Wearing Book

 Hey all - sorry for the lack of posts.  I am still very much on a reading binge, which tends to make me want to reserve my writing energy for writing books, rather than writing posts.  I'm hoping to get Book of Firsts (the New Adult bit of fluff I've been working on) out end of December (though potentially in January).  Then I will probably spend my time swapping between writing Tangleways and the sequel to Book of Firsts.

But on to the subject of Wearing Book, which is a trope in Chinese webnovels used almost as frequently as rebirth (it's kind of a sub-category), and the type of story I'm reading a lot of currently (mixed with some metaphysical master is a teenaged girl stories).  "Wearing Book" is a plot where a reader wakes up suddenly in a book that they've (usually) read, often as a character with the same name as their real-life name.  These characters are rarely the main character of the book - they're usually the villainess, or the cannon fodder, or the friend of the heroine, or a total side character who barely gets a named mentioned.  Quite often they're the mother of the villain, in a kind of unwritten prequel to the book.

I somewhat prefer straight rebirth to wearing book, as the protagonist is considerably more emotionally invested, but there's also a lot of fun in seeing the doomed-to-fail rival for whoever's attention suddenly declaring that her Field of Fucks is barren, and romping off to do something far more interesting than follow the main plotline.

So far I've not encountered a Wearing Book which involves any actual written books, so they're not a variety of fanfiction, but I thought it would be fun to ask: If you could be anybody other than the protagonist of a book you've read, who would you be? [One for my books, one for all the other books.]

I'd say I'd like to be Nils, but I don't think I'd be very good at being a Setari, let alone Nils, so if I was going to go Touchstone, I think I'd be a pinksuit, someone in admin, doing the virtual equivalent of pencil pushing (while writing books in my spare time, of course).  However, if I could choose which book to wear, I'd definitely be one of the gamers who got the Starfighter Invitation.

The Absence Sue

Mary Sue, as first defined in the Star Trek fandom, was an original character introduced to the Trek universe whose presence bent the plot to serve a wish-fulfilment fantasy of a fanfic's author.  Mary Sue was a self-insertion valorised to the detriment of the existing characters.

This definition has been expanded to include "any authorial self-insertion" even in original fiction, (and in the worst instances distorted to substantively cover "any female who is valorised at all, in any circumstance"), but lately I've been thinking back on the occurrence of Mary Sue as a fanfic insertion and wondering at the purpose she served.

In particular, I've been thinking about Mary Sue in relation to this web comic by Interrobang Studios.  It's a very funny comic!  In the first episode, "Mary Sue Must Die", the Enterprise suffers a Sue, and the crew takes drastic action.  But it's the second episode, and specifically this page, which has been bubbling over in the back of my mind.  This episode, "The Wrath of Sue", involves a veritable plague of Sues, which have spread from the Trek universe and gone to take over other stories.

The page features a bunch of different men characters from stories I had enjoyed over the years - represented here as "the greatest minds in the Universe" and I found myself saying: "Speaking of Sues...".

But, of course, these were men characters with their own stories, and thus the plot cannot be distorted to serve them, as it was shaped around them in the first place.  The Doctor and Sherlock there most definitely fit the "overloaded with virtues" criteria, but not the Enterprise crew.  There we have Kirk the action guy, Spock the Smartest, Sulu the Swordsman, Bones the Cynic and medical genius, Scotty the reliable, and Uhura the linguist.

Then it hit me.  The Smurfette Principle.  The stories where Mary Sue was born, and where we hear the most about her obnoxiousness, are the stories where the main characters are almost all men - and all different types of men - and perhaps one main female character (who usually doesn't get to do as much cool stuff as the guys).  A male fan of Trek has a range of male characters in which to identify, who are all cool and valorised in their own different ways.  A female character either gets to identify with the male characters, or with Uhura (who is cool and valorised but is frequently not given much to do in the plot).  The same with female Lord of the Rings fans.  There are a broad range of male characters, one of whom is likely to suit a male reader's personality.  There are no female characters in the Fellowship, and the female characters (particularly in the novels) are either brief appearances, or kept out of the main action.

We don't hear about the plague of Mary Sue inserts in Cardcaptor Sakura fanfic.  Or the Powerpuff Girls.  Sure, there might be a little, but where a story offers a range of female characters, who are not sidelined from the action, a female fan is in the situation which the male fan enjoys in Star Trek or Lord of the Rings.  A range of characters of the gender she identifies with, actively participating in the story as a main player.

And so I ask myself: Is Mary Sue - obnoxious and world-distorting as she can be - simply making up for a lack in the world she has entered?  When we see Mary Sue, should we be deriding the fanfic writer?  Or questioning the gender breakdown of the original universe?

Is Mary Sue in fact Absence Sue, working hard to make up for the 50% of the population missing out on the fun?