By Jeanne
OK. I won't say how old I was before I twigged to the fact that not everyone tells themselves stories in bed at night before falling asleep. I mean, I just naturally figured that people do, right? because otherwise what else is there to do after you go to bed except- well, fall asleep? No, don't bother telling me what you do in bed before falling asleep. I'm talking from a kid's point of view.
I've been making up stories and acting them out in my head for as long as I can remember, which takes me at least back to age five. The settei at that point was that I was one of three red-haired identical triplets (and I won't say how old I was before I realized identical triplets aren't possible either) and our mother was the Queen of the Universe. Five years later I was one of a dozen girls living in a big old house with no adults in sight and a horse for each of us. We spent more time quarrelling and carrying on sentimental rivalries than riding, but the horses were important. At thirteen I started on what turned into a multi-generational saga of two families, one a line of kings and the other a line of magician-priests, whose fates intertwined over the course of three or four hundred years, as seen by the apparently immortal young girl- me- who kept showing up one way and another every generation. By fifteen the focus had shifted to the love-hate relationships, especially the love, between the various kings and magicians involved. I had the spiritus naturaliter yaoi that Thomas Aquinas would have talked about if he'd ever heard of yaoi
Of course I always knew enough to keep these stories to myself. I figured other people told themselves *normal* stories, about dating neat guys and winning debating tournaments. For sure, I never read anything that even remotely echoed the stuff I watched each night except- in an odd way- a 19th century children's series called Elsie Dinsmore. That was a many-volumed strongly moral fundamentalist Christian work containing the most blatantly incestuous and masochistic subtexts I've ever come across. Fascinating in an icky kind of way. But what Elsie did was make it clear to me that head stories should be kept in the head. (Just as Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers demonstrates to my perfect satisfaction that jerk-off fantasies, however much fun they are for the person jerking off, do not constitute literature.) Out in the light of day head stories look embarrassingly childish and self-indulgent. Besides, they're just too personal. There's a high and unrestrained id content contained in them, as in one's more disturbing dreams, and like certain bathroom functions they're nothing a civilized person talks about in public. So I didn't talk about them.
Consequently you can imagine how I felt when I got to Japan and started reading Japanese manga. Couldn't believe it. There everyone was, having the same fantasies as me and putting them in print as if they were the most normal Cherry Ames stuff in the world. Queen of the Universe? Check out Meiteru's Mom from Galaxy Express 999. Schoolgirl affairs and cabals? Swing on by O-nii-sama e. Kings and magicians- even, as mine were, Egyptian kings and magicians? Thick as autumn leaves in Vallambrosa. Can't go near an Asuka or Bonita series without tripping over them in piles. And as for yaoi kings and magicians-- well, after I first fell into fandom I went cruising the local bookstore desperate to find something that had the same erotic energy as my Servis-sama, and discovered what looked by its cover to be the very thing. Mamahara Elli's Tower of Transience. I mean, how much more QED can you get?
It's not really amazing that shoujo manga and its sub-category, shounen ai, should contain the whole gamut of adolescent female fantasies. They're aimed at adolescent girls, after all. But what does amaze me is just how cheerfully and unrepentently upfront Japanese manga is about showing them. Our 'young adult' books would never dare be so openly, innocently, and dangerously self-indulgent. Everyone here took Psych 100 and knows what a cigar really signifies- and has a strong puritan interest in keeping it out of the text. It wasn't always thus in the west, is why you've got oodles of homoerotic subtext in Huckleberry Finn and Classic Trek, and wallows of masochism in Elsie Dinsmore. Not any more. These days the id never gets a look-in except under carefully controlled circumstances. No hot-eyed suggestions of girl/girl attachments here. No, we have positive novels about proud young lesbians putting out rainbow flags, God help us all. I'll bet even the lives of the saints, on which my generation of Catholic kids cut their s/m teeth, has been quietly suppressed. No more Rose of Lima sleeping on broken potshards or St. Lawrence being fried over a fire or Whatserface having her breasts cut off. (sigh) Much less are we allowed good self-pitying 'ohh the pooor thing' literature any more. Anderson's Little Match Girl got to die of cold in the street, Bronte's Jane Eyre got to be abused by her horrible family, you the reader got to cry your eyes out. Does anyone do that any more over here?
They do in Japan. The Japanese, let's say it now, have no shame in these matters. Ohh the poor sweeetie is a regular feature of shoujo, shounen, and even of yaoi occasionally. 'Poor boy out !alone! in the !cold! night on his !birthday! for the !fourth! year in a row so his roommate can !have sex! with his !girlfriend!'-- god, pile on the angst why don't you? You start school and people hate you for no reason and tell nasty stories about you, and your best friend stops speaking to you and you want to die. (A lot like 14 year old life, O-nii-sama e.) Poor little rich boy with no-one to love him has a birthday party alone (again) with only his teddy bear as the guest of honour. To make it more poignant, teddy bear was the casual contemptuous gift of the guy who perennially raped him, whom rich boy loves because the rapist once said 'I love you' even if he didn't mean it. I mean, it just goes on and on.
And what about adolescent power fantasies? The Japanese invented them. Take all those anime where the ordinary teenagers are *really* super-warriors or sailor senshis or witches or shape-shifters or divine priestesses, and possessed of super-powers and/or psychic ability. It's practically the default mode of anime. So much so that a series where the guys don't pilot a gundam or wield a weapon must be countable on the fingers of a mutilated right hand.
Now I'll admit I find a lot of manga setteis embarrassing, but there's no blinking the fact that they're embarrassing to me precisely because they remind me of stories I've told myself before falling asleep. The Japanese don't find it embarrassing at all. There's no sense there that a mangaka is walking around revealing areas of her psyche that she ought to keep to herself. We feel uncomfortable when an writer like Dorothy Sayers falls in love with one of her characters and starts turning him into an avatar of perfection. When Aoike Yasuko does it, she thinks she should burble about it to the world, and her fans think it's perfectly natural because after all gee, they're in love with Klaus' ur-personality too.
So what have we joyless gaijin got to oppose to the unbridled self-indulgence of the Japanese? Nothing nearly as official- or as popular- as a published manga where everyone loves the heroine/ mangaka/ reader, including the cross-dressing gay character. Oh, you the fanwriter can do something similar; you the fanwriter can do whatever you please, if you're prepared to take the consequences. Because there'll always be someone ready to lecture you on the point--to tell you at length in a webpage rant or a ML flame why having designated sex roles or showing twelve year olds screwing or making your guys cry copiously is a Bad Thing and you shouldn't do it.
But I take heart from the apparently undying figure of the Mary Sue. Slashers can rant as much as they like, people are still writing out-and-out shameless Mary Sues as if they'd never even heard of the term, let alone registered that MSs are a Bad Thing. Incidentally, it doesn't matter how you define a MS. Evidence suggests there are in fact two kinds- the idealized Self and the idealized Female- but both, bless them, still make their appearances. All-competent or all-wise, spunky ensign or serene survivor of hideous happenings, we still got 'em, and everyone in the story loves them unreservedly. And more power to them, say I.
The MS, as someone said, is the highest form of fannish devotion to a series. You like it so much you want to come play in it yourself. Most fan writers are content to do this by sneaking in under cover of one of the canon characters. Slipping on my Hakkai mask, I jump in the jeep and set out for the west with Sanzou and the guyz, pretending all along that it's Hakkai telling the story I'm writing and not me at all. Havers. *Of course* it's me and not Hakkai. Mary Suers simply have the honesty to appear as themselves. And if there's no room for a girl in that jeep, by god they make room- like the Japanese fan who writes stories where Gokuu is a teenaged girl is Guess Who, who thus gets to hang out with that kewell monk Sanzou.
People who dislike Mary Sues say that the MS makes them feel embarrassed for the author. I strongly suspect that they're embarrassed for themselves, recognizing a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God character from their own head stories. Besides, the criticism ignores the rather obvious point that the author herself isn't embarrassed. She doesn't care if aspects of her psyche are showing, so why should we? People who argue that MS writers don't know that their psyches are showing are, I believe, deluded. Everyone here has taken Psych 100 and knows what a silver-haired lavender-eyed High Priestess is. Some people still want to read about her in a story- an English story, not a Japanese manga, where you'll find a lot of her too. If they really don't suspect at all that their psychic healer is an idealized version of themselves, well, god bless the child who's got her own. Such imperviousness to surrounding pop psychology should be cherished, not admonished.
The other commonly levelled criticism is that the Mary Sue takes attention away from the series characters to focus it on the author. Yes. So? Fanfiction is a process whereby fans interact with the series and its characters to do any number of things-- recreate things they liked about the original, alter things they didn't like, and most famously, have sexual fantasies about the characters. The process of inserting the authorial pov into the story is a little more obvious in a Mary Sue than ordinary, but I'd argue that it's the same process. Instead of a judicious choice of adjectives and events to show what I think of these guys, I the author walk into the story and actually talk to them. Or screw them. Whichever. But I see little qualitative difference between me-pretending-to-be-Hakkai having sex with Gojou, and me-appearing-as-a-purple-haired-youkai-queen having sex with Gojou. In the first Gojou will react to Hakkai. In the second he'll react to the youkai queen. In both cases, you'll be seeing some aspect of Gojou that isn't in the canon but which, we may hope, recalls the canon Gojou. And no guarantee that the former is more likely to do that than the latter.
Anti-MS is the reader's problem, not the writer's. It's like any squick, including an aversion to representations of m/m. If people don't like them, they shouldn't read them. If they find themselves reading one by chance, the solution is simple: stop reading. And, obviously, it's a good idea not to rant on about how So-and-so made you read a Mary Sue when you hate Mary Sues. A writer is a writer, not a nursemaid. And I personally find it far more embarrassing to hear people being outraged that their ever so delicate sensibilities have been injured, than I do to read about silver-haired psychic healers and lavender-eyed high priestesses.