season 2 of clone high might have killed joanfk and spat on its corpse but i still love this ship with all of my heart, even if the show does not LOL

Z, T, E, N, or B for your fic ask thing!

Hello and welcome back my grey spherical friend! How are you this fine rotation around the planet? Let’s see what questions you have for me this lovely February evening!

B:  What was the first fandom you read fic in?  Which was the first you wrote fic for?

Oh lordy... Uhm... I think the first fandom I ever read fan fiction for was... hmmm... Fushigi Yuugi maybe? Or Sailor Moon? Maybe Voltron? Please note that this was old school 80′s Voltron where Pidge was just a precocious young boy with a serious adenoid issue and no one had last names and also Sven. 

Lordy I loved that stupid joke episode in the Netflix run for Voltron. Also I stopped watching after, like, the second season so I’d like to leave my New Voltron experience with wild cackling as Lily rolls her eyes to the ceiling and begs the Force for patience. 

The first fandom I ever wrote fan fiction for was probably Fushigi Yuugi for me and my friends in high school. Friends gave me some original manga from Japan and some Chinese versions from Taiwan and of course I had to write about our further adventures with Tatsuki and Chichiri because that’s how all baby writers start, no da. ;D I can’t remember much else except flowy clothing in the fan art I drew. 

I didn’t really show up to the Star Wars fandom until 2016, late for the Clone Wars with Space Starbucks and an abiding need to make Obi-Wan’s life worse before I made it much better. 

E: What character do I identify with most was answered here. 

N: Any fic ideas brewing that you’d care to share?

Uhmm.... Ah.... There’s... Captain Shiny... but I’m kind of nervous... because it’s niche, even for me, and I feel like there’s only so far my audience will go with my Lady Obi-Wan nonsense. But anyway, Rex has to pretend to be a Jedi General and someone else has to pretend to be Rex but Anakin is sick with Felucian Pox, and also Way Too Tall to Be A Clone and Ahsoka is back on Coruscant studying for An Important Space Wizard Test That I Made Up For Reasons so that just leaves General Kenobi who is Not Sure This is a Good Idea Cody But Lives Are At Stake So I’ll Do It But I Won’t Like It. 

Rex Does Not Get Paid Enough For This Shit But He Gets To Wield A Lightsaber So That’s Cool At Least.

Fives, Echo and the rest of Torrent Company are living their best fanboy lives and shipping like it’s going out of style.

T: Any fanfic tropes you can’t stand?

My mama taught me that if I can’t say anything nice I’m not to say anything at all. But I’m not really a fan of “The Jedi are Evil and Deserved What They Got”. That’s gonna get a hard “No, thank you. I’ll see myself out.” 

Z: Is there a story you’ve written that doesn’t seem to get much love?

I feel like it would be disingenuous of me to complain about one fic or another of mine not getting as many comments as I would like considering the amazing and wonderful feedback I have received from so many people over the years. Not everything I write will be Tano and Kenobi or After the End and I’m okay with that. Honestly, I don’t know if I could handle that level of feedback given how anxious I get about Tano and Kenobi comments between seasons. Also how bizarre is it that After the End is my second most popular fic? I am continuously puzzled by my redheaded step child of a fic that’s just out there living its best fic life and giving Vaderkin something to do in between yelling at me for not working on his favorite fics. 

At the end of the day, I’m just happy to know someone has read what I wrote and it made their day a little brighter. If I can help someone escape our Modern Hellscape 2020 for just a little bit I will have done my job as a writer. 

Anyway, thanks for stopping by my sunnies-wearing friend! Enjoy the rest of your February!

A Defense of Mary Sue OCs

This is a direct response to the post I just reblogged about the creator of a Mary Sue test denouncing the test. I was going to post this as a reblog, but then it got hideously long on me so I decided to post it separately. Here is the link to the Mary Sue Litmus test in question if you’d like to look at it (prepare to be horrified: it’s sickening).

Firstly, I did not know this test existed until I saw it tonight, however I did see the kind of damage this kind of thinking did to the fanfiction community on fanfiction.net in real time.

For some background, I discovered online fanfic through FFN and Wattpad around July 2013 (I know this because one of the first fics I remember reading was the fic “No Hiding, No Safe Covers” which was published then). I was active on FFN in some form basically from then until I made my AO3 account in July 2018. My FFN account still exists, though I haven’t done anything there since December 2019 according to the last thing in my Favorite Stories.

I was in the Star Wars fandom during my FFN heyday (this should actually not be surprising: I have never loved anything else the way I loved Star Wars). This was when the Clone Wars was airing so the fandom was massive, there were so many new fics everyday. There was always something new to read.

Only it wasn’t all good. We had a lot of people who would go around leaving hate comments (we called these messages flames). I remember there was this one person who started deleting the hate comments on their work. When the flamers figured out about this they dog-piled on this person screaming about how they were deleting comments to make it seem like people liked their work more than they actually did. I’m pretty sure this person eventually left the site.

But what does this have to do with Mary Sues, Emjen? Let me tell you. As I recall, this person was writing Self Insert fanfic. In fact, most if not all of the people who ran afoul of the flamers were. At the time FFN (or at the the Star Wars fandom) had a huge anti-Mary Sue culture. People hated Self Insert fanfic because all the characters were Mary Sues.

What they missed was the fact that most of the people writing these fanfic were, you guessed it, middle school kids. These kids had just discovered fanfic and they were just learning to write. They loved the Clone Wars and they just wanted to be part of it. They made characters who were like themselves only better; the sort of people they wished they were. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with getting yourself through the crap that is middle school by imaging that you’re amazing and powerful and and get to save the day. There’s nothing wrong with exploring how to write with characters people might not be interested in reading. Kids shouldn’t be attacked for that.

Also, I firmly believe that the “cringey” Self Insert OC phase is one all fanfic writers go through. I know I did. Hell, my username is the name of one of my Self Inserts. I’ve just sort of detached it from the character and began to use it for myself over the years because I like the sound of it, but that doesn’t change where it came from. The difference is that I didn’t start posting fanfic on the internet until I was sixteen and by that point I was well past that stage and into more “respectable” types of fanfic. My Self Insert stuff--like the series my friend and I wrote when I was in middle school featuring my older Self Insert Reba-Kah who was one of Anakin Skywalker’s best friends (**insert ironic aroace chortling here**)--will forever remain buried in the notebooks we wrote them in. So will the detailed character guides I wrote with some canon characters and all my OCs (I had OCs for basically everyone I knew including detailed backstories for each one). Maybe it was cringey, maybe it was poorly written, maybe the characters were too perfect, but that stuff contained every ounce of my middle school aged passion, and there was nothing wrong with it. Nothing about it deserved hate, and the same holds true for every other kid who has ever written fanfic.

So back to the anti-Mary Sue sentiment on FFN. By the time I started posting on FFN, I wasn’t writing Self Inserts anymore. At one point, I did write a fic about my friend’s (the one from above’s) OC, but that was only posted on my Wattpad. Tbh I can’t recall if I had my FFN account at that time, but either way no Self Inserts were posted on my FFN. I learned that no one liked OCs; that at best you wouldn’t get reads for fics containing them, at worst you would get hate comments about how they were Mary Sues. I actually had a thicker skin in high school than I do now (how did that happen?), but I still stopped writing OCs. I went from a girl who had literally hundreds of OCs (ask me nicely and I might screenshot the character lists from my Warrior Cats phase for you: its impressive), to a girl who wrote canon characters and canon characters only.

It took me a long time to start writing OCs again. Eventually, when I was college I started to feel like the hatred of OCs was stupid. Why did I have to avoid OCs just because everyone hated them and thought they were Mary Sues? I wrote original fiction as well as fanfic! Didn’t that mean that I knew how to write an OC without making them a Mary Sue? I decided I was sick of it so I wrote a fic flying in the face of all of it. That fic is about the Jedi Order during the Clone Wars, and its easily one of the artsiest things I’ve ever written. It’s structured as a collection of short scenes set from the of AoTC until RoTS. Each scene is in a different character’s POV and at least mentions the character who will be in POV character in the next one. The characters were drawn from canon, the old EU and my old OCs. Reba-Kah makes an appearance, and so does Emjen Enla (actually I think this might be the only time I ever actually wrote Emjen, but that’s another story entirely). I’m not going to link it because I wrote it a long time ago and I’m a much better writer now, but while writing this I looked back at it I noticed that I’d included an author’s note that talks a lot about the same things I’m discussing here, so obviously that was on my mind.

No one read that fic, but at least I didn’t get any hate on it. Still, it’s now 2020 and I’m writing the Fightingverse, which is a series where half the major characters are OCs. I’m pleasantly surprised with the responses that it’s getting, actually. I didn’t think anyone would read the first Baas POV fic (I hesitate to say Baas’s fic because that’s something else entirely), but people did and it has a fair number of Kudos so it seems people like it. Maybe things are getting better now (probably not, but I’m a pessimist, what do I know?).

On a more global scale, in my experience only two types of characters get nailed with the “Gross, a Mary Sue” bullshit. They are:

1. Characters who are women who inhabit roles that are considered men’s roles or who are badass and powerful in ways people think only men should be. (Rey from the Star Wars Sequels is an example of this.)

2. Self Insert OCs written by kids (usually girls, actually) who are just having fun imagining that they are part of the story and are cool and powerful and can save the day.

If you look at those two categories it becomes obvious that there is a lot more to unpack here than just whether someone who writes a “Mary Sue” is a terrible writer and deserves to be shamed off the internet. Actually, it becomes obvious that isn’t the problem at all (//sarcasm Oh, it looks like Mary Sue hate was just misogyny all along! Who would have thought? I’m so shocked!). It becomes obvious that Mary Sue is just a charge people level on characters they personally dislike even if the character is well characterized. (And yes I know a Gary Stu is a thing, but that term was never used with as much hate as Mary Sue is.)

To further hammer this home, out of curiosity I tried to fill the Mary Sue Litmus test linked above out on myself. I got a 20, which in fanfic terms means there’s a low-to-moderate chance I’m a Mary Sue (//sarcasm “but don’t worry this is generally a safe range to be in”). 😬The list contains traits possessed by many well-loved fictional characters including Katara, Toph and Aang from Avatar the Last Airbender. It shits on age-old tropes like the chosen one narrative. Your character becomes more of a Mary Sue if the other characters mourn them when they die (wtf?). If you only check a couple things your character is either a “Hood Ornament” (meaning you’re such a sucky writer you can’t even manage an active character so we’re going to hate you) or an “anti-Sue” (meaning you tried so hard not to write a Mary Sue you did the exact opposite and we’re still going to hate you). Above all you can tell that the list is based on one person’s opinion, and their arrogance oozes through every word of the stupid thing. It’s awful. I hate it. It’s a good thing the creator realized it was messed up, even if it’s too late and the damage is already done.

Basically where I’m going with this is that there’s nothing productive about Mary Sue hate. It always either demonstrates your prejudices or attacks younger writers (often both). People need the space to learn, and they can’t do that if they get attacked for writing things that they enjoy. Women chosen ones and women with badass powers are also things that should exist; they should not be held to standards that men in the same roles would not be. The Mary Sue label is not helpful and just gives people a convenient buzzword to use to spew hate.

tl;dr: The concept of Mary Sues in inherently flawed and based in attacks on young writers at best and outright misogyny at worst.

(Note: I deliberately did not touch on the genres of x OC and x Reader fanfic that is written by adults because I have very little experience with them. However, at casual glance, it appears the point is writing a character who is generic enough to allow the reader to project themself into the story, which changes the rules slightly as you could argue the writer is deliberately trying to write a character who would be considered a Mary Sue.)