So, here’s a bit of geek jargon for you: the Mary Sue. This is a pretty well-documented phenomenon (if you are so inclined to Google more about it, like why they’re called Mary Sue’s to begin with) but the basic upshot is that a Mary Sue is a character in a fictional story that wears its embodiment of authorial wish-fulfillment a little too plainly on its sleeve. Now, given that so much geek entertainment is essentially wish-fulfillment fantasy to begin with (I’m looking at you, superhero comics) this might seem either redundant or hair-splittingly picky, but … a well-drawn fictional character is like a slice of genuine New York style pizza, and your average superhero is like a slice from Pizza Hut. But admit it, you’ll eat Pizza Hut when it’s in front of you, and it’s not all bad. A Mary Sue character is like a piece of elementary school cafeteria pizzoid-foodstuff.
Mary Sue characters have all the nuance of a crayon drawing rendered by a six year old. Batman may be extravagantly wealthy, a peerless hand-to-hand combatant, the world’s greatest detective, and any number of other things which hit the sweet spot of escapism and adolescent power fantasies, but he also has a few flaws and shortcomings that keep him interesting as a character. Mary Sues cleave to the uber-competent power fantasy without balancing it with the slightest bit of imperfection that might betray some self-awareness, and that might sound in the abstract like a minor distinction but in practice it can be disastrous. If you’ve ever read or watched (or started to but couldn’t finish) a story unfold in which the protagonist was utterly devoid of problems or issues, the best in their field, irresistible to the opposite sex, and generally annoyingly too-perfect-to-be-true, you may very well have been exposed to a Mary Sue. If said protagonist is the same gender, ethnicity and approximate age as the author, the odds multiply exponentially.
And that’s bad enough in a self-contained universe, where it just seems silly. But it crops up with frightening regularity in existing property franchises, which can be a real howl. I think I’ve touched on this before, but I’ll say again that there are some little kids who are perfectly happy to run around pretending to be Batman, and other little kids who pretend to be Moonman, a character of their own invention who happens to be Batman’s new best friend. And unless the kid has serious self-esteem issues, he won’t want to play second banana to Batman, and their imaginary adventures will ultimately evolve into Moonman figuring out the vital clue that unravels the Riddler’s plot, or Moonman rescuing Batman from the Joker’s deathtrap. Which is all well and good for the self-directed amusement of a small child, but the very existence of someone who’s better at beating up the Joker or outsmarting the Riddler than Batman goes a long way toward undermining the very concept of Batman, which means it would make a less satisfying entertainment for mass consumption. Geek audiences especially are attached to the groundrules of their respective canons, such as Batman being the world’s greatest detective. Woe be to the auteur who says “Batman is actually the second best, after this guy I just made up!”
One of the worst offenders in this category, by the by, is the character of Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Given all of the existing groundrules of how Starfleet and its future universe worked, as established in the 60’s series and 80’s movies and so forth, the audience was suddenly asked to accept a whiz-kid ensign who often became the de facto protagonist of the Enterprise’s adventures by virtue of being smarter than everyone around him. And who was really, gratingly annoying. It was a bad writing decision by any measure, but it was also so nakedly obvious that one or more of the writers on the show had been a young nerd, skipped a grade or two, and always felt they didn’t get the attention they deserved which could only truly be found in the sci-fi future. So they projected themselves onto the cipher of Wesley, and fans nearly revolted. (Incidentally, Wil Wheaton himself recognizes what a blatant Mary Sue Wesley was, and has since apologized for it and joined in the Wesley bashing, and is now generally beloved by the huge overlap in the Venn diagram between internet screedists and Trekkies. So don’t feel too bad for the human being who brought Wesley to life, whenever entitled fans treat the concept of the fictional character like their own personal punching bag.)
The reason Mary Sues are on my mind lately is because last week I finished reading a Star Wars “novel” – Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry. (Sorry for the abrupt shift from Star Trek to Star Wars; to me they’re so different as to be impossible to confuse one with the other, hopefully for everyone else the whiplash isn’t too bad.) I’ve been meaning to get around to reading this book since it came out, which was 1996. Allow me to set the scene: 1996 was the year before the special edition remastered original Star Wars trilogy was released, and about three eyars before the prequels started coming out. Some licensed tie-ins to Star Wars, really the first new Star Wars stuff for fans in 13 years or so, had been doing well in the marketplace. Shadows of the Empire was supposed to be a full-on assault hitting two major retails sectors: video games and books. The plan was carried out adequately enough (I remember my college roommate getting a copy of the video game and showing me some of the better sequences) but neither the gaming nor publishing industries were rocked to their cores. To this day Jar Jar Binks has had a bigger impact on the Star Wars legacy than Shadows of the Empire.
Somewhere inside the Lucasfilm monolith, they decided that the Shadows of the Empire novel, and the action covered in the video game, would take place mainly between the movies Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. On the surface, this seems like a good plan. You get to involve all of the main characters that fans love and fill in some of the narrative gaps that geeks obsess over, and at the same time create something somewhat new. Truth be told, Perry plays it very conservatively, hitting a lot of the same beats as the movies as if that’s the only thing that could possibly entertain the fans. He even has the characters make occasional head-slapping observations, such as when they fly into an asteroid field and someone says “Hey, remember when Han tried to lose those Imperials by flying into an asteroid field?” When Perry does stray from the well-established Star Wars familiarities, it’s to introduce two new characters who would ostensibly justify the existence of this new work, a hero and a villain: Dash Rendar and Prince Xizor.
Holy fricking bantha-poodoo, are they a couple of Mary Sues.
So at the time Shadows of the Empire is set, Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. Lando Calrissian is hanging out with the Rebel Alliance, but the smooth-brother rogue is apparently not archetype enough to make up for Han’s absence. Dash Rendar is introduced as a mercenary-smuggler intended to fill the Han role. Much like Moonman overshadows Batman, Dash is everything Han is … and more. Where Han flirted with Princess Leia, Dash hits on her shamelessly. Where Han is good in a firefight, Dash is so skilled with a blaster or a spaceship laser array that he. Never. Misses. Ever!!! And where Han wasn’t particularly inclined to help the Alliance out of the goodness of his heart, until he came around, Dash is an even bigger jerk. Then Dash, while escorting Luke and some other Rebels through space, fails to intercept an imperial missile, and people die. Dash is so shaken by finally missing a shot that he has a crisis of faith and ends up saving the day multiple times by always being in the right place at the right time as the climax of the book unfolds. And then in an out-of-left-field epilogue moment, it turns out that the missile Dash failed to intercept was some kind of cheater missile, so it’s not his fault people died after all. Um, hooray? So basically he’s a bag of clichés who shows up sporadically throughout the book when the plot contrivances call for someone to be totally awesome. (I understand he’s also the POV character for the video game.)
Prince Xizor, on the other hand, is the ultimate evil bad-ass, an alien crimelord with schemes within schemes and back-up plans for every back-up plan. He propels and headlines a subplot in which he tries to push Darth Vader out of the Emperor’s favor, intending of course to fill that power vacuum himself, by assassinating Luke Skywalker once he learns Vader has promised to deliver Skywalker to the Emperor alive. He personally oversees his criminal empire despite its mind-bogglingly vast size, he’s a connoisseur and a Casanova (who, incidentally, ends up obsessed with Princess Leia and tries to date-rape her using his natural reptilian pheromones – so, you know, that’s in there for the kids) and quite possibly a ninja. Seriously, at the risk of overusing this metaphor, with just about every page of the book I kept imagining Lucasfilm execs approaching a sugar-addled six year old and saying “We need you to come up with a Star Wars story and a pirate a million times cooler than Han Solo and a big meanie a billion times worse than Darth Vader.” And then they asked Steve Perry to transcribe it all more or less verbatim.
Sadly, it’s not even a very well-written story, beyond the egregious Mary Sue-isms. The plot is really pulpy, where random happenstances are explained away as logical developments facilitated by futuristic technology. The dialogue is fairly wooden (not surprisingly, since this is basically a Star Wars puppet show with a couple of homemade new puppets thrown in) and the interior monologues are much, MUCH worse. I’d probably have to read something else by Steve Perry, something totally original that was not interfered with at any level by Lucasfilm, to know if he’s really a horrible hack or just grabbed one convenient licensed paycheck, but the risk outweighs the benefit in that particular scenario.
And yet, I can’t say it was a total waste of time. Misguided infamies are often as interesting to me as deservedly heralded classics, and despite the rough rogering the franchise has gotten of late, I’m still an unrepentant Star Wars fan. I appreciated that Perry showed the actual process of Luke building his green-bladed lightsaber, which shows up otherwise unexplained in Return of the Jedi. I smiled, a little, at the intentional comedy of C-3PO and R2-D2 flying the Millennium Falcon during the climactic escape, while everyone else was planetside. Super-cheesy, but in a fun and nostalgia-filled way. I need a little bit of that in my diet every now and then.
A few thoughts:
ReplyDelete--Steve Perry needs to write a "Star Wars" novel entitled "Wheel in the Sky." Yes he goddamn does. I won't stop believin'. (And I'm sure that I'm the first person in the History of the Internet to make that joke. Booyah!)
--The "Shadows of the Empire" videogame was pretty good, I remember, but not an undying classic. One of my old roommates, the drunken saxophone player, was obsessed with "Star Wars," and had the game on his N64. (Which he purchased with money he owed me to turn the phone back on. But that's a story for another time.)
--From what I recall, the idea from Lucasfilms was that "Shadows" was a full-blown "Star Wars" movie, without the movie. Novel(s), video games, toys, even a soundtrack album, all churned out as per normal, but no actual movie. Part of me loves that idea. Part of me wants to hit someone with a shoe for it.
--You know what "Return of the Jedi" needed? A re-establishment of the Jedi order and a fight scene between, say, IG-88 or Boba Fett and Jedi Knight Lando Calrissian. I'm just sayin'.