Thoughts on Torchwood, its tie-ins, and a girl called Mary S & her brother Gary

[neadods]

Okay, I've been offline for two hours watching the latest Torchwoods. How many smutty fanfics have come out of "We've been under the same Doctor"? Because honestly - there's a whole ficathon in one line.

While I continue to be thrilled to pieces at the quantum leap in quality between S1 and S2 Torchwood (and be amused that they are now writing for the kiddie cut, because last season, Owen wouldn't have said "kneecaps" and we all know it), I do have to take a moment and point out that this was pretty obviously Tie In Rewrite Week. I'm pretty sure Reset takes an entire scene verbatim from Slow Decay. And Border Princes and Adam share the same plot foundation (along with a certain obvious-to-Buffy-fans Buffy episode).

And now I want to talk about Mary Sues in print and onscreen.

I don't care how well Border Princes was written. A fair number of people appreciate the fact that it's a fairly well written tie in. HOWEVER, no matter how good the writing, the plot was a damn Mary Sue (well, in this case Gary Stu) and while it's impressive that Abnett managed to successfully pitch what looks and reads exactly like Internet fanfiction the fact remains that the story is, essentially exactly like Internet fanfiction.

There are Mary Sue Litmus tests and Gary Stu bingo cards all over the Internet. But you want to know the real rule of thumb on the difference between an original character and a Mary/Gary? Original characters blend into the whole of the narrative. Mary/Garys exert a psychic gravity force that pull all the other characters out of their positions to orbit around the new kid. In Border Princes, James wasn't just part of the team. He was called the "heart of the team" (replacing Gwen), he was shtupping Gwen (replacing Owen), he could obtain the unobtainable (replacing Ianto), and he was not only the witty one (replacing Jack) he was SO witty that he changed the speech patterns of all the rest of the cast members to mimic his sayings... even when said witticisms required (as they did in one case) a paragraph of leaden exposition to make sense.

Frankly, what I found the most entertaining about Border Princes was watching all the newbie fans - the ones most likely to be cranking out Suefic of their own - reading the book and going "Who's James? Why is he making everybody act weird? I want to read about my favorite characters, not this guy!"

And at the very end of the book - skip this one paragraph if you don't want a complete spoiler; this is your only warning - we get the ultimate Mary/Gary ending. Even though the whole team now *knows* he's an imposter, they cling to their memories and feelings for him as he nobly and tragically snuffs it for his Greater Destiny. James comes in as a Gary and he goes out the same way, Stu-ful to the end while everyone sheds tears for him.

Someone hand me a barf bag. Part for the plot, and part for my wallet, because I paid (plus conversion fees and airmail shipping) for something I can download for free any hour of the day.

Y'know what I love about Superstar (the Buffy episode) and Adam? They both take the standard Mary/Gary plotline and make a plot point of the characters pointing out the parasitic nature of the Mary/Gary character. In Superstar, loser character Jonathan uses magic to rewrite reality become the ultimate celebrity. In Adam, Adam uses... whatever (my admiration for the feeling of the story does not overcome a couple of huge plot holes, such as what this being is and how it works) to rewrite memories to become a major member of the gang. Neither one seems to mean harm, and both of them do manage to do some good (from their point of view) for some of the overlooked or shyer characters in the cast.

But both shows have a scene where the people who shake off the gravity pull of the Mary/Gary and then turn around and rip Mary/Gary a new one for having pulled them out of their original paths. "You made us meatpuppets," Buffy tells Jonathan. Jack doesn't speechify, including any little speeches about how if you feel human you are human and that's good enough. There is a threat to his team. He uses lethal force to eliminate it. Even while Tosh cries for Adam, we the audience know that she is crying as much for herself as for him.

There are ways to make the Mary Sue plotline work beautifully - didn't you get chills every time Adam touched someone, even before he went all evil? - but none of them involve taking the Sue stereotype at face value. Or more accurately, they lie in ripping off the mask of adorability to show the real face and it's lack of value.

That said, back to the squee. Damn, Gareth and Burn knocked it out of the park this week!

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Not to mention (veering off on the Buffy tangent) that Jonathan was my absolute favorite secondary character, and Superstar was an important part of his character arc. Someone else might have cast that spell for the sake of money or power. Jonathan... wanted people to like him; he wanted to help people, and just chose a spectacularly bad method of doing so. Jonathan was, ultimately, one of the standard tragic archetypes: the basically decent person who gets caught up in something that gets out of hand and becomes too deep for them to survive. And I still mourn the way he died.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Yes, I wanted Jonathan to have a much better exit. *sigh*

That's hilarious--

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

Not that you spent good money on bad fanfic, I mean, but that a full-on, Marisa Picard-level Stu (written by a male author, btw) got through Editorial and was published.

The character-warping effect is harder to see in original fic, but it's there, too - in Slactivist's hosted discussions/destructions of the Left Behind series, it's now a given that Rayford Steele and "Buck" Williams are both Gary Stus; and I was getting extremely frustrated with a police thriller that *should* have been right up my alley, sort of Alistair-Maclean international adventure with a female cop in the lead, only EVERYONE kept on telling us how PERFECT she was at her job, but we just keep seeing her screw up, and every character *and* the author keeps on talking about her terrible, tragic (improbable) backstory, and all her victories seem to come due to the hard work of her associates and/or sheer bloody luck, and she doesn't have any character except being impossibly beautiful and cool and excellent and tragic, and when I reread it I was like Oh, hey, I know where I've seen this before and why it reeks so! I was just thrown off by the profic wrapper!

And of course that's all Clive Cussler writes, and he's hardly the only bestselling original Manly Man's adventure ficcer I know of who is guilty of Stuage-dumping...

Re: That's hilarious--

[neadods.livejournal.com]

she doesn't have any character except being impossibly beautiful and cool and excellent and tragic

My opinion of half a dozen literary heroines in a nutshell, mostly Anita Blake and Phryne Fisher. I have to seriously wrestle down the urge to shove the Mary Sue Litmus Test into their author's hands during book signings.

And I've been reading Slactivist's deconstruction of Left Behind - he goes a lot into the Gary Stu-ism.

Oh dear!

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

[reading wiki page on Phryne]

Yipes!

I...knew about Anita Blake, but somehow I'd missed Miss Phryne, strangely enough, when buying my history-mysteries. I'm not sure whether to thank you for the forewarning, or demand compensation for the Bleepka needed to scrub this knowledge out of my brain!

{Egads. Just - egads!]

Re: Oh dear!

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I reviewed two of the Phryne books for RtE. The first one wasn't so bad, which is why I asked for the second one. But between Phryne committing date rape ("We've had dinner. Now we have sex." "Is this a relationship?" "...") and everyone going on and On and ON about how she was just like a goddess only made me more and more ready to barf.

One of the Dear Author letters is aimed at the author, the one that sardonically thanks her for an interview, because she point-blank admits that she was deliberately building a Sue.

Re: That's hilarious--

[xwingace]

I quite *like* Clive Cussler's books, but oh, yes, Dirk Pitt is one of the Stuiest Stus that ever Stued.

As for the episode; much as I can appreciate the way this was all handled, I still didn't like it. I liked Superstar, but Adam just didn't work for me.

XWA

I think the difference between "Indiana Jones on the High Seas"

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

and "Flint's Law" that made the latter so extremely hives-inducing is that everyone just stands around worshipping Grace, the heroine - even her enemies - for pages and pages and pages, in dialogue and via editorial narrative, going on and on about how unearthly-beautiful she is (the scars from her tragic past only enhance her beauty!) and how impossibly capable she is (thus she must be brought down and put in her place even by her own jealous allies) and how unspeakably tragic her improbably-tragic and mysterious past was, to the point where you think "Sheesh, the only reason for writing this plot was so that Paul Eddy could put up a shrine to his 'Sue!" because it certainly doesn't stand on its freakin' own!

Where with the Dirk Pitt stories the adventure comes first, and it's more that he's done the juvenile let's-pretend/gamer thing of wanting their favorite character to have EVERY POSSIBLE cool/useful attribute a human can have, no matter how OTT it ends up being (Square-Jawed Hero whips out his handy-dandy ability to hang-glide just when it's crucial to Save The Day, Our Heroes just happening to have a hang-glider at the crucial moment!) and while there's a *little* OMG Dirk Pitt is such a GOD! fannish squee committed by the other charas in the couple I read, it doesn't come across as being the sole excuse for the story...

addendum--

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

What the bullet points of the litmus tests are is DSM-style codification of the typical (archetypal?) symptoms of a Sue/Stu exerting that black-hole pull on the Narrative Reality around them - like any disorder, one or two symptoms is not enough to prove that you've got it and not something else or are perfectly normally-quirky, but if you have a large cluster of them, then it gets more and more unavoidable that this is what's going on here.

Re: addendum--

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

"Border Princes" is (so far) the only TW book I read, because it's the only one available from my library, and I'm not about to spend the bucks to buy the books. I have to say I pretty much agree with your comparison between "Adam" and "Border Princess." I've certainly read plenty of fanfic that was better than both and there have been plenty of OCs who managed NOT to become the Mary/Gary Sue black hole of plots.

It's disappointing, both could have been so much better.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

It's a pity that you don't have access to the other two: Slow Decay was pretty good, although it would now read more like an expanded version of Reset. And Another Life was quite exciting.

I actually liked Adam, mostly because it didn't make the case that Adam was inherently anything other than parasitic.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Mostly agree with you, except that to me Adam came across not as well-intentioned but as simply a straight-down-the-line vicious, sadistic bastard - I thought he seemed to really enjoy mind-raping Ianto and then holding Jack's perfect childhood memory hostage.

But I also thought that Adam's effects on other characters were cliches of bad or lazy fanfic - Tosh is an intellectual young woman, so she's obviously hideously repressed and needs to show more skin and turn into a person whose sole interest is sex with the hot guy; Owen needs to be forced to show his soft centre and pour his heart out; Jack needs to have a secret super-tragic backstory to angst over; Ianto's dull so let's make him a psychotic serial killer; I don't like Rhys and want to ship Gwen with someone else so I'll just completely ignore his existence.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Adam came across not as well-intentioned but as simply a straight-down-the-line vicious, sadistic bastard

I was cutting him a small amount of slack t the beginning on the basis that he was just doing what he did to survive, but that didn't last very long.