Tag Archives: Mary Sue

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #6 (with Mary Sue tie-in)

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For those who care about such things, this is both part of my ongoing series on the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman run and part of our ongoing roundtable on Mary Sue characters.

I wrote this over the weekend, incidentally, before I’d convinced myself that Mary Sues had some positive aspects. I could have rewritten, I guess, but…eh, why bother? Consistency is the hobgoblin of my little mind.
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In this post I argued that the comic Legion of One, and much of contemporary Wonder Woman — and indeed, much of contemporary super-hero comics in general — are essentially Mary Sue stories. Mary Sues is usually used to refer to a non-canon, author-surrogate character of exceptional and irritating wonderfulness introduced into a fan-fiction story. I argued that, in contemporary comics, the canon itself is riddled with Mary Sueism, such that you get stories whose main point seems to be the reiteration of how great Wonder Woman is, or how mythical Superman is, or how everyone wants to be in the Justice League. Whole comics seem devoted to puffing the putative protagonists, as if the reader won’t believe that Captain Marvelous is really Marvelous unless he or she is reminded of that fact every fifth panel.

One could argue, I guess, that this is in general true of all super-heroes; after all, the whole point of Superman is for him to be super, the whole point of Wonder Woman is for her to be wonderful. That’s true to a certain extent, sure — but I think that in general, golden age and silver age comics tended to be less self-conscious about this sort of thing. I think this is especially true of the Marston run; certainly, Wonder Woman was always wonderful, and Marston liked that about her…but his plots tended to be as much or more about his own weird fetishes and his goofy imagination as about reiterating her greatness. If the plot called for it, he’d cheerfully have Wonder Woman be saved by Etta Candy, and damn WW’s supposed superiority. If his fetishes called for it, he’d happily have WW fail in her duty to be authoritative and be chastised for it by Aphrodite.

You can see the sort of thing I’m talking about in the first few pages of Wonder Woman #6. In the ostensible plot, WW is putting on a show to raise money for “restored countries” (presumably nations retaken from the Axis by the Allies.) She’s there to demonstrate just how great she is, to do spectacular feats, to wow the crowd. And yet, Marston just can’t keep his focus; his mind drifts…and suddenly, before you know it, we’re talking, not about WW’s greatness, but about the wonders of multi-ethnic restraint technology. Priscilla Rich, the socialite who organized the benefit, has a hobby, you see…she collects manacles from around the world! Or, as WW puts it “Priscilla’s hobby is collecting chains…mine is breaking them!”

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This scene climaxes (as it were) with the sequence that first got me intrigued with the Marston/Peter run in the first place: WW in a gimp mask underwater, sneering at the weak jaws of French girls as she braeks free of the gimp mask with her teeth (Marston loves, loves, loves to have WW tied up in such a way that she can only escape by using her teeth. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.)

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Basically, Marston’s fantasy uber-self is a trussed-up woman with phenomenal jaw strength. You can call that a Mary Sue in a sense…but it’s a Mary Sue so preposterously idiosyncratic that it really seems like she needs another name. Masoch Sue, perhaps.

So that’s that for that argument…or rather, I wish that were that. Because the fact is that, while Marston’s obsessive eccentricity usually does allow him to avoid most of the Mary Sue pitfalls, things don’t always work out quite so neatly. Specifically, in this issue, Marston does actually, and with some consistency, treat Wonder Woman and the Amazon race in general as something of a typical Mary Sue. As a result, this issue is (by Marston-Peter standards) relatively boring. It also, and I think not coincidentally, highlights some of the less pleasant implications of Marston’s gender politics.

As you can see from the cover at the top of the post, this issue involves WW in a fight against the Cheetah. The Cheetah, as it turns out, is actually Priscilla Darling (the socialite who likes to collect chains.) Said chain-collecting socialite is jealous of WW, and also owns a mirror — the combination, apparently, drives her insane, and she becomes…evil!

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The rest of the issue is given over to the Cheetah’s sneaky plans to destroy WW. These are for the most part typical Marston fare; fairly entertaining, though not as crazed as he sometimes gets. The moment where she dresses up some captives as zebras is probably the highlight.

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Overall, though, the Cheetah is a problematic villain in a couple of ways. First of all, she’s actuated entirely by jealousy; she’s a super-villain just because WW makes her feel inferior. From Marston’s perspective, this is supposed to be a cautionary tale about women’s self-esteem, I think — that is, women should feel good about themselves.

Which is okay I guess, but…the thing is the Cheetah really is inferior to Wonder Woman. In past issues, WW’s enemies have been gods like Ares, or evil geniuses like Dr. Psycho or the Baronness, or entire subterranean races. They were real threats. But the Cheetah’s just this socialite with multiple personality disorder. Yes, she uses lots of cowardly tricks, and she’s supposed to have agility because she’s dressed like a cheetah I guess, but…come on. She’s screwed; she’s the underdog. And if she’s the underdog…well, you feel bad for her, or at least I did. You sort of want her to win.

In other words, you have a classic Mary Sue set-up — WW is too good to root for. She’s got an unfair advantage; you feel like the author has his hands on the scale. It’s especially painful because WW seems to know, just by osmosis, that the Cheetah’s real problem isn’t that she’s evil, but that she’s just misunderstood.

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I mean, in that two-panel sequence, the Cheetah is clearly a more appealing personality. She’s all crazed bluster and braggadocio, while Wonder Woman comes across as some kind of sanctimonious super social worker.

Things only get worse in the book’s final chapter, though. For obscure reasons, WW decides to stage a contest between her friend Paula’s slave girls who are being trained by Amazons on Paradise Island and the greatest women athletes of earth. The Amazon-trained women are, of course, stronger, faster, and more awesome, primarily because they wear chains.

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So, inevitably, the sportswomen of earth get their butts kicked by the chain-wearing submissives.Paula, the slave-girls’ leader, even insists that her girls compete in the running events while wearing ankle chains.

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The woman on the right in the picture above is the Cheetah in disguise. And, I have to say, she’s got a point. Running a race with ankle-chains on does seem like an effort to deliberately humiliate your competition; it’s a shitty thing to do. Moreover, while it’s not a trick of Wonder Woman’s diagetically, it does seem like a trick of Marston’s — the Amazons all seem like Mary Sues, boosted into wonderfulness by authorial favoritism.

What’s especially icky about all this, of course, is that the favoritism is explicitly linked to the women’s submissiveness. This isn’t exactly new, of course; Marston is always riffing on the virtues of submission as power, or power as submission. Often, Marston presents that submission/power as an alternative to low self-esteem and weakness — “you girls really can do anything! Don’t let me hear you say you can’t crush the seal-men! I know you can if you just learn to love giving and receiving bondage!” It’s ridiculous, but at least the overall arch is about depowered women gaining strength and control over their fate, at least in some sense. Here, though, the women who Marston is supposedly educating about the virtues of self-confidence are already world-class athletes. And as a result, you really start to wonder…do these women actually need a skanky perv, no matter how well-intentioned, lecturing them on the virtues of self-esteem? I mean, let’s say you’ve got an Olympic level runner there, someone who has been training for years; someone who has bucked the general prejudice against women’s athletics, which certainly existed back in the 1930s. How exactly is it liberating to pretend that she’d be better off as a runner and as a human being if she learned to love being chained?

Marston’s fetish and his feminsm often work together, as I argued in this essay. In this narrative, though, they don’t…and forced to choose, he unhesitatingly goes with the fetish. The bondage girls of his wet dreams beat the real-world athletes, and even humiliate them. And just to clinch things, he gives the only word of protest to the piece’s villain:

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That’s the Cheetah in disguise again…and, again, she’s absolutely right (and I’m not just saying that because I love those Peter-drawn eyebrows.) The Amazons, or rather Marston through the Amazons, are being condescending assholes. You do sort of want to see them (or rather him) get a comeuppance. Let’s have the damn Mary Sues trip over their stupid chains, already.

Cheetah makes a go of it, but, of course, it doesn’t work out. She does get to tie up Hippolyta, but really, who doesn’t? Ultimately, WW wins. And as if that’s enough, with the help of the magic lasso, she makes the delinquent confess and beg, not for forgiveness, but for discipline — “keep me a prisoner here and train my cheetah self!”

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In our Helter Skelter discussion I expressed some doubts about bad-girl, Courtney Love style feminism; the whole idea that being a jerk is an effective way to fight the power. This story, though, made me recosider. I still don’t think that being a jerk is necessarily a particularly useful strategy…but if the choice is between more or less futilely acting like an evil jerk and meekly acquiescing in your own disempowerment — well, one can see why the first option has some charm. Marston connived to make the Cheetah feel inferior, and so she got pissed right the fuck off. The getting pissed off is supposed to make her evil…but in fact, getting pissed off seems like a reasonable, and even, dare I say, a feminist response. Marston decides to discipline her because she’s not sufficiently restrained, and then he sanctimoniously suggests that restraint will make her stronger. In fact, though, power doesn’t necessarily always come from restraint — or, at least, it depends on who is doing the restraining. The Cheetah represents, it seems to me, an angry feminine — a feminine not bound by Marston’s particular obsessions, and not especially interested in his games. He doesn’t handle it well.

Mary Sue Cleanup

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I’m batting cleanup on the Mary Sue roundtable with a bunt: I can’t get my head around it. “Mary Sue” as a critical term seems so particular to a certain practice, or at least so loose, as to elude me.

My critical proclivities tilt to the formal and textural over narrative, but still. I mean, I look in my toolbox, I got pomo, pron, meta, I-novel, Quijote, Pale Fire, Dante settling scores, artist-n-model, Godard in King Lear, Vito Acconci being really annoying. They’re not helping. I even got Wikis and whatnot, which tip me to:

Author surrogacy is a frequently observed phenomenon in hobbyist and amateur writing, so much that fan fiction critics have evolved the term Mary Sue… thought to evoke the cliché of the adolescent author who uses writing as a vehicle for the indulgence of self-idealization rather than entertaining others.

So it’s about amateurs and hobbyists, who want not for love, just control? Hackish pros dismiss the term so they don’t look like naked royalty? Okay.

My failing? I don’t read fanfiction or linger near.

Maybe I should. God only knows the scene’s apotheosis is Comiket, the fanmade comics festival in Tokyo (motto: “We outnumber Cleveland”). Fans don costumes, line up, engage in raw commerce. I’ve been to Tsukiji, the daily Comiket of fish. I imagine Comiket’s the same with less blood on the floor.

The spectacle’s candy for anthropologists. The works being bought and sold? I’m not so sure. What’s the breakout masterpiece? Which one will make me a fan of fanfic? I’ve never been convinced to take a look. In my experience, the activity trumps its product. I imagine it’s similar for participants, enjoying the community, the shared codes, the privacy, even. It’s why I like sports, naked tribalism for the primordial in us all. The characters, or players, become shorthand with other people who know the code. And they don’t make a lot of sense to people not clued in.

Which is why seeing my favorite piece of writing on the Net this year get its nits picked in the comments is such a pain:

How about agreeing on one definition of the concept you’re discussing at the start (the one the rest of the world uses too, preferably)?

Ah, the heartfelt meets the graceful tact of Phillipe Starck. As a term of literary criticism, “Mary Sue” has seemed an occasion, not an case study in precision. Besides, it’s very obscure. I had never encountered it prior to the roundtable, unlike “metonymy,” “inclusio” and “praeteritio,” and I suspect the rest of the world knows the latter three over the former. Perhaps using the term loosely marks one as outside the small group that birthed it, which on the Internet’s a mortal sin. So, since I can’t match Stephen Daedalus, Jeeves or Lewis Trondheim’s bald eagle with the term, I’ll bunt. Thrown out at first.

Mary Stu and Marty Sue

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This is the latest in our ongoing roundtable on Mary Sues. So far Tom has written a kick-ass essay about Michael Corleone as a Mary Sue. And Miriam has an essay which I talk about below.
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In her effort to define Mary Sues Miriam argues that the point is not author insertion:

Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.

In other words, it’s not about putting yourself in the story so much as it is about overweening affection: “Don’t love your characters too much!” as Miriam quotes Leigh Dragoon as saying.

I think Mary Sue is often about love, in one way or another. A good example is Dorothy Sayres’ Lord Peter Wimsey. I mentioned him before as a possible Mary Sue; in various of his tedious adventures, he manifests an unlikely ability at cricket, at bell-ringing, and lord knows at what else. one Phil Jimenez Wonder Woman story, but it was about as Mary Sueish as it could be. The whole comic was, literally, a puff-piece feature story about how great Wonder Woman is. It’s a pretty lousy idea for a narrative, in my opinion …but part of what even makes it tolerable, I think, is the glee with which Jimenez, who is gay, plays with the idea of thinking of Wonder Woman as a gay man, or of himself as Wonder Woman, or of both at once. He dresses her up in fabulous clothes, for example; he makes her bitchy and funny; he has her actually banter (i.e. flirt) with other gay men. There’s a real love for the character there, and the gender slippage, the tension between loving her as an object of desire and loving her as an aspiration or ideal self, is part of what gives that love a texture and a weight. In short, there’s something singular, or queer about Jimenez’s Wonder Woman which makes her (within limits) enjoyable to read. (As opposed to the WW in League of One, who has no discernible personality except for her allegiance to her equally boring league comrades and her quest for self-purity via the-lasso-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-bondage.)

One more for instance might be Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, Helter Skelter. In our roundtable on the manga, I expressed a good deal of animosity towards the detective character, Asada, who gets to figure everything out and has some special and unearned connection with the main character Ririko. Thinking about it some more, it seems like Asada might be considered a Mary Sue; Okazaki seems to have a weird, overweening interest in his well-being. But what exactly is her investment in him? Is he supposed to be an object of desire? Of envy? And what would she envy him for, anyway?

One possible answer is…she might find him appealing because of his connection to Ririko — a connection which is, in various senses, perverse. Asada admires Ririko for the fact that her face doesn’t fit her bone structure; she’s fake. His recognition of her fakeness gives the two their unexplained and creepy connection; they seem to have been together in a past life, or to have shared feathers, or something. In my earlier posts I tended to interpret this as a stalking scenario…but thinking about it again, it seems like it could also be a metaphor, or a glance, at a gay relationship. Ririko — the out of control diva with a terrible secret involving the falsity of her appearance — could certainly scan as gay or transvestite — and the secret’s fascination for Asada, provoking a submerged connection, is suggestive as well. Okazaki does have explicit gay content in the manga; there’s a lesbian relationship which is treated with a combination of voyeuristic excitement and moralistic contempt. Given the gay themes, and the anxiety around them, it doesn’t seem impossible that part of Asada’s Marty Sue status, part of why he gets favorable treatment, is that he’s a fantasy means for lesbian and/or straight women to imagine themselves as gay men desiring a beautiful androgyne of indeterminate gender.

If that sounds far-fetched…well, it’s a fair thumbnail description of the gender dynamics of yaoi — or of slash-fiction, one of the Mary Sues’ natural habitat. For a particularly vivid example, you could try this fan fic by Vom Marlowe. It’s called “Girl Yoji” and it’s about a male assassin who turns into a girl and then has lots of sex with his male partner, who he has long loved. Did I mention that he’s pregnant with the other assassin’s child? It’s written by a woman, primarily for other women who enjoy a fun fetish story about imagining they’re men turning into women. The line between wanting to be someone and wanting to be with them is crossed, recrossed, blurred, and gleefully bounced upon; indeed, violating that line seems to be much of the point of the story.

And I think it may be part of the point of the Mary Sue as well. “Don’t love your characters too much!” sounds like good advice…but the persistence of Sues in canon and out, and their popularity with both authors and readers suggests that loving too much is one of the things we have fiction for. And, often, the “too much” is not just a quantitative excess, but a qualitative one. It’s a way to try on different patterns of desire — envy, lust, gay, straight — that you usually have to keep separate in real life. The appeal of Mary Sue, in other words, is that she is a love you can wear like drag.

Update: Kinukitty says leave me alone about the Mary Sues already; Bill concurs; but I won’t shut up about Mary Sue and loooooooove.

defining mary

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We’ve just begun our Mary Sue roundtable (Noah here, Tom here) but it’s already clear in the posts and comments that we’re working from several overlapping definitions.

I surf around the fringes of the sci-fi and fanfic internets, so I’d been hearing the term for several years, as well as where it originally came from (Star Trek fan communities). But my personal working definition is not the strict-construction fanfic one, rather one alluded to best in Leigh Dragoon’s tips on breathing life into your characters (written for a sci-fi, fantasy and fanfic reading audience who wanted to branch into writing original fiction), specifically tips 3 and 4:

3. Don’t love your characters too much!

It’s important to love your characters, but try to love them the same way you love your family: don’t be afraid to acknowledge their faults. Everyone wants readers to like their characters, but it’s very easy to make your character a little too likeable. At that point, you are well on your way to creating a Mary Sue. Also, when you’re handing out those flaws, make sure you add in a few good ones! Avoid the Playboy Pin-Up Characterization – eating dessert and watching R-rated movies are not really flaws.

4. That said, avoid Mary Sue/Gary Stu’s siren song. “Luke, it’s a trap!”.

Mary and her male counterpart Gary will pretend to be your best friends. They will lie to you like there’s no tomorrow. The lie they tell most often is, “The more perfect you make me, the more everyone will love me!”.

First off, how many perfect people do you know in real life? I’m willing to bet not a one. Perfect people are boring! Nobody wants to read about someone who is physically flawless, never makes a single mistake, and is loved by the entire supporting cast for no real reason. I’ll be the first to say that it doesn’t help that so many actual published novels and comics are peopled with Mary Sues. A prime example of a “canon” Mary Sue is the hero of Mercedes Lackey’s “Magic’s Price” trilogy, Vanyel Ashkevron, a classic Emo Stu.

In my estimation, Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.

But you could say that creating a character whose primary purpose is to win readers’ love and adoration is a self-insertion, because Mary is a stand-in for the love the author himself wants to receive. That’s why I find folks like Chris Ware’s, Dan Clowes’ and Adrian Tomine’s self-insertions (either straight autobiographical personae or your standard white*-guy comic-reading loser protagonist) to be just as insufferable Mary Sues in their own way; I’m gonna make this guy such a loser that you’ll hate him because I hate myself so much.

I am, for obvious reasons, very interested in (semi-)autobiographical protagonists as Mary Sues. I think the key to avoiding them is to make a character that doesn’t desperately radiate either “love me!” or “hate me!” vibes, but just manages to be a compelling character among compelling characters. Phoebe Gloeckner’s Minnie is my prime example of this, and as Noah notes, Ariel Schrag’s Ariel pulls it off as well. Schrag herself mentions Art Spiegelman as an influence. I think Maus does it well, but in the new Breakdowns there’s way too much of both love me (do you see now how much of an innovator I was?) and hate me (I’m still a neurotic loser despite my success!).

Speaking of Clowes, it’s been awhile since I’ve either read or seen Ghost World, and neither of them really affected me deeply. But to weigh in on the comic Dan Clowes/movie Steve Buscemi character debate going on in comments here: the way people describe it, in the book he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)he’s shot down and ridiculed by the protagonists. In the movie he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)… I saw the movie before I read the book. So the first thing I thought when the Buscemi character was introduced was, “Hey, that’s R. Crumb.”

I didn’t think Zwigoff had him in there because Zwigoff wanted to sleep with teenage girls, rather Zwigoff wanted to be a zaftig teenage girl so he could sleep with R. Crumb. I thought Zwigoff’s earlier, celebrated documentary about Crumb was an amazing story, but the hero worship is palpable, especially as concerns Crumb’s sexual prowess. Aline Kominsky-Crumb has certainly expressed exasperation with that aspect of the doc in interviews.

And as long as this post is just a big mash of comment responses rolled into one… I don’t think, per Tom’s post, that a merely super-confident, super-cool character who garners widespread respect is of necessity a Mary Sue. There are a lot of stories that make use of inhumanly competent characters for non-mary-sue reasons. The one that always comes to my mind is Corwin in Nine Princes in Amber (any other fantasy geeks in the house?). He’s stupidly resourceful because it’s thrilling to watch his resourcefulness, not because it’s just awesome how awesome he is. An overcompetent character can escape sueishness by having flaws or mistakes that cost him as much (or almost as much) as his genius gains him. If Michael Corleone has a downfall, and if the downfall is his fault at all (no, I haven’t read the books, or even seen the movies, shamefully), then he’s not a Mary Sue by my definition.

Hopefully I’ll write a more cohesive post on the theme soon. Or I’ll just keep dredging up arguments from comments. In the game show we call: “Mary Sue or Nary Sue?”

*ok, so in Tomine’s case, he’s vaguely ethnic.

The Name of My Mary Sue Is Michael Corleone

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We’re having a roundtable about Mary Sues, with Noah leading the way here. I never heard the term before, but I think I can add an example: Michael Corleone. When the writer seems to gloat over how wonderful a character is, you’ve got a Mary Sue, and the Godfather novel does a lot of gloating about Michael; the movies, though more classy and understated, also adore him. Book and movies remind us over and over that Corleone is cool, controlled, lucid, unflappable, and (when it comes to business) infallible. I was writing here about the character:

… he is a born leader, a paragon of competence and nerve, a decorated war hero and cool-headed tactician. He is the dream self-image of Mario Puzo, that poor shambling yutz who wanted to pretend he was hard, compact and capable.

I think Michael Corleone works as a Mary Sue for a whole lot of people, for myself and a ton of other men born a little before, during, and a long time after World War II. Maybe the younger fellows have lost interest in him; I don’t know. But we’ve got decades’ worth of American males who dote on the Godfather films and the special punctilio of its characters, and especially on Michael Corleone, the paragon and epitome of the Godfather style. 

Notice that Michael Corleone doesn’t quite fit either Mary Sue category described by Mandy in a comment to one of the posts here. Unfortunately I can’t find the post/comment, but if I remember right Mandy says there are two types: the winsome, wonderful Mary Sue who’s adored by his/her fellow cast members, and the brilliantly resourceful Mary Sue with his/her endless bag of gadgets and skills.

Batman and James Bond were examples that came up for the second group. Michael Corleone belongs with them because of his competence, but at the same time he marks a difference. Batman and James Bond know how to do all sorts of things, and they carry all sorts of gadgets, and that’s supposed to be what a second-category Mary Sue is all about. Michael Corleone doesn’t master birdcalls or fingerprint analysis or carry around a laser suitcase. He’s always on top of it, but he doesn’t really do anything.  Starting out, he kills Sollozzo and McCluskey; the act condemns him to a criminal career and proves his competence at the basics of the family business. But after that Corleone is strictly management.

The winsome Mary Sue is all about others’ reactions: the whole reason she exists is to be found charming, courageous, sexy or whatever by the rest of the cast. To borrow a phrase from sociology, she’s outer-directed. The second kind of Mary Sue, the endless-skills variety, is more inner-directed. A second-cat Mary Sue has to know judo and safecracking whether or not people admire him for it. (In practice, of course, people do admire a second-cat MS, but that’s icing as opposed to cake.)  

Michael Corleone is something different, an outer-directed second-category Mary Sue. Operationally, he does nothing but plot strategy and interact with his colleagues, and according to the series he does these things in glorious fashion. But follow along closely and the strategizing starts to look a bit thin. How does he know Tessio sold him out? Because Tessio is smart and selling out the family is the smart move. But if Tessio is so smart, doesn’t he realize that being smart will automatically make him Michael’s prime suspect? Well, no, he’s not that smart. Michael is a master strategist in a world where the author makes sure everyone else spots him 10 points. Michael’s great master strokes are presented as triumphs of brainpower, but all he does is send people to kill his enemies. The brilliance involved here is not too advanced: “I know, dress our guy as a cop! And for Roth, have the guy carry a newspaper under his arm! Nobody will suspect!”  

That leaves interacting, which technically would mean how he deals with other people. But in practice the focus is just as much how he comes across to other people, and also to us. Michael Corleone’s competence is so ideal that it transcends specific abilities and becomes a matter of temperament, and his temperament is right in front of us, on display. He sits there, keeps his poker face, coolly meets our gaze, and you know he’s a competent kind of guy, a “man of respect.” But what if nobody respects him? Like the winsome Mary Sue, he’s a failure unless enough other characters give him the proper reaction. But, boy, they sure do, and for the ones that don’t there’s a hard lesson headed their way.

Action isn’t Michael Corleone’s thing; he behaves, and the behavior itself has got a twist to it. He’s a forceful, dominant personality, but he keeps quiet, sits still and doesn’t throw his weight about. He just takes what’s being given and turns it back, his face unblinking, and in the end he decides all. Senator Pat Geary sneers at him and tries to shake him down, and an hour of screentime later we see Geary broken, a bloody dead girl next to him in bed, and he’s nodding as Tom Hagen tells him the way things are going to be. Michael never raised his voice, never lifted a hand. But he’s deadly, you can tell by looking at him, and his deadliness takes practical form in his command of a deadly organization. His fitness to head that organization is signaled by the cool (no, “steely”) self-command he shows as he faces his enemies and underlings.

Which is convenient for us (for me and my fellow Godfather fans as I imagine them). If we had to be like Sonny Corleone, big James Caan stomping about and shouting, the mismatch would become a bit too much. Michael Corleone does what we do, which is to sit still and watch our mouths, and he turns it into strength, not weakness. The time comes for him to flex that strength, put it into effect, and, well, other people do that for him. Meanwhile, Michael keeps sitting around and coolly measuring out his thoughts and being careful about what shows on his face, and we’re happy. The deal hangs together even if a certain amount of stupidity is woven in. We buy the gimme that Michael is a tough guy who never does anything tough, and the one that has him beating opponents at checkers-level strategy contests. He helps us get by the way we are, which is a powerful incentive to buy a fantasy. And the disincentive, the implausibility, has to do with work, and work is a vague thing to us.

Nowadays most of us work in offices doing jobs that are fairly pointless when considered by themselves. Even if the details can be explained to a nonpracticioner, there’s not much reason to do the jobs themselves, not on their own. They make sense only as component actions of a vast process, one that’s undertaken by no one in particular and benefits nobody we know. We don’t expect to understand other people’s jobs, and we don’t expect them to understand ours. If they did understand, we wouldn’t expect them to be interested. Everyone has his compartment, and what we share outside the compartments is just us, making small talk. Michael Corleone works just fine for us, a dream version of ourselves that is 90% demeanor and 10% a vestigial work element.

The same slippery ground of unrealness travels from beneath our feet to the world of the Corleone family and its operations. It’s all “them” territory, as in “They”ll take care of it.” In our work lives we’re “them,” in the Godfather series the “they” work falls to buttonmen and we’re off with Michael Corleone, lounging quietly in our chair, in command.  As the Godfather series goes on, the actual work of the Corleone family becomes hazy. The killing of Luca Brasi early in I is a big deal because he is an exceptionally good assassin; lose him and the family is crippled. By the time the movie is over, Michael can engineer a string of simultaneous deaths, a miracle round of killings, and we’re barely aware of who does what. Apparently the talent grows on trees. In fact when II ends Michael throws away one of his top assassins to get at Hyman Roth, an enemy who is on the ropes and trying to flee the country. The loss of the assassin is not a huge deal: a setback, possibly, but the family continues right along. 

You can’t be proud of a fantasy like that. A bit of narcissism can work wonders in fiction, but a little too much is way too much. People get cloyed and disgusted, or else they see thru the whole deal at once and recognize how the same old dumb desires are being catered to. The selfishness and tunnel vision built into the deal are pretty awful when you stop to think: the killing of that girl so that Senator Geary can be blackmailed doesn’t even rise to a Barbara Gordon moment; the characters and movie wad her up like Kleenex. And if the Godfather series was just about a brilliant, cool-nerved Mafia leader who always gets his way, it would wear out its welcome pretty quickly. But Michael suffers. Though he’s a Mary Sue step by step, day by day, his big story is all about how he screws up, how he throws away his life. He winds up nowhere, sitting by himself and feeling bad, much like some of us on particular Sunday afternoons but in a far grander edition. He’s not moping, he’s bleak; he’s looking at the devastation he’s wrought, not job interviews he bungled. He has carved his way thru the world, made giant choices (an empire over love, vengeance over family), and now he takes the measure of the soul his actions have given him. It’s really not the same as me on a Sunday afternoon; but it looks the same, and the feelings have a lot in common, and if Michael is suffering I know there’s some kind of seriousness to outbalance and neutralize the vanity of his story’s appeal. His mistake was to love his father too much and to fight too hard in the world, and these are nothing like the mistakes I’ve made, or most people make, but his story still becomes a tragedy, and told well enough the whole dream becomes beautiful.

Snapper Sue

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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.

People Hate Me! They Really Hate Me!

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Various members of the When Fangirls Attack crowd explain why I was wrong, wrong wrong in this post.

The only thing I really wanted to respond to was that a couple people accuse me of being prejudiced against fan fiction, and (by extension) kind of sexist (since fan fiction is mostly written by women writers.) I just want to say, again, for the record: I have no problem with fan fiction. Some of my closest friends write fan fiction: notably kinukitty, who is now writing a yaoi column for this site — a column which, I am informed, will also probably discuss slash fiction at some point in the not too distant future. In my Gay Utopia project, I included a number of fan fiction related contributions by Kinukitty and others (here; here and here.) I’m a fan of Clamp, a collective that started out doing dojinshi, or fan-fiction Japanese comics. I wrote an essay in praise of Torchwood’s fan-fiction roots.

I think fan fiction, like most genres, is prone to some characteristic weaknesses. I think those weaknesses are exacerbated in super-hero comics, where corporate stewardship tends to pander to the lowest common denominator and excise the more interesting visions (which in fan fiction often involve unexpected romantic pairings.) Given that, my guess would be that there’s WW fan-fiction out there that’s better than most of what has been done with the character since Marston died.