A post full of thoughts

[elvenpiratelady]

So this is a post about fandom and meta and me looking back on the things I did in my younger fandom days. It began when I got linked to a few posts talking about the term 'Mary-Sue' and how its meaning has changed over the years since fandom started on the internet.

The first link I read was this essay by Boosette on Dreamwidth (be warned, it's quite provocative even if I agree with most of it, and there's a lot of emotional language), and I was going through it and agreeing with quite a lot of what the author was saying. Then she said a word that I would never have associated with myself: bully. Direct quote:

"Translated, roughly: PPC goes around bullying tweens, teens, young women and yes: older women, too -- for daring to write fanfiction not up to their (dubious) standards. For writing original female characters, minor canon characters and major canon characters in a manner that is empowering to them."

I was shocked to read that. Holy shit, I said to myself, is she talking about me? Am I a bully? Because I used to spork fics a few years ago (going on four or five now, and by god that seems like a long time). I used to post MSTs here, and I used to be on the PPC message board. I wrote a couple of missions, although I only posted one and a half.

Being called a bully was a great shock. I didn't want to believe that of myself, but I have to admit, from an external point of view it sure looks that way. But taken without its context an idea or a word is going to sound off, and I think I should relate how I got to sporking fics in the first place.

The thing is, I got into fandom just when the LOTR films were getting started. I think the first fics I read were printouts of the Very Secret Diaries and Bagenders. I saw The Fellowship of the Ring and read the books in the year between that and The Two Towers, and I fell in love with the world and its canon.

When I got to fanfiction.net, though, what I saw was thousands of romances between a canon male (Legolas, usually, I think it was almost a fandom requirement to fangirl him at one point or another) and an original female character. I clicked on a couple and wasn't impressed (for the record - romance is not my thing, and to this day I'm more interested in plot than pairing). I was amazed at the sheer mass of them, and how they all seemed to follow the same pattern of OFC meets canon male, falls in love, saves world, lives happily ever after. A lot of summaries had some variant of "not a mary-sue!" and eventually, through the Official Fanfiction University of Middle-earth I think, I found the original PPC missions with Jay and Acacia. And I read them, and I loved them, because I wasn't the only one who thought that there were rather a lot of Legomances in the LOTR section of ff.net. When I was reading it the PPC felt fresh and new and because there were so many OFC-centric fics, it didn't feel like it was doing anyone any harm. The targets (the Department of Mary-Sues goes into fics and assassinates the Mary-Sue to bring the world back to canon) had negligible personality. It was like getting upset about watching someone destroy a cardboard cut-out, and so I thought it wasn't doing anyone any harm. What my younger self didn't know or willfully supressed was that every fic that was targeted had been written by someone who had made an effort and put it online hoping to get feedback, hoping to join fandom, hoping to connect. To my knowledge, the PPC missions were not intended to be seen by the original author but they wouldn't have been that hard to find. And so it's possible, no probable, that a lot of the authors of the fics found their stories getting torn apart.

If I'd mentioned this to my younger self, by the way, she probably would have shrugged and said 'they clearly didn't put any effort into it and they didn't make any attempt to stay within canon, so they don't have any right to complain'. This is the point where I want a time machine so I can shake my younger self and say 'can you hear what you're saying?'

Because I used to have ideas about writing my own OFC in Middle-earth too. Her name was Aleia, she could work magic, she was a human adopted by Elves in Hollin and she ended up saving the world and being mortally wounded, going over the sea to be healed/made immortal in the process, and of course she and Legolas fell in love. She's still in my head in an evolved form, wandering around in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender right now, and she's having a good time. Good for her.

I used to pride myself on not writing and posting my OFC fic, even if I had one in my head. I thought I was better than the other writers posting their Mary-Sue fics, and this is the point where I have to go and smack my younger self around the head a couple of times. I might not have posted a Mary-Sue fic, but nobody starts off writing masterpieces that will make the world weep. My earliest fics were the Fellowship-in-modern-times, the poorly-written parodies, the strange ideas liberally laced with crack. They're still at the end of my ff.net account, if you really want to look at them. I never deleted them because they're still the ones with the most reviews, and because I reminded myself that we all had to start writing somewhere.

My younger self was conscious enough of the fact that everyone starts off writing god-awful fic, but she didn't pick up on the hypocrisy of slandering Mary-Sue writers. I thought Suefics had plotholes that you could drive a tank through. My earliest fics were a series of scenes that I thought were funny and the plot was made up as I went along. I accused Suethors of writing canon characters completely OOC. My earliest fics were exactly the same. I winced at Mary-Sues tromping all over the canon. The very first fic I posted, in the WoW fandom no less, contains in the AN: "I haven't played Warcraft 3 and I'm using the game manual for information, so please excuse any mistakes." I had, essentially, no leg to stand on criticising fellow ficcers.

But I was having fun, and I never thought that the Suethors were having fun writing their Mary-Sues. It never occurred to me that they could enjoy writing those types of fics as much as I enjoyed writing fics so cracky that they were coming apart at the seams, but there you go, hypocrisy again. Eventually I grew as a writer and discovered things like plot and subtlety and proper characterisation, and I've gone on from there. I never had my fics torn apart by reviewers, and I think I might have given up writing fics if that happened. Young writers are not exactly thick-skinned. But I think now about how easy it was to jump on a new ficcer for writing a romance badly, or getting canon details wrong, and I feel awful when I think that I probably contributed to people giving up fandom. I love fandom so much because it's inclusive and creative and I think it has made me a better person, and I feel like the worst person in the world for depriving other people of it. If you're out there somewhere, I am so sorry, so very sorry.

At the same time I made a lot of friends at the PPC and I learned a lot about writing in general. Some of my greatest friends here on LJ are people I met on the PPC boards or connected to it in some way, and I value you guys very much. I am not trying to insinuate that any of you are bullies, but I'm not comfortable with the culture any more. For most of you we've moved on from PPC matters and we've got other things that make us friends, and I treasure that. I treasure being included and being able to love fandoms with you guys. If I could take back the hurt I caused to other people and leave the good times with you standing, I would, but life doesn't work that way.


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So looking at the whole issue from that perspective, yes I accept that I probably hurt a lot of people and I should have known better. But I thought I was doing the right thing at the time, and here's why:

From an internal POV of the PPC, it was never about bullying or degrading other people's works. It was about protecting the canon.

I loved the LOTR canon - nowadays I still love the books but I have a lot of issues with the movies. But in my younger days I loved the books and the movies both. I was confused to see so many fics about characters that didn't exist in canon, doing things that never happened in the original source. Tolkien made us this wonderful world, I thought. Why aren't they playing with the things he gave us? Why have they brought in other toys?

So eventually I settled into the mindset of canon = good and non-canon = bad, when it's more like you can like some parts of canon and dislike others and still call yourself a fan, and non-canon is not necessarily bad unless you don't explain it. Those are long, though, and it was easier to stick with the shorter slogans in my mind. I started scanning fics for canon errors and judging the fics by how well they stuck to canon, not how well they were written.

This is where Suethors come up against a major barrier, because LOTR canon has very few women, and to a modern audience they have very limited roles. Women in LOTR do a lot of behind-the-scenes work that isn't mentioned or is mentioned only in passing, and it takes a lot of reading between the lines to see them. To a new fan coming straight from the movies or having just read the books, the world of Middle-earth desperately needs more female characters, and if there aren't enough canon females then the only option is to make some up. And if you're going to make up OFCs then why not make them fight with the men and do things that might actually rate a mention in the books?

Because that's not canon, I can hear my younger self whining in the back of my head. They're mangling the canon, they're ruining Tolkien's work, they're not doing it right.

Shut up, younger self. The canon is fine. The canon doesn't know about fandom, and if it did it wouldn't give  a damn. Someone writing a fic about a dragon-riding half-elf princess who saves the world and marries Legolas isn't going to change every copy of LOTR in the universe to their version of what happened. My younger self worrying about Suethors mangling canon is about as logical as me worrying that driving instead of taking the bus is going to make the sun stop shining.

I still maintain that you can write awesome original female characters that don't go against the canon, but you need time and patience to do so. Writing a Mary-Sue is one step on the road to writing an awesome female character, but a ficcer isn't going to go any further down that road if they get reviews saying essentially 'your story is a travesty, you can't write for shit, you're ruining the fandom'. Of course they're not going to keep writing if they get that day in day out.

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In her essay Boosette also talks about how "Mary-Sue", which was once a fairly neutral term for an original female character, is now equivalent to "scum of the Earth". I find myself agreeing with her. When I hear or read "Mary-Sue" I think, approximately, "astonishingly beautiful girl who can do everything and do it better than everyone else, who saves the world and has everyone love her because she is so wonderful, and who screws canon over sideways with a shovel". But what I have there are some of the symptoms of a badly-written original character, not the problem, namely that the character is badly written.

Me calling an OFC a Mary-Sue, with that definition, is implying that well-written OFCs are not beautiful or talented or competent or anything else, and I have a problem with that. I shouldn't be tearing down other ficcers (and knowing fandom demographics, they're probably other women too) for writing about beautiful/talented/competent women. I shouldn't be tearing down women for being beautiful/talented/competent, we get enough of that in society.

What I should be doing is looking past the descriptions and going to the characterisation and the writing, and saying things like "your OFC sounds like a fun character to write but I'd like to hear how she got that scar and how it affected her". And the like.

This is going to be hard. My method of reading fics used to be:

a) click on fic
b) read through fic searching for Mary-Sue symptoms and canon errors
c) find them, go 'oh god, not another one' and click away. I didn't leave much feedback because I was lazy and I didn't know where to start on the list of perceived problems with the fics.

Now it should be:

a) click on fic
b) read through fic, trying to ignore what I've trained myself to see as classic Mary-Sue symptoms. Look for canon errors and try to think of ways to justify the difference or change the fic so that it's within canon. (Easier for some canon errors than others)
c) if I need to, vent my anger on this LJ under lock and key. Not at the author.
d) then go back to the fic and review it properly.

I fully expect that this is going to take a lot of effort on my part, not least because I'm in the bad habit of bookmarking fics without reviewing them, and because looking for signs of a badly-written character takes more concentration than looking for typical characteristics. But I'm determined to try.


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And because of this I am not going to use the term "Mary-Sue" anymore because it does not mean what I intend it to mean any more (and hasn't for a good few years) and because it is demeaning, and not gender-neutral. Instead I'm going to try badly-written original character, which is BWOC and I guess I'll get used to it.

Because badly-written original female characters are not doing the canon any harm, and they are the start of writing well-written original female characters. I've been increasingly appreciative of female characters in fanfic (see: femgenficathon , my post about ladies in the Silmarillion) and it is not fair that badly-written male characters don't get nearly as much flack as OFCs. And I cannot think of any situation when I could look at a fandom and say "okay, that looks like it has enough awesome ladies, no more please".

I love me some female characters. I really really love me some well-written female characters, but the badly-written female characters are the first step to them. New authors need encouragement and gentle criticism and eventually they will be writing original female characters well. BWOCs are a pain, but they're a passing pain (and a lot of ficcers will keep writing, look back on their first fics and roll their eyes. But they'll still be in fandom and they'll still be writing, and that's a good thing.)

It's going to be a hard habit to break, but I promise to try. Encouraging new ficcers = more people in fandom = more fics being written = ficcers learning to improve their writing = more fics about well-written OCs and canon characters = everyone wins. And that, younger self, is worth a little heartache at seeing canon get mangled.


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More links:

Boosette's essay, again: Storming the Battlements or Why The Culture Of Mary Sue Shaming Is Bully Culture

Niqaeli weighs in here and here

Goldjadeocean here

And lastly here are Sarah Rees Brennan's thoughts on female characters in fiction. I'm linking them here because they made me think critically about what I think about female characters and SRB makes a lot of good points about the Mary-Sue thing even if she's not talking about it directly.

Ladies, Please!

Ladies, Please (Carry On Being Awesome)

Ladies, You Are Awesome (Just Admit It, Quit Fronting)



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Holy shit that's a long post. Well done if you lasted to the end, if you didn't here's the tl;dr version: tearing down ficcers for writing badly when they start writing is bad, encouragement and gentle criticism is good, and I'm not using Mary-Sue anymore. Back to crackfic posting now.


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EDIT: Apparently this is getting more coverage than I expected. For the record, this is just my personal experience with fandom and you shouldn't hold this up as a yardstick to everyone who used to spork fics or still does so, everyone is different. If you're going to comment here please keep it polite, not everyone is going to have the same opinion and I don't want to hit Metafandom and Fandom Wank in the same week.

Comments

[stained_glass]

Thank you for this post - it is really wonderful, and well thought out.

I was very young when I first heard about the PPC, through boz4pm. I was never a part of it, because I knew that in writing TAD, I would not have a leg to stand on! I had written other fics even more "Sueish" when I had been younger, and after a very brief period of "NO SUES!" - pure herd-following - I realised that I was having fun playing a character that could legitimately be called a Sue in TAD and TADers, and if I was having so much fun then others could be as well, so I didn't mock all the 11th walker fics in the LoTR fandom as much. Nen wrote several MSTs, I remember, and I recommended one to spork, because it was so full of insulting depictions of child abuse - there were a couple of others that we judged to be deserving because they had ANs congratulating themselves on their canon knowledge. But I myself was probably too harsh at times, and I am sorry for that as well.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting, I'm glad it makes sense. I thought it was going to be longer than this but I think it says everything I need to say right now.

Looking back I am really not happy with my younger self at all, because I remember thinking "isn't this kind of mean?" but I reminded myself of all the things they were doing with canon and I didn't do anything about it. Mocking the canon errors and bad writing was easy, trying to be constructive would have taken effort. (And I thought - and still think - it's really hard to give some fics concrit because there is so much in them that could be improved, and you need to break it to the author gently without completely disheartening them.) I remember Nen's MSTs, they were entertaining because they pointed out how silly the mental images were and by the end of the MST the story was completely different to the actual fic. But I say that as someone who's never had a fic MSTed and in the end it doesn't help the author become a better writer.

[sandtree.livejournal.com]

Can I friend you? I feel ridiculous, because I recognize you, but have I ever talked to you? I just can't remember! I've been around the LotR fandom since I was 13, so we must have crossed paths at some point, even though I've been inactive for a few years. Were you ever on the PPC posting board? I was BeautyID. I don't know if that means anything to you (and now this sounds like, "Do you know who I am?!" Haha). Anyway, I looked at your profile/journal and You Are Cool. And now I'm done. XD

[stained_glass]

Rereading your post, I picked up on this:

I love me some female characters. I really really love me some well-written female characters, but the badly-written female characters are the first step to them. New authors need encouragement and gentle criticism and eventually they will be writing original female characters well. BWOCs are a pain, but they're a passing pain (and a lot of ficcers will keep writing, look back on their first fics and roll their eyes. But they'll still be in fandom and they'll still be writing, and that's a good thing.)

That is the big thing - writing a character that I find insulting - for anti-feminist stuff, or offensive depictions of child abuse, or whatever - I realise that my younger self saw them as somehow deliberate. I could see it, and therefore they could see it, and included it anyway, and so it had to be a deliberate inclusion - they know it is wrong, and want to rub my face in it anyway. Having matured I can recognise that mistake, and feel guilty at my inclusion in things like the MSTs. They felt gentle at the time, to read and laugh at, especially in comparison to the PPC stuff which was too much for me, but that might not have made it any less hurtful.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Yes good point, I remember reading the fics and going 'are you deliberately trying to get the highest score on the Mary-Sue Litmus Test? Are you trying to be as unoriginal as possible? There are thousands of fics exactly like yours, try to be creative for once!'. But the authors probably didn't see it that way, or they saw someone else writing about a girl with a dragon and thought that was a cool idea so they would do it too, and so on throughout the fandom. So yes, I remember thinking that they deserved to get their fics torn apart if they were going to write like that intentionally, when that wasn't the case at all. (And younger self, your hypocrisy is showing again, there were thousands of Fellowship-in-modern-times fics when you were writing them and none of us could hold a candle to Bagenders.)

[julyflame.livejournal.com]

I'm probably going to post my own thoughts on this in my own journal and link to that essay because it has its points, but I've got an exam to study for right now. >.>;

But from what I read I personally thought the essay was being unnecessarily condescending and tossing the misogynist label around needless and was leaving out the important thing of bad writing in general.

(Kel is an awesome character because she is written well. A character of that same summary badly written is a Mary Sue, etc etc.)

My younger sister also writes fic, and she personally doesn't give a damn about actually improving her writing as far as I can tell. (I say this because I've offered to beta or at least remind her to spellcheck and she gives me a stare of evilness and then goes out of her way to not have a beta and not spellcheck. Her stories make my eyeballs cry but I'm still proud she's interested in writing.)

And it's just yar. I'm going to wait to say more in my LJ before I trip myself up.

[julyflame.livejournal.com]

That said, I'm totally linking that on the PPC Board because I think a lot of people there do need to read it and think it over. >.>;

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

The essay was very emotional, certainly, but maybe if it hadn't been so it wouldn't have grabbed people's attention. I read that one first and got quite upset and defensive, and then the other ones I linked gave me a better idea of what they were all talking about.

But yes, there is a difference. I adore Kel, but someone with the exact same description could be a very badly-written character and would probably get shouted down if they were an OC. It's like cars: cars need a working engine to run, but that's not the thing you see. You see the outside whether it's shiny or battered and rust-eaten, but that doesn't tell you anything about the engine. It doesn't matter how shiny the car is, no-one will buy it if the engine doesn't start. But cars can be shiny and have working engines, or be rusted and not work at all, and it's not right to just them by their outsides if you haven't looked at the engine too. I hope that strange analogy makes sense.

Yes, you have to strike a balance between letting the newbies run free despite their questionable writing because they're having fun and teaching them how they could write better. And new writers generally fall into one of two categories: they're writing fic and they want to improve their writing, or they're writing fic because it's fun and they don't want to try to improve their writing, they just want to have fun. I don't know what to do with the second type because I don't know how you could write fic for a fandom without loving the canon and wanting to flesh out the world, but they're entitled to their fun.

Good luck with the exam.

[sandtree.livejournal.com]

This is all true. Even though I really don't read or write fan fiction anymore, it's still something that I have opinions about. I was disillusioned with the nastier aspects of the PPC and other things like it a long time ago. When I was 14 or 15, bashing Mary Sues and having a fit about canon and bad writing and characterization seemed very important. Then I got older and realized that it's not the end of the world if someone wants to share a poorly written story about a super awesome girl who gets with Legolas, especially if they're having fun doing it. And even if these authors never really improve, even if they continue writing this stuff for the rest of their lives, who cares?

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Hindsight's a real pain in the neck sometimes. But yes, what seems like srs business when you're 15 often tends not to be so when you look back on it.

I can deal with authors not caring about improving their fics, although I don't really understand it. But if they want to go and play in their corner of fandom then that's fine, I probably won't review their fics but they're having fun. As long as they don't try to pass of their fics as the greatest epics in the history of the world, because then I'll start eyerolling.

But then there are the authors who do want to improve their writing and keep their OCs. So if a ficcer really and sincerely wants to make her dragon-riding half-elf OC a well-rounded character, I should be giving her advice about making a character consistent and a believable person who just happens to be a half-elf and has a dragon. Unfortunately my younger self probably would have said 'lose the dragon and pick elf or human, then we'll talk' if I'd even bothered to review. This is the problem, see, for myself and for the fandom in general: we don't check for the differences between these two authors, we just see a half-elf with her dragon and assume they have exactly the same attitude towards writing. So instead of making sweeping generalisations, I should be looking at each fic individually, and that's hard because there are so many of them. But we should try.

[minviendha.livejournal.com]

I'll be back to reply to this.

But thank you for this post. I have my own thoughts to share too, but what you've written here is full of thoughtfulness and consideration, and by god, but I admire your coherence. All so true, and while it's hard - and I did not mean to make you confront something painful - I'm proud of you (if that's allowed) for moving forward past this.

We all grow up and figure things out; lord knows I have too.

Okay, more tl;dr because I've been thinking about this - another really good point you make in here is that honestly, in writing Mary Sue fanfiction, who are the writers hurting? Even if they don't make an effort to improve - I don't know, maybe this is incoherent, but rant about it to your friends, who will nod and understand and quickly forget about it. Why rant about it to the author, who will either flip out and take it incredibly badly or just crawl off to a corner to cry over the shreds of their ego, and really...what good does that do to anyone?

I probably had it easy because I joined fandom in a small, friendly group with an enormous cast of characters to play with and very few Sues. I found a few and I complained my share about the dooom in fanfiction, but honestly...Mary Sue just seems to be such a - it's a derogatory term, and by branding a character a Mary sue it seems to say that there is no possible way in which that character can be redeemable, ever.

It also has to do with, I think, the impossibility of forgiving things in female characters that would be easily forgotten in fandom favored males.

I don't know, when it comes right down to it, but this has definitely been food for thought - and I understand all of what you're saying, because while I was never part of a sporking community officially, yes, I've said things in my head that I regret, and I've written things that I never want to look at again.

And if people grow up on Mary Sues, it seems quite possible that they'll switch over to either original characters of their own eventually, or awesome female characters, and as you point out, isn't that a good thing?

So that's my rambly and incoherent two cents, it sounded a lot more sensical in my brain.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thankyou for the links, you inspired this! I'm glad it came out coherent, the night before I wrote it my thoughts were approximating a cyclone and I really wasn't sure if I could get the point across at all. It took me more than two hours from start to finish, but I feel better for getting this all off my chest. This is something that I've grappled with before in a smaller way, from twinges of conscience when I was ficcing to looking back at my sporkings in the last few months and going "wow, I was a little bitch". But the links brought this to a head and I realised at last what I had done, and a couple of fandom secrets brought the Oblivious Guilt Slinging trope. It was painful, I never imagined that I would see something I did as bullying behaviour and no-one wants to see themselves in that light. But I feel better for getting my thoughts in order. This is part of growing up, I guess, learning to admit that you were wrong and apologising for it, and being determined not to make the same mistakes again and not to cause people more hurt.

Can I just say I am really touched that you're proud of me, and that I really value your good opinion? I've been afraid to put friendships to the test before, being scared that they wouldn't be strong enough to withstand the pressure or would be irrevocably weakened, and I'm glad that's not the case. (Younger self, your paranoia was unwarranted, and we still have a lot of social interaction stuff to work on.)

...but rant about it to your friends, who will nod and understand and quickly forget about it. Why rant about it to the author, who will either flip out and take it incredibly badly or just crawl off to a corner to cry over the shreds of their ego, and really...what good does that do to anyone?

Yes thank you this is a good point that I missed! Sure I might blow off steam by posting a little rant here or on ffrants going "oh god, guys, how could they ever think this was a good idea?" but there's no point in saying that to the author's face. That's not constructive and it doesn't help.

It is really not okay the way people talk about BWOCs only as female characters, when the guys get a lot more slack. Occasionally I hear Gary/Marty Stu in the fandom but mostly they're not there. I don't know if this is because there are not so many male OCs or if they get a lot more forgiven by being male. If it's the latter then that's not okay at all.

by branding a character a Mary sue it seems to say that there is no possible way in which that character can be redeemable - yes this is a good point too, implying that a BWOC is a static character, that they can't be improved or evolved. I think the impression that a lot of new writers get is that you can only improve your BWOC by taking away everything that the author believed made them special, like so: you have your half-elf dragon-riding girl. Lose the dragon and make her either human or elf*, you can't have both. She can't go with the Fellowship because there's no reason for her to be there. She can't have magical powers because only Valar or Maia have them. And so on and so forth until you end up with a character that might be canon compliant, but the only thing she shares with the original dragon-riding girl is her name, which you could change too. So if the author watches their colourful creation get turned into what they see as a grey shadow, and then get told 'alright then, off you go and have fun writing her!' then of course they're going to be disillusioned.**

[agenttrojie.livejournal.com]

You're right, you know. And I live in fear of someone finding one of my sporkings and being hurt by it. An author once did find a sporking of her fic that tea_fiend and I did, and she commented, and took it pretty well. She said she'd laughed while reading it, which is nice.

On the other hand one of our sporkings apparently got ranted about on ffr because we had no taste and the fic was actually awesome and we wouldn't know good writing if it fell on us out of the sky (this was the Remus Lupin/Severus Snape fic with the violent magical sex-change).

Admittedly I don't deal with Sues. Ever. I just avoid writing with OCs in it, and always have. I deal with slash, which is also what I write.

To be honest, I know that a lot of what I write would be considered 'crimes against canon' by some of our younger and rather scarily rabid members (we're getting a lot of people in from TVTropes now who think that ficcing itself is bad, which is worrying to me in the extreme), and I ... don't really care. 'Crimes against canon' to me, is the in-universe reason for PPCing. To me? It's fun. It's stupid. It's relaxing. It's practice writing.

And sometimes I feel like a hypocrite. And sometimes I don't. I never really know how I feel about it. It's just something I've done for a long time.

But you're right. We're stomping on someone's playground, and we're kinda revelling in it.

On the other hand though, we don't write these things for them to find. We write them for our own amusement. We're probably hurting these ficcers no more than ficcers themselves are hurting the original authors of a work simply by taking it in a direction they don't like.

I'm not really clued up enough to consider the morals of it, I suppose. But I can say I'm getting more and more scared by the attitudes of some of the newbies that are coming through. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll give it up.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I used to be really afraid about my targets finding my fics (and I used to use the Story Alert function on ff.net to keep track of them, and I remember one author found my fics because of that and left nice reviews, and I kind of had a crisis of conscience about it. Except then I MSTed her fic anyway, after asking LJ if it was okay. Meet my younger self, isn't she a sweetheart?) I think, as I said in the post, a lot of ficcers look back on their earliest BWOFC fics and go "oh god, was I really that bad at writing once?" and maybe then if they found someone had sporked their fics they might have a laugh about it. But you can't control when someone will find the sporkings and if they'd found them straight after writing their fics they'd be upset, which is understandable. But I agree that no-one I know who sporked fics actually went out of their way to link their targets to it, and it was a way of venting steam among like-minded people. I remember one of the sporking communities getting really annoyed about someone linking authors to their MSTs and Sue reports, because that wasn't what we were aiming for. If we'd wanted them to read it, we would have posted a review saying such.

I'm not touching the issue of taste because YKINMKATO and et cetera, plus I read a couple of Snapefen wank reports yesterday and some Snape fans are really scary. But I really wonder why someone would complain about sporking to ffrants, because that's half the posts basically. (In a shorter form, but still.)

Imo, I think the Department of Bad Slash did less harm than Mary-Sues, because a) there was seldom if any killing involved, so there isn't an immediate reaction to a pair of agents riddling an original female character with arrows, and b) it makes the distinction of being Bad slash, while Mary-Sues is much more ambivalent.

They... seriously? They think that ficcing itself is bad? Oh god, this is the last thing I want newbies to any sort of fandom to think.

And I've realised that writing against canon is not a bad thing if the author can write it well enough and if they explore how it would affect the rest of the story. Something like "I made it so Boromir didn't die because I think he's hot" vs "I made it so Boromir didn't die because I wanted to see how he'd affect the course of the War, Denethor and Faramir's actions and Aragorn becoming king". Basically I love AUs. And um there is a difference between writing AUs and "what if?" stories and writing stories that you claim are canon-compliant but have character X acting completely OOC for no reason.

For the record, I eventually gave up sporking because it was taking up time that I could use for writing my own stuff. Also I ended up not reading anything at ff.net anymore, now my main source of fics are LJ and recs pages and the like, so I'm not wading through seas of badly-written fic to find gems any more. And sometimes I still read things that make me rage and I have to rein myself in and say "cool it, click away if you don't want to keep reading". But it is a slow process and I expect that I might lapse from time to time.

I gotta call some shenanigans

[dharma-slut.livejournal.com]

On the other hand though, we don't write these things for them to find. We write them for our own amusement.

Why then, are all the anti-Sue comms open to the public to read, and not kept locked down?

We're probably hurting these ficcers no more than ficcers themselves are hurting the original authors of a work simply by taking it in a direction they don't like.

Are you talking about hurting a ficcer's feelings and possibly scaring her away from ever trying to write another original character in her fiction?

And are you comparing that with 'hurting' Tolkien, by writing an alternate story in his universe?

Tolkien is dead.
And the girl is alive.
Tolkien has written his masterpiece, the culmination of his life's work.
The girl hasn't gotten that far yet.

[dracoena.livejournal.com]

Are there actually essays classifying the PPC as bullies? That´s awesome, and makes me feel rather vindicated. Back when I was in the Tolkien fandom, long ago, I came across the PPC and found the whole concept disgusting. Not that they ever messed with me directly (I´ve written crap but there wasn´t a Designated Evil Life Form aka Mary Sue in it, so I guess that makes it right), but I was just fresh from many long years of school in which I had been a bullying target, and when I saw it -let´s say I wasn´t amused.

What I thought was: there´s a very simple fact about fanfics (which applies to many other things as well). Don´t like -don´t read. Whoever finds a fic horrible from the summary/disclaimer/first line and still reads it anyway and bashes it, and puts it in a forum, and mocks it, and makes a show of feeling personally insulted -well, it´s classic bully behaviour, isn´t it? Messing with people who haven´t done anything else to you than post their fics in the same site because... well, quoting James Potter "because they exist". Because they should be behaving as you want them to and writing what you want them to and thinking what you want them to, and they aren´t.

Also, to me it seemed to be a lot about feeling better. Someone picks the very worst story they can find, rips it to pieces and wham! authomatically that makes them feel like they´re a good writer and not One of Them. It´s like going to a toddler who is scrawling on a paper and saying "Look at this, that´s how a tree is supposed to look like, because yours is crap and mine is so much better!", and walking away happy with oneself.

Please, don´t be angry but, as I said, I used to have strong feelings about the matter and this just made them briefly resurface after so many years. Now, I am actually starting to undestand things much better: the PPC people were teenagers, and many of them (like, obviously, you) probably didn´t even have those hideous motives I attributed to them to begin with. They were just being teenagers. In fact, I´ve always liked you and your weird posts a lot -when I think that, had we clashed years ago as immature teenagers about the PPC business we might have been enemies forever, that´s a very sobering thought. (I was very immature at that age, and said and did things in the fandom that I am very ashamed about now. I didn´t bash other´s fics, but I clashed with more people than most of the PPC board for other reasons. It´s not likely that I´ll ever write a post on that, though... it would be too embarrasing! :P)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I only found one essay (the first I linked) that explicitly accused the PPC and badfic sporkers of being bullies, but you could probably find others. And my younger self used to bristle at "don't like, don't read" but it is true, although it requires a lot of self-discipline. Morbid curiousity played a large part for me, because I used to read the fics and keep reading in horror at how badly they were crossing canon or simply getting plain facts wrong - and as another commented pointed out, I got to the conclusion that they were doing it deliberately, that all the BWOC authors a fandom were someone colluding. (In my defence, you could almost pick a fic at random and have it be a badly-written BWOC romance with a canon character, because there were so many of them when the LOTR movies were going and because they all sounded pretty much identical.) So when I found the original PPC missions (and there were only about 15, as I remember) they felt like a breath of fresh air because there were only two agents against untold thousands of BWOCs, which I saw as the enemy. And then other people started writing their own PPC missions and became institutionalised, it grew to have a much larger presence in the fandom. At the start I didn't feel bad about the missions because they were like (odd analogy here) hyenas picking off a few antelopes out of a herd of thousands. What was a few antelopes to a herd? I thought, and I didn't think about what the antelopes who got taken down would think about it. But then more and more hyenas came so the numbers were more like 2/3 antelopes, 1/3 hyenas and I got uncomfortable. Is this making any sense at all?

I do not quite agree with the toddler drawing analogy - I would have seen them as an adult deliberately drawing something as badly as possible and then expecting to be praised as the next da Vinci or whoever. I sporked fics to get out my anger about what they were doing to the canon, because I loved it and held it up as a deity, almost, and couldn't understand why anyone would mangle it so badly unless they didn't love it at all - and if that was the case, why weren't they writing original fic? The sooner they were out of my fandom the better. (But of course this is an internal POV of a sporker, not an external one, and you're probably in the majority.)

It's the GIFT theory in action, basically, people taking things at face value and authors judging other authors by their avatars and forgetting that there was a living breathing person behind it all. I'm certainly not angry with you - people are going to have strong feelings about this one way or another and everyone's experience is going to be different. My younger self wasn't bullied at school but she was very insecure and that channeled itself into sporking things in fandom. We were all teenagers once and I am a prime example of them not being the most well-adjusted people in the world. (Disclaimer: I know a lot of awesome teenagers, but we all slip up from time to time.)

That is a sobering thought, that I might not have ended up being friends with you or half the people on my flist if we'd met earlier. First impressions make a big impact and that's a reminder that everyone should act courteously in fandom.

[ssquirrel-fic.livejournal.com]

I agree completely with your 'don't like, don't read' paragraph. It doesn't matter that it's online and [relatively] anonymous, it's still bullying. =/

[sedri.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit late to get on the comforting-wagon, but I hear you.

I had a Middle-Earth self-insert, too. Her name was Ciorina, and I dug through the family trees for ages until I found a Baggins who could possibly have married an elf and therefore made her half-elf, half-hobbit - for putting in that much effort, I thought I was so much better than other writers. Looking back, I shake my head and sigh. I'm still ashamed, but I'll call her a Mary Sue 'til the end of my days. Despite everything you've said here, I don't think there's anything wrong with that; yes, there is a sense that "Mary Sue" = "irredeemable", but what I see as the centre of the problem with most Suefics is that the plots are practically impossible to do right - everything's too easy, there are Uncanon Magic Tools and so on and so forth. Things better writing alone couldn't cure.

But that's not the point, so let me change the subject.


As I see it, the simple thing is, at that age, none of us were nearly as mature as we thought. I'm absolutely certain that everyone that age has made some absolutely stupid, hypocritical and selfish mistakes - which is why I can now laugh (or sigh) at the teenagers who think they're adults just because they've finally grown tall enough to pass for one. That's just how we are as teens; self-centered. And for the record, I use the term "teenager" lightly - some people continue to act like that well into their twenties; some, for most of their lives. That's the part of life in which we're trying to grow out of childhood and figure ourselves out, which means making a lot of mistakes. No one can grow up without making mistakes.

So for exactly that reason, the problem keeps coming up; most Suethors are young, and while I'm not saying that this makes them all, without exception, selfish and hypocritical, it does mean that they haven't had time to experience things from multiple angles, as we - being older - have. So the best thing we can do is put up gentle posts that offer guidance from experience and hope they care enough to listen. I remember an essay by Merlin Missy in which she talked about older authos having taken "the scenic route" through fanfiction - I think this is the same.

The short of this is, don't scold yourself so badly. You were young. You grew up. What's done is done and you're even going the extra step of trying to make things better. That makes you a good person.

And if that doesn't make you feel better, think of it this way: Even if you did hurt people, even a lot of people, it was a long time ago, and regardless, they'll have gotten over it by now. Whether they're still writing or have gone on to enjoy playing sport all day, you haven't irrevocably ruined anyone's life.


Also, you don't have to feel guilty for your preferences when it comes to what you read. You're not obliged to read anything, and if something isn't your taste, regardless of whether that's because of Sueish traits, canon errors, or just focusing on a character you don't like, that is YOUR CHOICE. There are way too many fics out there to read. You are certainly not obliged to review them, regardless of the communcal guilt-pressure of "I reviewed yooooours".


(Sorry if this is a bit topic-jumpy.)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting. You have a good point about the plots, because yeah, most of them were very basic storylines and the most well-written character in the world could not have saved them. I only found one girl-falls-into-ME fic that was written well, and that was Don't Panic! and its sequel. I never found an arranged marriage fic I liked because elves not having arranged marriages is one canon fact I will not budge on: they don't, they never will. I guess as people keep writing they learn to write better plots as well as better characters.


I think a lot of the time people read "immature writer" as "bad writer" which is a little unfair. Immature writers haven't developed their writing style and plot/characters yet so it's unfair to compare them to people who have been writing for years. Immature writers are also often immature in the sense of being young and they don't have as much experience as other people in the fandom. I guess everyone thinks they know it all when they're teenagers.


The essay by Merlin Missy sounds interesting, do you have a link?


I don't feel guilty about not reading something that I know I won't like (see: arranged marriages between Elves) but if I read something that looks promising but I think needs a bit of work, I'll review it and mention what I think could be improved. But I do like to leave a comment on fics even if it's just "I liked this" because I know how disheartening it can be to post a fic and not get any feedback. I have this theory about fandom karma.

[dharma-slut.livejournal.com]

you know what though, a lot of women have not gotten over being bullied. (http://majoline.dreamwidth.org/13571.html)

And if that doesn't make you feel better, think of it this way: Even if you did hurt people, even a lot of people, it was a long time ago, and regardless, they'll have gotten over it by now. Whether they're still writing or have gone on to enjoy playing sport all day, you haven't irrevocably ruined anyone's life.


That is a shamefully dismissive thing to say, frankly. How can you know what's happened to someone else?

Visiting via Metafandom

[clodia-metelli.livejournal.com]

As a relative newcomer to the Tolkien fandoms, this was a riveting read! I've been following the MS debate with more interest than normal, because it's primarily a writing issue with socio-political overtones rather than the other way round, and (a) it's particularly interesting to view the whole thing in the context of my home fandom; (b) your post offers something of a window into the fandom's history, which I always find fascinating. Thank you for sharing!

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting. I haven't been following the MS debate except when people link me to it, but this confession post has been simmering away for a while and I needed to get it out. It's been interesting to watch the fandom change over a few years.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

This is a brave and impressive essay. *applauds*

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Thankyou, I didn't expect it to resonate with so many people.

here via goldjadeocean

[dharma-slut.livejournal.com]

I was born in the wrong body, with female genitalia instead of male. I knew what was wrong from about two years old, as far as I can recall.

This has been a problem for me all my life, but it might have been easier to bear if being female didn't come along with so many inequalities, like never being default for heroic qualities, and always being default for sluttishness qualities.

There is nothing that will send you into feminism than the constant realisation that you are being treated in a certain way solely via appearance. I became fiercely protective of women's right to be THE HERO, especially in fiction where, at least, the writer's pen could have some control over the world it created, control that is missing in reality.

Tolkien did more to cement my gender discomfort than any other influence in my life. '

because he was a fantastic writer, and he wrote fantastic...

Men.

So my younger self wants to punch your younger self in the face, and isn't it a good thing we've both grown up some? ;)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of the problem in LOTR is that Tolkien didn't see many opportunities to put women in central roles. I like his female characters in the Silmarillion a lot more.

[ssquirrel-fic.livejournal.com]

Here from so_sue_me on Dreamwidth ~

Just want to say thanks for writing this. As a teen I always thought the Mary Sue bashing stuff - fics being ripped apart, rather than general dislike - was just cyber bullying, so I stayed well clear. It was interesting to read how it worked from the other side.

I'm really glad this whole topic has been under discussion recently. Not many of us can handle criticism (of any sort) well when we're just starting out. I see lots of new-to-writing writers in my main fandoms and I know that if I pointed out all the problems in their fics, they'd likely never contribute to the fandom again. Instead I focus on something they did well and encourage them to write more - a few chapters later you can scarcely believe it's the same person. By making them give up on fandom, they don't get the chance to practice and improve.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

I am... a little surprised at how much this is getting linked.

Giving constructive crit is really hard even if the author explicitly says they'd love to hear it. Taking constructive crit is equally hard and a lot of new writers probably get worked up over the 'crit' part and forget the 'constructive'. The first time I got a fic beta'd, I got the impression that my beta was trying to break it to me, ever so gently, that if my fic was a car not only did the paintjob need work, the engine and wheels were missing. I never did end up posting that fic but it's important to get the feedback and practise rewriting things, practice picking yourself up again.