39 KiB
Against "Mary Sue"
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8x7f94/against_mary_sue/
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Score: 0
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Created: 2018-07-09T03:04:23
Post:
[removed]
Comments:
u/InfernoVulpix [+12] (29 minutes later)
Personally, after the discussions I've seen on how to define Mary Sues and whether X character is or isn't one, the best understanding I have of it is that a Mary Sue is a character who the story and world revolves around to the exclusion of anything else.
The only point of other characters is to reinforce or oppose the protagonist, anything beyond that is frivolous set dressing. Further, since the only relevant points of those characters are their relationship to the protagonist, they are best served by having those points at the forefront of their character at all times.
The protagonist will have a backstory chock full of plot devices and tragedy because they're the only person that really matters. The protagonist's flaws only exist to highlight flattering features, or are flattering features masquerading as flaws. The protagonist is tethered to the main cast in order to have easy access to people who reinforce or oppose the protagonist.
There is overlap with protagonists as a whole in this, since a story will invariably focus on the main character and pay attention primarily to them and things relevant to them, and more than likely the protagonist is one of the most important people around, but the difference in magnitude is starker here, and it's not a difference that can be discarded. There's still room for ambiguity, someone might say that a story is a Mary Sue story because they feel it revolves around the protagonist too much, and someone else might disagree. This is okay, to me.
At the end of the day, I believe that a Mary Sue is less a quality of a character, and more a quality of the story at large, describing a story that has nothing to show but the protagonist and things directly connected to the protagonist, most commonly but not inherently wrapped up in a shameless power fantasy. Calling a character a Mary Sue, I believe, is an accusation that the story, world, and characters are not fleshed out and that the protagonist is the only character treated as a person.
I could be wrong about this, approaching it from the wrong set of assumptions or lacking a key insight, but from what I know right now I do think the term has merit.
u/None [+1] (42 minutes later)
Saying that a story with a Mary Sue in it is one that revolves principally around the Mary Sue (to the exclusion of everything else) is a good definition in theory, but it still relies on the subjective observation of the critic. In effect it's the same, because the only indicator of whether a Mary Sue is a Mary Sue is whether it meets the criteria outlined in my post. Only counting "pure" Mary Sues that meet all of the criteria will make actual instances of the trope astonishingly rare, and the kind of stories that fit the Pure Mary Sue category will generally have much more to worry about than the story revolving around the protagonist. (like My Immortal) Besides, we should take the word to mean how it is colloquially used if it's used more often that way. Otherwise we have the perfect set-up for a motte-and-bailey argument.
Also, no matter what the phrase Mary Sue means, so long as it's a conglomeration of lower level deficiencies in a story, it would still be more accurate to address those lower level deficiencies. A big concept will have a larger concept-space, and a large concept-space means a larger body of fringe examples that require time and argumentative energy to properly classify. And the more a concept stands for, the easier it is to include hidden connotations.
EDIT: This is a less formal but related argument. I dislike terms like "wish fulfillment" and "power fantasy" because they usually imply that the author is wrong for writing a power fantasy, which is inane. "The author wrote this because they had a strong desire to see it written." is essentially the same argument - you wouldn't expect an author to write something they didn't want to see. The problem is obvious wish fulfillment, but if it's obvious wish fulfillment the problem is that it's obvious, not that it's wish fulfillment.
u/Croktopus [+10] (an hour later)
but it still relies on the subjective observation of the critic
So does every other criticism...
Also, no matter what the phrase Mary Sue means, so long as it's a conglomeration of lower level deficiencies in a story, it would still be more accurate to address those lower level deficiencies. A big concept will have a larger concept-space, and a large concept-space means a larger body of fringe examples that require time and argumentative energy to properly classify. And the more a concept stands for, the easier it is to include hidden connotations.
This argument could be easily applied to, like, every other concept ever. i mean, shit, were having a subreddit-wide debate about defining rational/ist fiction right now, because thats how words work. umbrella concepts have things under their umbrella; that doesnt make them bad, and that doesnt necessarily make them less accurate either (perhaps less precise)
u/None [+1] (an hour later)
So does every other criticism...
Every criticism is subjective, some criticisms are more subjective than others. The Mary Sue isn't bad because it relies on subjectivity, it's bad because it relies on it more than most. This is because in its unrestricted form, it contains a large number of works.
"This argument is a fully general counterargument, it proves too much." (paraphrased)
No it doesn't. I'm not saying an umbrella concept is bad, I'm saying that an umbrella concept has the potential to be misused because of sneaking in connotations, which I linked to in the post. Mary Sue sneaks in connotations like "the author wrote this purely for masturbatory self-satisfaction" and "the author is bad at writing". If you disagree with this point, I can gather thousands of examples of people using the term like this just skimming through the YMMV page of basically every work on TV Tropes, or leafing through reviews online, or online criticisms.
Note that in the case of the subreddit, we're running into debate about what is rational fiction or not. This is not in the design of the term "rational fiction" - we did not make the label so that everyone could get confused and argue over definitions, which is why we're redefining it. But there is no moderator to make the "redefining the mary sue to be less ambiguous" post, and arguments thrive off of being discussed, so people continue to accuse something of housing a Mary Sue. It doesn't just have the potential to be inaccurate, it has the potential to be inaccurate because it survived a long process of memetic natural selection purely for the sake of being applied as a criticism to as many works possible.
u/Croktopus [+5] (2 hours later)
has the potential to be misused
then maybe object to misuse rather than use. it sounds like youre saying "some people are using mary sue without backing up their arguments, so nobody should use mary sue". this dude's criticism is more what i encounter on /r/rational, where yeah they call her a mary sue, but he backs it up so you know exactly what he means (and he's totally right btw)
also on the wish fulfillment/power fantasy point...those are much better defined terms, and i think you might have a misconception on what they mean. it's not "The author wrote this because they had a strong desire to see it written" so much as "The author wrote this because they had a strong desire to experience it, but couldnt, so this is the closest they could manage" and it becomes bad wish fulfillment if they compromise the story to make it go the way they would've liked it to go in real life
so of course wish fulfillment has a negative connotation because the only time it's ever an issue is when its done poorly.
u/None [+2] (3 hours later)
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u/Croktopus [+2] (5 hours later)
lol yeah i dont blame you, but like i said in that thread...hes not wrong. says it a lot more vulgar than i would, but hes not really far off the mark (and i personally prioritize effectiveness over aesthetic for language). there were like a hundred scenes where everyone was like "wow, ur like, the smartest person ever, and super dangerous too, and ur so cool cuz u dnt even think ur that cool wowow". it got so old so fast
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
The problem is that the vast body of criticism is misuse. Even Ardvarkeating's point, which spurred me to write this post to begin with. I didn't want to tell him off, because that thread had too much inertia and I've been sitting on this general Mary Sue counterargument for a while now. His specific issue with The Arithmancer was that she was praised for using basic modern military techniques when really she should have been scolded for not immediately using the most brutal and efficient modern methods to win the war. This is the minimum requirement for being a Mary Sue? Sure, he backed it up with evidence, but since when is "the author didn't think of everything" justification for all of the other baggage Mary Sue has. In no way is The Arithmancer central to the category of Mary Sue - he did exactly what I said in this post, which is wait until a single part of the story broke his suspension of disbelief and then fit the rest of it under that umbrella. And people do this all of the time. When does something stop being misuse and just start being use?
it becomes bad wish fulfillment if they compromise the story to make it go the way they would've liked it to go in real life
But the dividing line between good and bad wish fulfillment is a subpar execution of storytelling techniques. If the author could have possibly retained the integrity of the story while still doing the same wish fulfillment, then the problem wasn't the wish fulfillment damaging the integrity of the story, it was the author rushing, or doing a bad job of justifying themselves, or any number of other smaller failures. Criticizing them for "bad wish fulfillment" does nothing for the author or the audience other than point out where the failure occurred, and only reinforces the silly idea that wish fulfillment is somehow a badness-attractor.
u/Croktopus [+1] (2 hours later)
which spurred me to write this post to begin with
thought it mightve been lol
His specific issue with The Arithmancer was that she was praised for using basic modern military techniques
that was one specific issue. i dont know if youve read it, but that is far far from the only one. its not even one of the biggest ones for me. the one that really killed it for me was when ron was only barely able to beat her at chess near the start, even though that was like...the one thing he's good at in this fic. and then they played together for a few weeks and she was better than him. and really, she's a better strategist, but they let him help sometimes cuz he has a relative advantage in terms of her time being better spent elsewhere. but again, thats just one more example out of countless others.
like, why is she so good at chess. its not like shes doing probabalistic analyses of every move or some such bullshit, she's just a super-smart-and-amazing-person.
If the author could have possibly retained the integrity of the story while still doing the same wish fulfillment
i think the problem is generally that...you can't. wish fulfillment implies that it's good stuff happening to the protagonist, cuz why would you wish for a bad thing to happen to you. and good stuff happening to the protagonist is very rarely good writing (the exception being, like, slice of life anime?)
u/None [+7] (an hour later)
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u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
I don't like being told what to do.
That's precisely why I tried to be a little gentler about this, but I get the feeling I've prickled more than just you. I apologize if it sounds like a demand - I've just been bottling this rant up for half a decade of reading. As for the other points:
The types of stories it is supposed to describe would still exist, and people would want some word to talk about them with, even if not this one. If I'm warning people why I don't think they should read a poorly-written power fantasy, I'll still use words like "Mary Sue".
You seem to have grasped what I'm trying to say, but missed one of the key points. Incontrovertible Mary Sues still exist, but they tend to be very rare, and the works that they're in have other obvious flaws besides Mary-Suism which would be better to point out, and on top of that you still have an incredible amount of works that are "borderline" Sues where you could argue one way or another ad-infinitum. HPMOR is one of these, Daystar Eld launched a massive reread investigation into this, and he could only come out with something like "I believe in this, but it's still probably possible to construe it in the other way."
The solution isn't to destroy words that can be used for that--it's to notice when people are doing that, and not be fooled. And also try to get people to quit doing that, which is a really hard problem. Are the people you see using the term on r/rational trying to sneak in connotations? If so, you should address the problem directly when they do that, instead of suggesting we discard the word.
What do you think I'm doing? (lol) I can't possibly write out this entire thesis every time I try to talk someone off the ledge, so I wrote a big post to convince people otherwise that I can link to. I think it's reasonable to expect people on the subreddit to read this at some point, and maybe it's a good enough meme that it sticks in their head and they share it around. I couldn't possibly destroy the word, but maybe having people think about what Mary Sue really means every time they use it will make them more reluctant to do so. (Eliezer also wrote an essay on this) You do exactly this when you say there are two possible uses for Mary Sue. If it's as simple as saying:
...the story is too much of a power fantasy and it's damaging suspension of disbelief.
Then why not say exactly that? It's not too many words, and it's certainly more helpful. In fact, words like "power fantasy" have a large number of meanings as well - if I wanted to make my story less of a power fantasy, I wouldn't just turn down the "power fantasy" dial on my write-o-tron 2000, I would have to do other things like make sure that the character had a few more permanent losses and that he didn't grow too much better than the antagonist. If those things constitute better advice, then obviously it's better to say those than to say "power fantasy" or "mary sue".
It's not a coincidence...
That was the whole point of me saying it was an enormous coincidence, so much that I couldn't have possibly made it up. The implication was that the coincidence was so big it couldn't possibly be a coincidence.
u/Croktopus [+6] (2 hours later)
"Mary Sue" is a category created in response to a suspiciously large number of stories with protagonists that share the same few traits. The most archetypal example of a Mary Sue is a female character that will be liked by the protagonists of the story and disliked by the antagonists for some tangential reason, who has very few flaws and many strengths, some of which are out of place in the setting, who also has some kind of relationship tethering her to the main cast whether it be familial or coincidental, and has some kind of sympathetic backstory meant to engage the reader in her story (and little else). There is a male analogue to this, the Gary Stu or Marty Stu, who has all of the same traits with the gender reversed.
from my experience 'round these parts, a mary sue is a protagonist who is too good at too many things in a way that violates suspension of disbelief and robs the story of suspense and a satisfying resolution. im not gonna argue about which definition is superior because that sounds boring, but i think most people on /r/rational who say "mary sue" are referring to something akin to my definition.
u/Cuz_Im_TFK [+5] (2 hours later)
I'll just chime in what I thought a Mary Sue was, without ever having looked it up and only ever heard it colloquially:
A person who's so good at everything there's no real reason for anyone else to exist aside from creating conflict. And for this to seem unrealistic or unreasonable to me as a reader.
So, mostly in line with your definition. But I won't argue strongly for this. I'm sure other people use it differently, but this is one point in favor of your guess.
u/Croktopus [+3] (2 hours later)
yeah the point of everyone else's existence being pointless in context is a good extra dimension, and lines up with what others have said
but yeah, i wouldnt defend any definition of mary sue all that hard, its just more of a way to vocalize a certain vibe you get about a character that you have issues with
u/vaegrim [+2] (5 hours later)
The occasions when I'm inclined to call something out as a Mary Sue, it's because the characters virtues dissolve conflicts before they've materially inconvenienced that character.
More generally, It's not about a specific set or high amount of attributes, it's how many of the character's conflicts are overcome by attributes they're purported to have had since the start of the story. A character who's capabilities at the start of the story are sufficient to overcome all the conflicts that occur in the story.
This may or may not break someone's suspension of disbelief but that isn't really the issue. Rather, characters who never fail or need to grow reduce the tension, and that's a story structure problem.
u/Croktopus [+1] (5 hours later)
yeah the thing about characters never needing to grow/change/overcome is a big part of what makes it feel bad as a reader
u/CCC_037 [+3] (5 hours later)
I had understood 'Mary Sue' to mean, in short, 'a character who is never at risk of failing to succeed, and who never loses anything'. I do see your point that there is a strong overlap with 'protagonist' in there, and there are indeed some very famous protagonists who would fall under that definition.
Consider, for example, Sherlock Holmes. When you start reading a Sherlock Holmes story, you know he's going to solve the mystery, win the case, and the rest will continue in more or less the status quo. But Holmes is not quite a Gary Stu character, because he often not only risks failure, but often fails. He almost never loses the war, but he will sometimes lose battles along the way - sometimes come to an erroneous conclusion and have to frantically work to recover from the error (and, in one or two stories, even Holmes did fail to solve the mystery correctly).
Sherlock Holmes can take one look at a person and describe his profession and what he did that morning. A Gary Stu version would take one look at a person and describe the mystery that he was presenting and its solution; and in there we have the difference between a mere protagonist and the far less interesting Gary Stu version.
Which isn't to say that you don't have a good point... the term is perhaps being used too broadly, and it is reasonable to suggest that that phrase be tabooed in order to better understand precisely what the problem is with a given story.
u/vaegrim [+2] (5 hours later)
I mostly agree with your definition, and came up with a similar one independently. This seems to be a good direction to converge towards.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (6 hours later)
I think you and I have already pretty much converged. Do you think we can persuade the rest of the Internet to converge with us? Would this be a useful thing to attempt, even on a small scale?
What is your opinion on the original question, that is to say, whether or not the term should be generally retired in order to more explicitly describe the flaws of a story?
u/vaegrim [+2] (15 hours later)
I agree that there's a measure of aimless vitriol tied to the word, but I'm not sure any sort of community effort to retire it is a good use of time. I'm definitely persuaded to at least accompany usage of the word with my definition so as to make that definition more prominent.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (15 hours later)
That seems most sensible, I agree. The word is out there - it exists - and trying to sweep it under the carpet won't work - tying it more securely to a useful and well-defined concept seems a much better strategy. Then, as with many other concepts, the short word can be used when referring to it tangentially, and the longer definition when it takes a prominent place in establishing whichever point one wishes to make.
u/Russelsteapot42 [+2] (4 hours later)
I think part of the problem we're running into is that we've expanded a term that was invented to describe a trend in fanfiction to use in general fiction.
In fanfiction, the setting that is being used already has a distinct fabric to it, a set of relationships between people and other people, between people and things, between people and the power they have, etc. Original characters that are inserted into these settings disrupt these relationships somewhat by their existence, if they are relevant at all.
The classic example of Mary Sue bent the fabric of the existing setting around her like a black hole, damaging the existing setting and characterization by their new relationships to her. Dangerous enemies were easily overcome, authority figures cede authority, etc.
u/silver7017 [+2] (12 hours later)
I disagree strongly, and fully intend to continue using the term, not just despite it being "toxic", but because of it. almost everything "toxic" in the world exists for a reason. "Mary Sue" is useful both as a categorical criticism to identify a common kit of writing failures to an author, and as a derogatory term writers fear being applied to their own creations. I expect the use as a categorical criticism of a work will be a common position, and thus vigorously defended by those probably better suited to do so than I, so I will leave it to them.
I will, however, attempt a defense of my intent to explicitly continue the use of a phrase with the specific purpose to cause harm to the feelings of others, as I suspect that position may be rarer and thus my contribution here will not be repetitive. I feel that having hurtful language which is extremely specific in who it targets to be an extremely useful component of enforcing soft standards.
Take the US military, for example. There is an extremely common bit of jargon which specifically refers to someone who goes to the doctor too often and for minor things, and misses a great deal of work because of it. this not only is not against the rules to do, but making any sort of rules limiting a person's access to medical attention would be illegal. thus, the denigration of those specific people is important to keeping soldiers productive, and the ability to wield a word which is meant to specifically hurt the people who have that negative behavior is amazingly powerful. with the inclusion of this word in common parlance, anyone who has this habit will continuously be reminded and shamed for it, until they either stop or are removed from the community one way or another.
as it is useful for the military, so too is it useful here. having a term in common parlance which offends and hurts the feelings of the type of author who would write a Mary Sue in the first place is one of the circles of protection in place which shelters our community from those authors and their stories. a writer who fears that they may be writing a Mary Sue has two options: either they will take steps to ensure that they are not to varying degrees of success and will grow as a writer regardless, or they will complain about the term, hopefully be ignored, and eventually will leave. in either case this community benefits, and I might go so far as to suggest that the fear of writing a Mary Sue itself may be one of the most potent protections against doing so. the refusal to change one's self and the demand that the community change instead should be a sufficient red flag that we should ignore that person.
while there may indeed be a good deal of subjectivity to the label of Mary Sue, that subjectivity becomes a valuable trait when it is used as something to avoid. in trying to avoid something which is subjective, the writer must take pains to try to see his work from as broad a perspective as he is able to imagine. avoiding the label takes work. and should an author fail, and receive this particularly painful criticism? at least in this specific community, they are more likely than not to also receive a list of reasons for it. thus the author is given the opportunity to see which specifics triggered the reaction, and how frequently the same criticism comes up. being able to sort through criticism and use it to better yourself is also a vital skill for a writer (or anyone, really).
I don't really know if I have made my point, but I do feel like I have probably rambled enough. please let me know if I have made any glaring errors, for I too benefit from criticism.
u/None [+1] (14 hours later)
I don't want to be too blunt, but this is really, really wrong:
It's a general principle of western society not to rule through fear, and the utilitarian reason is that the order it creates does not offset the negative emotions it instills in people. The consequentialist reason is that in an open system, ruling through fear drives people away more than it brings them in. The deontological reason is that using fear tactics will reduce your moral character. I think all three of these arguments have merit.
In the military, we allow it because the possibility of disorder could destroy the usefulness of a military. You'll notice that writers are not soldiers - their only instrumental purpose here is to entertain and possibly educate, and as a whole they are entirely individualistic. If an author can't write a good story, peer pressure isn't going to make them write a better story, it's going to make them sad and depressed, and then they won't bother writing a new story that has the possibility of being better. You don't want to discourage new writing from an author because every additional word is a word spent getting better at writing, and because badness is localized within an author. You can argue that maybe the Mary Sue is a meme that spreads from author to author, but I'm fairly certain it's just naivety from not knowing how writing works, and not some kind of contagious infohazard.
I made an entire post discussing why the Mary Sue isn't precise, and i would appreciate if you actually took the time to understand it. If the category is so broad that a minor infraction can allow a reader to lump that book into the rest of the pile, it's not good. It'd be like the military using that derogatory term about someone who broke their leg. I'd imagine that the author would rather read that events X, Y, and Z in their story stretched the suspension of disbelief of the audience, than read that their work is now a part of the category that includes stories like My Immortal and A Trekkie's Tale. Saying that an author at the fringe should worry about the same failure as an author at the center is the non-central fallacy.
If subjective judgement requires a broad imagination on the part of the author to avoid, in every possible instance of writing, the audience will still be able to subjectively judge the author, because it's impossible to account for the opinions of everyone. You're going to say that the author shouldn't account for the opinions of everyone, but if they don't, what's the point of using the Mary Sue as a scare tactic for doing so? And the Mary Sue is a contagious form of criticism - the louder the audience arguing for it is, the more it catches on, because people are attracted to conflict like moths to a flame.
Holy shit, at least leave some of the work to the audience. If the impetus is on the author to write a decent work, the impetus is on the audience to write a constructive piece of criticism. If the Mary Sue isn't constructive in the sense that it provides direct, actionable feedback (which it doesn't, as I've gone over elsewhere in this thread) then it's not the author who has failed to live up the audience's whims, it's the audience that's failed to correctly point out where the work became bad. It's like making a weather forecast saying it's anywhere from 0 to 800 degrees kelvin outside - the Mary Sue correctly encapsulates the boundaries of the failure, but you wouldn't say the weatherman has done their job.
And more, but I don't have much time for this, and your post seems to be a very large inferential distance away from my own.
u/silver7017 [+1] (21 hours later)
No, be blunt. I literally asked for it. If you have the power to show me how I am incorrect, then you are improving me in some small way. I do not think that you will do so, but I am happy to be proven wrong. Let us examine your list:
I once again strongly disagree with this. Fear is a valuable tool and should not be discarded because it is unpleasant. In an ideal and magical world where all things are possible using any tools, then I agree that fear can be discarded. in the distant future maybe that will truly occur, but in the present and especially for this specific task, I cannot take it seriously that the use of fear for this specific purpose is unjustified.
let us imagine that what you have asked for has come to pass. we cannot speak of this idea of "Mary Sue". on average, how much effort would it take to explain to every writer who fearlessly posts a first draft that they have made a common error? how much effort could their self-doubt save, if they knew there was something to fear? instead of a void in which the utterances of "Mary Sue" are verboten, in reality they will see this concept pop up from time to time, and will be exposed to the idea of "here is a generic thing that we don't want to see". they will know fear, and they will expend personal effort to correct the most grevious of their errors, and grow in the process. the simple act of not censoring the idea from this community brings that about.
I mentioned the use of fear specifically as a tool to drive people away, in a selective and targetted fashion. some authors will not fear this reaction, and will instead lash out at critics. they refuse to change, and ask that a community change for them instead. I do not and will not ever feel bad to see such people driven from any given community.
my background in deontology is very much lacking, and I do not ascribe much weight to moral good beyond what things do harm and what do not, though the mention of morality does remind me - the foundation of western civilization was built on fear indirectly through the imposition of moral norms. hundreds of years ago, people didn't cheat on their spouse because, on average, people feared to be caught breaking that taboo (and subsequently punished by their community). if that were not so, then punitive punishment would never have been developed. on average, people did not abuse children, did not murder their neighbor, did not do all manner of horrible things because they feared what might happen if they were caught. these axioms, which have been baked into our culture over the centuries, all are rooted originally in fear, even if they are something different now. while modern moral systems may be founded on more positive principles (and in doing so achieve better results), fear definitely works until you have the luxury of developing that something better. we should not shut down our coal power plants until we have enough nuclear plants to handle the load, so to speak. nothing you have presented so far contains any benefits of sufficient magnitude to justify a horrific act such as censorship simply because you don't want fear to be wielded against people to a useful end. show me something which works better or takes less effort and I will happily abandon fear in this instance.
while you are correct that writers are not soldiers, it should not be the case that a person is so fragile as to be unable to undergo the experience of having something they've written subjected to vague harsh criticism. this is one of the things which horrifies me most about people in recent years. it feels like an entire generation of people have somehow failed to learn how to manage their emotions. let people be offended, let them be hurt (non-physically). people are not brittle, either in body or mind, unless you coddle them. a person who never physically moves for decades to protect them from the possible harm of falling down will probably end up dying if somehow they did fall down. someone who cannot face small mental pains may indeed become hopelessly depressed as you describe. these fragile sorts of people are broken, and I refuse to adjust my world to make them safe. to be perfectly clear, I do not mean legitimate medical conditions such as clinical depression. I would never imply that someone who suffers so is weak or that it is their own fault.
regarding the idea of the meme of "Mary Sue", it would actually be a common sort of contagious anti-infohazard. an idea that protects you from itself once you know it. many hazards work this way. with respect to writing specifically it does actually make you a better writer for knowing it - every detail you know about what is not good writing potentially improves what you produce. once you know something exists, you are there after always on the lookout for it. Discordians call this the Rule of Five in its generalized form regarding human perceptions.
I did indeed take the time to understand what you wrote. I just disagree with you regarding whether or not an imprecise grouping is useful. it is broad enough that a pathological reader could throw almost every possible story there. on average, however, that does not happen. the usefulness of such a label shows itself when many readers apply it to a story, and on average people will not apply it unless many of the vague criteria for this imprecise label are met. in the military it does sometimes happen that the term I gave as an example is used for someone who has a true medical problem such as a broken leg. in this cases the rest of the military community correct the person who used the term in a way which does not fit the average definition, or else this single aberant voice is ignored. the same is true here of this label: if someone wrongly labels a story, their voice will be alone or they will be refuted by another commenter. these vague labels only work effectively and are useful when they have the weight of a community behind them, not just a single voice.
this one ties into the above - when an auther seeks to avoid such broad judgement, they make what effort they think will be sufficient to do so. the amount of condemnation, if any, gives them a more accurate read on what, specifically, it is that they need to avoid. it is impossible to account for the opinions of everyone, but it is possible to account for an iteratively observed average. the point of the scare tactic is not to ensure that they poll everyone, but that they do any polling and self-reflection at all. while it is certainly possible for a new writer to become good purely through consulting lists of things they should not write and things they should write, many writers improve through more intuitive means. technical lists for those budding authors who will seek them out, fear of condemnation for those who will not. isn't it better to be inclusive of as many learning styles as is reasonable?
saying "this is a Mary Sue and you should feel bad" is not actionable, but this community does not provide that sort of feedback on average. I more often see something like "this feels a bit like a Mary Sue for the following reasons explained in five paragraphs with excellent spelling, grammar, and formatting..." which seems to me that the audience of this sub is indeed doing rather a lot of work.
I do apologize for consuming time if you cannot spare it. while I suspect that the inferential distance is less than you think, I also suspect you have a much firmer grasp on the theory of rationalism itself (while I tend to spend more time watching and adjusting people and things in meatspace to optimize time, effort, and effect).
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (21 hours later)
This post was removed by AutoModerator due to the number of reports it received for being off-topic. I agree with that assessment, since this is mostly a post about the means and methods of critical discussion rather than rational fiction per se, and seems like it would be much better deployed to combat the problem as it happens, rather than as a general message to this subreddit (which we don't encourage). Feel free to repost it in the Friday Off-Topic thread.
u/ToaKraka [+0] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (16 hours later)
The solution to a vague term is an explanation of what the term means. Yes, if I call Rey a Mary Sue, that's dangerously vague—but, if I call her a Mary Sue and provide a dozen examples comparing her to Luke Skywalker, I'm providing a definition for the term. However, even though in theory the term is superfluous when you can use the definition instead, in practice I don't always have my definition available—at this very moment, for example, I can't post my two or three images comparing Rey and Luke because I'm on my phone and the images are on my computer.
There's a continuum between "every use of this vague term is bad because the clearer alternative is just as convenient to use" (e. g., generic singular "they" vs. explicitly saying "they (singular)" or just not using a pronoun at all) and "some uses of this vague term are allowable because the clearer alternative is cumbersome to use" (e. g., "Mary Sue" vs. a specific list of the character's missing faults and failures).
Furthermore, moderation must be destroyed.
u/silver7017 [+2] (21 hours later)
Furthermore, moderation must be destroyed.
but because all things should be done in moderation, moderation must be destroyed in moderation.