Subject: I agree with this.
Author:
Posted on: 2011-07-18 00:25:00 UTC
This is why I treat Sues as a kind of evil spirit or demon that is the manifestation of these bad author wishes. It's the wishes that are bad, not the author-- and heaven knows Sues ARE NOT a reflection of the author. I wrote my fair share, and they were all temporary blotches of what I wanted at the TIME. NOT who I am or my potential as a person...
This is a lengthy post -just under a sixteen hundred words- so please bear with me.*
I've been noticing a viewpoint on Sues that is encroaching onto certain pages of the wiki, but isn't actually addressed in the main article on Mary Sues. That viewpoint is that Sues are not sentient or sapient beings, little more than humanoid-or-whatever-the-species-they're-trying-to-be-shaped flesh-bags filled with glitter, while the main article's definition is the following:
"A Mary Sue is a pet character that the author exempts from realism and/or rules that otherwise govern a fictional world. The more that the author exalts this "darling" at the expense of the rest of the story, the more of a Mary Sue the character becomes. Mary Sue is impervious to failure and resistant to all in-story attempts at criticism and humiliation; any attempt at an external critique usually provokes an authorial temper tantrum. With a preference for style over substance, attitude over empathy, and romantic relationships above all others, the Mary Sue is nevertheless a popular character type due to her function as cheap wish-fulfillment."
If you notice, sapience and sentience are not addressed at all in that definition. I'd argue that it's not something you can pin on all Sues as a matter of course, much less say that all characters are sapient or sentient or not because of a few issues that come up. Needless to say, I'm interested in everyone else's opinion, but before I do, let me outline a few ways we can look at this.
For one, from a 'normal' writing perspective, you can't say that a fictional character is sentient or sapient just by fact of being fictional and not actually being alive. Their ability to 'think' and be aware of their surroundings is limited entirely to what is allowed them by the author, and that is controlled. The author controls everything in the piece they are writing, and in cases of bad writing they will have the characters do things that do not line up with the setting or circumstances where characters are terribly obliviously unaware of something they should be, or understand and know things they have no business or normal ability to know. Judging if a fictional character is sapient or sentient is downright impossible due to this.
Secondly, from a writing perspective where you do treat the characters as people, it's the opposite. All characters should automatically considered to be self aware, and thus sentient and sapient beings. They know who they are, what they're doing, and they're the ones making those decisions and learning and understanding things, even in the case of bad writing where things jump the logic line.
That said, you can of course argue that it is on a case by case basis that each character should be judged, on the basis of how they're fleshed out, what the setting is like, and their role in the piece in question and how they act and react and whether they grow or not, and why. This of course renders any blanket statement impossible to make just on that alone.
Finally, there's also how we in the PPC treat Sues, and the fact that we, as a group, do several things that can be used to treat that statement in a method of ways. First and foremost is the fact that something that is not condoned in the least is torture. It's looked down on both in character and out of character, both from higher-ups (Flowers and/or PGs**) and from colleagues (fellow working agents and your average Boarder). Torturing a Sue is Going Too Far, and not just due to the fact that it isn't funny, because as I have illustrated previously, yes, you can make it funny with the right spin or angle.° It doesn't, however, make it right. The fact of torturing a humanoid character implies that said character is able to experience pain and not like it.
The definition of torture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture is the following:
"...any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions."
Using this definition (which I will adhere to for the purposes of this thread, and I ask others to do the same) eliminates considering Sues as animals or less than animals, especially when the torture of Sues would fall under the bolded clause.
Additionally, there is the continued recruitment of Mary Sues who are either mild or are sincerely penitent, which means the statement can't be a categorical imperative. You need to be aware to be apologetic of previous actions, especially to be able to be willing to repent. It's the recalcitrant ones who are killed after being charged, which also indicates a viewpoint on the part of the PPC as an organization that Sues are aware of their actions. In court trials, the punishment for those who have been decided by the court that they are not fully in control of their actions, be it through insanity, infirmity of the mind, or otherwise not understanding what they did or the consequences of their actions is different from those who have been proven to have full control of their faculties.
This of course, you might think, does not coincide with the various foods and beverages the PPC has that have Mary Sue as a base ingredient, such as Sue Soufflé or Water (for those of you who aren't aware what Water is, it is a beverage made from Sue blood. Why yes, it is glittery), or the acts of keeping Mary Sue scalp belts, or collecting their skulls, and taking all their things, and what have you.
In regards to Sue Soufflé and Water, the PPC Cafeteria is downright infamous for the many questionable foods it serves, to the point where eating from from it instead of being there to socialize with agents besides your partner is an excellent sign of having finally Lost It. The Cafeteria, as a matter of fact, low budget, and cooks who have to produce meals for hundreds (if not thousands) of people every day, needs to obtain ingredients quickly and cheaply to produce something that at least looks edible, even if it is not, in actuality. It is without a doubt very easy to obtain Sue corpses when they're not being fed to monsters and are left out in the fields, steps, hallways, and rooms of various continua, and better than leaving them there to stumbled upon by an unwitting and clumsy canon character.***
Scalp belts and the collection of various shinies are a natural development in an environment of few awards and accolades, little recognition from Upstairs of the combative abilities of Assassins and other agents who deal with Sues, and little-to-no pay****. Having items that show proof that yes, you had taken down this Sue what had sparkling glowing rainbow hair or had a blood dripping katana that would play a Battle Royale if you swung it just right is important in an organization of hearsay, gossip, and rumor, like most organizations that get large enough become. When people are not awarded for their own achievements in a potentially morale draining career, the only option is to provide them yourself.
In short, I don't think we can say that a whole group of something- Mary Sues, in this case- are non-sentient, not aware, and are essentially animals. There are many many ways to view if a character would be self aware or not, and the definition of Mary Sue as provided on our wiki does not contain anything to suggest that they are or are not, just that they are characters designed to fulfill wishes and desires on the part of the writer. It doesn't even address it.
With that all said; thoughts?
*But let's not badger about.
**While I am aware that your average Permission Giver will quibble against being considered a higher-up, when it comes to certain things like what one really, really shouldn't do, Permission Givers do have more sway and pull over things where the matter of what spirit of the PPC is and what can be broken.
°As Noted and given an example here.
***One can theorize that the reason Neville was in such fair shape for fighting and leading the resistance at Hogwarts by the end of the seventh Harry Potter book was more due to the constant invasion of Sues coming for Harry over the last few years than the treatment he and others received at the hands of the Carrows, as no doubt the food at Hogwarts has remained delicious and nutritionally filling, and Harry, while the protagonist, is a bit oblivious as to what most of his housemates get up to and who some students in his house even are. Poor Neville probably spent years 3-7 tripping over usually dead Sues and Stus.
****The average teenager and young twentysomething knows little of the power of unions and other similiar organizations.
Working under the logic that any fictional character is sentient, Sues count as sentient as well. To be sentient, one only has to have the power of perception by the senses. Technically worms are sentient. As for sapience, I'm not sapient. I've never shown great wisdom or sound judgment in my life. Well, maybe once or twice, but those were flukes. So, no, Sues aren't sapient, but then a case could most likely be made for more than half of the PPC being non-sapient as well.
Also, here's a thought: Unless they have the sense of touch, the Flowers are not sentient, while Sues are. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure at least most of the flowers are sapient.
Hm. I'm going to try to reason it out as I go along. Feel free to poke holes. (Not going to get into bit characters.) Wow, this turned out longer than I expected.
I usually get the impression that Sues are a cross between badly-raised children and ghosts/phantoms/something-of-that-nature.
The bad child aspect of course comes from the parent/author coddling them. The author gives his or her darling little Sue whatever she desires. The Sue doesn't have to work for anything. She doesn't suffer consequences. She simply does as she pleases, much like a spoiled child (you know the kind: the child you want to smack silly in the store because she's terrorizing the staff, breaking the merchandise, and acting like a deranged monkey while her parents completely ignore the behavior). Because she doesn't know what is acceptable behavior in a character, she simply goes on doing as she pleases. The longer this goes on, the more set in her ways she becomes and the harder it is for her to see that she's in the wrong. So, in this aspect, the Sue is sentient, but in a way that all of her thoughts and actions are based off of what she has been taught by her parent/author. If removed from the bad influence (the author) early enough, it's possible that the Sue could reform. The problem is finding Sues who are "young" enough, so to speak, that they will listen to reason and not go running back to the author who has always protected them and given them what they want..
The ghost/phantom aspect is a little harder. You can, of course, see the Sue and touch her. She has a body. It's inside, where her soul (her sentience and consciousness--that which makes her *her*) is supposed to be, that you find the difference. Some Sues have more thought put into them than others; they have a more solid soul/substance. Others are merely blatant, self-insert Sues: empty, with no purpose other than being a vessel for the author or reader. The soul has faded so that it's almost nonexistent. Those Sues with more soul are basically filled to the brim with glitter, and there's no hope for them. There's no room for anything else, and they must be destroyed. Those empty Sues, though, can go down two roads. The moment an agent cuts them off from their author and confronts them, they 1) collapse and fade away when they are dispatched, leaving nothing behind but a body; or 2) they waver a bit, trying to stand on their own, but ultimately use the new, good influence of the PPC's canon, agents, and authors to solidify into something that doesn't resemble a Sue quite so much anymore (this could possibly require intensive, long-term therapy to ween the former-Sue away from bad tendencies, and to prevent a relapse into Sue-hood).
So, you are murdering the Sue when you kill it, but by the time it reaches the Cafeteria in a Sue Souffle (or other inedible), you're not actually eating a Sue. The "soul" is already gone, and all that's left is a toxic body. Likewise, in the case of scalp belts, they're simply trophies, no longer a part of the Sue. In fact, they never were. The Sue's body is more like a shell or a suit for the Sue. As soon as she's removed, that's the end of it. There are still traces of Sue (which is why consuming any part of it is a bad idea), but the body is not itself as bad as the Sue. I imagine that if someone decided to turn into sort of monster and eat part of a living Sue, the results would be far, far worse.
... My mind seems to be wandering a bit at this point. I wonder if I covered everything I wanted to cover? This is mostly just speculation and what I imagine when I'm thinking of this sort of thing.
I like it! It makes sense (but not cents, sadly; my purse weeps).
In the case of scalps or whatnot, what is being kept is essentially the same as keeping some ridiculous piece of jewellery or furniture the Sue conjured up while in power - that it was part of her body doesn't really make a difference in the end, when all the words come tumbling down. So, as you say, there's no Sueish influence left (thank goodness!)
The bad parenting analogy seems particularly apt. Makes me glad I've put forth the effort to be a good parent to my characters. ^_^
Presuming that the rules of canon are law, though, and not arbitrary, killing Sues still isn't murder. They're charged and executed with due process, not just offed whenever someone feels trigger-happy (y'know, mostly). From this perspective, that's why the agents have to watch the fic and read the charge list, and also why they have partners.
~Neshomeh
It really isn't murder, per se; more of a deserved execution. Gosh, for how long it took me to write that all up and proof it, I can't believe I missed that. ^_^' Glad you liked it, though.
I am of the personal opinion that most 'Sues are indeed sentient, and know all too well what they're doing. Most of the 'Sue stories I've read have given me the impression that the 'Sues know exactly what they're doing, deep down inside of their glittery little hearts, and that they simply don't care. They allow Suethors to manipulate them, but that's just because a Suethor makes the 'Sue's life oh so much easier.
It's because of this willful desecration of canon that 'Sues are targeted by the PPC. They're like war criminals: we allow them basic human rights by not torturing them, but otherwise, it's open season on Mary Sue.
In my mind, Sues are characters the same as any other—agent, canon, whatever. However, Sues, by virtue of their status as fan characters, don't actually belong in the worlds they reside in. (This obviously doesn't apply to canon Sues like Eragon, who do belong, for better or for worse.) As Sues commit worse and worse transgressions against the canon over the course of their existence, they become more and more glittery, and more and more openly hostile against the canon. The less glittery specimens can still be removed from their badfic (and author's influence) and become part of the PPC. More glittery ones are more likely to be openly hostile against agents when they reveal themselves to the Sue. (Also, compare factory Sues, who are created almost entirely out of glitter rather than writing, and are also essentially "programmed" for hostility against the PPC.
I pretty much agree with you - I would only add that the sentience or sapience of any given Sue doesn't necessarily mean all others have the same capabilities. In one of my early missions, Agent Sedri killed an original character and commented on how there just wasn't enough 'substance' to him for him to fight death. Judging whether or not a character has enough 'substance' is always going to be subjective, but it's generally the way we distinguish between bit characters and other OCs, isn't it? That's how I've always treated it.
So, if they're bit characters, I tend to treat them as having no sentience and just being parts of the scenery, so to speak. In my opinion, some Sues are so flat and underwritten as to fall under the same umbrella category. Others are - infamously - complicated and undoubtedly substantial enough to have sentience as we class it in the PPC world.
So, if you agree with the above, I'd say they have limited sentience, then, depending on their particular origins. We can show respect as a generalisation, but not treat them as sacred.
On that note, I'd also add that (I think) our modern western society is very frightened of doing anything that might be seen as 'wrong' by anyone, and while I definitely do not want to get into that debate, I do think that we are less fussy within the world of the PPC, hence the Sue Soufflé and its kin.
But let's not get into the complexities of PPC salaries - whether or not an agent can prove that they've killed however many Sues isn't going to get them paid anyway ;p
High Voltage was right about Ranger being recruitable because he had less (well, no) 'substance'.
It would appear that he is a living person with a generic personality by default, but still sentient due to lack of author tampering.
So I take back what I said.
I forgot about the phenomenon of bit characters when I made my statement. Bit characters aren't sentient and they appear to "deactivate" once their purpose in the story is fulfilled. Often, they are minimally defined if at all.
I'd like to amend my statement to say that lack of author tampering can produce a sentient character, but that character must somehow drive the story by his or her own written actions. In other words, they must have an important role in the story. Obviously, this gets into the realm of the subjective and is a rare occurrence as major characters are often highly tampered with.
This eliminates bits like shopkeepers, wingmen, and arranged engagements that Sues like to angst over by allowing them to deactivate once their purpose is served.
Ranger would have been a villain in the story and as such is a major character. By the time the other Sues were killed, he really didn't do much and was able to be recruited.
Perhaps, the timing in which we meet the character in the narrative is important? Maybe a Sue can be redeemed if removed from the canon early enough.
I think it's all going to end up being judged on a case-by-case basis anyway.
I'd imagine that, if we could pull a Sue out of a story before there's any description of her beyond "There once was a girl named Jane who was sitting on a chair", then she could theoretically be redeemed, but not always. If she was introduced as "Silverfeather Hyacinth was the most beautiful elf EVAR!", then I doubt it.
We can't rescue too many Sues, anyway. That would make the Department of Mary Sues irrelevant, which would be a travesty. Better to just kill them for the sake of PPC canon. :)
Just practical ;)
Actually, saying "this isn't meant to be fair" probably can't be taken the 'right' way very easily at all. So let me clarify that I meant that the PPC was never designed to careful consider every Mary Sue's potential and weigh up their ability to contribute to the Word Worlds before deciding their fate. It's more a god-help-me-kill-that-painful-thing-NOW! sort of place :)
Of course some things, like torture, are right out, because they make us look like bad people, but I can't really see the point of being so serious here. I see this place as mostly light-hearted fun. For me, anyway, it is a real fun killer to have to go over my deep personal beliefs in regards to human rights to continue to write fanfiction of fanfiction.
Serious discussions like these are how we better understand the fictional universe this all takes place in. Better understanding of canon leads to better fanfiction.
If not that, some fanfics (any sporked by DAVD) have some very needlessly disturbing moments. It's good to establish that we're better than them. :)
Are they sentient? In my opinion, yes. Is it murder to kill them? From a neutral viewpoint, yes. Do I care? Nope.
I don't believe Sues are quite sentient/sapient... but I do believe they have the potential to be. It's just that the Author doesn't LET them be a person.
This is because all Mary Sues (that I have encountered) are the product of some ulterior motive on the part of the author. Does the author want to write about coolness, or wish they were cooler? The Sue is cool. Does the author have a vendetta against other people in their life? The Sue is now abused or teased and everybody feels bad for her and hates the 'preps,' 'evil parents,' or 'mean kids' that harass her. Does the author wish they could be a canon character's girlfriend? The Sue is irresistible. (Though they may not admit or 'actively' desire these things... people's true feelings DO come out in their work. The personal attachment many suethors have to their Sues proves that...)
But... those things aren't a person. How many times do we encounter Sues that don't have a place to call home and instead are just inexplicably hanging around canon characters? How many of them don't have families or sources of income? How many of them literally do not have any sort of life outside their interactions in the fanfic? Or, if the nominally do have lives, how many of them drop them in a heartbeat for something 'better' that doesn't contain having to live as a real person?
Furthermore, the author's super-involvement with the Sues' conflicts and environment also suggest that a Sue may not be as independent or capable as a real person should be. Romantic rivals in the way? Author kills them all. Unbeatable enemies? Author gives Sue powers that kill them all. Impossible task? Author creates circumstances where it's magically easy. A Sue doesn't get by on her 'own' merits: doesn't HAVE to think, doesn't HAVE to work, doesn't HAVE to strive to survive.
All they have is this mission that the author gave them. Nothing else matters; everything is an accessory to that goal. She has to sleep? It's so she can have prophetic dreams. She has to exercise? It's so the love interest can see her all sweaty and glistening. She gets wounded? It's so people can fuss over her. None of her functions as a character... or even a living thing exist for the sake of themselves-- they all exist for this goal.
That sure doesn't sound like a legitimate character to me. That doesn't even sound like a living thing to me. In fact, it sounds more like a doll that the author's moving around.
It's not putting them as 'lower life forms' in my eyes. It's putting them as not even alive in the first place.
Sure, all characters are assumed from the get-go to be sentient or sapient. But it's the actions of a person that count, and if that person does not demonstrate that they are sentient... or even an organism at all... then why should we just assume that they are thinking beings when they give us evidence to the contrary?
This is also why Sues are redeemable... if they give us MORE information that suggests that they are in fact living, thinking beings, then they can be real characters. If they act like people, they can BE people.
So no, in my eyes, Sues are not lesser animals or bags of glitter. Sues are more like willful dolls, or angry spirits that may take physical form with a single goal and no need to act like a living thing at all in pursuit of that goal...
This is also why torturing them is a no-no aside from appropriateness. A Sue isn't built for that. You aren't causing it pain, you aren't making it suffer. It's useless. Any clever thing the agent does to kill a Sue is for the agent's amusement only. Sues don't suffer because in their own story the author prevents them from suffering. They're prevented from being characters, because an outside force tailors their appearance and interactions to not even NEED the Sue there.
And that's why Sues are often generic. They aren't their own person. The story doesn't need a character there. It needs a Sue. Which can be anything-- meaning, that Sue is in fact, nothing.
Characters are something, not nothing.
While I haven't read the fanfic that Ranger from the original PPC (Chapter 7: Children of the Earth) came from, it seemed that his sentience/sapience came from the fact that he was less defined as a character. All that was really said of him is that he was an evil twin of a Sue character and that he had little impact on the story when they met him. Based on his case, I believe that all added characters, including cute animal friends are sentient when they are created and it is through constant author tampering that they become nothing more than viruses that infiltrate the canon and re-purpose it to fit the author's desires.
Ranger didn't have a really defined personality, but he was able to reason that joining PPC was preferable to death and that fear/avoidance of death is part of the definition of a living being. It would appear that he is a living person with a generic personality by default, but still sentient due to lack of author tampering.
On the contrary, a skilled author could make a well-defined character and the character can be sentient as long as the character acts in accordance with his defined personality and faces challenges realistically.
As for torture, even if a Sue is not technically living, it still reflects poorly on the agent. For example, you wouldn't want your child playing with another child who likes to take hacksaws to his teddy bears.
Characters start out with the assumption that they will be people, but if they break that assumption, we have no reason to doubt them. That's why charge lists are important-- we can PROVE that this character exists to do this terrible stuff.
You don't need to prove you have a defined personality-- the assumption still holds up. But you do need to NOT PROVE that you are an un-sentient thing that exists only for a goal.
That too, but I was going more for 'torture is bad because it's useless in the first place against a Sue, so why would you do this cruel thing that has no point anyway?' but that too is a good point.
This was pretty much what I was trying to say in my post, although I think you may have phrased it better.
As far as characters in general go, I'd say some are definitely more self-possessed than others, and I mean that literally. I mean, we're all writers here, we all know what happens when a character suddenly becomes more than we ever planned for. I do think of myself largely as a scribe or historian, recording things that are not under my control beyond the effect I have by observing them from my own point of view.
Tangential thought: suppose that sensation comes from the collection of ideas that makes a character using unfamiliar pathways in the brain? I mean, ideas are real, they exist, so characters exist in the same way. It's all neurons firing when you get down to it. Our brains are infinitely complex. If they go off in a pattern we're not used to, responding to things we've never seen in ways we'll never practice in real life, is that not, in effect, another real consciousness? Do our characters, in a non-metaphorical sense, use our brains to become sentient? O.o
... Leaving that aside.
As far I'm concerned, the reason Mary Sues are treated as autonomous is to avoid bullying the author. Yes, Mary Sue is the author's darling; yes, she gets everything she wants because her author give it to her. However, the point is not to beat up on the author, but to critique the writing. Therefore, we kill the creation, not the creator. From this perspective, it doesn't matter whether the Sue has that quality of seeming-sentience or not.
From an in-universe perspective, the issue gets a lot more complicated because we're dealing with individual agents who may each have a slightly different take on things:
- Derik doesn't worry about whether Sues are sentient or not; they're a plague, it's his Duty to destroy them until he himself is destroyed, end of story. If Thread were sentient, dragonriders would still burn it out of the sky to protect Pern from its wanton, pitiless ruination.
- Earwig is a kender; he thinks it's all a game.
- Gall is perfectly happy being a murderer.
- Supernumerary, if you really, really pressed him, would own up to suspecting everything is made of words, so he's a fictional character fictionally killing other fictional characters, the difference being that the story he's in is better-made than the one the Sue's in, so it's like natural selection or culling the flock or some other metaphor in which the stronger thing destroys the weaker thing for the greater good.
- Jenni knows that it's all made of words—at least from one perspective. From hers, it doesn't matter, because it all feels real to her, so she has to act accordingly. She probably wouldn't be able to kill a Sue except to defend someone else's life, and even then she would try everything in her power to avoid it. If you ask Jenni, former avatar, fan character, and possibly Sue herself, no one is beyond redemption. Too bad she can't personally fix everyone.
- Ilraen . . . I don't actually know what Ilraen thinks about it. It's one of the many issues he has to make up his mind about as he grows. I suspect he'll come down on the side of his warrior ancestry and accept it as due process in the course of defending the universe, though.
So, in the end, every viewpoint is equally valid. Therefore, one blanket statement of "Sues are sentient" or "Sues are not sentient" can never apply.
~Neshomeh
This is why I treat Sues as a kind of evil spirit or demon that is the manifestation of these bad author wishes. It's the wishes that are bad, not the author-- and heaven knows Sues ARE NOT a reflection of the author. I wrote my fair share, and they were all temporary blotches of what I wanted at the TIME. NOT who I am or my potential as a person...
So why not treat them that way?
I've always thought that torture is verboten is not only because of the unnecessary suffering, but because of the way it reflects on the torturer. It's very hard to write a character who can thoughtfully and knowingly inflict suffering as a prelude to death for no reason other than their own personal satisfaction. Compare and contrast animal cruelty- even though the animal isn't sentient, and not a "person" by an stretch of the imagination, we're still (generally) loathe to inflicting unnecessary suffering on them. Considered from this angle, the question of Sue sentience becomes irrelevant: one don't torture them not only for their own sake, but for the sake of not employing people who will perform torture for their own satisfaction.
Whether or not the killing of a Sue is murder is largely academic. By the rules laid out within the PPC's internal continuity, Sues are damaging to the canon in which they are inserted and, as such, must be excised. The few who aren't too warping to their "home" canon can be extracted without killing them, but the more serious cases must be terminated in order to reverse the damage their existence does to the canon they infest.
I guess what I'm saying is that, while intriguing, the question of Sue sentience isn't too relevant to the Great Work.
For my definition of torture I used the one I gave, from the UN, and bolded the portion on it being as punishment or other discrimination, which is where the torture of Sues would fall as concerned by how the PPC is organized and how we deal with Sues, it's even in the very name. Protectors of the Plot Continuum. We style ourselves as being a form of law enforcement. We're a law agency. In the original series, we had constables; only later did we become agents.
We treat the Sues as people because we find what they did wrong, we tell them what they did wrong, we come to a conclusion on what the punishment should be for those aforementioned charges, and then carry said punishment out. Killing a Sue is an execution, not a murder or pest control.
From a “normal” writing perspective, I don’t think the ‘Sue sentience should be taken all that seriously, but from the perspective of treating characters like people, or from an agent in the PPC, and defining sentience as simply self-awareness, I think that ‘Sues are a bit like the ghosts of the Harry Potter continuum, even though they behave like a real person, and appear self-aware, they are not, just the imprint of a real person that has been left behind. In the case of a Sue, this would probably be the Suethor’s image of an idealized self (fitting again with the wish fulfillment) and in the case of a canon ‘Sue, the image of a Suethor’s idealized canon character.
When a ‘Sue is recruited, they stop being a ‘Sue; they become more then the shadows of an idea, and are fleshed out into “real” people. Thus, I think ‘Sues themselves are not sentient, but some ‘Sues have the ability to become so, which should be judged on a case by case basis, (which in turn, is different from an animal, who by any science we currently have cannot become anymore “sentient” then they already are or are not).
Torturing a ‘Sue is looked down upon, in part, I think, not because ‘Sues are sapient, but because they are so close to being sapient. It’s a small step from torturing a ‘Sue to torturing a “real” person.
Basically, I think ‘Sues are not sentient, but rather something that mimics self-awareness and sentience. I think ‘Sues have the ability to gain sentience, but only partially by themselves, or wholly with help form either from their author or agents. Also, I like to think that many agents have less then satisfactory morals anyway.
In that way, ‘Sues are a lot like robots. o.o
Hopefully I haven’t just made myself look idiotic by posting this here. >_>;
I am personally of the opinion that characters are (in a strange sort of way) their own people. This is mainly because I usually lose control of my stories and my characters end up yelling at me that "No, you idiot! I am not going to jump in to save her! I don't care that she is my love interest's sister, I'm not that nice of a person!" which in turn causes arguments between me and my characters.
This would then pose the question of: "If Sues are sentient then isn't it murder to kill them?!"
The way I see it, characters are not sentient until suddenly it is the characters dictating the story rather than the author. An example of this (besides mine) is the appearance of Faramir. According to http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Faramir#Trivia (which, admittedly, I do not trust very much, but let's pretend it is credible for the sake of my argument) Tolkien himself wasn't quite sure where Faramir came from and was "Sure [he] did not invent [Faramir]". In this case Faramir, would count as sentient because he is, more or less, dictating his own actions rather than having them dictated by the author. In most cases of Sue fics, the author is controlling the Sue like a puppet. When a milder Sue is confronted by the charges they are able to break free of the author's control (with the help of the different author, of course) and repent their Sueish ways.
The other time when characters have sentience is when they are well developed and their actions and abilities make sense for their character. (For example: it makes sense that Merry and Pippin, being loyal friends of Frodo and slightly foolhardy, would insist on going on the quest, and, because their is more to hobbits than meets the eye [and they are extremely loyal], would be able to play an important role in saving Middle-earth. It would not make sense for Mary Sue, a twelve year old girl from earth, to be allowed to join the Fellowship because she proved her [previously non-existent] fighting skills.) When it comes to the point that the character's actions are predictable based on their characterization rather than the archetype of their character, then the character can count as Sentient which is why most Sues do not count as sentient and are okay to kill.
This is really just my (rather lengthy) opinion, and the way I rationalize it. It is also how I remain in denial of the fact that arguing with my characters might seem slightly crazy.
'This would then pose the question of: "If Sues are sentient then isn't it murder to kill them?!"'
We do, after all, have assassins, not pest controllers or exterminators or hunters, or what have you. There's also the fact that we stress the need to charge them before we dispatch with them.
To me, charges are not really intended for the Sues. They are essentially summarizing the agents' complaints against the fanfic itself. It's more of a review or note to the author, so that the author can write better characters and fiction in the future. Upstairs gets mad when charges aren't spoken because otherwise, the complaints aren't spelled out to the author.
"Assassin" seems more of a courtesy to the fact that Sues are usually humanoid.
That is true. I think my logic about whether or not a Sue is sentient still stands though, whether that one statement was incorrect or not.