Sue terminology
Feb. 14th, 2008 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraJosh was vaguely confused about what sort of thing I meant exactly in my previous post, so here are some quick thoughts about terms as I was using them.
First of all, the cryptic abbreviation "OC" means "original character".
I talked somewhat loosely about "Mary Sues" when referring to my own private fantasies, but I think the term is best applied only to characters in works that have actually been committed to existence somewhere. I would argue that a Mary Sue can be defined *purely textually*, on the basis of eir characteristics and relation to the work, without any knowledge of the author or the author's intentions. There's lots and lots out there about Mary Sues - I consider this comic the definitive work on the subject. ::grin:: Basically, they are Extra Special and break the consistency of the universe or other characters in some way.
A self-insert or author avatar is a projection of the author or someone very much like them into the text, either as a character with their own name and characteristics or as The Author breaking the fourth wall, claiming metafictional powers, etc. To know whether a character is a self-insert or author avatar, you need to know something about the author (maybe as little as their name.) (Is every character who claims to be The Author necessarily an author avatar? Discuss for extra credit.)
A surrogate is a character who is gratifying some personal desire on the part of the author, playing out some sort of fantasy or wish-fulfillment. Surrogacy is a relationship between the author and the text (or between the fantasizer and the fantasy, if there is no fixed text). To know whether a character is a surrogate, you need to know things about the internal psychology of the author. Often not tremendously *subtle* things, but still.
Self-inserts can be Mary Sues, but do not have to be; both Mary Sues and self-inserts are frequently surrogates, but aren't necessarily. For example: if in my story Lord Peter Wimsey throws a big party for the London swells and finds a shy woman with a lopsided face in his library sketching the frontspiece from one of his incunabula, that's a self-insert; that's totally where I would end up, if I was somehow at that party. If he throws a big party for the London swells and finds a shy woman with a lopsided face in his library and he has passionate library sex with her, that's a self-insert, a Mary Sue, and a surrogate - a self-insert because there I am again, a Mary Sue because Wimsey is behaving out-of-character under her influence (he would never cheat on Harriet like that), and a surrogate because I think passionate library sex with Peter Wimsey would be *totally hot*. If the woman in the library has stunning white-blonde hair and knows more about incunabula than he does, she's not a self-insert any more, she's still a Mary Sue, and she may or may not be a surrogate depending on whether I'm more turned on by Lord Peter Wimsey or turned off by the idea of being blonde. (Yes, I definitely think it is possible to write a Mary Sue with whom you cannot personally identify.)
I don't think any of these terms inherently have anything to do with good or bad writing. Morpheus of the Endless famously scores as "one hell of a Mary Sue" on one original character Mary Sue test (link), but that doesn't make Sandman a bad comic. Self-inserts, if done smoothly, can be just another character. I think most works have at least one character who serves as a surrogate for the author at some point or other, or why would they even be writing the thing? Identifying with your characters can lead as easily to good writing as to bad, imo.
Oh, one last term: I'm using "alter" in a weird way nobody else does to refer specifically to fantasy selves that share some part of your own real history and don't overlap with any public fictional universes. Why I think it's interesting and important to distinguish surrogates and alters is beyond the scope of the present post. ::grin::
First of all, the cryptic abbreviation "OC" means "original character".
I talked somewhat loosely about "Mary Sues" when referring to my own private fantasies, but I think the term is best applied only to characters in works that have actually been committed to existence somewhere. I would argue that a Mary Sue can be defined *purely textually*, on the basis of eir characteristics and relation to the work, without any knowledge of the author or the author's intentions. There's lots and lots out there about Mary Sues - I consider this comic the definitive work on the subject. ::grin:: Basically, they are Extra Special and break the consistency of the universe or other characters in some way.
A self-insert or author avatar is a projection of the author or someone very much like them into the text, either as a character with their own name and characteristics or as The Author breaking the fourth wall, claiming metafictional powers, etc. To know whether a character is a self-insert or author avatar, you need to know something about the author (maybe as little as their name.) (Is every character who claims to be The Author necessarily an author avatar? Discuss for extra credit.)
A surrogate is a character who is gratifying some personal desire on the part of the author, playing out some sort of fantasy or wish-fulfillment. Surrogacy is a relationship between the author and the text (or between the fantasizer and the fantasy, if there is no fixed text). To know whether a character is a surrogate, you need to know things about the internal psychology of the author. Often not tremendously *subtle* things, but still.
Self-inserts can be Mary Sues, but do not have to be; both Mary Sues and self-inserts are frequently surrogates, but aren't necessarily. For example: if in my story Lord Peter Wimsey throws a big party for the London swells and finds a shy woman with a lopsided face in his library sketching the frontspiece from one of his incunabula, that's a self-insert; that's totally where I would end up, if I was somehow at that party. If he throws a big party for the London swells and finds a shy woman with a lopsided face in his library and he has passionate library sex with her, that's a self-insert, a Mary Sue, and a surrogate - a self-insert because there I am again, a Mary Sue because Wimsey is behaving out-of-character under her influence (he would never cheat on Harriet like that), and a surrogate because I think passionate library sex with Peter Wimsey would be *totally hot*. If the woman in the library has stunning white-blonde hair and knows more about incunabula than he does, she's not a self-insert any more, she's still a Mary Sue, and she may or may not be a surrogate depending on whether I'm more turned on by Lord Peter Wimsey or turned off by the idea of being blonde. (Yes, I definitely think it is possible to write a Mary Sue with whom you cannot personally identify.)
I don't think any of these terms inherently have anything to do with good or bad writing. Morpheus of the Endless famously scores as "one hell of a Mary Sue" on one original character Mary Sue test (link), but that doesn't make Sandman a bad comic. Self-inserts, if done smoothly, can be just another character. I think most works have at least one character who serves as a surrogate for the author at some point or other, or why would they even be writing the thing? Identifying with your characters can lead as easily to good writing as to bad, imo.
Oh, one last term: I'm using "alter" in a weird way nobody else does to refer specifically to fantasy selves that share some part of your own real history and don't overlap with any public fictional universes. Why I think it's interesting and important to distinguish surrogates and alters is beyond the scope of the present post. ::grin::
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 07:51 am (UTC)Oh, definitely not — mostly because authors lie. Dave Sim, Jeff Vandermeer, and Gene Wolfe come to mind as authors who have inserted characters into their work who could, believably, be their avatars, but probably aren't.
Re: Morpheus, I'm not at all sure you can Mary Sue your own work. I wouldn't consider Lazarus Long a Mary Sue, even though he's smarter than everyone else, has more sex than everyone else, and is obviously Heinlein. (A later author might be able to Mary Sue their own earlier work; Long is more of a Mary Sue in The Number of the Beast than Methuselah's Children, imho. But an author is not the same person at 60 that they were at 20.)
no subject
Date: 2008-10-14 09:31 pm (UTC)~Sor