According to Wikipedia, the first time a Mary Sue character was called “Mary Sue”, it was a deliberate parody of the new characters that kept showing up in fan submissions of Star Trek fiction (fanfic). You know, the youngest person ever to graduate from the academy, the one who upstages all of the established canonical characters, the one who *OBVIOUSLY* is the (adolescent?) author self-inserting into the story? Yeah. Her.
Anyway, this essay contains minor spoilers for Transmetropolitan and middlin’ spoilers for Legend of the Guardians. (Bottom line: They’re both very good… The latter for your inner child and the former for your inner Mencken.)
Now, Mary Sues aren’t in themselves a *BAD* thing. Heck, I read The Belgariad twenty times between the ages of 11-13 and wrote myself into the story as I read it the second through twentieth time (Hettar was the character I was most likely to upstage). The problem is that this is a childish thing that one must put away when one matures to adulthood.
When one is an adult, one has the responsibility to create one’s own universe in which to insert oneself.
Just follow any given “Hero’s Journey”. It’s a great story, ain’t it? You hear it and, even if you’re cynical about it, you grow younger and imagine yourself as the protagonist. Star Wars is the obvious example (as I get older I wonder if I shouldn’t change that to Harry Potter), but there are dozens out there: Ender’s Game. Wrinkle In Time (aside: in the drifting off to sleep discussions after the lights are out, it is hugely fun to call Charles Wallace an early model for Wesley Crusher… try it on your loved one(s)!). Rocky. Lord of the Rings. We’re all feeling embiggened already just remembering the first time we heard these stories.
In any case, I had the pleasure of enjoying two different Hero’s Journeys this last week.
Legend of the Guardians and Transmetropolitan.
Legend of the Guardians is a movie that you have seen before. It’s pretty much a good thing because we’re dealing with owls and I’m not very good at owl differentiation. Luckily, that doesn’t much come into play. You will say “Oh, that’s the rival. Oh, that’s the villian. Oh, that’s the sidekick. Oh, that’s the gruff mentor. Oh, that’s the …” throughout the movie. It steals from the best and isn’t particularly embarassed by it. For example, in one scene, we said “you’ve turned your targeting computer off” and had a good laugh until we realized that the next 30 seconds were, of course, awesome. In a nutshell: This movie is not only formulaic but derivitive. Not only derivitive but downright calculated. Just as Shakespeare was more Aristotelian than any of Aristotle’s contemporaries, those who stand on the shoulders of Joseph Campbell are more Campbellian than any who preceeded him. Lucky us! Watch it with the kids. Everyone will have a blast.
Which brings us to Transmetropolitan. Don’t let the kids read Transmetropolitan. Or, well, let them. They’re your kids, after all. I’m not going to tell you how to raise your kids. You may not want to leave it out lying around if the kids aren’t old enough to appreciate the difference between judicious uses of slang terms for reproductive organs and gratuitous uses of the same words. Because there are a lot of those terms strewn about willy-nilly. With that disclaimer out of the way (hey, maybe you don’t have kids or they’re out of the house!), this is one heck of an awesome Marty Stu story. It’s about a writer who uses the power of wordsmithing to help make the world a better place, kinda. At the very least, he changes it while overcoming great opposition. No ox is too sacred to gore. Or would it be cows? Sacred cows are gored too. There’s a lot of goring going on. With that said, it’s taking on a lot of topics very seriously and there’s a lot more satire than parody. Surprisingly conservative for being so surprisingly anti-establishment, I’d say that there’s something in every collection (of six issues) for you to laugh at and something for you to get mad at and, if you’re lucky, something for you to be offended by. (Hey, when was the last time a columnist engaged you even half that much?)
It would be too easy by half to just tell things about Spider Jerusalem (he’s a good writer!) without showing any of the stories he writes… and Warren Ellis does not fall into that trap. We are occasionally blessed with one of Spider’s columns and, in my opinion, the guy is good enough to want to read on a regular basis. (I’d say “I wish we had one for real!” but that’d be too political, in my book.) The first book, the one I linked to, is about a transhuman religious group being beaten by police… until it gets stopped by a column that Spider writes. It takes off from there to bring down a corrupt president and goes from *THERE* to bringing down an even more corrupt president. You’ll never have so much fun remembering John Edwards. (Too political? Probably. Eh, he didn’t get the nomination. See it as a punchline.)
Check them both out.
