Subject: Re: Why the second?
Author:
Posted on: 2010-07-09 14:51:00 UTC
I also restrict Sue to a certain type of fanfic character, and have never much liked the Canon Sue and Historical Sue terms, but like everyone else, I don't have a good easy replacement term. Without something easy and catchy to replace it with, the terms are stuck.
I've just read the wiki page about cycle theory, and in response, I would like to announce that it is BULLOCK! Let me make myself understood implicitly - I am a proponent of Cycle Theory, in that I know it is happening, but I'm opposed to it in that I think it shouldn't be happening. Regression is the worst possible thing that could happen to the PPC, yes, even worse than our total destruction. If we are destroyed, Bad Things will happen due to our absence, but if we regress to the early days of the Organization, we will be the cause of Bad Things, and they will Not be Funny!
First, the issuing of the TARDISes. This changes the entire focus of the Agent of the PPC, from someone who does their job as best they can in the field, who isn't afraid to get their hands dirty or improvise, sponsered and organized lunatics who can get in and out of any amount of trouble just so long as it's funny, to shadowy figures, lurking in their TARDISes and 'fixing' whatever parts of fanfiction they don't like. It's creepy, it's uncomfortably sterile, it's not as funny, (Think about some of the problems Jay and Acacia faced in the OS. Would they have been as funny if their RC was five steps away?) and it wouldn't work. Think about it; If our agents were as psychotic as we make them out to be, and they had to stay in an enclosed space with someone just as disturbed for such prolonged periods of time, where their only chance to get out involves killing things...How long would it take for those police boxes to begin dripping blood?
In an RC, you can call for help. In a Tardis, no one can hear you scream.
The Sun Crushers and Mass Neuralyzers are also a problem. They give Agent's more freedom, freedom that they really shouldn't be allowed. It gives more opportunities to take the easy way out. Why slice off a 'Sue's head when you can hit her with an antitank weapon? And who cares if the canons noticed? Turn on the Mass Neuralyzer and it won't matter at all. This isn't funny, and this isn't what the PPC should be. I'm 80% sure that we have rules against this, and if we don't, we should.
Our rules are also being compromised. Yes, we argue about them like a trio of Ashkenazi Rabbis. Yes, our agents barely every follow them even when we do manage to agree. But we have them, there are reasons that we have them, and we are currently making a mockery of them. And it isn't even an amusing mockery.
It seems that we've lost focus. What are we, what is our purpose? Are we enforcing canon or quality? If we're just enforcing canon, does that mean that we kill any fic that doesn't follow the books to the letter? If we're enforcing quality, what's the difference between that and bashing stuff that we don't like?
No. We're not doing either. We're writing these missions to be funny and interesting, because we are the goddamn PPC. That is the goddamn point of the entire organization, and we are missing it completely. In HQ, Rule of Funny is Word of God. Sometimes we need to be serious, but when we do we should beware of blowing this seriousness out of proportion. Angst should be kept to a minumum, and the same goes for plotline. The point of this is to have fun with the plots of badfic, not to create monolithic storylines and backstories for each individual agent. And the Grey Lady knows that we don't need a full-blown Emergency to write a decent fight scene.
This may appear to have nothing to do with regression. But think about it this way; the OS is the foundation on which all of the PPC is built. This means that we're supposed to build on it, progress and improve what they created, not tear it down because we think we can do better.
I'm probably just rambling here. In fact, I'm almost certain that I am. But I, for one, want to know what people think about this, if this is a problem that needs to be fixed, and how we might go about changing this.
Overthinking things as usual, EBW
Here I quote:
"No. We're not doing either. We're writing these missions to be funny and interesting, because we are the goddamn PPC. That is the goddamn point of the entire organization, and we are missing it completely. In HQ, Rule of Funny is Word of God. Sometimes we need to be serious, but when we do we should beware of blowing this seriousness out of proportion. Angst should be kept to a minumum, and the same goes for plotline. The point of this is to have fun with the plots of badfic, not to create monolithic storylines and backstories for each individual agent. And the Grey Lady knows that we don't need a full-blown Emergency to write a decent fight scene."
A-men!
...To the oldbies, (especially Sedri) for bringing this topic up again, and to the newbies, for making them bicker like...something that bickers a great deal. I would also like to issue a personal apology to MAXinsanity, whom I appear to have accidently made the object of a positively itinerant hate-fest. Again. (I would also like to apologize to any and all grammarians who are shuddering at my horrible use of the word 'itinerant'. But, y'know, if they didn't want anybody to misuse it, they shouldn't have made the word sound so damn nice. Who 'they' are, I have no idea.)
Where was I...? Ah, yes. The whole cycle theory thing touched a nerve with me. I was so ticked off that I didn't bother to wonder if the article was a sarcastic one or not, or check when it was last updated to make sure that I wasn't beating a dead horse.
Overthinking things as usual, EBW
... Sambar's wrong (I should know; he's mine). The PPC isn't going to degenerate into a planet-destroying network of uncaring wossnames, simply because that's not even a story. I can demonstrate what those missions would look like by pointing you to my "friend" Jaycacia Thornbyrd:
The first thing she saw on arrival was, naturally enough, a Mary-Sue. Using her secret powers, given to her at birth by a wandering daffodil, she deleted the ‘Sue from the story. Any other Assassin, having killed the ‘Sue – by normal means, as only Jaycacia had the power to alter the story at will – would have expected the Canon to snap back, but Jaycacia was not fooled. There were still thirteen more ‘Sues, along with a host of Cute Animal Friends, to destroy.
So destroy them she did. Standing there in the clearing, Jaycacia stretched out and, with a fraction of her powers, deleted the uncanons one by one. Once she was satisfied that the story was fixed, she opened a portal back to HQ using the power of her mind – no need for silly Remote Activators – and stepped back into her room.
If that was what missions turned into, no one would write them, and there would be no PPC.
Oh, and yes, it was a joke article, but written as a gentle warning that things might be getting a bit over the top. Which seems to have worked.
And have you seen Catastrophe Theory?
hS, just bobbing in and out
Will FanficLand be re-opening for business again this year?
It depends on whether anyone's able to help me. I'm rather a busy bee right now, and updating FfL is a fairly intensive job for the few days it lasts. If someone can volunteer to make a daily collection of updates (with all relevant details - username, user number if applicable, story/chapter title, reviews etc, and date of posting, plus the actual text) to email to me, then yes. Or if someone wants to brave the perils of my idiosyncratic HTML and update it themselves, then also yes. But I currently don't have time to find every new post on the thread myself, I'm afraid. :(
I'm really hoping we can do it, though.
hS
It would take a while in either case, but the new entries don't need to go up on FfL while we're playing the game, I think - do they? We do all our playing here on the Board anyway, except for referring to last year's entries.
I'm no good with html of that complexity, though. The best I'd be able to do is collect every chapter and its reviews in Word documents and email them over.
And of course, if anyone wants to help, I'd appreciate it. If something comes up in my Real Life and I fall behind, it'd be most appreciated.
If I don't try and update as we play, I can do it a lot easier. Would everyone be okay with that? Or at least, everyone who's reading this particular post?
(I've already written out the opening post for the 2010 Contest, so it looks likely to go ahead)
hS
But I can't imagine anyone will mind; as long as we can see last year's work on FfL and this year's stuff on the Board, nothing will get lost.
Should I make a new thread on the first page to ask?
I love Fanfic Land, and it was last July, wasn't it? Eeeeeeexcellent.
Excuse me, I'm off to dig out and dust off LAdy cyskia and HonestCritic from my Alter-Egos box :D
It's positively diabolical.
I'll go through and add a note about how the theory is regarded in the real world.
It's not like I've made an idiot of myself on here before. I'd rather not people bring up specific incidents, but I have done some pretty stupid stuff here, so it's expected for me to flip out a little once in a while.
I overreacted a bit myself, to be honest. Anyway, don't worry about it.
What you're describing is essentially the same issue as came up late last year, when there was a rather tense conflict on the Board and the oldbies collectively put their foot down on the entire Emergencies problem - it's also why I wrote the Guide To The PPC, which has an entire section on exactly this issue.
I really hope this debate doesn't start up again, because frankly, we've heard it before. In short, everyone's keeping an eye out for missions and other writings that are losing the PPC 'spirit' and becoming too powerful, particularly the PGs when they give Permission. We're being vigilant. Within the word world, most agents do not have access to these powerful tools anyway, and those who do and abuse the use of them tend to be singled out by the Flowers for brain-breaking assignments. It's now they keep order in HQ.
Also, I might point out that the Cycle Theory article hasn't been updated for almost a year, which is before all this began, so strictly speaking, it's out of 'date' with regards to this particular discussion. Let me also quote the editing note made when the page was first created:
"Because if there's one thing the PPC needs, it's another insane theory."
To me, that seems to imply that only the insane agents (in fact, only ONE agent - Sambar of Finance) who believe in said theory. I doubt it's therefore something that should be taken very seriously, let alone be the cause of a Board-wide dispute.
- Sedri, wearing her Boarder Hat
Also, I would ask you to kindly tone down your 'rant' next time something upsetting comes up. Calm down before you post and please present it as an argument for discussion rather than throwing around final statements like "it is _!" and "it wouldn't work", which leave no room for opinion and can hurt people's feelings.
- Sedri, wearing her Relative-Oldbie and Hopefully-Respect-Worthy-PG Hat
(I know exactly why, of course - I was using the markup for a livejournal post in the other window and typed it in the subject header here out of habit. Apologies for that - I didn't mean to make it out like I was shouting.)
Have you been reading recent missions? It's evident that most people agree with you.
Recent agents don't have TARDISes; nor do they use Mass Neuralyzers; and it doesn't make sense that they should. Nobody else liked being overpowered, either.
Why? Simple: Glitter levels. An overly powerful PPC agent ends up Sued, and then their own partner (or the DIO, which doesn't exist) has to take them out. It's not fun, and while it's "never happened", we don't want it to ever happen. It's not necessarily even the way that most agents would want it; very few agents are actually sociopathic enough to want to go killing at random without checking first to see that their target is a personality-free, canon-destroying Sue. And that means they'd prefer that other agents not go on killing sprees, either.
The agents need to keep their distance from the canons, sure; but the SEP fields and the constant presence of a partner are usually enough to ensure that. Equally dangerous would be keeping too much distance from the canons--too much distance to care about the characters, understand the continuum, or notice the small details that can be crucial on a mission.
On the writer's side, we don't want our agents to be overly powerful, either, because it's no longer fun to write for them. It's like having Superman as your main character; only he lives in a world where the worst crimes are purse-snatchings and shoplifting and nobody ever thought of becoming a supervillain. In a word: Boring.
Bringing in the big guns isn't necessary unless it's absolutely warranted. That's one of the reasons why I think the PPC should continue to maintain, and train pilots for, Sun Crushers. There will always be sci-fi continua in which the fangirls will write extracanonical solar systems; and there has to be a way to deal with them. But Sun Crushers are no good for any other purpose. With a few hundred agents (give or take a few thousand) who are all dedicated to protecting their favorite continua, there's absolutely no way the PPC will go back to just blowing up any planet with a Sue on it. Would you like it if they blew up Middle-earth because it was such a Sue magnet? Do I hear the phrase "over my dead body"? Thought so.
The Mass Neuralyzer, however, seems to be something that probably isn't a good idea. Yes, it's efficient; but it's impersonal, and you're likely enough to accidentally neuralyze someone hiding outside the radius of your vision. Consider the scenario: You're in Rivendell and you've just neuralyzed the entire Fellowship with a Mass Neuralyzer. Your neuralyzer flash was seen through the window by five Random Elves and Bilbo Baggins. They now all think they are part of the Fellowship. Is this good for canon? Nope.
What I do disagree with, though, is the idea that we shouldn't be writing stories that flesh out our agents' personalities, or writing stories that have a plot beyond just "See badfic, see Sue, kill Sue". Plot and characterization are both good. The PPC is not MSTing; if you want to just spork badfic, plot-free, you should be writing an MST. Your characters should be realistic people, and the reader should care what happens to them. That doesn't mean you have to pile on the melodrama. When I say "plot", I'm talking about things like someone getting hurt, or the Sufficiently Advanced Technology frizting out, or the Warrior!Sue turning out to be a little too Warrior-y for the agents' taste. Things should happen other than just sporking the plot of the badfic. Large-scale emergencies? No. But bringing in another agent pair for backup, or having a food fight in the Cafeteria, or RPing a romance with another agent? Not Emergency material.
Are you trying to imply that the unhinged, unstable lunatics that are agents are realistic in any way, shape or form?
That clearly isn't the case from how I see it. Yes, their personalities are fleshed out, but they don't seem very natural to me. Of course, insanity does come into play a bit, but even the most insane lunatic is going to be scared (insert term for fecal matter here)-less when near something that can kill them or worse with as little as a thought or can control them like puppets with little hope of escape.
What I see are a bunch of highly exaggerated, apparently "insane" freaks who are using their insanity as an excuse to get away with things that no normal person could get away with.
I'm not saying that the crazy, over-the-top agents are a bad thing. What I am saying is that the silly has gotten just as out of hand as the serious has, in my opinion, and THAT is truly disgusting.
...And that's my second rant for today.
'Are you trying to imply that the unhinged, unstable lunatics that are agents are realistic in any way, shape or form?'
My feelings!
My poor poor feelings! They're hurt! Alas! I was stabbed! Right in the heart!
Because truly, my agent that was based off of me must mean I'm insane and unstable myself.
And I guess that goes the same for everyone else too.
I bet they're totally hurt to find out you must think they're unhinged and unstable and insane and practically worthless to society, or that they're freaks, and so on.
Maybe this is the reason you don't have friends, Max.
You end up insulting everyone in your bid to be superior and above it all.
I'll also add that the agents undergo situations no real person has ever suffered, so you can only guess how their thought processes during and after the incidents would work. Some of them are pretty SIMILAR to real situations, e.g. it's possible to look up the effects of drunkenness and sleep deprivation, but no real person has become addicted to drinking bleach, had their physical sex abruptly swapped, or been demonically possessed. I'd say most of the agents are reacting in perfectly reasonable ways to the craziness they face every day.
... Some Real World faiths do believe in demonic possession, and I didn't mean to offend anyone who belongs to one of those faiths when I said "nobody's ever been demonically possessed". I could have phrased that better; nobody's ever been officially proven to be demonically possessed. Just covering my tail here.
On the other hand, I think everyone agrees that nobody HAS ever become addicted to drinking bleach or had their physical sex abruptly changed without their permission.
I can beat my bleach habit whenever I want to. I'm not addicted... Honest!
The sane people are just boring. :)
*fist-pumps*
And darn proud of it ;)
Do you hear the loonies sing?
Singing the songs of cuckoo-land.
It is the music of a people
Who will not be sane again?
When the beeping of consoles
Sets off the pixies in your head
It is the life about to start in a padded cell!
And so on...
Elcalion, wondering why he always ends up writing a Les Mis parody whenever something like this comes up on the Board. Oh yeah, because he is a LOON!
*though just la-la-ing along, because she's got no talent for filking, but very enthusiastically*
Will you go nuts and sing with me?
In the badfic cavalcade,
Is there a Sue picked out for thee?
Will you go disguised as an Orc 'til the canon goes free...?
~Neshomeh, randomly inspired to continue the filk. ^_^
This is an organization of people who kill other people for a living. They are not going to be the well-adjusted, normal people you see on the street.
Also, they are stories. Stop taking them so seriously. If you don't like it, then don't read it. Complaining on the internet doesn't help.
Many of the Agents-- last time I checked, the majority, actually-- are based on their authors.
What I see are a bunch of highly exaggerated, apparently "insane" freaks who are using their insanity as an excuse to get away with things that no normal person could get away with.
Max, I've always kinda liked talking to you in chat, but this sentence crossed a bit of a line. Maybe I just need to read more of the current spin-offs (well, actually, that point's not up for debate; I do), but if you really think the PPC is so terrible, I hate to say it, but why are you here? It was always about a bunch of crazy misfits doing crazy things that, yes, no normal person could get away with. But I don't think anyone on this 'Board believes in normality anyway. (Do you? I speak for myself, here. Maybe you guys do. I have to doubt it, though.) The PPC-focused bit aside, that still crossed a line. Maybe I'm just being touchy, but "using insanity as an excuse to get away with things that no normal person could" strikes a nerve for me. There's no "It's okay for ME to do this, because I'M CRAAZYYY!" in the PPC. It's more "Hey, I'll do this because it doesn't bother me!" "...Rooting around in pink, glittery blood, looking for specific organs doesn't bother you? That's a little strange. You might be crazy."
Again, maybe I just need to read more spin-offs. You could be right; I just doubt it rather highly.
Also? The humor is the point. It's satire. It's making something humorous out of something relatively serious (well, not -really-. But kind of). That's why we're here.
So... yes. The unhinged, unstable lunatics that are our agents are realistic. In most ways, if not shapes and forms (I mean, come on. We've got elves, aliens, and anthropomorphic animals-- shapes and forms are Willing Suspension of Disbelief).
Their basically their authors (us), only with all their personality dials cranked up to 11.
But some of us are insane. Some of us are insane and don't particularly mind, and are happy to write amusing stories about self-inserts dialed up to eleven. And some of us aren't exaggerating all that much.
That was basically my point-- it's cutting close to a line, in my opinion, to say something like "highly exaggerated, apparently 'insane' freaks," when they are based on their authors. You know, the people on the 'Board... who the comment was adressed to.
But this has clearly gone on long enough, I don't think Max was trying to offend, and it's probably best dropped. I just wanted to clarify-- it's not the comment on writing quality and characterisation that got to me. It was the implication that the characters are, well, 'insane' freaks, when they're based on their authors.
Excuse me while I bang my head on the wall for being such an idiot.
I cannot for the life of me tell if this is sincere or sarcastic.
For sake of peace, if nothing else.
Did you know that legal insanity is partly based on the concept that the person would have committed the same acts even if they were standing right next to a cop?
Insanity in that case actually precludes the ability to react to normal stimuli in normal ways. The really insane agents, in fact should not be capable of be scared (blank)less.
But I really haven't noticed anyone being over the top wildly insane (and most of them have shown that they are capable of fear). I see the reactions to be similar to the gallows humor that allows morticians to joke about dead bodies, or trauma surgeons to joke about blood, or soldiers to joke about war. It is a pretty normal human reaction to make light of situations that have high risks of psychological or physical trauma.
You're also leaving out all those agents who are not World One humans. I actually don't have a single World One human between my four agents. Two of them aren't human, and one of the ones who is, is from a continuum where it is perfectly normal to have mild super powers and to expect Doom From Above in the form of super villains. Anyway, my point is that expecting these characters to react in normal World One ways is wrong for the characters involved.
I think I have a coherent point in there, maybe.
Our agents are a little unhinged, but none of them that I have read would be "legally insane" except when they are actually being dragged (kicking, screaming, and possibly wielding a flamethrower) to FicPsych because they're no longer capable of acting as agents.
If they're in the field (and not currently in need of being dragged anywhere), then they are capable of understanding what they are doing, understanding right and wrong, and making decisions. That's not legally insane.
You've got to be a little nuts to go into badfic and set things right. It's a survival mechanism. And it's actually quite realistic. How do people cope with tough things in real life? That's right: We go a little nuts. We escape to fantasy worlds by playing games or reading books. We get sarcastic and cynical and joke about things that no sane person would joke about. We pretend things haven't changed, even though we know they have. We get hypervigilant; we get addicted; we get obsessive.
That's what everyday humans do. Under stress, we get just a little crazy. Now take that, satirize it, use it for humor. Apply it to people with a tough, extremely risky job. And you get the PPC.
Too much stress, and you get somebody with a diagnosable mental illness; and their functioning level starts to go down. Real-life people can snap, too; and while we don't get out flamethrowers (are, in fact, no more likely to be violent than the most sane guy on the planet), we do end up unable to do our jobs. But that isn't the everyday insanity that we use to cope with life.
Bottom line: Everybody's a little crazy. It's how we cope.
"See badfic, see Sue, kill Sue"
I'm not sure anyone's noticed, but dialogues about What We Are and What We're Doing that contain bits like this kind of exclude some of us. There are some of us who never involve this element in our missions at all. There are some of us who don't really have to worry about turning into what we're sporking. There are some of us who don't have to think about whether we're killing people creatively instead of en masse. Not all of us kill people. Can departments outside the DMS maybe be recognised in these discussions about Our Raison D'Etre? Not only would it be nice, but it'd also make us non-assassins a bit less likely to get bored/uncomfortable and so go elsewhere when such discussions come up.
But that "See badfic..." phrase kinda makes me want to write a PPC-style picture book. "See Sue. See Sue run (away from Agents)."
Maybe it's a sign I've been playing with my one-year-old nephew a little too much!
Elcalion
And yet another reason why the PPC isn't (and wasn't really even during TOS) about "See badfic, see Sue, kill Sue." Sometimes there's no Sue in the first place!
What it is about is simply putting the canon right again, fixing what's horribly wrong, and being a fun thing for those of us who've ever had to search through the badfic looking for the good. The Bad Slash department gets every bit as much horribly-wrong as DMS--probably more, come to think of it.
Anyway, DBS has to fight insanity same as anyone else does; and it's not like exorcists don't occasionally get possessed by the odd escaping slashwraith.
Other departments who may have Sue-free missions: Implausible Crossovers, Despatch, Angst, DAVD, the Troll Division, DOGA, and (obviously) Floaters.
It started with Sues, branched out into implausible crossovers, then added bad slash. From there, we've had plenty of places where the more pacifistic agents can go. There's just so much more to badfic than Mary Sue.
(My personal opinion on the assassination/killing thing: Mary Sues are not "people" unless you insist on putting anything vaguely people-shaped into that category. With such cliched characterization and lack of personality, the average Mary Sue has little more than a basic set of "chase Lust Object" reflexes to serve as a brain.)
I'm fairly sure that Bad Slash was added before Crossovers.
Bad Slash was mentioned before Implausible Crossovers (thanks to Lux's skill with taxidermy), but Implausible Crossovers had the first full mission from a department other than DMS when Jay and Acacia were transferred there.
Might as well tell you my opinion on sues being "people", like I have much better to do right now...
From how I understand it, sues aren't dumb or just humanoids with cockroach intelligence, they're just so used to their rather simplistic routine of the words given to them inside their fic that they're just deathly afraid of breaking it, and almost incapable of acting outside of them without seeming awkward.
This is why I try to portray them a little more innocently than most people do in my PPC writings/rough drafts. They have the potential to be so much more (actually good, well designed characters and sentient) but most of them are just fine with wasting their potential and not having to put up with anything in their lives ever as opposed to actually going out there and coming out of their shell of powers and popularity.
...Yeah, it's kind of weird.
...any more than the elements that make up a human being are the same thing as the human himself. We're a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, with a bit of nitrogen and calcium and other random elements thrown in... But go to your local lab and pick the elements out of their containers, shake them up, and you won't get a human; you'll probably just get a blob of random stuff (and quite possibly explosions). What makes a human isn't the elements in our bodies; it's the information that ties them together.
Sues are fictional characters. They're made of words. But in their case, they're not full characters; they're just a bunch of words thrown together without much coherence. They're little better than a blob of chemicals, with the same ingredients as a good character but very little of the information. Fictional characters, even more than human beings, are made of information. And for the Sue, that information is so cliched and mixed-up that nothing sentient could possibly result. Take the same words and put them together a different way; use good characterization; trim the extra Sue traits; and yeah, you could have a good character. But you don't have one now, any more than a blob of chemicals is the same thing as a human being.
I can see your points, and they're quite valid...
... And I kind of agree with you on them. Some of the things we're putting into our PPC stories aren't funny and/or interesting, they're downright stupid, lazy and cheap. It's almost like we've started defiling our own writing, our own canon, our own characters just to protect the things we love. It's disgusting in my opinion, and this is coming from the guy who can't write humor for his life!
I haven't been here in this community for long, and I already see that we're losing what our whole point was originally. We've became kind of divided, with some people still in it mostly for fun and laughs, just trying to have a good time more than anything else, but with others taking this more seriously and trying to explain and expand the fictional universe of the PPC because it means something personal to them somehow. (I'm one of the latter, mostly because I've ended up becoming attached to my agents despite not even getting permission yet, but also because I don't really write humor to begin with). There isn't anything wrong with either in moderation, but it seems that there's a lot more of the second group now than the first one than there used to be.
What we need to find is balance. Not too serious, but not too funny either. What we are is lost, incapable of realizing that we're tearing our whole beloved fictional world apart because we're trying to resist change a bit too much to be healthy. We're attempting to enforce both canon and quality, but we've leaked into enforcing what we think is bad a little as well. This is kind of visible on the wiki, as well. A (possibly somewhat bad) example is on the Pokemon page. Look under the "Sue types" section and you'll see that pokemorphs are for some reason grouped up in there despite there actually being some good 'morph characters out there if you look hard enough. Yes, 90 percent of them are canon defiling, biology defying wrecks that deserve to die by (insert hilarious method of execution here), but just because someone writes an idea that's been done horribly over and over and over doesn't mean that the character is immediately a sue. There's using an overused idea poorly, and there's using it right despite everyone else expecting something horrible just because everyone else is using it badly. Kind of getting a little off topic here, though, so I'm gonna stop ranting.
...Or maybe I'm just rambling on again because I see another wall of text, and my brain wants to make another wall. I dunno, it's kind of hard to tell. Hopefully I wrote all this to get a valid point across, because I can't tell any more.
..but I have one issue. The point in question is the "Pokemorphs" example.
I understand what you are saying there, not all pokemorphs are bad. I agree with you on that. However, it is not under Mary Sue types because it is always bad, it is under there because, as you said, "90 percent of them are canon defiling, biology defying wrecks that deserve to die..." The Sue types list is pointing out the character types that most often exhibit Sue-ish qualities in the Pokemon continuum, not saying that every character of those types is a Mary Sue.
I would further state that not all Mary Sues are bad. A 'Sue may be well written, well thought out and used in a manner that is enjoyable to read. However, the overwhelming majority of them are poorly written, totally flat and used in a manner that most of us find to be truly annoying.
To sum it up, I agree with you, just because something is usually bad doesn't mean that it can't be done well. But just because something can be done well does not mean we should ignore the fact that it is done poorly 90 percent of the time.
Because if they're not bad, then they're not Mary Sues.
However, a character can be a beautiful, powerful character who falls in love with a canon and still not be a Mary Sue.
The most basic traits of a Mary Sue are distorting the canon and having a flat or cliched personality. Both of those traits need to be present for a character to be a Mary Sue. If the OC is beautiful, powerful, and falls in love with a canon, but does it while being a realistic person who honors the canon, then she's not a Mary Sue.
There are cases where a Sue is not horribly grating, of course; but most of them are in original fiction, not fanfiction. These are characters like Drizzt Do'Urden and Superman--characters who, while they have a lot of Suvian traits, don't have a canon to distort and are usually written realistically enough that people still read their stories despite the way the story revolves around them. If they were in a fanfic story, they would be ridiculous Sues and targeted by the nearest PPC agent in about two seconds flat.
...I believe that if a Mary Sue is well written then there is no reason why it can't be a good character.
An Example
Historical Sues, the name says it all. They are Sues, therefore they are bad, right? I don't think that is the case, but let's not take my word for it.
I note specifically a line that says "Historical Sues are generally less egregious and poorly written than their contemporary counterparts, and most of the works mentioned below are worth reading."
So a Sue can be well written and liked. That does not seem like a bad thing to me.
...only because of the Grandfather clause. Many of these stories would be eye-rollers if we read them by modern standards, but we allow them their effectively bad writing because they were cornerstones of literature.
Historical Sues are "grandfathered in" because we used to have different values about what we considered "good writing"--values that didn't at first have "realistic characters" at the top of the list. It wasn't until around the 1800s that people started complaining about the Sue-ness of various characters; and not until the 1950s or thereabouts that the Mary Sue problem was really addressed directly. In fan fiction, it wasn't identified or named until a couple of decades after that. So we've been learning, collectively, to create literature with realistic characters; and what was acceptable back then isn't something we like now. It's a cultural thing, for the most part.
I'll agree that many canon/Historical Sues aren't damaging their own canons; and that, if you don't judge historical literature by modern standards, it's very enjoyable for its own sake and gives an interesting picture of what life back then was like, and what literature was like, and what values people held.
You can't judge modern literature by historical standards, either--there's a great deal more informality. Even fifty years ago, using contractions or italics for emphasis in a printed book was considered pretty informal and on the edge of acceptable (though there have apparently always been exceptions for people who used those things for artistic effect, in dialogue, or while writing in a dialect as Mark Twain often did).
Historical Sues fit into their books because back then books were written in a way that was more accommodating to Mary Sues, and sold to a readership that was more accepting of Mary Sues. But try to write the same kind of character in a modern novel, and you'll just get an Eragon or a Bella Swann. Modern canons are much less accepting of Sues in general because we expect realism, and Sues just aren't realistic. That's probably another reason why Sues in sci-fi and fantasy continua (like Drizzt and Superman, both of which I offered as examples of Canon Stus) are less grating than those who are supposed to live in a modern world. But you can go too far even then (especially when you steal half the Star Wars canon, digest it, and upchuck it onto your word processor).
As I said before, many of them were (and still are) well written and well liked. And giving them a pass does not make them not Sues.
Also, a different standard of writing back then does not mean bad. A Tolkien character is on that list and I don't believe for a moment that anyone here would say that Tolkien's writing is sub-par by today's standards.
Same as that whole "essay thing" a few months back.
Some of us are using "Mary Sue" to mean exclusively a fanfic character that is shallow, poorly written and distorts canon. By that definition, there is no such thing as a Canon Sue or a Historical Sue. It might be poor characterisation, but it's not a Sue.
Another way of looking at it is that "Sue" is a descriptor for an archetype of character - some of which occur in canon works, but the vast majority of which are in fanfic.
I like the definition that someone linked to around the time of that essay thing: the "Stranger in the Living Room". In fanfic, the Sue is just that: someone disrupting a place that's not theirs by right, bending it to their will, as opposed to a canon-compliant OC, who would be a "Guest".
For canonical characters, it's their own "living room" and therefore they can't be a stranger in it. Many "Historical Sues" work within their own living room canon, but would be jarringly out-of-place if put into another canon. (Beth from Little Women, I'm looking at you - but she works within her own canon even if she isn't a very realistic character).
Elcalion, who, extending the analogy, would love to trash Eragon's living room, but won't cause he's canonical, dammit.
...and raise you a duck. The duck in this case is a Mary Sue. As I see it, a duck is a duck. They quack, they fly, they have feathers. All ducks are pretty much the same.
If you are walking through a desert, or a shopping center, or your house, and you happen to find a duck, you are likely going to think that it is out of place and that someone should do something about it. That is your basic fanfiction Sue.
Now, if you have a duck in a pond, nobody cares that it is a duck. We are quite content to let it go on being a duck (excepting the ducks who insist on quacking loudly at 3 in the morning. *cough*Eragon*cough*). These are canon Sues. They are still Sues, the have all the same character traits, we just don't care that they are Sues because they are in their own setting.
Taking a duck out of your house and putting it in a pond does not make it not a duck, it just makes it okay for it to be a duck.
On another note: If there is no such thing as a canon Sue, why do we insist on calling some canon characters Sues? Why do we have the lists of Historical Sues? We can't have it both ways.
The definition of a Mary Sue is not set, so whether a canon character can be a sue depends on how you personally interpret them.
Either definition fits (fan fic only versus character archetype) - and since the PPC only targets Fanfic OC's, whether canon and historical sues exist comes down to semantics.
If you prefer, we can rename Canon Sues and Historical sues as 'Canon characters that exhibit traits that commonly occur with Mary Sue characters' but that seems unnecessary.
I agree, that would be unnecessary, as I see nothing wrong with the terms as they are. However, as long as we continue to use the terms Canon and Historical Sues, I don't believe that we can say that all Sues are Bad.
According to the wiki and, by extension, the organization at large, Canon and Historical Sues are Sues. My point is that saying, "for purposes of broad generalizations about Sues (like "all Sues are Bad"), they don't count," is contradictory. You can't have it both ways.
So, since we acknowledge the fact that Canon and Historical Sues exist, then we should also be willing to acknowledge the fact that not all Sues are Bad.
That will require one of two things happening:
1) In the official PPC terminology, Canon and Historical sues will be recategorized so that they are not a sub-category of Mary Sue.
2) Department of Mary Sues is renamed.
Just because "Sues are bad" doesn't mean automatically "All Sues must be killed". Sometimes they're fairly benign, staying in their own canons and affecting only their home worlds, and don't need to be dealt with. Would their worlds be better if they weren't Sues? Yes. But killing them would be a bad thing because they've inserted themselves into the canon to the degree that they're partly supporting it. It's sub-optimal, but it's an equilibrium that doesn't get worse.
Whether you include canon and historical "Sues" in the definition or not, the Department of Mary-Sues still deals with Mary-Sues.
Also, Barid isn't proposing re-naming anything, if you'll notice. His argument is actually that the names are fine the way they are, because sometimes it's okay to be a Mary-Sue.
(My position, on the other hand, is that we ought not to call them Canon Sues and Historical Sues, because in my opinion Sues are something that can only occur in fanfiction. But since I can't think of a more convenient name for canon characters that share traits in common with Mary-Sues, it'll have to stay the way it is. But, like Barid is saying, that doesn't mean they're bad in the way that fanfic Sues are.)
~Neshomeh
I also restrict Sue to a certain type of fanfic character, and have never much liked the Canon Sue and Historical Sue terms, but like everyone else, I don't have a good easy replacement term. Without something easy and catchy to replace it with, the terms are stuck.
I've never been comfortable with the terms "Canon Sue" or "Historical Sue", because for me, a "Sue" is an entirely-fanfiction dependent phenomenon.
Personally, I describe "less-realistic" published canon characters as such (as "poorly-characterised" or so on) rather than as "Sues".
But it reverts to a fundamental problem of terminology: some of us consider "Sue" to be a catch-all term for poor characterisation, some of us consider it to be a fanfic-exclusive definition.
I agree with Neshomeh in that I think Sues are a fanfic-only phenomenon... but that means we need a better term for so-called "Canon Sues" or "Historical Sues".
Elcalion, ruminatory
Mostly because the writing itself doesn't change, only the fact that one of them is 'official' and one isn't. So the terminology for a character with one or all of the same traits in an official work being exempt from the terminology used in fan fiction writing doesn't seem appropriate.
The only way it would work, in my opinion, is if a Mary Sue was revised to only include a fan fiction OC's tendency to warp official canons, and not include the large range of traits that Mary Sues currently occupy.
I would agree with that. The primary thing I think of when I use the term Mary Sue is canon warping. That goes for a fully manifested Sue or the Sue-Wraith that warps the canon characters without being visible.
The poor quality of plot, spelling, grammar, etc. does tend to go along with that, but not always, and I dislike extreme canon warping in all its forms (badly written or well written). Which is almost contradictory, because I will read and enjoy good AU's, of course good ones make a change and then keep characters in character while dealing with the circumstances of the change, so I guess that even applies to AU's.
The Sue/Sue-wraith can only be a character that warps canon, all other traits are just common symptoms, is just my view. It does preclude the existence of Sues in canon except in rare cases of late cast additions to long running series, because they can't warp canon if they are canon. There are a lot of different definitions.
However, I think that there is also one more basic trait to qualify for Suedom: The desire of an author to gratify himself at the expense of his work or another's. If one writes a story just so he or she can hook up with a hot person just because he/she is hot, get the love interest out of the way by killing or convering his or her love interest, or administer the Worf Effect to the strongest characters in the setting using powers pulled out from his ass, then that character is a Sue.
That said, I like Superman, and while I've only read two of the Drizzt books (Exile and Siege of Darkness, neither of which I bought), I don't really think badly of Drizzt either (though some of the things he writes in his journal are Narm).
See St. Dymphna's Academy, where many of the Mary Sue characters are actually not quite Mary Sues--because they don't force the plot to revolve around them, and can't, because there are other people behind the other characters! Despite having Suvian traits like immortality, magical ability, or extreme genius, many of them have become realistic characters. It's really a fascinating experiment in Suvian psychology.
I believe drawing attention to all of that was the point of the article, actually. In my opinion, it's satire at its finest. {= )
But rest easy--we're not moving in that direction as much as you may think. If you look at the bulk of recently-released missions, I think you'll find they're all nicely low-tech and amusing to some degree, and no emergencies. {= )
~Neshomeh