community: snowflake_challenge Challenge #3

[matsushima]

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favorite character, anything at all.

When I was a teenager, I used to be part of those sporking communities where people made fun of self insert/Mary Sue fanfiction. I'm not proud of it.

I realized in undergrad that what I really wanted was an excuse to read "badfic." I pretended I was doing it ✨ironically✨ but I genuinely enjoy reading Mary Sues and self inserts - still do. My first big research paper was about Mary Sue fanfiction. Almost 20 years later, I'm working on a conference proposal about… yeah, you guessed it: Mary Sues. I'm returning to my roots.

Mary Sues are honestly so fun. I love your mood ring eyes, your flaming red/raven black/sunshine golden hair. You're dating your blorbo? Good for you.

Mary Sues aren't hurting anybody. I guess maybe wading through FF•net in the bad old days before AO3's tagging system was a thing might have been annoying for older fans trying to find more canon-centered(?) fic but… It was weird when I realized that many (most?) of the members of marysues weren't other teenage girls but whole ass adults? As a whole ass adult now, I'm like, Did these grown-ups really have nothing better to do with their time than make fun of actual children?

Honestly, I think the time I spent in those "sporking" communities really did a number on my creativity in ways that I'm still trying to unpack. I cringe when I think I've given too much of myself away, made it too obvious that I like this or that other media… even though I screamed (in a good way!) when the sandworm rises out of the dunes in Trigun Stampede in a frame-by-frame reference to/recreation of the scene in Dune (1984). I love catching references and allusions to the author's influences but I'm shy of doing it myself because of the old "pepper jack cheese" [archive link] joke at pottersues.

Nowadays, I'm (one of the) admin(s) at fandomocweekly and, while not every original character is a Mary Sue, I consider it a pro-Sue community. Is Paisley Webster a Mary Sue? What about Mary Brigid Mohan? I don't know… but I also don't really care any more.

I've been thinking of starting a Mary Sue fest here. Somewhere we can all write and share our repressed teenage 10th walker dreams. Maybe I'll run it this summer while I'm off school.

P.S. Sorry I didn't do the actual "love letter" format. I couldn't get into it.

Comments

[glitteringstars]

A conference proposal on Mary Sues?! That's so cool! Do you have any paper recommendations?

But I know the feeling of having old adjacent hatedom burning in the back of your brain when you want to write something for yourself. Things I've turned to are a couple of times are a couple of interviews by Kimberly Lemming with Smart Podcast, Trashy Books (found here and here). Lemming takes a lot of inspiration from Chuck Tingle's philosophy on sincerity in writing.

[matsushima]

I've only just started collecting my bibliography but my most recent find is Gimp Sue Gets the Girl: Disability in Twilight Fanfiction.

My idea is to look at fanfiction, specifically Mary Sue fanfiction, as children's literature - an unusual literature as it's the only one named for the audience, not the authors (in most cases, with a handful of notable exceptions). But most Mary Sue fanfiction is written by children for other children.

[majoukoufu]

As someone who literally picked up my 6th-grade self-insert longfic for a rewrite a little bit back, high-five for embracing a love of Sues in adulthood! (It's an interesting balance challenge, appealing to both what I want to write now and what kid!me would want to read.) OC/SI fic (on Geocities sites where you had to be looking for it in the first place to find it) was my formative net fandom experience. It just shaped so much for me, even if I also do a lot of strictly-canon now too.

And yeah, I was never in those comms myself, just stopped writing because of them for ages - not just the sporking comms, there was a lot of "good writing is not having Bad Stuff get in the writing, so don't do this" all around back then, it seems in retrospect? - and it was a real shock to realise how much older they skewed than I initially assumed.

[matsushima]

As someone who literally picked up my 6th-grade self-insert longfic for a rewrite a little bit back…
That's so fun!!

I think back then, I didn't know how to find Mary Sue/self insert/wish fulfillment positive communities, you know, people who actually liked this stuff. I'm so pleased for younger fans growing up in the era of "cringe is dead" and self-shipping shrines. (I mean, there's a lot of fucked up stuff, too, but those two trends are positive.)

[majoukoufu]

Idk how things evolved in the later 00s, but at least when I was actually following the community instead of doing it on my own, it was way more spread out than canon-centric fandom, at least within the fandom I was in at the time. Mostly on Geocities and Angelfire type sites that linked and webring'ed with each other, and I guess there was a forum or two I just never found. But there was relatively little crossover into canon-centric-fandom spaces, linking to canon-focused sites, etc. A few very big fics would submit links to archives that mostly contained canon-character-only stuff, and a few writers would put both their canonverse and OC stuff on their personal sites (perhaps in different sidebar sections), but they were the exception. So at least from my POV, it makes sense if you couldn't find them back then! You kind of had to stumble on some corner of it almost by mistake and branch out from there.

[matsushima]

Given the hate for Mary Sues at the time, I guess I'm not surprised that it was less centralized and harder to find. It's too bad, tho.