Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Everybody’s Talking About Mary Sue

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Not sure about everybody else, but I’ve really enjoyed the Mary Sue roundtable…not least because it’s prompted so many thoughtful comments. I thought as a conclusion to the festivities I’d collect some of them here.

Mark Andrew

Backing Craig L. up here: I’ve heard – and I don’t have a source, and it could be an urban legend – that as soon as Robin was introduced the sales on Detective Comics skyrocketed from “good” to “amazing.” Even if this ISN’T true, comic companies obviously thought sidekicks sold – look how many of ’em there were back Golden Age comics. Expanding the point a bit, Jimmy Olsen (the original Snapper Carr) had his own comic for decades, so he must have had some kind of fan support.

And a Snapper/Jimmy Olsen/Robin can be useful to have around for other reasons, as well.

A) Someone for the hero to talk to. A Holmes to their Watson, someone in the know who will listen patiently while the hero drops exposition.

B) Handy comic relief, quick defusing of narrative tension. (Think Etta Candy here. WHOO! WHOO!)

BC) To paraphrase Frank Miller “There ain’t nothing like having Robin in the panel to make Batman look BIG.” They’re a visual device to make the hero look bigger/more powerful/less dorky in his silly 19th century carny costume ’cause he’s standing next to Jimmy Olsen and his doofy bow tie.

D) Older comics tended to aim for an audience that wasn’t necassary skilled at parsing both the pictures and the text at the same time.

Which means that it’s REALLY useful to have someone around to say “Holy Mother of Fuck! Superman just turned coal into diamonds! Superman is awesome!” to let the people who are JUST reading – not looking – know what’s happening. And even with today’s storytelling it’s useful to underline an awesome Superman moment by having Jimmy hang out and look awestruck.

And, for the record, I like Robin more than Batman. Always have, and still do.

Menshevik

Speaking of teenage sidekicks, it is worth recalling that Stan Lee, who was a teenager himself when they were first in vogue, confessed to hating the concept and saw to it that Bucky was wounded and replaced by a female, somewhat older sidekick towards the end of World War 2 and who in the early 1960s had him retroactively killed. (And I don’t care how much praise people heap on Brubaker, Bucky should’ve stayed dead, dammit). I am not sure if Rick Jones was meant as a substitute for Snapper Carr; at least to begin with he probably wasn’t since he was created as part of the origin of the Hulk (where Rick’s criminal recklessness, driving into a nuclear bomb testing range, led to Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk).

Matthew J. Brady.

I wrote about this a while back, but the example of a Mary Sue that I think of is The Sentry, the Superman-like Marvel Comics character created by Paul Jenkins. He’s a pretty stupid character, but the audacity of his introduction was notable, with Marvel even waging a promotional campaign that posited him as a lost creation of Stan Lee. The idea was that he was the first Marvel superhero. He was insanely powerful, and he inspired all the rest of the heroes in the Marvel universe. He was a smarter scientist than Reed Richards, he found a way to cure the Hulk, etc. And then everybody forgot about him and history was rewritten, but he came back, and, I forget, it was stupid. The thing was, Jenkins created a new character that was not only supposed to be the greatest ever, but he rewrote history to ensure that he would be greater than everybody else as well. And who knows, maybe that’s kind of clever, but the execution was pretty terrible, and that’s where the real Mary Sue-ish-ness comes out: he’s supposed to be great and awesome, but we never see him actually do anything. It’s all hushed, reverential tones, with everybody assuring us that yes, he is wonderful and perfect, but there’s no story there. The entire comic is an introduction that makes sure we know how great he is.

Of course, he did have flaws, and that’s what allowed him to remain in the Marvel universe, since if he was as perfect as the text says he is, he would solve all problems and there wouldn’t be any plot conflict. So now he’s crazy, or amnesiac, or under other people’s control, or something; whatever they can do to keep him around and usable. Maybe he’s ceased being a Mary Sue (he’s still a shitty character though), but at least in that story that introduced him, he was a doozy of one.

Craig L.

Does it help that the original story is very brief?

http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/dark/1000/marysue.htm

It’s about abusing a fictional world to gratify your ego. The emphasis doesn’t land on Mary Sue’s unlikely prowess (wouldn’t that be a “tall tale”?) but on the shower of triumph and admiration. The problem with some of the suggestions we’re seeing is that a derisive term that came from Star Trek fan fiction can’t be used in a way that would also describe Captain Kirk. There’s confusion because, after all, isn’t heroic fantasy designed for ego gratification? But the Mary Sue doesn’t smell right.

Noah, I do agree that you’ve identified a style in late-period DC, the endless recognition of the character’s wonderfulness, that has to be related. If you haven’t seen Superman Returns, don’t. But I think the “author’s ideal self” is a ubiquitous and often perfectly healthy part of the world of fiction- Elizabeth Bennett? If authors were as tall and attractive as they’d like they wouldn’t spend so much time at their desks.

I went through my doubts about Ghost World after Noah scolded me, but now I’ll carry the certainty to my grave: it has a hospital bed scene.

Cerusee

I don’t think anybody referenced this elsewhere in the roundtable, so I thought I’d delurk and mention it–there is a nice, if now somewhat old essay on Mary Sue that traces her as far back as 19th century literature: 150 Years of Mary Sue. When I originally read it–probably back in 2001 or so?–it was one of the first things I’d encountered that made me think twice about the MS phenomenon as some kind of a prima facie evil. The many qualities that people identify as MS in one interpretation or another are both very old and very widespread in fiction, which is just damned interesting, too interesting to dismiss or simply demean: there’s clearly something psychologically important going on.

I don’t really endorse Pflieger’s definition of What’s a Mary Sue–she’s trying to trace a character type, not unpack the whole idea, and to do that, she narrows it more than I’d like–but it’s interesting anyway.

I personally gave up on Mary Sue as being a useful term for discussion a long time ago: the many, many overlapping definitions of the folk term make it too vague to be used for any prescriptivist advice to writers (I think, anyway), and since many people in fandom are wedded to the idea that a Mary Sue is a Bad Thing, it fuels a kind of witchhunt mentality–fandom writers and readers are socialized into constantly hunting for signs of Mary Sue, whose presence, even in small doses, renders a work unfit for enjoyment, whether it’s a fanwork or an original creation. You’re not supposed to enjoy a Mary Sue–to be gratified by something so gratifying shows you’re immature, unsophisticated, childish (I could go on forever about the age-related stuff but it’s tangential to this). If you don’t enjoy a work, it’s enormously satisfying to be able to point to some perceived quality of Sue-dom, and say, that’s why! Not that such behavior is exclusive to fandom or anything–but I have reached a stage in life where I have to roll my eyes at anybody who works so hard to limit their enjoyment of the culture of which they partake.

I do enjoy discussions like this one, though, where there’s more interest in examining the functions of MS and related things than in hammering out a strict definition for the purpose of being able to shake our fingers at perpetrators for Doing Culture Wrong.

John E.

Back in the early 80s an author named Vonda N. McIntyre wrote what was then (and probably still is) one of the better Star Trek novels, The Entropy Effect, and followed it with adaptations of the second, third and fourth Trek films. In Entropy we are introduced to Security Chief Mandala Flynn and Captain Hunter, two strong female characters who are Captain Kirk’s subordinate and former lover, respectively. For my money, both characters — who are for all intents and purposes the same character — are the ultimate feminist Mary Sue. Both possess superb abilities, hair-trigger tempers, intimidating personalities, and a severe animus towards that cement-headed sexist James T. Kirk. Now, there are few fictional characters who could use a good feminist ass-kicking more than our good Captain, but with McIntyre it becomes almost an obsession. In her version of The Wrath of Khan (in which Mandala and Hunter are prominently mentioned) Saavik can barely suppress her burning rage against the Admiral, and Dr. Carol Marcus is simply a milder version of Hunter. In The Search for Spock we meet Scotty’s willful, angry niece Daneen, who gives her uncle an earful about what an asshole Kirk is (her brother was the young cadet who died in the previous film). McIntyre’s version of Gillian Taylor in The Voyage Home is a bit mellower Mary Sue, but still more rebellious and quick to anger than her film counterpart.

If the standard Mary Sue is intended to be loved and/or romanced, Vonda McIntyre’s Mary Sue was intended (I think) in great part to correct or avenge the inherent sexism of Gene Roddenberry and of Captain Kirk specifically. (Spock and Sulu are treated in a gentle and greatly respectful manner by the other characters.) I’m not sure this was at all a bad thing, except for it becoming slightly tiresome to have nearly every female character possess so many similar traits. And often the thoughts and backstories of these characters at times threatened to drag the story to a halt. But if you’re gonna have a Mary Sue, I’d prefer McIntyre’s version over the fan fiction variety.

Vom Marlowe:

I was going to comment something like this on Kinukitty’s post, but then I deleted it.

As someone who writes the occasional Mary Sue (amethyst eyes!), I think part of what is going is that Mary Sues are the adult equivalent of loving sparkly unicorns. Look, I adored unicorns. I still might. I had purple unicorn shirts as a kid, and I was ruthlessly mocked by many. Sometimes by other people who also had purple sparkly unicorn shirts.

If we mock our Mary Sues, then we’re saying “We know these are just worthless toys, ha ha ha” and it’s like we’re in on the joke. Even though our own laughter might be uncomfortable and insincere, it’s a way to get the critics to back off. Bold and shameless enthusiasm is simply not considered a serious thing (as a girl, anyway). A more staid, critical approach is more acceptable.

There are lots more, but my cutting-and-pasting digits done got wore out. Thanks again to all who commented and all who read.

Rancid Cheesecake

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I’ve got an article up at Comixology about super-heroine cheesecake. Here’s a quote:

Which brings us to the last and perhaps most important point. Super-heroine cheesecake is often offensive just because it’s so thoroughly incompetent. Star Sapphire’s costume, for example, goes right past sexy and on into ludicrous. For the Marvel Divas cover, the artist couldn’t even come up with more than one body type – and he can’t even draw the one he’s got. As I already intimated, Black Cat’s top and bottom look horribly mismatched; similarly, Hellcat seems to have borrowed her breasts from Giant Girl. All of them look like toys, not people. And that Justice League cover starring Supergirl’s chest…why would you even do that? How is it sexy to have a disembodied bosom flapping about your foreground? And as if that’s not bad enough as Katie Moody says in comments on the Beat; the artist seems to have accidentally left out our heroine’s ribcage. Or maybe it’s deliberate; did Supergirl lose her skeletal structure during one of the post-Crisis reboots? I must admit I haven’t been following the continuity that closely….

The Sue That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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Bill and Kinukitty both posted fine conclusions to the Mary Sue roundtable. Both of them said they were sick of thinking about it, and intimated that maybe we could stop now, please? But unfortunately for them, I am like the evil terminator…except for maybe without the suddenly appearing from the future in the nude thing. And also not governor of California.

Where was I anyway? Oh right. A couple days ago I posted here arguing that Mary Sues are less venal, and more ubiquitous, than they are usually given credit for being. Several people have protested that I’ve expanded and abused the term to such an extent that it’s useless.

Be that as it may, I think the core of what I’m seeing as Mary Sueism, partially based on Miriam’s post is a character who seems brought into being to be an object of love — either self-love, or romantic love, or a mixture of both. The character is treated the way loved ones are treated; with excessive care and admiration. In some instances this can be annoying; in others it can be moving or beautiful.

My argument is bolstered by this essay by Pat Pflieger Pat Pflieger linked by Cerusee in comments, which argues that, rather than being an aberration, Mary Sue is a central trope of romance:

Mary Sue is more a placeholder, a term apparently used by writers of romance fiction, as mentioned in several essays in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Despite appearances, the essay authors agree, readers of romance fiction aren’t identifying with the heroine of the work; their real focus is on the hero, with the heroine holding open a spot in the novel into which the (usually female) reader can slip mentally. Though this argument may seem simplistic in regard to romance novels, it does seem the basis for the Mary Sue: she holds a place open in the story for the author — and presumably for the reader. She can be successful: fan fiction abounds in examples of original characters who are interesting in their own right. All too often, however, the character is a failed placeholder; her very obtrusiveness keeps readers from slipping into her place and into the adventure they have come to enjoy, as she shifts the focus from the media characters readers want to read about.

I think that who the reader is identifying with is maybe more complicated than this suggests; still, the general point is that Mary Sue is about, or tied to, the romance genre; it’s a device which allows reader and author to have, or which indicates that they have, a romantic investment in the story.

With that in mind, I think I can point to a couple of characters who, despite appearances, really aren’t Mary Sues at all.

The first is Sherlock Holmes. Tom mentions Sherlock Holmes as a Mary Sue on the strength of his hyper-competence; Holmes always wins and always has the answer in a way that is certainly suggestive of Mary Sueism.

However, if you look a little closer something is off. As one example, in the first Sherlock Holmes adventure, Watson, quizzing Holmes, discovers that the detective doesn’t know that the earth goes round the sun. Moreover, Holmes is irritated to have been told this information. Holmes, you see, only cares about information that helps him with detection. Everything else, he tries to forget as quickly as possible.

In other words, Holmes is a a freak. He requires constant stimulation, to such an extent that if he doesn’t have a case, he turns to cocaine. He has no interest in women…and while his bachelor status might suggest homoerotic subtext, compared to, say, Poe’s Dupin, this subtext is really quite muted. Watson, the obvious person to slash Holmes with, actually gets married during the course of the series…and in general, the whole point of the Holmes character is that he’s so obsessed and monomaniacal that he doesn’t have time for any romance, gay or straight.

Nor is that monomania necessarily supposed to be appealing: you get the sense from the books that Doyle is interested in Holmes, that he admires Holmes to some extent…but you never exactly get the sense that he loves Holmes. Indeed, often he doesn’t even seem to like him all that much. There’s more than one Holmes story where Doyle really seems to enjoy giving the detective a comeuppance. And, of course, Doyle tired of the character quite quickly, even trying to kill him off so as to move on to other projects. Yet Holmes survived, not because Doyle stacked the cards in his favor, but in spite of the fact that he stacked the cards against him.

Overall, the point of the Holmes stories always seems to be the adventure much more than relationships, and Holme seems more a plot contrivance than an actual character. The fun is in watching the unwinding of the plot, and the clever, gee-whiz gimmickry of the machine that is Holmes. He’s a dues ex machina, not a Mary Sue. (Hercule Poirot works in the same way; Agatha Christie often said that she didn’t like him very much, and reading the books, that seems clear enough — she often went to some effort to keep him off stage as long as possible.)

Another false Mary Sue is Asterix. Asterix, like Holmes, is super-competent competent, super-clever, and always victorious. Furthermore, it’s clear that Goscinny really does have a good deal of affection for the character. And, of course, through the magic potion and numerous other means, Asterix and Obelix and all the village have a hugely unfair advantage against Romans, Vikings, and any other adversaries who are unfortunate enough to fall afoul of them.

What’s missing, though, is sentiment. Asterix’s prowess isn’t supposed to inspire wonder or pull at the heart strings; it’s supposed to make you laugh. The fact that this little Gaulish village is constantly beating the tar out of the Roman empire is the central joke of the series. It’s hyperbolic French boasting; it’s like when _________ raps, “you’re addicted, to what my dick did, the pain and the pleasure that the whing-ding inflicted!” Romance requires uncertainty and longing, and there’s neither of those in Asterix.

There’s a similar dynamic with Jeeves (who Bill mentions as a possible Mary Sue) and with that ultimate avatar of unfair advantage, Bugs Bunny. Both have God on their sides, obviously…but the machinery of divinity is so clear that it can only be played for laughs. Those characters are there to amuse you by their triumph, not to impress you with it. You don’t envy or desire Jeeves or Bugs Bunny because they’re not designed for that kind of emotional investment. They’ve been given power and brains, but no hearts.

Which brings me to the final false Mary Sue — Mary Sue herself. Here’s the story that supposedly coined the term, (hat tip Craig L.

A TREKKIE’S TALE

By Paula Smith

“Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky,” thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise. “Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet – only fifteen and a half years old.” Captain Kirk came up to her.

“Oh, Lieutenant, I love you madly. Will you come to bed with me?”

“Captain! I am not that kind of girl!”

“You’re right, and I respect you for it. Here, take over the ship for a minute while I go get some coffee for us.”

Mr. Spock came onto the bridge. “What are you doing in the command seat, Lieutenant?”

“The Captain told me to.”

“Flawlessly logical. I admire your mind.”

Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and Mr. Scott beamed down with Lt. Mary Sue to Rigel XXXVII. They were attacked by green androids and thrown into prison. In a moment of weakness Lt. Mary Sue revealed to Mr. Spock that she too was half Vulcan. Recovering quickly, she sprung the lock with her hairpin and they all got away back to the ship.

But back on board, Dr. McCoy and Lt. Mary Sue found out that the men who had beamed down were seriously stricken by the jumping cold robbies , Mary Sue less so. While the four officers languished in Sick Bay, Lt. Mary Sue ran the ship, and ran it so well she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vulcan Order of Gallantry and the Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood.

However the disease finally got to her and she fell fatally ill. In the Sick Bay as she breathed her last, she was surrounded by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott, all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday of the Enterprise.

The thing about the Mary Sue in this story is that she’s a parody. She’s played for laughs, like Bugs Bunny or Jeeves. Her prowess is supposed to elicit groans and chuckles, not wonder or awe or love. As such, she isn’t a Mary Sue at all.

To parody Mary Sue, in other words, you have to go outside the Mary Sue genre. You may say, “well, of course” — but the fact is that there are a lot of genres where this isn’t the case. Take science fiction, for example; Douglas Adams’ books are science-fiction parodies, but they’re also science-fiction. The super-hero genre is arguably defined by its parodies (and I make that argument here). Mary Sue can certainly be funny (like, perhaps, Elizabeth Bennett) but she can’t be a self-parody. A caricature of Mary Sue isn’t Mary Sue.

I think the reason for this is, again, that Mary Sue is, perhaps, another way of saying “romance.” A parody of romance, one that really sneers at the genre’s tropes and ideology, is no longer a romance — it’s bitter realist screed, or a farce, or something else (though Northanger Abbey does walk the line, I guess.) Romance is just, at its core, fairly earnest. You could say that’s because it’s humorless and stupid, I guess. But you could also argue that it’s because it deals with stuff that actually matters; not spaceships, or giant goombahs in tights hitting each other, but with relationships, and love. I think a lot of the loathing of Mary Sue that Kinukitty and others have discussed has to do with the general discomfort with romance as a genre — a discomfort that seems to extend even to its practitioners. Writing about something you care about is embarrassing. Censuring the Mary in your neighbor’s eye, then, may be a ritualized way of distracting from the love in your own.

Star Trek, The Clone Generation

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In this week’s reader, J.R. Jones uses the new Trek movie to write a nice appreciation of the original series.

One episode that never fails to freak me out is “Miri,” broadcast in October 1966. Again a landing crew from the Enterprise beams down to a strange planet to find all the adults dead, this time from a horrible plague. The children are fine, but once they hit puberty their immune system gives way to the disease; they begin to collect awful blue sores, go insane with rage, and finally die. Kirk and company, infected with the plague and cut off from the Enterprise, implore the children to help them, but the kids are naturally suspicious of grown-ups—or, as they call them, “grups.” From there it’s only a short leap to “The Deadly Years,” broadcast in December 1967. This time the Enterprise officers beam down to a planet and contract a radiation sickness that causes them to age 30 years in a day. Kirk grows so forgetful that he’s relieved of his command and must collaborate with the similarly doddering Spock, McCoy, and Scotty on a serum that will reverse the aging process.

This Hurts Me More…No, Actually, It Probably Just Hurts You

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I have a review of Anne Marie-Cusac’s book Cruel and Unusual, about your prison system…and mine! It’s in the Chicago Reader. Obligatory quote below:

“Capital punishments are the natural offspring of monarchical governments,” Benjamin Rush wrote in 1792. Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the father of American psychiatry, an abolitionist, and a prison reformer, and he’s one of the minor heroes of Anne-Marie Cusac’s Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America. Cusac, an assistant professor of communication at Roosevelt University, singles him out as representative of a stream of reformist thought common among the Founding Fathers and their peers. For Rush, opposition to cruel punishment was based on both Christian faith and patriotism. He saw American republicanism as uniquely free, uniquely Christian, and therefore uniquely humane.

As Cusac points out, things haven’t worked out quite as Rush hoped. America is far from the forefront of prison reform. We still practice capital punishment, and our rates of incarceration are by far the highest among Western nations. Moreover, since Abu Ghraib we’ve become notorious not for humaneness but for torture.

How exactly did this happen?

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #6 (with Mary Sue tie-in)

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For those who care about such things, this is both part of my ongoing series on the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman run and part of our ongoing roundtable on Mary Sue characters.

I wrote this over the weekend, incidentally, before I’d convinced myself that Mary Sues had some positive aspects. I could have rewritten, I guess, but…eh, why bother? Consistency is the hobgoblin of my little mind.
___________.

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In this post I argued that the comic Legion of One, and much of contemporary Wonder Woman — and indeed, much of contemporary super-hero comics in general — are essentially Mary Sue stories. Mary Sues is usually used to refer to a non-canon, author-surrogate character of exceptional and irritating wonderfulness introduced into a fan-fiction story. I argued that, in contemporary comics, the canon itself is riddled with Mary Sueism, such that you get stories whose main point seems to be the reiteration of how great Wonder Woman is, or how mythical Superman is, or how everyone wants to be in the Justice League. Whole comics seem devoted to puffing the putative protagonists, as if the reader won’t believe that Captain Marvelous is really Marvelous unless he or she is reminded of that fact every fifth panel.

One could argue, I guess, that this is in general true of all super-heroes; after all, the whole point of Superman is for him to be super, the whole point of Wonder Woman is for her to be wonderful. That’s true to a certain extent, sure — but I think that in general, golden age and silver age comics tended to be less self-conscious about this sort of thing. I think this is especially true of the Marston run; certainly, Wonder Woman was always wonderful, and Marston liked that about her…but his plots tended to be as much or more about his own weird fetishes and his goofy imagination as about reiterating her greatness. If the plot called for it, he’d cheerfully have Wonder Woman be saved by Etta Candy, and damn WW’s supposed superiority. If his fetishes called for it, he’d happily have WW fail in her duty to be authoritative and be chastised for it by Aphrodite.

You can see the sort of thing I’m talking about in the first few pages of Wonder Woman #6. In the ostensible plot, WW is putting on a show to raise money for “restored countries” (presumably nations retaken from the Axis by the Allies.) She’s there to demonstrate just how great she is, to do spectacular feats, to wow the crowd. And yet, Marston just can’t keep his focus; his mind drifts…and suddenly, before you know it, we’re talking, not about WW’s greatness, but about the wonders of multi-ethnic restraint technology. Priscilla Rich, the socialite who organized the benefit, has a hobby, you see…she collects manacles from around the world! Or, as WW puts it “Priscilla’s hobby is collecting chains…mine is breaking them!”

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This scene climaxes (as it were) with the sequence that first got me intrigued with the Marston/Peter run in the first place: WW in a gimp mask underwater, sneering at the weak jaws of French girls as she braeks free of the gimp mask with her teeth (Marston loves, loves, loves to have WW tied up in such a way that she can only escape by using her teeth. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.)

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Basically, Marston’s fantasy uber-self is a trussed-up woman with phenomenal jaw strength. You can call that a Mary Sue in a sense…but it’s a Mary Sue so preposterously idiosyncratic that it really seems like she needs another name. Masoch Sue, perhaps.

So that’s that for that argument…or rather, I wish that were that. Because the fact is that, while Marston’s obsessive eccentricity usually does allow him to avoid most of the Mary Sue pitfalls, things don’t always work out quite so neatly. Specifically, in this issue, Marston does actually, and with some consistency, treat Wonder Woman and the Amazon race in general as something of a typical Mary Sue. As a result, this issue is (by Marston-Peter standards) relatively boring. It also, and I think not coincidentally, highlights some of the less pleasant implications of Marston’s gender politics.

As you can see from the cover at the top of the post, this issue involves WW in a fight against the Cheetah. The Cheetah, as it turns out, is actually Priscilla Darling (the socialite who likes to collect chains.) Said chain-collecting socialite is jealous of WW, and also owns a mirror — the combination, apparently, drives her insane, and she becomes…evil!

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The rest of the issue is given over to the Cheetah’s sneaky plans to destroy WW. These are for the most part typical Marston fare; fairly entertaining, though not as crazed as he sometimes gets. The moment where she dresses up some captives as zebras is probably the highlight.

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Overall, though, the Cheetah is a problematic villain in a couple of ways. First of all, she’s actuated entirely by jealousy; she’s a super-villain just because WW makes her feel inferior. From Marston’s perspective, this is supposed to be a cautionary tale about women’s self-esteem, I think — that is, women should feel good about themselves.

Which is okay I guess, but…the thing is the Cheetah really is inferior to Wonder Woman. In past issues, WW’s enemies have been gods like Ares, or evil geniuses like Dr. Psycho or the Baronness, or entire subterranean races. They were real threats. But the Cheetah’s just this socialite with multiple personality disorder. Yes, she uses lots of cowardly tricks, and she’s supposed to have agility because she’s dressed like a cheetah I guess, but…come on. She’s screwed; she’s the underdog. And if she’s the underdog…well, you feel bad for her, or at least I did. You sort of want her to win.

In other words, you have a classic Mary Sue set-up — WW is too good to root for. She’s got an unfair advantage; you feel like the author has his hands on the scale. It’s especially painful because WW seems to know, just by osmosis, that the Cheetah’s real problem isn’t that she’s evil, but that she’s just misunderstood.

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I mean, in that two-panel sequence, the Cheetah is clearly a more appealing personality. She’s all crazed bluster and braggadocio, while Wonder Woman comes across as some kind of sanctimonious super social worker.

Things only get worse in the book’s final chapter, though. For obscure reasons, WW decides to stage a contest between her friend Paula’s slave girls who are being trained by Amazons on Paradise Island and the greatest women athletes of earth. The Amazon-trained women are, of course, stronger, faster, and more awesome, primarily because they wear chains.

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So, inevitably, the sportswomen of earth get their butts kicked by the chain-wearing submissives.Paula, the slave-girls’ leader, even insists that her girls compete in the running events while wearing ankle chains.

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The woman on the right in the picture above is the Cheetah in disguise. And, I have to say, she’s got a point. Running a race with ankle-chains on does seem like an effort to deliberately humiliate your competition; it’s a shitty thing to do. Moreover, while it’s not a trick of Wonder Woman’s diagetically, it does seem like a trick of Marston’s — the Amazons all seem like Mary Sues, boosted into wonderfulness by authorial favoritism.

What’s especially icky about all this, of course, is that the favoritism is explicitly linked to the women’s submissiveness. This isn’t exactly new, of course; Marston is always riffing on the virtues of submission as power, or power as submission. Often, Marston presents that submission/power as an alternative to low self-esteem and weakness — “you girls really can do anything! Don’t let me hear you say you can’t crush the seal-men! I know you can if you just learn to love giving and receiving bondage!” It’s ridiculous, but at least the overall arch is about depowered women gaining strength and control over their fate, at least in some sense. Here, though, the women who Marston is supposedly educating about the virtues of self-confidence are already world-class athletes. And as a result, you really start to wonder…do these women actually need a skanky perv, no matter how well-intentioned, lecturing them on the virtues of self-esteem? I mean, let’s say you’ve got an Olympic level runner there, someone who has been training for years; someone who has bucked the general prejudice against women’s athletics, which certainly existed back in the 1930s. How exactly is it liberating to pretend that she’d be better off as a runner and as a human being if she learned to love being chained?

Marston’s fetish and his feminsm often work together, as I argued in this essay. In this narrative, though, they don’t…and forced to choose, he unhesitatingly goes with the fetish. The bondage girls of his wet dreams beat the real-world athletes, and even humiliate them. And just to clinch things, he gives the only word of protest to the piece’s villain:

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That’s the Cheetah in disguise again…and, again, she’s absolutely right (and I’m not just saying that because I love those Peter-drawn eyebrows.) The Amazons, or rather Marston through the Amazons, are being condescending assholes. You do sort of want to see them (or rather him) get a comeuppance. Let’s have the damn Mary Sues trip over their stupid chains, already.

Cheetah makes a go of it, but, of course, it doesn’t work out. She does get to tie up Hippolyta, but really, who doesn’t? Ultimately, WW wins. And as if that’s enough, with the help of the magic lasso, she makes the delinquent confess and beg, not for forgiveness, but for discipline — “keep me a prisoner here and train my cheetah self!”

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In our Helter Skelter discussion I expressed some doubts about bad-girl, Courtney Love style feminism; the whole idea that being a jerk is an effective way to fight the power. This story, though, made me recosider. I still don’t think that being a jerk is necessarily a particularly useful strategy…but if the choice is between more or less futilely acting like an evil jerk and meekly acquiescing in your own disempowerment — well, one can see why the first option has some charm. Marston connived to make the Cheetah feel inferior, and so she got pissed right the fuck off. The getting pissed off is supposed to make her evil…but in fact, getting pissed off seems like a reasonable, and even, dare I say, a feminist response. Marston decides to discipline her because she’s not sufficiently restrained, and then he sanctimoniously suggests that restraint will make her stronger. In fact, though, power doesn’t necessarily always come from restraint — or, at least, it depends on who is doing the restraining. The Cheetah represents, it seems to me, an angry feminine — a feminine not bound by Marston’s particular obsessions, and not especially interested in his games. He doesn’t handle it well.

Mary Stu and Marty Sue

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This is the latest in our ongoing roundtable on Mary Sues. So far Tom has written a kick-ass essay about Michael Corleone as a Mary Sue. And Miriam has an essay which I talk about below.
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In her effort to define Mary Sues Miriam argues that the point is not author insertion:

Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.

In other words, it’s not about putting yourself in the story so much as it is about overweening affection: “Don’t love your characters too much!” as Miriam quotes Leigh Dragoon as saying.

I think Mary Sue is often about love, in one way or another. A good example is Dorothy Sayres’ Lord Peter Wimsey. I mentioned him before as a possible Mary Sue; in various of his tedious adventures, he manifests an unlikely ability at cricket, at bell-ringing, and lord knows at what else. one Phil Jimenez Wonder Woman story, but it was about as Mary Sueish as it could be. The whole comic was, literally, a puff-piece feature story about how great Wonder Woman is. It’s a pretty lousy idea for a narrative, in my opinion …but part of what even makes it tolerable, I think, is the glee with which Jimenez, who is gay, plays with the idea of thinking of Wonder Woman as a gay man, or of himself as Wonder Woman, or of both at once. He dresses her up in fabulous clothes, for example; he makes her bitchy and funny; he has her actually banter (i.e. flirt) with other gay men. There’s a real love for the character there, and the gender slippage, the tension between loving her as an object of desire and loving her as an aspiration or ideal self, is part of what gives that love a texture and a weight. In short, there’s something singular, or queer about Jimenez’s Wonder Woman which makes her (within limits) enjoyable to read. (As opposed to the WW in League of One, who has no discernible personality except for her allegiance to her equally boring league comrades and her quest for self-purity via the-lasso-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-bondage.)

One more for instance might be Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, Helter Skelter. In our roundtable on the manga, I expressed a good deal of animosity towards the detective character, Asada, who gets to figure everything out and has some special and unearned connection with the main character Ririko. Thinking about it some more, it seems like Asada might be considered a Mary Sue; Okazaki seems to have a weird, overweening interest in his well-being. But what exactly is her investment in him? Is he supposed to be an object of desire? Of envy? And what would she envy him for, anyway?

One possible answer is…she might find him appealing because of his connection to Ririko — a connection which is, in various senses, perverse. Asada admires Ririko for the fact that her face doesn’t fit her bone structure; she’s fake. His recognition of her fakeness gives the two their unexplained and creepy connection; they seem to have been together in a past life, or to have shared feathers, or something. In my earlier posts I tended to interpret this as a stalking scenario…but thinking about it again, it seems like it could also be a metaphor, or a glance, at a gay relationship. Ririko — the out of control diva with a terrible secret involving the falsity of her appearance — could certainly scan as gay or transvestite — and the secret’s fascination for Asada, provoking a submerged connection, is suggestive as well. Okazaki does have explicit gay content in the manga; there’s a lesbian relationship which is treated with a combination of voyeuristic excitement and moralistic contempt. Given the gay themes, and the anxiety around them, it doesn’t seem impossible that part of Asada’s Marty Sue status, part of why he gets favorable treatment, is that he’s a fantasy means for lesbian and/or straight women to imagine themselves as gay men desiring a beautiful androgyne of indeterminate gender.

If that sounds far-fetched…well, it’s a fair thumbnail description of the gender dynamics of yaoi — or of slash-fiction, one of the Mary Sues’ natural habitat. For a particularly vivid example, you could try this fan fic by Vom Marlowe. It’s called “Girl Yoji” and it’s about a male assassin who turns into a girl and then has lots of sex with his male partner, who he has long loved. Did I mention that he’s pregnant with the other assassin’s child? It’s written by a woman, primarily for other women who enjoy a fun fetish story about imagining they’re men turning into women. The line between wanting to be someone and wanting to be with them is crossed, recrossed, blurred, and gleefully bounced upon; indeed, violating that line seems to be much of the point of the story.

And I think it may be part of the point of the Mary Sue as well. “Don’t love your characters too much!” sounds like good advice…but the persistence of Sues in canon and out, and their popularity with both authors and readers suggests that loving too much is one of the things we have fiction for. And, often, the “too much” is not just a quantitative excess, but a qualitative one. It’s a way to try on different patterns of desire — envy, lust, gay, straight — that you usually have to keep separate in real life. The appeal of Mary Sue, in other words, is that she is a love you can wear like drag.

Update: Kinukitty says leave me alone about the Mary Sues already; Bill concurs; but I won’t shut up about Mary Sue and loooooooove.