Round 33, Hour 21

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Or: The Pains and Misery of Shipping, the fic_rush edition.

Do you stare at fandom and not understand why everyone concentrate on the romance while what you want to write is that epic genny longfic? Do your shipping preferences contradict that of anyone else in fandom? Are you THAT OT3er when everyone else goes for the OTP and care not about poor 3? Do you ship the least popular OTP of all time?

Are you the only person who ever wrote Owen/Amy? Or Brannigan/Valerie, for that matter? Do you randomly compare and consider two huge movies and then the penny drops all of a sudden and you go, OMG NATASHA/SELINA IS JUST SO OBVIOUS AND WONDERFUL only to find you are the only person to write this, AGAIN? Do you, too, want MOAR BRUCE/SELINA?

In short: ARE YOU A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE LIKE ME?! AND HOW CAN WE ACHIEVE GALACTIC DOMINATION THROUGH IT???

Share it with us here. That's what we're here for (well, no, we're here to write fic, not to complain about how no one cares about our ship, but, y'know, I'm writing a presentation).

Comments

[lolmac]

I'm a special snowflake! I must be! Of my own very special type!

I want ALL THE FIC in my own very obscure fandom, but I don't want Mary Sues, or slash, or torture porn, or ghastly OOCness, and there's so damned little else that I ended up writing it myself because there was NEVER ENOUGH. And still isn't.

I don't much care about shipping Mac at all, as long as you don't expect him to settle down and get married. Or ship him with Murdoc. Or Pete. Or Jack Dalton. So much room for ewww!

*Bruce pets Selina with apparent sincerity*
*Selina claws and bites Bruce and purrs*

[pitry.livejournal.com]

I actually do sincerely wish more people wrote Mary Sues. :D (Hmm. And now that I think about it, I can actually see Mac/ Jack. Athough what I'd really want to see is Penny/ Nikki! That'd be awesome ♥)

/completely missing Beth's point. :D

[lolmac]

So far, every Mary Sue MacGyver story I've seen has Mac hideously out of character. I used to believe that there was such a thing as a Non-Sucking Mary Sue story, but I now regard that as sad naïveté.

Penny/Nikki might be interesting, except that Nikki is bright and Penny is an idiot.

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Penny is NOT an idiot! She's just... well, she has the attention span of a magpie inside Aladdin's cave or something. Which is one of the reason Nikki/Penny would be so awesome!

.. I have a thing for clashing personalities, I think.

As for Mary Sues, here's the thing I think: we all know 95% of all fanfic sucks anyway. Younger authors are more likely to write Mary Sues because they haven't had the Wrath of Fandom come down on them hard yet. Young authors are less likely to be good authors because experience etc. so it LOOKS like there's no chance for non-sucky Mary Sues. But I still believe that somewhere, out there, there are good Mary Sues stories.

(Also, since I know my own progression as a writer and how important it is to just write regardless of quality, because otherwise you won't get better, I fully support people writing their Mary Sues. Even if they are sucky. That way, they'd still be interested in writing, and are likely to get better as writers simply by writing!)

[lolmac]

I still believe that somewhere, out there, there are good Mary Sue stories.

As I said, I used to believe that, and it was hard having to give up the idealism.

I also started out as a completely hopeless Mary-Suer: starting from about age 13, my only escape from the crap that was my life was to lose myself in Mary Sue fantasies. I wrote my Heroic Alter-Ego into every book, movie, TV show, and comic book I could (and that was most of them!) I had no idea that this was something anyone else did. (I was astonished when I found out, much much later.)

I also knew that the 'stories' I was making were crap, and that this was something only I would be interested in. I was ashamed of it for years and kept it a deeply hidden secret. Eventually, I recovered from the shame, and forgave myself, and discovered that it was much, much better to have survived adolescence by wallowing in my own imagination than by, say, drugs or sex or bullying.

But this still doesn't mean that any of those stories were something that belonged out in public. To be blunt, it was literary masturbation. Masturbation is an important part of a healthy life, but it still should not be done in public. Nor should the person doing it in public expect praise for this – but that’s what the typical Mary Sue writer is doing.

So, now, as a person who wants to encourage writers of all ages, I have two problems with Mary Sues. One is that, when I read a Mary Sue that’s written by someone with any writing ability: the story sucks. The Mary Sue ruins it. If the writer is good enough to write a good story, it’s time to learn to get beyond the Mary Sues, and write without them.

The other is that the Mary Sues are online at all – or, rather, that the manner of their posting seems to be placing the writer in the public masturbation zone. Usually, the author posts a work with a passionate declaration that this particular ‘OFC’ is NOT a Mary Sue, DON’T HATE ME PLS LUV ME. So any hope of growth as a writer has been scuttled: a young writer is not likely to get any better if they’re devoting their energy to denying the craposity of what they’re doing – or, at best, that the work is too self-absorbed to be accessible to others.

Mary Sue can be a phase, a starting point. But the nature of that crutch eventually cripples the user, unless they dump it the minute they can stagger on without it. Mary Sues are antithetical to good writing, or at least to good plotting and characterization.

/end soapbox mode

[pitry.livejournal.com]

It's a chicken and egg problem. See, a lot of the problems you point out here, I tend to blame fandom for, not the specific writer. A writer who declares "OFC’ is NOT a Mary Sue, DON’T HATE ME PLS LUV ME." is responding to the attitude in fandom (whether it had been directed at her or at others) that OFC = Mary Sue = crap. People end up not developing beyond writing Mary Sues because they're too afraid of writing a Mary Sue, so they go about it the wrong direction - instead of learning to build an independent character, they work with some assumption of what a Mary Sue is (which isn't necessarily correct) and try to work backwards on how to make their character not a Mary Sue, which often makes it an even worse 'offender' of the tropes.

There's too much awareness and self awareness of Mary Sues. And this crutch doesn't get dumped in time because of that awareness.

As for whether it belongs online or not... I don't know. My own experience tends to say, actually, bring it on. A lot of my learning experience wasn't just writing but also interacting with people. Granted, the nature of my interaction in writing was actually different from most experiences (not to mention that I admit a large factor of 'how I learned to write' included a huge list of things I couldn't address or do in my writing, so it's very different from the more common limitless fanfic writing). But. There was the interactivity there - writing, seeing what other people write in response, writing some more, not to hear people tell me I'm so great OMG!!!111!, but it really helped to keep the interest going.

But as I said, I'm aware my beginner writing experience is somewhat different than most people.

[lolmac]

I'm almost giggling, given that my beginner experience is also very different, and probably not replicatable now.

I like your points and I wish I could agree with them. My own experiences are getting in my way. But that doesn't mean that anything you've said is wrong: just that I can't personally get behind it. Honestly, I hope that you're right, or at least right for a larger part of the world than I am, because it means that part of the world is shinier than my cynicism sees, and I always prefer it when my cynical side turns out to be wrong. (Yikes, did that make any sense? I hope so.)

I do, definitely, completely agree that the attitude "OFC = Mary Sue = crap" is bad and destructive, and that damage is done, period, as a result of the hating. Especially, "Mary Sue is ALL THE EVIL" seems to have become an all-purpose bludgeon misused against any character or characterization. There's no growing or learning from THAT either.

Still, I'm not letting anyone see my unfinished Mary Sue Blake's 7 Post-GP Fix-it epic monstrosity, even though I don't have the heart to destroy it.

[pitry.livejournal.com]

Wait.

You're trying to say I had a discussion in which I was the OPTIMIST? something about this is just wrong.

And OMG ♥ I just love knowing you HAVE an unfinished Mary Sue B7 fic!

[lolmac]

Now you'll be able to blackmail me forevermore. Except that I finally managed to get over feeling ashamed of the whole thing.

But, truthfully: it was EPIC. And sucked EPICALLY.