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Mary Sues I Have Been
Feb. 13th, 2008 07:18 pmI'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 )
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.
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 )
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.
