman: the Complete History, which says Robin’s appearance doubled Batman‘s sales. (And Feiffer’s book, while a fun read — I recommend it before any other superhero analysis — is incredibly dyspeptic.)
Batman: The Complete History seems like a good cite…though these things are always somewhat less cut and dry than they look (how sure are we that it was Robin that caused the spike in sales exactly? Were they doing month-to-month analysis? etc.) But in the absence of other evidence, it seems like I’ll have to accept that somebody out there liked Robin…though I still can’t figure out why.
Yeah, that was a different time, almost a different medium. Check out Greg Sadowski’s Supermen: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes. It’s blowing my mind the way Marston’s WW seems to blow yours.
Backing Craig L. up here: I’ve heard – and I don’t have a source, and it could be an urban legend – that as soon as Robin was introduced the sales on Detective Comics skyrocketed from “good” to “amazing.” Even if this ISN’T true, comic companies obviously thought sidekicks sold – look how many of ’em there were back Golden Age comics. Expanding the point a bit, Jimmy Olsen (the original Snapper Carr) had his own comic for decades, so he must have had some kind of fan support.
And a Snapper/Jimmy Olsen/Robin can be useful to have around for other reasons, as well.
A) Someone for the hero to talk to. A Holmes to their Watson, someone in the know who will listen patiently while the hero drops exposition.
B) Handy comic relief, quick defusing of narrative tension. (Think Etta Candy here. WHOO! WHOO!)
BC) To paraphrase Frank Miller “There ain’t nothing like having Robin in the panel to make Batman look BIG.” They’re a visual device to make the hero look bigger/more powerful/less dorky in his silly 19th century carny costume ’cause he’s standing next to Jimmy Olsen and his doofy bow tie.
D) Older comics tended to aim for an audience that wasn’t necassary skilled at parsing both the pictures and the text at the same time.
Which means that it’s REALLY useful to have someone around to say “Holy Mother of Fuck! Superman just turned coal into diamonds! Superman is awesome!” to let the people who are JUST reading – not looking – know what’s happening. And even with today’s storytelling it’s useful to underline an awesome Superman moment by having Jimmy hang out and look awestruck.
And, for the record, I like Robin more than Batman. Always have, and still do.
Hey Mark. Those are really interesting points. I hadn’t thought of the important sidekick-as-peanut-gallery role.
So…why do you like Robin more than Batman?
I think Snapper Carr was killed in the recent Final Crisis (or one of the spin-offs? Final Crisis: Submit, maybe?) He did have a super-power–teleportation, making him like Ambush Bug without the humor. I honestly can’t remember if he died…and it was only a couple of months ago. 4 bucks well spent.
eric b: It was the Resist tie-in, and he didn’t die. But yes, he has teleporting powers now, which he uses by snapping his fingers. Looking through his Wikipedia article this is a holdover from some other crossover event in the 80’s.
Got to disagree about the Buscemi character- Zwigoff has him introduce Enid to old-time blues, which comes as a soul-nourishing revelation to her, and has her fall in love with him. The middle-aged record collector is not ideal but is presented as bumbling and adorable, and Enid, the girl we’re led to believe will go places, is made to strongly approve. The strange thing is, Clowes went so far as to insert himself into the comic, in order to show us that just because he drew these girls mocking everyone around them didn’t mean he saw himself as someone they would like. Zwigoff apparently missed the point of that.
I think the first dozen or so Batman stories where he has a dead face and strangely shaped ears are fun. He doesn’t work as well when he isn’t drawn crudely.
I think Tom’s point is not that Buscemi isn’t sympathetic, but that he isn’t perfect, or a paragon, the way Mary Sues usually are.
In other words, he’s an irritating author surrogate, but not a Mary Sue.
Speaking of teenage sidekicks, it is worth recalling that Stan Lee, who was a teenager himself when they were first in vogue, confessed to hating the concept and saw to it that Bucky was wounded and replaced by a female, somewhat older sidekick towards the end of World War 2 and who in the early 1960s had him retroactively killed. (And I don’t care how much praise people heap on Brubaker, Bucky should’ve stayed dead, dammit). I am not sure if Rick Jones was meant as a substitute for Snapper Carr; at least to begin with he probably wasn’t since he was created as part of the origin of the Hulk (where Rick’s criminal recklessness, driving into a nuclear bomb testing range, led to Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk).
However, I wonder if “Snapper Sue” really is a useful term if the common denominator is just youth, a supporting character status, and being a focus for identification by young readers. Why are we excluding stories and series where such a person is not just a supporting character (in the context of the stories she appeared in Kitty Pryde was more than that right from the start), but actually the or a star of the feature? Characters like Airboy, Captain Marvel/Billy Batson and Mary Marvel, Spider-Man (in his original and Ultimate conception as a teenage hero) or even the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew?
BTW, d’Artagnan was based on a historical person who had already been turned into the hero of a novel (which pretended to be the real d’Artagnan’s memoirs) published ca. 140 years before Dumas started on The Three Musketeers.
My nomination the most annoying Snapper Sues are Wendy and Marvin, non-powered junior members of the Justice League from the early episodes of Super Friends. For some reason, Hanna Barbara went the extra step of making them the focus of the show, not just annoying comic relief. I remember wishing they would go away so I could see more super hero action.
I don’t think the early Rick Jones was a Snapper Sue. Rick wasn’t portrayed as anyone special, just a dumb teenager who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Hulk is always smacking or chasing Rick. Despite the danger, Rick continues to help Banner because his feelings of loyalty and the guilt he feels over his role in the Hulk’s creation. I never identified with Rick Jones, but I don’t think the early issues of Hulk would be half as interesting without the atmosphere of menace created by Rick’s cat and mouse game with the Hulk.
This went away once Rick Jones became Captain America’s sidekick.
There’s just a lot of good anecdotes in this thread; I didn’t know Stan Lee hated Bucky. Good for him.
The thing about the Snapper Sue that’s annoying, at least to me, is the question of why the hell they’re there in the first place. They just seem so gratuitous. Captain Marvel and Peter Parker (and even Power Pack), on the other hand, make sense…I mean, they’re the heroes, just like Batman or Superman. Since Spider-Man’s the hero, it makes sense for him to defeat the bad-guy. Whereas Snapper Carr or Bucky or whatever just seem like hangers on; why should they be there? (Except, as MarkAndrew says, as a kind of chorus to explain what’s happening to the uninitiated.)
Oh, and I was trying to remember the name of those pre-Wonder Twin snapper sues…I think I saw them, like once. But, yeah, I didn’t like them either.
Robin’s better because channeling your pain and rage into being a giggling daredevil in pixie boots is WAY more interesting to me than turning into a skulky creature of the night. (And I gots big problems with all current variations of Batman anyway – It’s all rooted in a kind of faddish pop psychology I think is obnoxious to the max. Brave and the Bold (Cartoon) excepted.
Actually, I can’t think of a BETTER Mary Sue example than Steve Buscemi in Ghost World, and even he’s, well, Steve Buscem. So the character is kind of a pathetic fuck-up automatically because Steve Buscemi only plays pathetic fuck-ups, y’know.
But, by and large, Mary Sue’s don’t exist in popular commercial art. The writers know they’re their to stroke-off the audience. I’m basically with you on the current Wonder Woman, but see the current take as bad commercial art, (cause BORING) not blatant Mary-Sue-dom.
I don’t see why the adorable loser is any less a wish-fulfillment vehicle. The notion that such a character can’t have literal problems would exclude even the Byronic hero, and there’s nothing more narcissistic than that. In this case, the guy just doesn’t fit in a world that is relentlessly shown to be debased and vulgar. The issue is whether the flaws threaten our affection.
No, no. Everyone agrees he’s a wish-fulfillment vehicle (or I do, anyway.) Mary Sues just fulfill wishes in more or less particular ways.
We’re just quibbling about a technical definition, I think. I don’t have any disagreement with your description of how the character works.
I think Kitty pride wasn´t so succesfull, because young girls identify with her, but because teenage boys seen her as a potential girlfriend.
Nobody who read X-men had any chance to hook up with a woman like Storm (especial in the way Claremont wrote her), but Kitty seemed to be a real life girl. Not to beautiful, still a teenager, a bit nerdy (interessted in computers, “boystuff”)and always falling for the boys.
The whole “kid sidekick” thing seemed to be almost an unconscious process – I don’t think anyone was thinking about why they put these characters in, they just did automatically. The concept was killed by two spectacularly misbegotten examples, Scrappy Doo and Godzookie. I’m convinced they’re why DC were so keen to get rid of Robin in the 70s and 80s.
Tom C.
…Side comment: I liked the comic book Ghost World a lot but hated the movie.Didn’t hate it, but definitely considered it an inferior animal. Yet… In a strange way, does it prove the initial point. Did we have to accept Middle-Aged Marty Stu as an important figure because somehow, grown men would never have identified with the character of Josh; do grown men, at least in marketer-land (or at least the “arty” kind of men who presumably watched this film), actually hate being reminded that they were once guys like Josh?
Heck, is that why 99.9999% of Hollywood features some borderline ancient guy getting in on with some woman who hasn’t yet hit thirty? This is a recurrent trope is an awful lot of “serious” literature, too. Including stuff that’s being published as I write this…
— cleome45
Well, flashing back to a Zwigoff interview, I read long ago, I recall him saying that he built up Marty (if that’s the Buscemi character’s name) because he wanted the guy to be his own personal surrogate. Not audience identification, just auteur self-reward.
The GW movie struck me as catering to the young female audience except where it was catering to its director. Not much worry about how middle-aged men might see themselves; I mean, we’re not a big part of the indy cinema audience, as far as I know. We are a big part of the Hollywood audience, so like you say, all these films come out where Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis gets it on with someone decades younger.
As for the novels … well, career novelists tends to be in their 30s, 40s or older, and I think that about explains it.
It’s more than just the age of career novelists, though. It’s a genre convention. One way that a literary fiction novel can get to be literary fiction is by having some middle-aged guy experience a life-crisis and then get it on with some woman twenty years his junior.
It’s like they all read Lolita and completely missed the point.
I’d like ten cents for each person who read Lolita and completely missed the point. :/
— cleome45
The point of Lolita is that pedophiles don’t have to worry about the Mann Act but they do have to worry about Peter Sellers following them around.
Tom:
:p Seriously, though:
…Not much worry about how middle-aged men might see themselves; I mean, we’re not a big part of the indy cinema audience, as far as I know. We are a big part of the Hollywood audience, so like you say, all these films come out where Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis gets it on with someone decades younger…And yet, both supposedly very different subgenres produced almost the exact same trope. Though fwiw mr_cleome insists that GW: The Movie subverts the trope by showing the Seymour doesn’t get to keep the girl, etc. I don’t agree with this at all. I suppose maybe it’s toying with the trope a little, but it’s hardly a subversion when Enid tells Seymour point blank at the end of the flim that he’s her hero, and she means it.
— cleome45
“And yet, both supposedly very different subgenres produced almost the exact same trope.”
Well, yeah, in one case you’ve got middle-aged guys buying tickets, in the other you’ve got a middle-aged guy writing and directing the movie. Either way, odds are good some young woman will wind up in bed with a geezer.
Though the odds are better in the first case, since you’ve also got a middle-aged guy as the movie’s star and therefore as one of its key decision makers, along with writers, producers and a director who may well be up there in age as well.
Of course, I don’t know that Hollywood films have a lot more old guy/young chick pairings than indy films. It’s just my impression. From the days when I watched indy films, it seemed like that sort of business would crop up now and then, whereas with Hollywood films you see it over and over.
As to whether GW’s ending subverted the geezer-chick idea, I’d vote no. Don’t ask me why though.
I disliked that movie so much, and here I am talking about it 8 years later. That’s the power of art and procrastination.
The thing about the geezer-chick trope is that, I think it’s actually supposed to be validating — not for the guy, but for the literary quality of the story. The geezer-chick pairing is a way to demonstrate that the movie/book/whatever has serious literary ambitions and bona fides. If it’s too young people getting it on, then it’s just a beach movie…but if it’s some old fart lusting, then…why it’s art!
So then what if it’s two old farts pitching woo?
— cleome45
Why would people take geezer/chick as signifying depth? I mean, the examples that come to mind for me are things like Six Days, Seven Nights (Harrison Ford, b. 1942; Anne Heche, b. 1969) and Entrapment (Sean Connery, b. 1930; Catherine Zeta-Jones, b. 1969). People don’t look at one of those and say, “Well, it’s a dumbass comedy about people on an island with Ross from Friends in a supporting role, but at least it’s art.”
I stick to my theory: Old guys like young stuff, so a lot of books/movies made by and/or for old guys involve old guys getting young stuff.
“So then what if it’s two old farts pitching woo?”
Then it’s life, and God bless them both.
Just FYI – Wesley Crusher is actually a Mary Sue.
Gene Rodenberry’s (the creator of ST and ST:TNG) middle name was Wesley, and he wrote himself into the Enterprise…
– Tefnut
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