Special thanks to Corbin J Drake for the photo.
Shout out to the fans of The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy…
Tee would be remiss in the Dog Days of Podcasting not to address current events, and yesterday, an atomic bomb of current events hit the publishing industry.
This is Lani (that’s Annie with an L) Sarem. Let’s talk about Lani, shall we?
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Can I just give mad props to you Tee for using the term Mary Sue properly (for the most part but I’ll get into that)? That’s something I don’t see very often anymore. Though that’s a rant for another time perhaps.
Nah, fuck it, I’ll do it here.
You wanna know what really grinds my gears about people who use the term Mary Sue? It’s not like it’s origins are lost to the sands of time like some obscure phrase from ancient Babylonia. It is a fan fic term, created by a Trekkie, for a Star Trek fanzine in the 70s, and it has a specific meaning. And that meaning is NOT, despite what the modern Internet would have you believe, is any female character who is more than competent at what she does (or god forbid an out-and-out badass). Jill Bearup did a fantastic video on the subject of the Mary Sue for her History of Fan Fiction series, and in that video, she sums it up perfectly; One person’s Mary Sue is another person’s Batman.
A Mary Sue is a FANFIC character. By definition, a canon character cannot be a Mary Sue, no matter how OP you (the royal you, not you specifically Tee) think she is. Granted, in Lani’s case, since this doesn’t seem to be a real book but a longer-than-average movie pitch, I suppose the term could still apply. From what I’ve read about this book this isn’t so much a story with its own canon as it is a fanfic-ish pastiche of the various tropes of what’s popular in YA right now.
Okay, maybe that’s a stretch and you didn’t use the term right and phrases like Author’s Pet and/or Self-Insert Fic would be more appropriate but hell, even if that’s the case, you still used Mary Sure closer to accurately than about 99% of men (and let’s face it, it’s usually men, and straight men at that) I see on social media.
Oh, I forgot to include the link to Jill’s video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLqrLo9aC7Q
Full disclosure; one of the multiple Internet Reviewer hubs that hosts Jill’s videos, Chez Apocalypse, is a hub I run the fan Tumblr for, with the blessing if Chez’s co-creator Lindsay Ellis.