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….

Religion

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The liberal blogger Hilzoy has a good line:


I would think that people of faith, in particular, should be wary of politicians holding ceremonial observances of National Prayer Day. For one thing, one’s communications with God are intensely personal. If you think of God as a person, and not as a political weapon, the idea of having a ceremony of this kind would be like observing National Have A Serious Talk With Your Spouse Day by having such a talk in front of TV cameras.


Well … yeah. You wouldn’t even have to think of God as a person, just as a force, the Prime Mover, whatever. You would just have to be thinking about God, not how you could PR the masses into having the right attitude toward God.

As a nonbeliever (I settled the question here), I’m always surprised by how easily God slips from the minds of people who say they believe in Him/Her/It. If I believed in Him/Her/It, I’d believe 24-7. He/She/It would be a really big deal to me.

Good thing I don’t, because who needs the hassle. But to say you believe in God, and then to figure that praying ought naturally to be a photo op, or that you’ll follow this injunction of your faith but not another … it sure looks lame from the outside.

UPDATE:  A commenter at the site where Hilzoy posted (it’s the Washington Monthly, no permalink that I can find; the commenter is named Racer X) says the following:

Obama may just be trying to do what Jesus supposedly told us to do; pray in private and avoid the ceremonial prayers of the Pharisees. The bible is extremely clear on the directive, and yet the churches always have violated it. 


Okay, but is it ceremonial if everyone is just praying at the same time? And is it in public if they’re at their place of worship and not somewhere in front of nonbelievers? And where did Jesus say whatever Racer X claims he said?

But I’d like to believe Racer X is correct. To me the most interesting thing about religion is the way people can think they believe in it while choosing which bits to ignore.

UPDATE 2:  From comments, the Jesus quote and Bible cite. Thanks, Naomi.

Matthew 6:5-6:

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”


Wow, that seems pretty open and shut. So for 2,000 years, or close, Christians have been gathering together to do what Jesus expressly told them not to do. That’s bizarre. There’s got to be an explanation here. UPDATE 3:  Or I would think there had to be an explanation if I hadn’t just said in comments that the “whole thing is weird and inexplicable.”

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.

Gluey Tart: Mary Sues

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This post is part of a roundtable on Mary Sues. You can read the rest of the posts here.

________________

Frankly, I resent being forced to think about the concept of the Mary Sue. As a writer of fan fiction, it’s something I’ve come across. Thought about. But not, like a certain number of my brethren, complained bitterly about.

Here’s the thing. Tastes differ. My Mary Sue might be your favorite original character ever. I’m not going to say both of us are right. Well, I sort of am, God help me, but I promise to be snarky about it.

There are literary standards. Some writing is good, and some writing is bad. Just because some people enjoy lousy writing (you say Danielle Steele, I say John Updike; neither one of us gets to call anything off), it’s still lousy writing. But. If lots of people enjoy it, good on ’em. I don’t have to read it. It’s especially easy in fan fiction, which is online, and behold! There is a miraculous thing called the back button. You don’t have to invest $20 in the thing and then realize it sucks. Or that you don’t like it. Or both. You scan a bit, you say, “Oh, God, I’m going to scoop my brain out with a melon baller if I have to read another word of this,” and you hit the back button. Problem solved. If only all disputes could be handled so easily!

Of course, it can’t be that easy in the fan fiction universe, either. In addition to “Mary Sue,” there is another term fan fiction will quickly acquaint you with. That term is “wank.” “Wank” is what happens when fangirls come together to defend their particular worldview against anyone who might see anything about their chosen fandom differently than they do. People get upset. People talk about how stupid and horrible and possibly evil the person who got it wrong is. Nastiness bubbles to the surface like gas escaping from six-month old chili in the back of the refrigerator (sadly, I know whereof I speak).

The Mary Sue thing is a time-tested allegation, often part of a checklist people consciously or unconsciously apply to any piece of fan fiction they themselves have not written (and I mean the checklist thing literally; I’ve seen them posted). It’s a very blunt instrument, is all I can say. Literature is rampant with Mary Sues. Also comics. Television. Movies. Much-loved characters across the centuries, and lots of them are Mary Sues. Dickens cranked out Mary Sues. Esther Summerson in Bleak House? Big old Mary Sue. Superman? Well, what are his flaws, exactly? Besides a highly questionable fashion sense? There are many examples given in the previous posts in this roundtable; you should read them all, if you haven’t already. Anyway, these characters are all re obviously much loved by their authors. They are loaded with virtue after virtue (and I think we should keep in mind that what counts as virtue can be highly individual). They are saddled with very few, if any, significant flaws. Maybe they pout or something. But they do it prettily. Exactly who decided it was categorically wrong?

You’re telling me I’m missing the point, aren’t you? You’re thinking, doesn’t she realize people rail against Mary Sues because they’re one-dimensional and boring and painful? And that fan fiction writers tend to be sensitive about this topic because society in general thinks we’re a bunch of losers whose social status ranks, possibly, just above that of people who play Dungeons & Dragons. To the extent that society knows we exist, of course. No, I get it. The thing is, nothing is always bad in a story. You just can’t prepare a list of “Things That Are Automatically Bad” and say, “Ah, a Mary Sue! D-!”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I write slash, which is fan fiction in which two same-sex characters from the source material are thrown together, in the Biblical sense. I won’t get into the controversy over slash’s place on the “Things That Are Automatically Bad” list (the idea is that if you decide two established canon characters are having a queer relationship it is, by definition, out of character); I think it’s a related topic, but really, there are only so many hours in the day. I mention it because one might think it makes me more sensitive to this kind of criticism than the average fan fiction writer. Whatever. I’m always bemused by charges of Mary Sue-ism in my own fandom, though. Said fandom (Weiss Kreuz, a late-80s anime of more-than questionable quality about beautiful young men who are florists by day and assassins by night) features a protagonist who is such a Mary Sue it’s ridiculous. He is perhaps a bit brusque and moody, but he is handsome and loyal and brave and strong and true and selfless and so very, very tough that in one episode he basically defeats an army division by himself. I mean, really. After that, what’s wrong with introducing the occasional largely flawless original character?

Fandom is highly suspicious of original characters, though, and especially female original characters. That isn’t surprising, given our society, which is – and pardon me if you hadn’t noticed this – sexist. It is perhaps another reason to think before you label, though.

But I’m starting to get a very Mary Sunshine feeling about all this. I think it’s starting to sound like I don’t believe there’s any room for criticism, and I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that. No, no, no. There’s plenty of room for criticism. What I object to are knee-jerk dismissals, blind application of unquestioned criteria, and an inability to appreciate anything that doesn’t match up one-to-one with your point of view. All I’m saying is give Mary Sues a chance? Eewwwww. But, yeah. Kind of. Give writers a chance, anyway.

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?

Oh, These Times

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This is funny:


Already, as a NOM commercial on the Prejean incident was released, a story about her implants was leaked. And, of course, that was only the beginning of the character assassination to come. 


The quote is from a column by Seth Leibsohn and Kathryn Lopez at National Review (via Sullivan, as usual). NOM is the National Organization for Marriage, which doesn’t want gays getting married. Carrie is Carrie Prejean, a girl who is Miss California (and looks like you’d expect Miss California to look). She told an Internet gossip site that she’s against gay marriage. 

The implants … well, apparently she had implants, and nobody needs an explanation as to where. Not even the people at National Review, who spend the rest of their column wading into all the terrible sexual things young people get up to nowadays. I guess this is what strikes me as the funny part. But Leibsohn and Lopez could argue back, if they felt like it, that their point was proved by this little aside. Everyday culture is now so sexualized that “implants” is a standard, commonplace term that everyone recognizes without explanation.

To take on some of the points actually made in the column:

  • Leibsohn and Lopez seem to deplore every decision Ms. Prejean has ever made except her decision to be against gays getting married. If she’s so bad at making decisions, are they happy having her agree with them?
  • L&L acknowledge that Ms. Prejean signed a release saying she had never posed for seminude photos, even though, well, she had indeed posed for such photos. L&L act as if this provided “some of the most radical opponents of her position on gay marriage” (interesting construction) with an easy pretext to play the hypocrisy card. But I think we can all agree that people should not lie in signed statements. Our legal system certainly thinks so.
  • L&L act as if everyone who’s in favor of gay marriage somehow got together to do down Ms. Prejean: “note what the movement of tolerance does when you simply exercise your rights to free speech, taking a position they disagree with. They go personal. They go for the jugular.” But we’re talking about leaked information. By definition, very few people have access to such information. A handful of people decided to reveal Ms. Prejean’s secrets; I bet they didn’t like what she had to say about gay marriage, but a movement they ain’t.
  • Finally, there’s a reason people like that phrase about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The reason is sentences such as the following:  “One report last year found that one in four teens has a sexually transmitted disease.” Oh yeah, what report and using what methods? Maybe the American Institute for Keep It in Your Pants held a nationwide contest and church members wrote their best guesses on boxtops. L&L don’t tell us.

Credit where it’s due, L&L are right in saying that Bristol Palin should not be doing publicity work for teen abstinence, especially since 1) she has a child to raise, 2) she still has to get thru high school, and 3) she apparently doesn’t believe in teen abstinence. Her decision to go before the cameras really is absurd. Who could have influenced her? Who around her has shown a persistent combination of reckless judgment and love for publicity? Oh yeah, her fucking mother. Which goes to show two things: parents don’t always know best, and Kathryn Lopez is very bad at picking worthy candidates for high national office. Good thing she knows so much about how teens ought to behave. 

UPDATE:  I forgot, L&L end their column with a plea for “decency.” Yeah, well, torture.

UPDATE 2:  The gossip site TMZ says Ms. Prejean’s parents got divorced and accused each other of gay shit. A reason for Ms. Prejean’s beliefs on gay marriage? Possibly. An occasion for one of the more amusing sentences ever allegedly found in court papers? Oh yes, very much so. Here is the sentence: “The mother also alleges the father told the girls their stepfather was gay, that all men with mustaches are gay.” Tom Selleck assures me that’s just what is called a rule of thumb.