Mary Sues I Have Been

[psocoptera]

I've been writing down fanfic for less than a decade, but I've been making it up in my head pretty much forever, since the imaginative play days when we were Mary and Laura Ingalls packing supplies onto the old couch for our journey to the West and one of us said "that never happened" and the other one said "but it could have". (Ok, I might have been the stickler for canonicity there.)

I've been thinking a lot about Pern recently, having read _A Companion to Wolves_ and being trying to turn my thoughts about it into something interesting and readable, and so I'm remembering my surrogate OC - man, did she bear the Mark of Sue. I think she evolved a lot, from the 4th grade when I read Dragonsong through the 8th grade or so when I'd read up all the McCaffrey I could find, and I can't remember the earliest details.

As she eventually crystallized, she came from off-planet! She was a slave of the planet pirates (like Sassinak, a nice crossing of the McCaffrey universes), and her name was Once (pronounced ohn-say, Spanish for eleven, after the last two digits of her slave number). I think she had another secret name but I've forgotten it now, alas. I've also forgotten her eye color (but I'm sure she had one ::grin::) but her hair was initially bald, kept shaved by the planet pirates, but grew in at an implausible rate over the rest of the plot until it was even longer than mine (was then). And dark red, of course. ::grin:: The planet pirates had somehow found out about Pern, and were planning to attack, but she managed to escape! somehow while they were still orbiting in another part of the system and stole a shuttlecraft and somehow piloted it successfully all the way to Pern only to crash! somewhere in the far north, where she survived the Arctic climate of the pole by finding a little oasis around a hot spring. There were of course firelizards laying eggs in the warm sand of the hotsprings, and she promptly Impressed two!, a blue and a bronze named Seastar and Comet respectively, but because she hadn't grown up on Pern she didn't know anything about the color hierarchy! and treated them as equals, which everyone else found very strange.

Succumbing to her injuries from the crash!, she sent the firelizards out with a frantic plea to bring help, and woke up in Benden Weyr being tended tenderly! by various main characters who were all very curious as to how she had gotten to the hotspring. She immediately freaked everyone out by speaking to them through direct telepathy! when she couldn't understand the Pernese language - oh, yeah, the same gene techniques that had been used to develop the dragons had been used on some humans, in the couple thousand years since the colonization of Pern, and it had bred into the general population and showed up randomly sometimes, but she'd always managed to keep it a secret! from the planet pirates that she was one. Anyways, *she* was of course confused that Pern had people like Lessa who could talk to all the dragons, but not to other humans - I think sometimes she managed to break through and teach the Dragonriders the secret of human telepathy, and sometimes she just used it long enough to learn the local language and that was that. (The planet pirates, meanwhile, orbiting elsewhere in the Rukbat system (I bet you forgot about them), seemed to be happy to wait for months and months to launch their attack - maybe they had really, really complicated invasion plans.) Once everyone had gotten over their initial suspicion and disbelief and was convinced that there really were people on other worlds and some of them were going to be attacking with energy weapons any day now, she figured out how the dragons could be used against shuttles and trained the Dragonriders up on anti-pirate tactics. You have all been waiting to hear about her inevitable dragon and wondering what non-canonical color it might have been: Asenath was silver! in some lights and black! in others, because, see, of course contact with her freaky telepathic mind while still in the egg had altered it to be extra special, so very unique that it couldn't even just be *one* non-canonical color but had to sneak in *two*. And then she convinced everyone that the only way they could win against the pirates was by becoming a freer society without so much hierarchy and oppression of the serfs and stuff and led Pern to defeat the pirates and free the pirate-slaves and they were all set to go contact other planets and for Pern to rejoin the galactic society and I think F'lessan was her boyfriend not that there was anything at all interesting about F'lessan but he was like the only single male character under the age of disgusting and *obviously*, *obviously*, there had to be one Dragonrider who could look past her inconsistently-lengthed hair (still recently grown in from shaved, in this scene) and tragic enslaved past and intimidating habit of speaking inside your head and see the beautiful girl who just wanted friends and a dragon even better than theirs.

And that was my Pern surrogate. I find it interesting to wonder, now, why it is I had a McCaffrey surrogate but not a Lackey surrogate - was it just that I came to the Lackey books a few years older? That I liked dragons but not horses? That being Chosen in the Lackeyverse was a sign of being the kind of rules-following self-sacrificing blah good guy I wasn't interested in fantasizing about being, whereas Impressing in the McCaffreyverse just meant you were awesome?

I'm sure I can't remember every Mary Sue I ever invented, but I remember some. I was far more interested in surrogate characters with special powers and extraordinary histories than I was in direct self-insertions of my boring old self into fantasy worlds - I had read enough Nesbit to know that when you're *you* on a magical adventure, you mostly spend your time being hungry and cold and tired and worried. Much better to be older, sexier, keeper of mysterious secrets and central to the plot. I don't think I ever had a Tolkien surrogate, and I dabbled very briefly with the Granddaughter of the Emperor over the Sea (hey, if he's got a *Son*...) until I twigged to the Christian mythology and was weirded out and abandoned it. I never had a Tortall OC, which is weird given how rabidly I re-read those books, but I guess I wanted to *be* Alanna, not hang out with her, you know?

Other than my dragonrider, my most developed OC was probably... but enough about me. What worlds did *you* run around in? What color were your eyes, what made you extra special, and who was your boyfriend? I was originally going to challenge everyone to score their surrogates on one of those Mary Sue litmus tests and see who could score highest, but, hey, they're long and boring and mostly apply to things written down, so just provide all the embarrassing details you can think of and we can crown somebody Mary, Queen of Sues by consensus. Please keep it to surrogates in "published" universes rather than alters in original universes - my main alter is still very precious to me, she doesn't want to hear about yours ::grin::. I am not normally the pleeeeeeez comment type but I would really love to meet some more childhood Sues. I will describe my second OC and all of her very important jewelry in the comments once a few people come play.

Comments

[antimony.livejournal.com]

The first Sue I had was actually a joint creation -- me and three friends creating really bad Who fanfic at age 8ish. I don't remember many distinguishing characteristics -- we were all Time Lords, and I think there was the vague plan of pairing two of them. (The lead on this travesty was a male childhood friend -- we both sort of assumed we'd date when whe got older. Then we grew up and went, um, no.)

I had a Pern Sue -- it was a "rediscovery" tale for the lost colony; she was an Earth scout who landed and got a dragon, and managed to get the dragons to planethop, thus connecting Pern back to the wider universe. She didn't get a romance; just a dragon. I have no idea what she looked like; but I do know her dragon was a queen who was pale, pale gold, almost silvery. She never got a name.

I had some Lackey Sues as well, but they were much more pieces of "playing with the laws of magic" in that universe, since for some reason the Lackey magic rules make me want to rules-lawyer. (And the Lackey trope of rules-following self-sacrificing character hits my buttons hard enough that this was a good universe for me to create characters in.) The main one was a pair of cousins, who were in line for a non-Valdemar throne, and some power-hungry villain got a prophecy that they'd be his doom. So he tried to take them out at age 8 or so -- killed one of them, but they were using their telepathy to both see through one set of eyes and both survived in one body. The attack awoke their powers at that point and they kicked his ass. And then ran away from home and picked up two Companions, bemusing the rest of the Heralds to no end. Neither of them had much power on their own; it was by acting as mirrors to each other that they kicked ass. I have no idea what they looked like, either.

Potter Sues -- I had a lot of fun trying to work out what a US version of the Potterverse would look like. All the Sues were set well in the future to avoid actual interaction with the HP cast. But none of the actual characters had much development. I think that's 'cause I saw too many awful Sues that people actually wrote.

Hmm. What other series might I have some for -- not Darkover, not Known Space, not Trek, not Tolkien, but I know there were others. Just can't remember.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

I actually really quite like that idea for the Lackey-Sues. I could certainly see it being possible using her rules, at least the twins in one body part. Did anything get written down, or was it too horrible to survive?

~Sor

[antimony.livejournal.com]

That was years before I ever had the nerve to try writing fanfic -- it would definitely have been too terrible for words. Also, they never actually had a plot. Just a concept.

And, heck, anyone who wants to do something non-Sue with it is welcome to the concept. I'm not going to use it. :)

[adfamiliares.livejournal.com]

Marge, you and I are very different people: I've been searching my memory, and there are plenty of fictional characters I've identified with, but I can't remember any cases where I imagined inserting myself or a me-surrogate into the fictional world. Is this something most people did? I never knew!

[sofer.livejournal.com]

I had to think about this for a while. I know I imagined myself in books as a kid, but I can't remember any particular Sues. I think I mostly just imagined I was one of the characters, rather than creating a new one. Maybe this has something to do with why I'm not much into fic now. The one exception might be a sort of uber-Sue: the time traveling freman who showed up on the Star Ship Enterprise and solved mysteries with Sherlock Holmes and may have had some pirate adventures too.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Time-traveling freman etc... that's an excellent Sue!

[kelilah.livejournal.com]

I generally made up characters to help myself go to sleep--I didn't know the term Mary Sue then, but I kind of figure that if you're not writing it down, it's less Sue-ish if you're central to the plot. I mean, it didn't help me go to sleep to think about things happening to other people! ;^) We called it "scenarioizing." And while my characters generally had some connection to the "main characters"--well, there had to be a good reason for them to be there in the first place, right? They tended to have angst, primarily about dead family members (and I often felt a bit guilty about killing off my beloved family in my head), and Sooper Speshul Talents, but they always looked like me (I think--I was looking out, if that makes sense). With different hair lengths as appropriate. :^) And, yes, I always had a romantic relationship. It's probably pretty obvious who, in each world. ;^)

I think the only book universe I used was from Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books. But lots and lots of tv, generally whatever I was watching most at the time: Star Treks TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise; seaQuest DSV; short-lived series McKenna; stupid teen sitcom a la Saved by the Bell (but with music!) California Dreams; Stargate SG-1; and a bit of Buffy. Also a long, long love affair with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I'm sure there's more, but I can't think of them at the moment. I often had mad engineering skills, or mad archery skills, or freaky deaky mental powers (but only if it seemed to fit in that world!).

I always thought I was the only one who did this, until in high school it turned out kivrin did it too--she was the one who dubbed it scenarioizing. But anyway, I liked reading about yours, and wanted to share back.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

I was of a created race similar to the Tayledras, only with bondcats instead of birds. And I had a black companion. There is Mary Sue, and then there is "Dear sweet gods"

(I refuse to discuss my Valdemar/Hogwarts crossover fiction. Because oh, it was bad)

~Sor, who is reading through all the relevant 30 stories, because they are wonderfully good.