The Mary Sue

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I think what you all are missing is that the sole reason these articles are written is to shadowbox against people who don't like this new character who obviously is the greatest damn thing due to having been designed in a laboratory for the most optimized pandering of whatever demographic the author of these articles is.
 
iafiv said:
Well the Bond character was created in the immediate aftermath of WW2 and to this day there is some element of that era in him.Which is why the character was already somewhat toned down by the time Connery played him.The dour gloomy Britain of 1950 was no longer as dour in 1960.You could actually say that in a way the mindset and worldview of the original character was already somewhat dated by the time the movies were rolling around.Every Bond needs to reflect to an extent the era.Camp in the 70's dour in the 80's carefree in the 90's grimm in the 2000's.Honestly I'm not entirely sure where you can take the character now since grimm has been overdone camp doesn't work and the character does seem more like a relic of not Cold War Britain but Imperial Britain.Its not that he's bad but he was created to appeal to people who saw no issue with capital punishment to give just one example and his attitude does reflect that.You change that and you basically no longer have the Bond that people like.But Britain today isn't that kind of country.
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Punctuation please.
 
iafiv said:
Well the Bond character was created in the immediate aftermath of WW2 and to this day there is some element of that era in him.Which is why the character was already somewhat toned down by the time Connery played him.The dour gloomy Britain of 1950 was no longer as dour in 1960.You could actually say that in a way the mindset and worldview of the original character was already somewhat dated by the time the movies were rolling around.Every Bond needs to reflect to an extent the era.Camp in the 70's dour in the 80's carefree in the 90's grimm in the 2000's.Honestly I'm not entirely sure where you can take the character now since grimm has been overdone camp doesn't work and the character does seem more like a relic of not Cold War Britain but Imperial Britain.Its not that he's bad but he was created to appeal to people who saw no issue with capital punishment to give just one example and his attitude does reflect that.You change that and you basically no longer have the Bond that people like.But Britain today isn't that kind of country.
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Despite being a product of his era, the character himself has proved inherently timeless, and infinitely adaptable. Through the many different interpretations and subtle differences, Bond is Bond. His character is a basic archetype that works, no matter the condition of the world around him. If stories were just willing to lean into his character traits, both the positives and negatives, you could get a very memorable story out of it. The newest movie's (the one currently on hold in production) attempt to update the character only risks dating the character, ironically, due to its obvious pandering.
 
WatchingAllOfYou said:
:story: where to begin with this, l m f a o.
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Smacking this worthless cunt in the face with a baseball bat would be a nice begin.
CWCissey said:
James Bond has actual flaws (haunted by a traumatic childhood, sex and alcohol addiction, enjoys violence).
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It's fucking sad that a site that literally named itself after the Mary Sue meme literally absolutely utterly fails to understand what that even means.
 
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AnOminous said:
It's fucking sad that a site that literally named itself after the Mary Sue meme literally absolutely utterly fails to understand what that even means.
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Most novice writers, especially really young ones, will write some flavor of Mary Sue or Gary Stu when they're starting out. If we're being real here, the most memorable Mary Sues for me have been Gary Stus (Christian Humbler Reloaded, any David Gonterman protagonist, too many leads in 2000's webcomics to count, literally any character made by Chris-Chan). Maybe in a different world, there'd be a recognition of the Mary Sue as just part of a writer's growing pains. After all, the people who were always the most militant about calling out characters as Mary Sues were almost always women doing it to other women. But we don't live in that reality. Instead we live in one where just the criticism of "Mary Sue" is sexist. I think there's an argument to be made that there might be a sort of self-policing sexism in the term, but I don't think anybody on this site should be making it because that would involve reflection that goes against their narrative that this is just a man thing, and that there weren't entire fanfic sporking communities of mostly women seeking and destroying Sues.

IDK man, it's Christmas Eve, I'm at my mom's house after a long drive, everybody's tired and I'm in a thoughtful mood and I don't care about James Bond beyond that CBT scene in Casino Royale.
 
Gail Simone is a competent writer, if we go by what I've read. I certainly can't recall her writing a character as bad as I understand Rey to be.

My guess is she's trying to break out of the dying comics industry (and I can't blame her) and is shooting for a position in Lucasfilm. Jumping off the Titanic for a seat on the Maine, so to speak.
 
BScCollateral said:
Gail Simone is a competent writer, if we go by what I've read. I certainly can't recall her writing a character as bad as I understand Rey to be.

My guess is she's trying to break out of the dying comics industry (and I can't blame her) and is shooting for a position in Lucasfilm. Jumping off the Titanic for a seat on the Maine, so to speak.
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From what I've heard, a lot of her newer stuff is as painfully woke as everything else in the comics, so her writing ability seems to have diminished as of present. I mean, I know that movie was shit.
 
Water-T said:
I don't know about the books, but I've never recalled James' childhood brought up in any meaningful way. He addictions are mostly passed off as charming and part of the job - I highly doubt we'll see a Bond film where he goes to AA or Sex Addicts Anonymous. To be in his line of work, being able to at least tolerate a high level of violence is required anyway.
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Three of the Craig Bonds— Casino Royale, Skyfall, and especially Spectre— touch on his childhood. Not always well, but they do address his traumatic upbringing.
 
Emperor Julian said:
Their's a basic fallacy that hovers around twitter that if you can somehow imply the flaws of the new films were present in the origionals it somehow negates the criticism of the new films .Even if you somehow suceed the truth is all you've effectively argued was star wars was always shit and nostalgia blinded you so you can just write off the entire franchise.

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This has naturally jumped onto the Mandalorian in general and specifically Lukes appearance since they're lazy and can't think. It speaks depths that mary sue is oblivious to the phrase gary stu incidentally.
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Personally I love that even as Disney itself is moving away from the new trilogy in favor of nostalgia bait that rags like this and retards on Twitter still compulsively defend it because of muh culture war.

Doubly hilarious that they've jumped completely on the woke trend and are deepthroating a corporation their ideology tells them to hate.
 
Reposting from Articles&News:

The Top Archive of Our Own Ships Say a Lot About Fandom​

“What’s fandom into these days?” is a hard question to answer, because fandom is not a monolith and fandoms lurk in all sorts of different places. One good indicator is statistics, such as the Tumblr Year in Review, but that’s just one data set. Another we can look at is the top ships on the popular fanfic site, Archive of Our Own. Ao3 user Centeroftheselights has for years crunched ships stats on AO3 and the latest “What fanfic was the world writing in 2020? (AO3 Year In Review)” tells us a lot about what’s popular in the fic world, what’s changed from years past, and where fandom has some serious work to do in terms of inclusivity.

Centeroftheselights lists the top 100 ships (romantic and platonic) based on new fics added to AO3 in the year 2020. She also breaks down the genders of the participants and their race. The results show that fandom in 2020 was still into stuff that was overwhelmingly male and queer (no surprise there), but the race of characters being shipped is not as white as it has been too often in the past, thanks to the massive popularity of Asian dramas and K-Pop ships.

The list isn’t the ships with the most fic on AO3 overall, which tells a different, longer story, but rather the number of new works reflecting what people were most excited about this year. So, let’s look at the ships first. Here are the top 10 ships in terms of new fic added to the site in 2020.
  1. Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng, The Untamed
  2. Aziraphale/Crowley, Good Omens
  3. Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier, The Witcher
  4. Rey/Ben Solo Kylo Ren, Star Wars
  5. Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Harry Potter
  6. Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku, My Hero Academia
  7. Bakugou Katsuki/Kirishima Eijirou, My Hero Academia
  8. Castiel/Dean Winchester, Supernatural
  9. Platonic Peter Parker & Tony Stark, MCU
  10. Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung from the K-Pop band BTS
The immediately apparent thing here is the popularity of Asian media, which is a pattern that continues beyond the top ten. Live-action Chinese dramas like The Untamed, K-Pop groups, and Anime shows and films are all huge players in the AO3 fic world this year. These also provide an interesting contrast to Tumblr’s top ships. While My Hero Academia was in the Tumblr top 100 many times, it didn’t crack the top 10 there. And the primary ship from The Untamed, “Wangxian,” for Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian, is at #13 on Tumblr’s top 2020 ships while it’s #1 in new fics on AO3 (caveat: this Tumblr ranking may be due to multiple tags, alternate character names, and multiple properties leading to the stats being a bit scattered; many fans use the tags “MDZS” and Mo Dao Zu Shi for the Xianxia novel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, upon which The Untamed is based. The Untamed is also tagged as “CQL,” for the Chinese title of the live-action show. There are also several other adaptations of the work, including animated and audio dramas).

Many of the usual ship suspects from years past are also here, from Reylo and Ineffable Husbands to Drarry and Destiel. Destiel is, as far as I can tell from the stats, the biggest ship on AO3 overall, with over 90,000 fics total. The next closest in sheer total number were Sterek and Johnlock, both of which were much further down in the 2020 numbers, as 29 and 53 respectively. I guess going canon does have its perks.

But of course, there’s a rub here. This list is incredibly male-dominated. In some cases where there are canon female love interests, like in Harry Potter or The Witcher, they’re nowhere near as popular as M/M ships from the property. Yennefer of Vengerberg’s relationship with Geralt of Rivia doesn’t crack the top 10. The entire list is mostly M/M-focused. While this isn’t surprising fandom-wise, it’s frustrating to see the relative lack of femslash in 2020.

There are only three (THREE!!!) F/F ships on this top 100 list and only one is live-action (SuperCorp). And yes, fans ignored the actual lesbian interracial relationship on Supergirl again. That’s depressing, and the stats are even worse when it comes to intersectionality. When we talked about Tumblr ships, we noted that very few of them included women and none of them included women of color. And that racial and gender disparity is even more pronounced on AO3. Here’s Centeroftheselights breaking all of this down:

Of the 200 names on the list, 22 belong to women and 2 to characters of indeterminate gender, down from 23 and 3 in the last comparable list. There are 16 Characters of Colour from Western media and 88 from Asian media, as well as 7 characters of ambiguous race. In total, 54 of the pairings are from Western media, putting the rate of POC representation for Western media fandom at 14.8%, up from 12.9% on the main 2020

So, yes, the stats are increasing, but … 16 characters of color from Western media? Just 16? And almost all of them are from animated television shows such as Avatar, She-Ra, Voltron, Miraculous Ladybug, and The Owl House. There is one Black man on this list, Finn from Star Wars. There are no Black women. None of the canon F/F ships from Tumblr’s top 100 made a dent here, and even on Tumblr, no BIPOC women in live-action showed up. Trans and gender-nonconforming characters are still lacking in media representation, and while fandom often explores gender within its fics and meta, canonically trans characters are absent from the top 100. This is all worrying.

Fandom can be a wonderful place to explore and be creative, and as fans, we are practically programmed to fall for shows like Good Omens and The Untamed (both of which have M/M relationship in canon) and ships like Destiel where half of the fun and exquisite agony of shipping is extrapolating from the thing that’s not quite there enough onscreen. It’s canon but needs more, a sentiment we find echoed across many properties that do provide some kind of queer representation. This can also be true of an M/F ship like Reylo, because what we get onscreen is just a hint of what fans want to see and find in fic. So often fic and fanworks are created to show the kind of deep, complex connections we don’t get to see from media. There’s nothing wrong with the ships we choose to ship and the amazing outpouring of creative energy worldwide to support them.

But fandom’s tendency to only see or prioritize these stories when they focus on men or white characters in western media is indicative of a larger problem, not just in fandom, but with our society and culture. Fandom, for all its talk of inclusivity, is still a place where women, BIPOC people, and non-cis people can feel erased and ignored. Even in a progressive space like fandom, we frequently elevate white, male, cis narratives. This can be indicative of systemic racism and ingrained sexism and we need to do more active work to dismantle it. We also need to keep pushing for far better representation onscreen, in books, and in video games so that fans don’t need to do all the heavy lifting of creating the narratives we want.

For so long, fandom, in all its queer glory, saw itself as inherently progressive and transgressive because it queered the narrative of very straight popular culture, and that’s still true to a point. But pop culture now has changed and become far more inclusive and queer than it was even 10 years ago, and fandom has not caught up. The erasure and ignoring of women and BIPOC people in Western media is a serious issue that fandom must reckon with if it really wants to be a space for everyone.
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as fans, we are practically programmed to fall for shows like Good Omens and The Untamed (both of which have M/M relationship in canon) and ships like Destiel where half of the fun and exquisite agony of shipping is extrapolating from the thing that’s not quite there enough onscreen.
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I abhor and reject this definition of fandom. Shippers should be kept separate from fans in general. Preferably within several feet of concrete, buried deep beneath the earth.
 
Water-T said:
* y a w n*

Yet again, a bunch of tards think that having/wearing [x] means that [y character] is gay/trans/non-binary.
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I vaguely remember VH-1 doing segments in the 2000s about various fictional characters that might be gay as a joke. Ken was assumed gay which honestly I can believe. The difference is that it was all lighthearted and a joke not a serious 'analysis'.
 
iafiv said:
I vaguely remember VH-1 doing segments in the 2000s about various fictional characters that might be gay as a joke. Ken was assumed gay which honestly I can believe. The difference is that it was all lighthearted and a joke not a serious 'analysis'.
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I think I recall that, but I thought it was Zangief and not Ken. In all honesty, whenever there is a "which SF character is gay?", Zangief is at the top of the list, followed by Vega.
 
Water-T said:
* y a w n*

Yet again, a bunch of tards think that having/wearing [x] means that [y character] is gay/trans/non-binary.
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I find it extremely annoying how people will say “gender doesn’t exist, it’s a construct!” Will then turn around and look at a guy wearing pink or a girl being into sports and seeing it as evidence that individual is gay/trans/non-binary. Like some of them are stricter than fundies. Of course the ‘they must be gay/lesbian’ is less common now since it’s no longer in vogue but I swear a lot of those progressive parents over the previous three decades have actively looked to collect snowflake children... then interpret their children’s slightest quirks into a way to justify trying to make them into those snowflakes.
 
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IAmNotAlpharius said:
I swear a lot of those progressive parents over the previous three decades have actively looked to collect snowflake children... then interpret their children’s slightest quirks into a way to justify trying to make them into those snowflakes.
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There are a lot of women who do Munchausen's By Proxy to their kids. The fact that it's now socially rewarded just makes it worse and more prevalent.
 
Lucille Bluth said:
So, they wrote this...
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iafiv said:
I vaguely remember VH-1 doing segments in the 2000s about various fictional characters that might be gay as a joke. Ken was assumed gay which honestly I can believe. The difference is that it was all lighthearted and a joke not a serious 'analysis'.
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Even in places like The Mary Sue, they can’t even keep track with their own hypocrisy. They’re supposed to be strong feminists that want to support strong women that need no man, but they also have to lend their support to female action figures since they don’t have any real strong female figures in their own lives?

It’s hard to keep track over what’s considered “newsworthy” on their site.
 
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