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I can actually link you to some very non-Sueish Twilight fics, amazingly enough. They tend to be detailed explanations of some of the darker possibilities canon could lead to, though, so... do not read late at night and alone.

Eep. Remind me not to act stupid around you.

I still don't agree with 99% of what the writer of the essay was saying, but I had been thinking along these lines a bit.

I have included comments about annoying Author's Notes in both of the missions I have written. Do you think that that falls under this?

I doubt you'd need a second opinion after Neshomeh's, but I ran into a good songfic the other day, so I'm with her. (The quality was helped greatly by the fact that it was a ration of 3 lines of lyric to 5 paragraphs of fic, making it a lot less disjointed and more comparable to the practice of normal authors starting sections out with quotes, kind of like Cornelia Funke's "Inkheart" does.

However, no one's going to hold a little thing like that against you. {= )

Also, I completely agree with everything you said. I would make the argument that it's the agents saying those things, which may be perfectly reasonable, in-character sentiments from their point of view; however, there's no doubt that the agents act as avatars for our own opinions, so it really wouldn't hurt to police our language more. Even if they also say similar things about their own authors. That's different.

~Neshomeh

... Ignore my making myself look like an idiot by adding my reply to this little spin-off discussion and not the main one. Is editing possible?

Hmm. This is interesting. I agree with the people who say that Mary Sue is not a feminist icon, of course, and I also agree that the author seems a bit uninformed about the actual definition of a Mary Sue.

However.

I think there are a couple of valid points made. One of them is that I think the Suethors do have a right to know if they're being mocked, although I acknowledge that that can sometimes go badly. However, although I feel a little out of line for saying this, but I agree with those below who said some of the criticism could get too harsh, and I think the PPC is in fact guilty of that. I mean, I'm aware that there is a policy against directly insulting the author. I have also noticed that this policy gets obeyed about as often as the laws about downloading music for free get obeyed. There are a lot of comments along the lines of "How can people possibly be this stupid?!", disregarding the fact that good writing doesn't correlate directly to intelligence; emphasis on the directly. Also, I could be wrong, but it seems to me to be a pretty common gag to have one agent beg to attack or kill the Suethor. THAT, I think, is out of line, and we could maybe lay off. I'm familiar with getting pissed off, but you know, maybe reach for the chocolate first.

I don't think we're a clan of bullies or the inherent downfall of feminism or anything, and I do love the PPC, and I did enjoy the missions I'm referencing, and the last thing I want is to offend anyone, so if I did, allow me to prostrate myself apologetically at your feet with a peace offering of absolutely heavenly pizza and a sincere expression of regret. But I do think a good bit more attention could be paid to the "insult the Sue, not the Suethor" policy.

Welcome! And thank God I'm not the only Boarder who thinks since Celebrain is a cop out, since the intent is to be disturbing. Now, for the welcome gift...You usually are supposed to give imaginary gifts, but for you, I offer a list of fics bad as or worse than Celebrian! Yaay! Well, sort of...

Cho Chang's Desires
Draco's Christmas Cuppa
Land Before Time: Littlefoot x Cera
legolas by laura
Lion King Orgy Poem
Little Miss Mary
Subjugation

Couldn't illustrate this one, due to lack of free time.

http://terrofen.livejournal.com/2680.html

I thought you guys might like the Comics Curmudgeon. He does MSTs of strips like Mary Worth and Family Circus.

http://joshreads.com/

You are NOT allowed to disappear without telling me how you did that fadey thing with the letters!

*reads*
*posts reply demanding blood elf for use as partner*
*realizes that partner needs to have worked at DoI for a while, and therefore could possibly violate the timeline*
*posts reply demanding to know when this occurs*
*realizes that since permission has not yet been given, timeline does not matter*
*retracts previous reply message*
*realizes timeframe matters regardeless*
*retracts previous retraction*
*realizes that since permission has not been given, blood elf will currently be next to useless*
*retracts everything and denies it was ever written*
A REALLY LONG TIME LATER:
*finally gets around to wondering what a blood elf is/does*

Pretend I actually did all of the above, it'll save time.

Have a big stick. Try wiggling it. I stole it from a Magic!Sue, so it has to do something interesting.

These people are nuts! For crying out loud, it's just a movie with doped-up special effects and a really cliched plot!

Damn, and I thought *I* had no life...

Being a bit too curious for my own good, I'm more interested in that kinda stuff than afraid of it...

But that's just me.

If your agent sang the song in the vicinity of a trigger happy agent that barely gets enough sleep as it is because the console keeps beeping, your agent could find themselves at the business end of a gun, or other weapon.

or something like that. I've heard of this fic years ago, probably even before I heard of the PPC.

Not all fics are equally suited to turn in to missions. I think this one would be too bad to tackle; aside form the fact that it has already been tackled for sporking before.

...is exactly why rabid fans of ANYTHING scare me. But if it means there will be less idiots in the world...

(Or is that being too mean?)

Welcome, new friend! Have some chocolate, and enjoy your stay here!

is an on-going and a very interesting one. I consider myself a feminist, but the problem with feminism as a label is two-fold. First, you have the obvious extremist, 'militant', 'sex is rape' feminists or the like. However, they are a minority of feminism. The second problem is that the patriarchy as it stands obviously defends itself*, and therefore is busy assigning as many negative meanings to 'feminism' and 'empowerment' as possible, by bringing up negative examples and exaggerating them.

Trying to switch from 'feminism' to 'equalism' might be an idea, but any label that feminism takes up would probably quickly get sullied by the extremists and the mainstream anyway. Therefore one might as well stick to their guns. The reason equalism is called feminism is that the female gender is still the disadvantaged gender.

How I understand feminism (and certainly there's no one true definition) is that it's about questioning existing gender roles, problematizing, even polemizing gender, and exposing the way gender is a social construct, and how our society is upholding that construct. (If you know who Judith Butler is, there you go.) I like to think of it as poking my finger in the eye of the status quo to make it notice things about itself.

Mary Sues, on the other hand (and to bring this post back to topic, phew), as stated by myself and many other, smart people here, often work within that framework of traditional gender and uphold those constructs. For instance, they can be weak female characters who must be rescued by males, whose raison d'etre is to marry and bang male characters, etc. Female characters who 'clean up pretty' and wear dresses and play the perfect wife for male canon characters.

The Sues are essentially working *in* the framework of popular culture and media, which is itself dominated by the traditional gender roles, and which helps to uphold them. They are *not*, generally, questioning or dismantling these roles.

Besides, real, actual human females have flaws just as the males.

* The patriarchy isn't a conscious beast or anything; it is merely the male-dominated world with traditional gender roles that we live in today and which dominates the discourse. It's the reason disgusting things like offensive jokes about trans people are still socially acceptable (because they are An Other and cause discomfort by problematizing gender).

If it's avatar-related stupidity you're looking for, you could check out the avatar forum weekend web article. the site can be NSFW, somethingawful being somethingawful, but weekend web is a funny window into the minds of insane fans.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/avatar-forums.php (don't know how to link yet)

Will have to see when it is, I have a college field trip I'm not allowed to miss, but I can try to make it.

I have been part of a group of people that have been doing an IRC MST of this fic. It's extremely disturbing. It starts with ten pages of "DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY ANYTHING" and "I DON'T LIKE PEOPLE SAYING BAD THINGS ABOUT MY FIC" and then a preface and a preface to a preface. I love it because it communicates what a history the fic must already have, with people vehemently criticizing it already.

I mentioned in the essay discussion about some Mary Sues being conformist to traditional gender roles and from what I've seen, 'Jenna' fits this to a T. Her existence is at first empowered, as a travelling salesman (at the age of 14?!), but then her true happy life only begins once she finds a man she can marry and do lots of naughty business with.

PS. the wedding scene is hilarious. It reminds me of the weddings some fans have in real life. IRL it's just cute and a bit dorky, but in this fic and this context, it's disturbing. I forget but was the CAKE shaped like the frakking Tri-Force?

PPS. If you wanted to do an analysis of the sexual symbology (besides the obvious, painful sex scenes), you'd have a field day with the horses and the mounting and the everything. Well, they ARE dreams...