dr-kara:

scifigrl47:

One last post on the subject, and then, I promise, I am done. 8)

One last question.  

Imagine a girl.  Who loves Captain America 2, even though she never saw the first one.  Or who has been watching Battlestar Galactica reruns non-stop for the last couple of months.  Or who found that old Orlando Bloom folder and thought about PotC movies for the first time in years.

Imagine that girl, having an idea.  How awesome would it be if Peggy time traveled to the present to help Steve?  Or if Starbuck was a Cylon?  or if Elizabeth’s best friend from childhood showed up and they ran off to be lesbian pirates?

What if.

What if she could find herself, find a place for herself in a world, in a place that she loved?  What if between work and school and family and friends and afterschool activities and a thousand other things, what if that girl wrote her story?  HER story.  One unique to her, even if it was every trope in the entire world, all rolled into one monstrosity on FF.net.

Maybe she wants to be a writer someday.  Or a filmmaker.  She wants to create comics.  Or tv shows.  Or run websites.  Or maybe not any of that.  Maybe she wants an audience.  Maybe she just wants to share this one story with a community she loves.

But she writes it and she posts it and someone says, “Mary Sue.”

And if she knows anything about fandom, if she’s been on the internet, she knows that’s bad.  She knows that means she’s failed somehow, that this story, this fun thing that she’s thought so much about, is somehow unacceptable.

She’s told that her female characters are unwelcome.  Her story is unwelcome.  She is unwelcome.

Maybe she shrugs it off and keeps writing.  Maybe she conforms, writes fewer ‘Mary Sues,’ and more canon white het males.  Maybe she grows up and becomes a screen writer and carries a life time of ‘girls don’t belong’ judgments into everything she creates, perpetuating the cycle. 

And maybe she just stops trying to find herself in that world.  Maybe she internalizes it.  Maybe she keep dreaming, but never posts another word.

I am adult, with experience, and a job, and something of a readership.  And let me tell you, the first time that landed in my comments, it hurt.  There was a drop of shame in my stomach, a little roll of nausea.  That I had created A MARY SUE.

My first thought?  How to devalue the character.  How to lessen her.  How to strip her of the things that made her funny, made her clever, made her loyal and strange and amazing.  Because my readership, I thought, didn’t want amazing.  

Amazing was a failure, somehow.

I caught myself doing it.  I caught that thought before it got too far.  I caught myself thinking, “does she really need to be here?” when I never thought that about any of the male characters.  I caught myself.

And then I got angry.

I got angry with myself, that I was so easily browbeaten.  That I had almost let one anonymous voice, one mocking, disdainful voice, change how I saw this character.  That I almost let someone do that to her.

That I had come so close to writing her out.  Because she was a Mary Sue.

I don’t care if you use the term as gender neutral.  It’s not.  It carries connotations in fandom.  It carries shame.  It carries the unspoken weight of ‘fake geek girl’ and ‘codebabes’ and ‘I like my fangirls like I like my coffee, and I HATE coffee!’  It is another attempt to shame and silence, and I am done with it.

And if my niece grows up in ten years, and gives me her fic, about how Angelica Perfecton gets engaged to Spider-Man and saves Tony Stark by fixing his armor and teaches Steve Rogers how to paint?

Then I will be so overjoyed that she is a fan.  That she is a fan who CREATES.  Who makes the space safe for herself.  Who dreams big.  Who wants to be the center of the world she loves so much.

Because it is her right to do that without shame.

“I don’t care if you use the term as gender neutral.  It’s not.  It carries connotations in fandom.  It carries shame.  It carries the unspoken weight of ‘fake geek girl’ and ‘codebabes’ and ‘I like my fangirls like I like my coffee, and I HATE coffee!’  It is another attempt to shame and silence, and I am done with it.”