What People Don't Like Are Poorly-Done Versions Of Tropes or: In Defense of Mary Sues
Someone on my Twitter feed posted this in-depth analysis, revealing the shocking fact that Patrick Rothfuss’s bestselling series The Kingkiller Chronicles features – *gasp!* – a Mary Sue in its lead role. And if you’ve ever been enspelled by Kvothe’s endless ramblings, you’ll find this list to be both simultaneously accurate and not at all useful.
Because of course Kvothe is supremely talented at everything, handsome, spat upon by jealous superiors and beloved by his underlings, the dream-lover of literally Gods. And reduced to a cold analysis, yes, the book must be as terrible as the thousands of other unreadable Mary-Sue-laced fanfics.
Except. Except.
For every one of of Kvothe’s obvious failures in character design, Patrick Rothfuss also manages to infuse him with a sympathetic humanity that thousands of people have responded to. Unlike most Mary Sues, the Kingkiller Chronicles have a feeling of constant tension – yes, Kvothe is supremely talented, but he’s also prone to hubristic flights of ego, and often self-sabotages. There’s a sense that yes, he could fail, even though in practice he never does.
In the hands of a lesser author, yes, Kvothe would be a Mary Sue and the book would be tripe. But thanks to Rothfuss’s skill, Kvothe is a Mary Sue and the book still has narrative interest. And that in turn leverages a potent fantasy that people want to live – while people hate an unbelievable Mary Sue, they fucking adore a competently done one, because when they step into Kvothe’s perfectly-polished boots they become the baddest, sexiest motherfucker alive.
Now, clearly, that interest doesn’t work for everyone… For example, Boye, the person who wrote the essay. Boye practically sneers at the idea of popularity, “Look! The Kingkiller Chronicles is like Left Behind, a patently terrible other book, so it too is terrible!” And forgetting that millions of people have not only read, but clasped those books to their chest and said, “I want more of this” – a talent that few can accomplish. As much as we spit on our Mary Sues in theory, too many popular books have Mary Sue-perfect protagonists to write off as “TERRIBUL TECHNIQUE.”
The problem I have with this essay is that while it’s a perfectly-true analysis, ultimately its argument boils down to, “If Kvothe is a Mary Sue, then the book is bad!” And the entire essay seems like one huge ground axe, spitting sparks and going, “Yeah! Look! This bestselling, beloved book I disliked is totally not following the rules! And therefore it’s objectively awful!”
The problem is, books don’t work like that. Ask any number of successful Madison Avenue retirees who decided they knew the formula to writing a bestselling tome, and failed miserable. It’s a comforting thought, thinking that writing a good book is as simple as a programming task – all you have to do is ask, DOES BOOK CONTAIN X, Y, OR Z? THEN BOOK == BAD.
The reaction here feels like terror. Like “Oh my God, if tripe like this can be popular, what does this say about my fiction? I’d better start finding some rules to follow!” (Though to be fair, I don’t know that Boye is a writer.)
But fiction, ever mysterious, simply doesn’t work like that. And maybe you think that “bestselling” doesn’t equal “good” – which, no, it certainly doesn’t. But it’s also not true that “bestselling” equals “awful.” For all of the flaws James Patterson books have, there is something buried in that lifeless prose and wooden characters that has appealed to people, getting them to come back like crack-addicted monkeys. And I think that rather than sneering that accomplishment off as, “Well, that’s just books for the masses,” we’re better served as writers by asking the more terrifying question of, “So if it’s bad on every level we deem quality, what’s actually working?”
If, as scientists, we found an engine that broke every rule we knew about physics and still produced electricity, we’d start asking, “Whoah! Clearly, something we know is wrong!” But as writers, we go, “Well, that’s really crappy electricity, and only the poorer homes run it,” and walk away feeling the problem is solved.
Because the central truth is, Mary Sues are not bad. Poorly-executed Mary Sues are bad. And I think that rather than spending your time devising a long checklist proving the Mary Sue nature of Kvothe is not nearly as valuable as, say, breaking down why Kvothe’s Mary Sue nature actually works where others have failed, and trying to learn a lesson that will improve your writing.
Because writing is about learning where the rules are, and how to break them. The more interesting the broken rule, the more interesting the lesson to be learned. And yeah, while on many levels Kvothe fails miserably, I’d rather know what the hell Rothfuss did to make such a terrible, unworkable, self-centered Mary Sue of a character and still make us want to follow him around.
The Door-To-Door Republican Problem
There’s been a big change in Ohio politics today: Senator Rob Portman has come out in support of gay marriage, stating that his views began changing when he found his son was gay. Which is good from the more global perspective of “Life may get a little easier for gays in Ohio,” and status quo for the traditional Republican problem.
Because as nice as it is that we now have a new gay marriage champion, one wonders who else we have to truck to Mr. Portman’s door to get him to change his views. He’s in favor of repealing Obamacare – must his son come down with a terrible disease before he finally considers that lack of health care may be a trouble for some? Should his son have to work two jobs at McDonald’s for several years, struggling from paycheck to unexpected cost to paycheck, before he finally supports raising the minimum wage?
When can we turn his son black? Or Hispanic?
Now, it’s not like Rob Portman didn’t know that his anti-gay marriage stance hurt people. He’s a Senator. Gays must have talked to him, petitioned him, told him all the standard stories of not being able to be with their loved ones on their death beds, being excluded from insurance, being legally bereft at the most stressful of times. He knew. But it gives us one of two unflattering opinions: he either knew, and didn’t care until these policies might have affected his boy’s happiness… or worse, he heard but didn’t really listen, writing off these tales as attempts to manipulate him into taking an unpopular political stance.
That’s the problem with the Republican party: these policies are all fine and well, until it applies to them. It’s like they’re sociopaths, unable to have any empathy for anyone outside their tribe until someone close to them gets hurt. And then, hey, maybe we should reconsider.
And because Senators are by definition wealthy – you can’t compete in a race without raising millions of dollars, so even if you’re not personally rich you’re sure not starving – you’ll never see a Republican say, “Well, I’ve seen my daughter go homeless, and so I’ve really come around on helping the poor.” Won’t happen.
Republicans may get angry at this portrayal, stating that Democrats do the same thing. And we all do, to some extent; it’s a human failing. And hey,I’m sure many Republicans do care about the poor in some abstract way, thinking a more Darwinian process is what we need to lift all boats. It’s a poor approach, in my opinion, and often shot through with a preening, “Hey, I work for my money, and all those people are lazy bums,” but it may well contain some errant shreds of compassion for people who work just as hard and haven’t had your luck. So there’s a pass on that.
But Republicans have been so magnificently cold-hearted in their anti-gay policies, so staunch in their anti-immigration issues, so willing to work to make voting harder for blacks, that one wonders at their ability to consider a question that, at our core, is really what makes us human: “What’s it like for that other guy, anyway?” And if you can’t possibly get it until you have to experience – and, given the way some worse conservatives ignore their gay kids, perhaps not even then – then you’re missing a vital part of what it means to be a functional person.
Until then, Rob Portman gets a functional thank you. Because he’s not helping the gays out of any particularly moral crusade. He’s selfishly doing it so life will be better for his son. Which is good as far as it goes, but it puts me in the uncomfortable position of wishing trauma and poverty upon his family so that his eyes might be opened some more to the realities he’s trying to inflict upon others.
Running Dry When I So Want Water
You may have noted the blog is being updated more sporadically. Usually, my day has a predetermined slot for “write a blog entry,” a small happiness that takes about twenty minutes, but these days?
I’m dry. I have no good ideas for blogging.
Part of that is the recuperation from surgery, sadly. Two months on and one bad night’s sleep can completely destroy my concentration, which is also playing havoc with my regular writing and my job. But it’s also that the ideas, which used to flow freely, don’t seem to stop by as much.
Which is sad. I’m oddly lonely these days; writing is kind of like my personal forum topic, where I say “Go” and get interesting responses from very smart people. I blog, primarily, because I am a comment addict and I’m curious to see what reactions I’ll get. But you can’t get none without giving none, and so my inbox lies strangely fallow while I stare at a blank WordPress screen.
It’s a shame. I’m hoping that mojo comes back. But hey, yesterday there was a new Pope, Veronica Mars kickstarted a new trend in Hollywood, and Google killed Google Reader to try to jump-start some additional interest in Google+… and I’ve got no interesting takes on any of that. I feel a little withered inside, honestly.
Please, mojo, come back. Or I may have to start an advice column, like Bart Calendar did, which I suspect like Bart Calendar’s attempt will only last about two weeks. In the meantime, I’ll check my inbox and realize that it’s time I start writing some very delayed thank-you notes.
In Which The Meat-Eater Goes Vegetarian For A Weekend
So when my pal Nayad came to visit me in Cleveland for the weekend, she told me she’d been thinking about going vegan. I, having recently been told I have to change my eating habits or die, was in the mood for a challenge. So I said, “Why don’t we try to eat vegetarian for the whole weekend? Like, find all of Cleveland’s vegetarian restaurants and try to see how many days we go before we eat meat?”
For as any vegetarian knows, the challenge is not in finding something to eat. You can have that bowl of lettuce with vinegar on it. The trick is finding a multiplicity of meals that you would like to have.
Fortunately, Cleveland is actually home to many, many fine restaurants. Clevelanders dine out more than just about any other major city, and so a lot of New York chefs have said, “Why should I pay New York rents when I can pay Cleveland rents and get the same number of enthusiastic, knowledgeable clients?” So while it’s a constant surprise to outsiders, Cleveland has some of the best and most varied dining I’ve had the pleasure to experience.
And it was a nice challenge. I had to do a lot of research to find places with good vegan options, so Nayad could sample the vegan lifestyle for a bit, but it gave us some lovely conversations as we debated options and weighed approaches, and then I got to try several new restaurants I hadn’t been to before.
The trick in vegetarian dining, I’ve found, is that the substitute route doesn’t work that well. Yes, I could technically go vegetarian by substituting “chick’n strips” for chicken, which can be masked with surprising skill, but in the end it’s not really chicken and it’s probably not all that healthy. All I’m doing is swapping a fat-laden meal for a processed chemical meal. (Or abandoning all hope and doing as bad vegetarians do, trying to convince the world that tofu tastes anything like chicken.)
No, what you need to do is to create a whole new meal that is vegetarian. One of the most satisfying dishes I had was a vegan ravioli, where they didn’t avoid the vegan-ness of it (aside from faking the egg for the pasta), but instead embraced it. Meaty mushroom for the filling, a thick and sweet thai chili paste for the sauce. Very savory and complex, with lots of veggies in it.
Much, much better than a BBQ patty with tempeh. A good vegan dish forces you to appreciate the beauty of vegetation, not to hide it.
The other thing is that vegetarian meals don’t prevent you from pudginess. This I knew from my friend Jim, an animal rights lover who was addicted to vegetarian corn dogs, but having not one but two vegetarian cupcakes was probably a bit much. And the smoothies, though full of all the nutrition and healthiness of fruit, also gave me a shock-sugar rush that set my hands to trembling. I gained two pounds over the weekend, and that was with a lot of walking and aerobic exercise baked in.
Still, if you’re interested, the clear winner in the Cleveland Vegetarian Restaurant Challenge is The Flaming Ice Cube, a lovely little hippiesque diner that is very concerned about getting all the details right. It had the tastiest smoothies, the best meals, and a wide menu with so many options that we wanted to go back twice (and couldn’t, since they were closed that Sunday).
Second place was Pura Vida, an upscale restaurant that’s a little pricey for everyday dining but has perhaps the most awesome African peanut stew you’ll ever try (kale and sweet potatoes round it out deliciously), and had the ravioli I discussed. They have monthly vegan get-togethers, which I may well go back to, though I was amused at how panicked I got when the waiter asked, “Are you a vegan?” and Nayad answered “yes” for me and I was like, “No! I’m not! I’m just pretending to be one of you for the weekend, I love meat, please don’t hurt me!”
Disappointments were, as always, Tommy’s – which is decent, don’t get me wrong, but it’s got that Taco Bell trick of presenting eight ingredients cut up a thousand different ways so that you think it’s an expansive menu and really it’s a few core selections – and The Root Cafe, which we were told had vegan bagels but didn’t, and had but one paltry vegan option for breakfast.
Still. I’d do it again. It’s a fun way to expand your taste profiles, even if I’ve gotta ease up on these vegan cupcakes. And if anyone reading knows of any other good (read: tasty) options in the Clevelandish area, let me know!
Behind On Everything, So Forgive Me
As I lurch back into real life, my job has once again taken a large precedence – and since basically, we changed our entire web architecture while I was asleep, catching up has been a bit of a nightmare.
Which means that I’m behind on a lot. I still need to write thank-you notes for many of the lovely sentiments and gifts received during my surgery. And my suicide post attracted a lot of well thought-out, very personal responses that don’t deserve to lie fallow. But I have a Nayad coming in this weekend to visit, and work presses today, and so I shan’t for a bit.
But I wanted to let you know that I feel very very guilty about it. And responses are coming.