Mary Sue and Amy Chua

[pyraxis]

ksol1460^Jay's response to my Marai post and the article he linked about the controversy over Mary Sue really got me thinking. Why am I even working against the Mary Sue stereotype? I remember in the 80's when strong female heroines were all the rage. I'm too young to remember Night of the Hunter but I grew up with Alanna the Lioness and J. H. Brennan's Shiva and Lisa from The Girl Who Owned a City.

I think what I was reaching for in my telling of Marai's story is the same thing I'm usually reaching for - psychological realism in high fantasy. I want the complexity of character you find in a good murder mystery, combined with a fantasy setting. Here, by focusing on the stereotypes and trying to answer possible critics before they open their mouths, I'm actually prejudicing readers to uphold the stereotypes themselves and to think in black and white.

Marai doesn't have a lot of the traits of a classic Mary Sue. She's in her thirties, not a teenager. She's not a self-insert - shashigai and I take turns writing for her, but she's part of nobody's multiple system. But she has rsakk eyes and a red cast to her hair, and she was classically beautiful when she was younger, so in a pre-emptive attack against potential critics, instead of changing her surface level traits, I slashed at some of her more complex values. Strong on the surface but actually bad, deeply flawed. It was... biased journalism.

I never realized that "Mary Sue" is often just a way of putting people down, not to point out a flaw in their writing, but to tear down an author who has dared make public a wish-fulfilment fantasy. I won't be perpetuating that stereotype again. I know that amateur writing is cutthroat, but it really looks like the Mary Sue stereotype is intimately entwined with the nature of highly social people, especially women, to attack by tearing at each other's confidence.

The further I got through the article, though, the more disturbing it got, on a level that was hard to identify. Bringing together rant posts from LJ and various other fanfiction sites, it hold up examples of young writers who gave up and stopped producing stories, and then blames the Mary Sue bullying. For example:

Before anyone says: "Oh, they/you should have just sucked it up and grown a thicker skin! Learn to to accept criticism!

Think.

You are blaming the victims of bullying for their behavior.

That is Not. Okay. Ever.

Actually, I believe that it is.

One, rather than launch some self-righteous campaign to abolish the term, I have to be ready to be called a Suethor and not compromise my writing by pre-empting it. Two, if it happens, I need to ask Pk whether they're correcting a mistake in my writing or just being manipulative. Three, I have to keep writing about what I care about.

That was when I stumbled on this article: Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior by Amy Chua. This, not Mary Sue, is the real face of perfection. What it looks like and how you create it. It caused a huge controversy when Amy Chua published it earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.

It's scary. I don't believe in trigger warnings, but for children who were raised in a certain way, it can be disturbing. I'm having more trouble writing about this part.

I can say it is something about differences in society. It is the opposite to the things that were disturbing about the Mary Sue article. This woman has been condemned for her parenting techniques, but look at the mentality she uses to justify them:

Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

Amongst all the praise for rote learning, which I know trains a child out of creativity - my main competition in the first two years of high school was a Chinese girl who was likely raised using techniques similar to the ones Ms. Chua describes. I was constantly frustrated by scoring one percentage point less than her, and she was constantly jealous of my creativity - I find this. The presumption of strength.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Ms. Chua forces her seven-year-old daughter through a repression which brings up all the wrong reactions in me, but afterwards she celebrates the victory with her. There is something in that which calls out to me in a way these coddling words about bullying never will.

Comments

[baaing-tree.livejournal.com]

I was not raised in a household like you describe (thank god), but I feel I've gone from that mindset described above to the more fluffy, coddling mindset. Until I met Mac, I worked my ass off, and agonized over succeeding; I was that overachieving nutball who literally fucking cried about being twelfth in the class of over four-hundred and fifty, because goddammit I WASN'T IN THE TOP TEN WHICH MEANT I FAILED EVERYTHING AND WAS WORTH NOTHING.

The thing was, I never succeeded. If I succeeded, I just raised the bar higher until it was impossible to reach. Because otherwise I was lazy.

Then I went to college and met people who were even more psychotic than I was, and I suddenly realized, "Holy shit guys, this isn't a game I want to win!"

I'm less successful nowadays. But I'm a hell of a lot happier.

--Rogan

[pyraxis]

I used to cry over it too. One time they pulled me out of class and took me to the counsellor because it's wrong to cry over getting 8/10 on a quiz, but nothing ever came of it.

For me I don't get happier when I stop caring about succeeding, just when I stop caring about the things other people want me to be good at.

[baaing-tree.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think I worded that badly--I stopped measuring success in the same way. So I stopped trying to succeed in ways that brought me only misery.

...so, what you said.

--Rogan