Subject: re: blog post
Author:
Posted on: 2022-09-12 20:00:29 UTC

Sorry I didn't respond to this very quickly; it's been a busy week!

I like the history of "Mary Sue" that you outlined there. I knew the history, of course, but this is a nice, macro explanation that cuts straight to the general trends. I agree with you that reclaiming Mary Sue through a feminist lens is a doomed exercise, because the character journey of "start out awesome" just can't be fit to any living human of any gender. As we've said more and more around here, lately, it's not the litmus traits of an individual character that make them unenjoyable, but their presentation in the narrative. And we, as real people, have to build our own narrative, and can't just latch onto a god-like figure to emulate and find success. That being said, though, I do think there's a lot of validity in criticizing the knee-jerk reaction to labeling a character like Rey a "Mary Sue" as though she has no complexity or struggle to her character. (And yeah, a lot of those doing the labeling were very much sad young men who felt their hero-fantasizing space being invaded by wOmEnZ, ther'e's no denying that.)

Okay, I know this is going wildly off-topic, but uh. Ayla. I'm four titles deep into Earth's Children, and I have to defend Ayla against the "Mary Sue" label. I know Ayla is good at a lot of things, she's a lady of many talents and insights, but I don't feel that any of her ability is undeserved. Her childhood, at least the portions we see where the narrative picks up in the first book, is absolute hell. I'm not going to bother listing out everything that happens to her, mostly because a good chunk of that is triggering for some folks here, but we see everything she goes through right there on page. She's good at hunting because she eavesdropped on the men, and later was forced to hunt just to feed herself. Her medical talent came from training under a medicine woman and practicing medical care. Her skill at reading body language and facial expression is a result of the Clan culture she lived with, learning their form of communication. Her figuring out "where babies come from" is the result of her own experiences, and observing the behaviors of people and animals around her. (Honestly, for me, Ayla figuring out the rough mechanics behind the process of conception is a lot less realistic than the fact that no human culture depicted in the series figured that out first.) A lot of her inventions, like the needle, are just modifications she made to existing inventions, and really, she doesn't have a monopoly on technological developments: it's Jondalar, not Ayla, who creats the spear-thrower; the Ramudoi carve entire, full-size canoes out of tree trunks; heck, Attoroa even invents fascist dictatorship, not that that was good thing to invent, but it's still a complex idea developed by someone other than Ayla. Really, the only trait Ayla possesses that feels purely Doylist is her attractive appearance, but even that was turned against her for close to two full books, because living with the Clan, and under their beauty standards, convinced her she was ugly until she started interacting with Jondalar. So yeah, I'm team Ayla, and sorry for this whole rant, but I had to defend my girl.

—doctorlit attends a Twilight convention wearing a "Team Ayla" shirt and manages to mutually confuse everyone there

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