Subject: "The Story of the Good Little Boy"
Author:
Posted on: 2012-11-02 02:58:00 UTC
Link here.
Apparently, it was a response to the way some people used to write low-quality stories for kids, in which the main character was a perfect child to whom wonderful things always happened. Naturally this annoyed Twain, and he replied to it with the usual snark.
In browsing fanfiction, I came across ACMSES, The Anti-Cliché and Mary-Sue Elimination Society. I browsed around their wiki, and they seem an awful lot like the PPC. They were created in 2009, so it's possible this could be plagiarism. Here's a link to the ACMSES wiki: http://acmses.wikia.com/wiki/ACMSES_Wiki. I'm wondering, has anyone found out about this?
...Around the same time I found the PPC. They lack a proper community, though, and the leader never got back to me on joining.
The main difference is that none of the Sues come from pre-existing fics. A few did come from badfic the authors wrote as newbies, though.
I don't know if the PPC invented the exact concept of killing Mary Sues, but Mark Twain was probably the first one to write a story to kill a Sue (specifically, a saintly-child Stu who found out that the real world won't follow his script) even back before "Mary Sue" was named.
There have been a lot of stories about the characters entering other stories. The Thursday Next series, for example, has characters entering books, and the first one in that series was published in 2001, roughly around the time the PPC also started. There've been other stories about characters from one world traveling to another, fictional world, but Thursday Next probably has the biggest similarity because it actually involves (sometimes) fixing damage to stories.
Mary Sue as a concept has been around for thirty years or thereabouts, so it's unlikely that killing Sues was actually invented by the PPC. The setting certainly was (HQ, the Flowers, all that), but the concept itself--nah.
If somebody steals the setting specifically, then sure, we can yell at them. If they're just using the concept of Mary-Sue eradication and story-fixing, then that's not plagiarism.
Please tell me you have links, or at least a title. That sounds really entertaining.
Link here.
Apparently, it was a response to the way some people used to write low-quality stories for kids, in which the main character was a perfect child to whom wonderful things always happened. Naturally this annoyed Twain, and he replied to it with the usual snark.
Quite entertaining, though, if nothing ever goes well for the child, doesn't that make him not-Stu-ish?
Oh, and I heard the Thursday Next series features an 'Isle of Fanfiction' or something at some point? I just read that on TVTropes, haven't gotten that far in the books, but apparently the people there are nice, if a bit flat. Good thing that the Thursday Next canon is quarantined, or else all the meta would make any agents who went inside have their heads explode.
First, yes there is an island of fanfiction and it if full of flat Mary Sues and OOC LotR characters.
Question: Are all Jasper Fforde continua quarentined?
It makes sense for the Nursery Crimes series to be so, as they are also a series in the Thursday Next ones, but what about Shades of Grey?
For those who just went 'wha?' Shades of Grey is about a futuristic dystopia in which status is determined by which colour you can see. It is also (according to the author himself, who I saw after the release of 'The Woman Who Died A Lot') book most likely to be confused with a bestselling novel.
And the way it reminded me of the PPC was overwhelming. The books are very, very good, and very funny. I read the first one in one weekend and loved every second of it. But I couldn't help thinking, Thank God this continuum is quarantined. Can you imagine what a Thursday Next badfic would do to a canon like that? PPCing that continuum would be a nightmare.
Fanfics of the series do exist. There are two on ff.net, at least. Dunno about their quality, though.
I guess it would help if we had the original Sunday school books that Twain was parodying, but he was basically saying, "See, this is what happens when you put one of those perfect 'role models' in a Reality Room."
The books aren't worth it, even for the context, trust me.
We had quite a few of those stories around the house, what with my mother carefully monitoring reading material. I think every one of my siblings would've killed for a copy of this story when we were kids. Purity Sues have been around since the stone age, and they've always been really, really, really irritating.
It was noted earlier on by one if the board members that so long as you don't blatantly call it the PPC and do exactly what they do, you can use the idea of Sue-hunting freely, since there's not really any monopoly of sorts on it.
But your concerns are definitely understandable - their name seemed just a tad too close to a fancy-worded "PPC" to me, and if what you said is anything to go by, they do use some similar ideas, but I wouldn't worry too much about them for now.
We've actually had some dealings with these guys a while back. Some of their members hung out in the chat and there was talk of some crossovers before they dropped off again. They do things differently enough from us that there isn't actually a problem. There were some concerns that their characters tend toward the Sueish, but other than that we have at least some good relations with them.
-Phobos