Thirty Days of Fanfic Meme: Day 8

[seawasp]

From Jeriendhal, of course!

 

8 – Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.
 1) Yes, certainly. In Saint Seiya (leaving out villains) the principal ones were Erik Nygard and Danielle Arwen Lanier.
 2) Um, why would I do that? Some of them ARE Mary Sues. I just try to make them GOOD Mary Sues, whose presence in the fic doesn't destroy the story. Erik Nygard is certainly ME, and he certainly gets to do a lot of Sue-stuff, but he's kept under control by considering his limitations.
 3) Original characters permit the writer to explore the universe from a point of view that's their own. This can lead to terrible Mary-Sues in which all things revolve around the OC, they can do no wrong, and everyone loves them, or it can illuminate aspects of the universe that the original show or book never explored for one reason or another.

Comments

[kayshapero]

Unless things have changed dramatically since I got involved in Star Trek fandom in the '70s and first encountered the term, a character is not automatically a "Mary Sue" if they are original, or even a self-insert. The "Mary Sue" is the literary black hole who drifts into the original mileau, warps everything including the existing characters around itself, and sucks in the entire plot. And of course commits the cardinal sin of the author: boring the reader.

A "good" Mary Sue, is not a Mary Sue at all.

[seawasp]

The way I've always seen it used is that Mary Sue is Special Self Insert. A self-insert who in one way or another is better than the real person, and who is UNMISTAKABLY the author, AND who plays a significant part in the story (as opposed to the little sly self-insert where the author encounters the main characters and they all go on their way none the wiser.

[kayshapero]

So it's mutated a trifle, but still useful enough as a term.

Though whether or not she's the author in disguise, I would maintain that the female protagonist of the belated sequels to Andre Norton's Beastmaster done by Lyn McConchie (and allegedly Norton - I expect she provided the world and the name on the cover) is a Mary Sue and a particularly annoying example of the breed at that. Though illustrative of the fact that you don't just find them in fanfic.

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

Ah, so maybe I have been well-advised to steer clear of those sequels. I was pretty unhappy with what some author did in the first Solar Queen sequel, so I can imagine how this would go. At least Sherwood Smith took over for the other SQ sequels and minimalized the damage.

[kayshapero]

Alas, it's pretty bad. Girl with interstellar ark collecting genotypes of rare/endangered/practically extinct species comes by Arzor to check Storm's team which are bound to be pretty rare since Earth was incinerated before the first book (talk about the Hero who is an Orphan). She fits into the place beautifully; everything local, sapient or otherwise adores her; any little problems resolve themselves before they get too awful and Storm falls in love with her (and vice versa) and asks her to stay. End of book. Tonstant Weader Fwows Up.

It's an insult to the original novel which was pretty well written*, and gave us someone with a number of problems, some of which not suited to simply killing something, then went through and dealt with them in an adult manner.

*Though I'm glad I didn't know at the time I read it that "Hosteen" is the Navajo equivalent of "Grandpa". I'm sure she did her research; alas it's all too easy to not know all the questions you should have asked...

[nuranar.livejournal.com]

UGH. That is worse than I'd even heard before, and yes, very much like what happened with the first new SQ. New *female* crew member is shoe-horned into the Queen and immediately everyone's focus revolves around her, how amazing she is, how inferior they feel around her but they can't keep away, etc. It was enough of a shock for the book to jump around instead of using Dane as the primary viewpoint; having it end up all about this new *person* really took the cake. Much less having the captain of the Queen dissolve into goo for True Love Of Her. Thankfully Sherwood Smith took over for the next two sequels and nearly marginalized her character. Whew.

(hehe, hadn't heard about that... thanks for telling me now! :p)

[kayshapero]

I got it from Tony Hillerman, whose novels are well worth the reading. (that's "grandpa" like "Grandpa Jones down the street", not personal male grandparent. An honorific for elderly men.) My guess is that whether Norton was working from written data or actual interviews on the rez, since most modern Navajo use first names like Joe, Mary or Bob, when someone was referred to as Hosteen Begay or the like it would have sounded like an authentic Dineh name at last, and that it was an elderly man would've only seem like confirmation. So "Hosteen" is authentic, just not what she presumably thought it was. Which far as I know "Storm" is not, but it probably sounded better for the time than Bob Tsosie or something.