![[REDACTED]](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/avatars/l/129/129871.jpg?1621054700){kind=avatar}
Please, for the love of god stop with the caps lock and the excessive punctuation.Treblaine said:
Takes deep breath. It was limited to fan works. Now it isn't. Words. Change. Got it?
Mary Sues! *Shakes fist*
- Thread starter Froggy Slayer
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Takes deep breath. It was limited to fan works. Now it isn't. Words. Change. Got it?
But Wesley always screws up and is made to seem like an idiot... meanwhile the brilliant, smart, uncompromising and perfect in every way Captain Picard comes to sort things out and set things straight. Wesley was used as a buttmonkey, set up to fail so it can be demonstrated what is the right way to do things.IamLEAM1983 said:
He exists to serve an ENTIRE CAST of Mary Sues!
It seems Mary Sues is more applied to "admired characters I wish weren't admired".
Really, list Captain Pidard's character flaws? You can't say "too perfect".
I think his balding only serves to show he isn't vain enough to use a futuristic cure to male-pattern-baldness, yet he still takes the time to dress and appear respectable. You can only find anything bad about his by going to the movies which were panned for how inconsistently he was written from the TV Series. I mean he forgave the Borg for what they did to him, constantly sought peace with them and turned down an opportunity to annihilate them all. He even shows compassion and understanding with a being that exists solely to exterminate all life. Movies turned this on its head, see the Red Letter Media reviews destroying those flicks.
You have to admit, most of the favoured characters are Mary Sues. The ones who aren't get out on trivial details like being to cynical or smoking, Ooooooh, a cynical smoker.
Rose Tyler and Gwen Cooper (Torchwood's Rose)
No, I kid. But thinking about it, he really only has that one "character flaw." And even that's kind of weak. It does develop into an arc, and I like the way it ends, but yeah.
"That thing about the chicken."SirBryghtside said:
No, I kid. But thinking about it, he really only has that one "character flaw." And even that's kind of weak. It does develop into an arc, and I like the way it ends, but yeah.
You didn't give any basis to your assertion that it was EVER defined as for fan-work only. Just because the term first spread amongst criticism of fan-works does not mean that was where anyone thought it could only work, even then.Atbird said:
As to your diving pleading for end to caps and my level of punctuation.
No.
I refuse.
After over 8'000 posts on this forum I am fed up to my back teeth of people reading my posts selectively and replying to one part of it, ignoring the main point, as a way to act like some sort of false refutation. It's as bad as picking apart grammar rather than the substance of an argument even though it's perfectly legible. The only time to pick apart grammar is when it really doesn't make any sense so it's not clear what they are saying.
But in defence of capitalisation. Read ANY legal document like a Terms of Service or End User Licence Agreement and you will find that lawyers have used Block Capital letters. I will continue to use block capital letters so that people have no excuse for skipping the important points.
Block capitals do NOT represent shouting, they represent EMPHASIS.
The block capitals and punctuation I have found are absolutely necessary when you are dealing with text only. It's easier to hold Shift key than grab the and so on which can easily break and not clear how it fits. I've always found itallics removed emphasis, for use if quoting someone so not coming from yourself.
I'd agree, but I'm just going to trip you and run so I don't share your fate.Treblaine said:
Yes, pretty much every member is a Mary Sue. I think even the Enterprise is a Mary Sue. But this is the watermark for the series, so...
*flees*
I've always said the "Mary Sue" label is worthless.Zachary Amaranth said:
You can apply it to anyone and it is mainly abused to be hypocritically applied against unconventional characters who try to be as perfect as white straight male characters.
The fact that it can be applied to the likes of Batman, James Bond, almost every Enterprise captain, almost every leading role in every Hollywood film I think Mary Sue (suitably renamed) should be part of the Campbell monomyth.
It's as worthless a criticism as saying a story has a beginning, middle and end.
And the fact several examples are white straight males eludes you?Treblaine said:
Oh, no wait...It doesn't as you at the end of your "message" you use it to thrash the concept.
Now, as my old Latin teacher said: "Words change, even if old farts like me doesn't' always like it."
Mary Sue-ism today is an acknowledged concept, no matter how much some people with some weird pretensions of being the Ultimate Authority On Everything says. It's not always a really precise concept, but it works.
And usually, at least these days...It's completely genderless.
The problem is the Mary Sue really applies to almost every main character ever. It attacks them for being admirable or exceptional, it's a campaign for mediocrity and boredom.NortherWolf said:
Mary Sue is a hugely discredited concept, it has discouraged writers from including female characters at all for how damning the Mary Sue slander can be against their work, much has been written however that (ungendered) Mary Sue is a very valid spectrum of characteristics to have even in well written stories.
The fact remains that the term Mary Sue is abused far more than it has served any useful role in criticism and it has such a vague and non-constructive definition.
Critique of characters deserve better than by contrivance looking over the 4th wall at author comparisons, it truly is irrelevant if a character is an author insertion or not on whether a story is good or not and easy to allege, hard to prove and almost impossible to disprove.
Like Wizzy said right after you, the Trekverse is pretty much a collection of unmitigated Mary Sues. Of them all, however, Kirk and Crusher take the cake. As to WHY this universe is fraught with too-perfect gentlemen or the occasional idealistic hard-lining leading woman (e.g. Janeway), it's largely because Gene Roddenberry was a secular humanist.Treblaine said:
He was firm in his belief that the far-flung future would fix absolutely EVERYTHING on Humanity's overall scale, while our current problems would remain to be found on a bigger, pan-galactic spectrum. The Vulcans are the British, the Klingons are the Japanese, the Borg fit right in with the early nineties' lasting Cold War fixations. Voyager's Doctor likes opera when he could've liked Bruce Springsteen or Alice Cooper, because opera is "high-brow" and intellectual, at least according to the popular consensus. Tom Paris had a thing for retro-futurism because the fifties' Pulp serials were a direct influence on Roddenberry and had their own brand of stubborn naiveté. Star Trek is a universe where you can have your Flash Gordon fantasy cake and yet avoid dragging your crew into anything that's so messy as to underline our less-than-noble leanings. Everything's put in place so Humanity comes out on top.
Remember; we've been elevated by the Vulcans, and by the time Voyager rolls around, we've learned to balance our emotions and ideals so perfectly that planetary war is a thing of the past. The only thing that's left of it is a very romanticized vision of the way - WWII as seen through Holodeck simulations, where the Americans are *very* American and the Nazis wring their hands, buff their phony accents are are relegated to your average boogeymen.
If this is the norm in that universe, then things that disrupt that norm become Sues. Crusher's a Sue because there's no way in Hell, outside of sheer nepotism, that a kid his age would've ended up serving on the Enterprise. Yes, he's a genius, but Vulcans tend to be depicted as dime-store geniuses, too. You don't see them enrolling their kids into the Federation. Crusher's the Impossibly Privileged White Kid, and yes, that might be a form of intentional parody of some fans. Considering how honestly loathed Wil Wheaton's character was, I kind of doubt it was. I'm still of the mind that he was a rather sincere concept that had gone awry.
I think Wesley Crusher was meant to be another facet of the awesome-tastic and utterly infallible Federation of Planets. Mainly, that Humanity had been elevated so far beyond its puny origins that exceptional talents had easy and complete access to the fast track.
Basically, when your entire setup is an idealistic author stroking his intellectual member and going "I wish everything was super peachy-keen!", then you can't really apply the concept of the Mary Sue to things that follow that baseline.
The Mary Sue is a clumsy, disruptive and destructive force. When your narrative and cast is made up of nothing but Sues and Stus, then you have to redefine what a Sue or Stu is - for that cultural production in particular.
To put things in even simpler terms, I think Crusher is another form of self-insert or author proxy altogether, one that's INSPIRED by the first series' self-insertion fanfics and possibly is also the product of a writer who may or may not have been caught up in that aspect.
After a while, once you realize you're getting paid to handle that obnoxious kid and put him in situations he has no business being in, you probably start considering him as a proxy.
Of course, the flat, stupid and boring answer is that Crusher's probably Paramount's attempt at creating a character that would fit well for the younger viewers watching the show on weekends. An attempt at capturing a then-younger demographic with a character that sits in their age range.
Honestly...I would say the main character from Legend of the Seeker
The main pilot from Gundam Seed for some reason always felt that way to me
Casshern from Casshern Sins
Simba from Lion King
Terry Long who married Wondergirl Donna Troy was based on the writer at the time and is known for being "creeptastic" but at the same time interesting
I don't think it is fair to call him a Mary Sue because a lot of what happens is his reacting to events around him and indirectly causing them. So we get a lot of reaction...What kind of flaws would work with the character. I would characterize him as prideful, lazy, having issues with his dad(I always interpreted his "chicken" thing as coming from resentment from his push over dad), reckless, but kind hearted and loyal.
The main pilot from Gundam Seed for some reason always felt that way to me
Casshern from Casshern Sins
Simba from Lion King
Terry Long who married Wondergirl Donna Troy was based on the writer at the time and is known for being "creeptastic" but at the same time interesting
>.> dude...the guy wet the bedJayElleBee said:
Actually...gonna point out that he is Greedy alongside prideful. He buys the almanac from 2015 out of that emotion, which ultimately sets in motion other events. Most of the problems he experience are caused by the same repeated mistakes in different forms. Not shown in the movie but in the original script he works for the Doc because he buys him beer, and combined with other signs of his behavior and looking at the comments made about Alternate 1985 Marty...we can assume that he has a tendency towards negative behaviors that simply just did not come up in the movies.SirBryghtside said:
I don't think it is fair to call him a Mary Sue because a lot of what happens is his reacting to events around him and indirectly causing them. So we get a lot of reaction...What kind of flaws would work with the character. I would characterize him as prideful, lazy, having issues with his dad(I always interpreted his "chicken" thing as coming from resentment from his push over dad), reckless, but kind hearted and loyal.
And don't forget that he apparently did such an awesome job in the War of the Ancients that Nozdormu sends him to the present just in time to see the birth of his children. Meanwhile, Broxigar the Red is left to die an agonizing death at the hands of Sargeras, because fuck the orc who slew a mountain of demons single handedly and diverted Sargeras' attention long enough for the demonic portal at the well of eternity to be closed. (I might be a bit of a fanboy for him though)Witty Name Here said:
Look, Roddenberry was no Lucas. He did not totally dominate the creative vision of Star Trek it was very much open to other people's input. For example Gene was hugely sidelined in the movies after even he admitted he screwed up with Star Trek The (slow) Motion Picture. If he did have veto power he didn't use it often.IamLEAM1983 said:
I think Crusher is very much a committee inclusion and it's evidenced by how later in the series he is completely sidelined and in discussing the structure of TNG cast you could easily leave Crusher out entirely except as an addendum to Picard's profile as "the kid who he lectures to a lot".
It was a ham fisted way of relating to a younger audience that the writers seemed to resent as they wrote him like a buttmonkey and then wrote him out almost entirely to focus on whole episodes of Picard being a brilliant person totally uncompromising and never having any significant personal failing.
I didn't suggest anything that would go against that, Treblaine. However, what I was getting at was the fact that the philosophical undertones of the first series became something of a trademark. You can't design a Star Trek series without blind optimism for the future, without considering Mankind as something that's eminently perfectible, as though solving world hunger and abolishing wars were just a question of us getting off our asses. It's very much a product of the sixties in that regard. The first series came about just as we'd managed to send a man to the Moon, so the enthusiasm concerning space was at an all-time high.Treblaine said:
Come the nineties and early two-thousands, we've transitioned into more of a postmodern context. Voyager manages to add a few nuances to the basic premise, but it still isn't enough to NOT give the impression that the show as a whole spits in the face of anything that's not highbrow. The darkest the series and overall concept ever got was when the Borg were introduced, and it's consistently remained the darkest facet of the series ever since.
Because, as we all know, the Smashing Pumpkins totally didn't appeal to our nobler penchants and as such, were utterly unworthy of the Doctor's consideration. And yes, that's sarcasm. There's a few other aspects (like the Vidiian Phage in Voyager), but the more recent series used to stick to generally brighter subjects to ponder.
I don't have anything against secular humanism, and I think Roddenberry did great things for popular culture, for the popularization of science in general, and for establishing science fiction as a genre that's worthy of some consideration. I still think it wouldn't be exact to call Picard a Sue, considering how in that logic of Mankind being utterly perfectible, everyone and their mother is a variant on the Sue archetype. Characters in Trek series aren't there to be adequately constructed personalities, they're meant to be intellectualized audience proxies the screenwriters put through the Ethical or Moral Debate of the Week. If they're basically just minds in a jar and need to be able to reflect to the best of our human abilities (seeing as a lot of Trek plot points are part of any basic Philosophy 101 roundtable), then it makes perfect sense for Picard to be so unflappable and difficult to put into question.
If everyone's a Sue, then nobody's a Sue, seeing as they respect the established norms of the universe. Wesley Crusher didn't. Like you said, and like I said, he was probably a committee decision - some sort of push by Corporate to bring in some extra heads during prime time.
If, on the other hand, we'd been given to understand that geeky takes on Mozart's progress curve are extremely common in the Federation and that teen super-geniuses are so common it's boring, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.
For a better example of kids mingling with Federation types, I'd point out Naomi Wildman from Voyager. She has aspirations of commanding the ship, sure, just like every kid out there's ever dreamt of being a cop at least once, but we're spared any scenes where she might save the day or display an uncanny amount of skill for her age. She's a kid, she acts like a kid, talks like one, and bumps into the same problems as any other kid. I'm sure there's other anti-Crushers in the canon, but I can't think of any others for the time being.
He is idealized in the pure fantasy sense of an unstoppable bad ass. His trope is pure comic book fan-fic. He is completely flat, unrealistic and cuts a swath of death through the canon of ancient immortals so wide you could drive a planet through it. It's such an over the top production, his motivations are irrelevant. You could replace Kratos with a goodie two-shoes and the plot with an invading force of evil and the result is the same - an unstoppable bad ass of monumentally epic proportions.Byzantinium said:
I see what you're getting at, but I can't agree because his unstoppable-badassness is never presented as anything but terrible, both for him and everybody else.
The games are never cheering Kratos on, and that keeps him from being a Sue in my book.
The games are never cheering Kratos on, and that keeps him from being a Sue in my book.
I can't be the only one annoyed about how big idea drug dealer conflicts always cut out straight to yet ANOTHER FREAKING SCENE WHERE WALT JR. EATS SOME DAMN BREAKFAST. I mean, I thought it was clever in the first season because you got to see the change in everyday life as Walt transitioned from bland teacher to dangerous meth chemist, but they just kept doing it over and over and it just started getting unintentionally hilarious and infuriating at the same time. I'm at Season 3 on netflix, and they still keep going back to Jr. and Skyler having a competition of who can ***** the most over Cheerios.liquidsolid said:
Sounds kinda hipster-y. You hated them, but now that you know a lot of people hate them, you don't really care anymore, but I understand.Durgiun said:
Also, I've seen for the last 2 or 3 pages the discussions, debates, arguments and stuff about the term, the meaning of and the use of the term Mary Sue, and all I got to say is:
Well, that escalated quickly.
Actually, hipster is a slightly correct term. But more like 60's hipsters. They want free sex, free love, and they hate religion (some Chakat stories involve massive strawman Christians)Justin1221 said:
However, Chakats all oppose drugs, even if it's just pot for chillin'. Very weird.