Say Good-Bye to Mary-Sues

These are my final words on the subject of Mary-Sues, so before you read this, please, please, read everything I’ve written that’s Mary-Sue related (Mary-Sue: Who is She?, The Mary-Sue Complaints Checklist, How to Tell Your Friend They Have a Mary-Sue) because I don’t think reading this before reading everything else would make any sense.  That being said, for my final words, where do I begin?

The first guide I wrote, What They Are and What to do if you See Them, was a blatant argument towards the person that called my first fan fiction a Mary-Sue fic, published way back in 2005, but the guide was published in 2009.  Now, if any of you remember that fic, yes, that story was poorly developed, but the “critic” could have handled their part better by actually taking the time to tell me what the heck a “Mary-Sue” was instead of just saying “look it up.”  In the subject of Mary-Sues, looking it up, and taking the test, is useless.  Absolutely useless.  Everyone has a different opinion, and if there are two people who have the same opinion, the line is drawn at different lengths, and a resulting number on the famed Mary-Sue Litmus Test doesn’t tell me how to fix my story or what I should look out for.  It’s just a number on a scale, and, during the testing, it felt suffocating, like I wasn‘t allowed to have any remarkable traits in my characters.

Not to mention that I did try and defend my work and even said something along the lines of, “Well, other people write Mary-Sues successfully,” only to be smacked back down with the person saying that I wasn’t good enough to write with Mary-Sues (so Mary-Sues are a good thing?).  It seemed like no matter how many answers I tried to get out of the critics, and how much I wanted to continue my story, no one was going to let me without ranting about “another bad fic.”  In the end, I just wanted to be left alone and deleted the story, but every story I posted after that, I cringed when I received a review, especially if said review is more than a paragraph long.  Only recently have seeing that I’ve gotten a review excites me again.  It’s traumatic when people keep telling you to just dump the story that you worked so hard on, and, yes, I did work hard on that story.

I’ve read some people claim that Mary-Sues are characters whose creators just cobble together with random bits, but that’s not always true.  I worked hard on my characters and stories, and it was still flamed to hell.  That story was written when I was fifteen and just barely getting into writing stories.  At that time, I just focused on my spelling and grammar and thought that was good enough.  Creating characters, a role, choosing which point of view was hard for me; writing is a skill that takes practice!  It’s not as if you can just read ten or fifteen guides on how to develop a character and the plot in the story and suddenly become a master at it.  So that story, what I had, was hard work.  I laugh at that story now, but the reviews I had gotten still haunt me, and it still makes me angry.  And because I defended the story I worked so hard on, my username was on a “Wall of Shame” on someone’s profile page, and that story was copied and pasted with bolded commentaries in the story on Live Journal making fun of it even more—as if the reviews weren’t bad enough.  If I knew I could have reported it, I would have, but it’s too late now.

So, according to the Mary-Sue Killers:

* Specifically for fan-fiction, watch out for any story with CanonxOC pairings, because, apparently, 99.9% of the time, the OC is female, and 99.9% of those female OCs are Mary-Sues.

*  Every story they deem as “Mary-Sue” should be flamed and insulted at all cost until it’s deleted, even at the cost of hurting the person’s feelings to the point of never writing again (because I had seriously thought about it for a long time).

* If the person isn’t smart enough to “look it up” or “take the test,” they shouldn’t even be on writing sites.

* Because they are the be-all end-all of whether a story is Mary-Sue or not, their stories are what should be strived for, even when they make separate accounts for “writing” and “flaming,” and won’t share their stories to provide examples of what sort of excellence should be strived for.  They claim that they don’t want their story revenge-flamed (if they didn’t want their stories flamed back, they shouldn’t have flamed in the first place).