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I'll start with an example of Mary Sues which I found to be very interesting. There is a season 4 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS) called Superstar in which perennial loser Jonathan casts a spell to make everyone think he is perfect. He twists the whole world of Sunnydale in order to make himself the hero. He is a vampire slaying, basketball playing, jazz singing millionaire who can do no wrong and knows everything about everything. The writers play a neat trick of making fun of self insertion fan fics. Imagine Jonathan as a geeky kid (which he is) sitting at the computer and writing a perfect version of himself into his favourite TV show. However the writers show us that while this may be harmless when it is pure fantasy, when it becomes a reality (in the show because of a spell, in our world because Meyer published her self insertion fic) the world the character is put in falls apart.
The cracks in Jonathan's fantasy start showing. How can the 5ft tall nerd be a superstar basketball player? How can he be a better slayer than Buffy when he has none of her super powers? How on earth did he star in the Matrix trilogy without ever leaving town? These flaws are picked up on because they make people question reality and even logic. These things can't possibly happen and so Jonathan is found out and the characters regain their freewill, no longer acting as puppets in his perfect fantasy land.
Now I'm sorry if that seemed a little obscure but here is the link. Bella Swan is a self insertion Mary Sue and because of this the world into which she is put is effectively ruined. No person can be that perfect and so the reader questions whether any of the characters becomes more than a 2D puppet of the author who has them do whatever she wants to make Bella seem more Mary Sueish.
Let's start with her name. Bella Swan. Bella is fine. Swan is fine. But the name all together means Beautiful Swan. Maybe it would have been clever for Meyer to have her character have a name which represents the character's move form an ugly duckling in Phoenix to a beautiful swan in Forks but the character doesn't change. She looks and acts no different from her Phoenix self from what we know and so no real change has taken place. It feels less like a transformation from ugly to beautiful and more like she thinks she is ugly but is really beautiful. There is a Mary Sue hallmark. The beautiful girl who isn't aware of her own beauty because if she was she wouldn't be accessible to the reader and would come across as arrogant instead of the lovely, modest girl we're meant to believe she is.
I think this is also the time to point out Meyer's newest protagonist from her book The Host. Her name is Melanie Stryder. Not a stereotypical Mary Sue name. Until you remember Meyer's own name. Mary Sue - Melanie Stryder - Stephenie Meyer. Take a second to look at the letters used at the start of each name. M + S. On top of this Melanie and Stephenie basically rhyme. Stryder and Meyer aren't even that different. Another hallmarks of Mary Sues is that their name will be in someway similar to that of the author. Usually a more exciting, exotic name. For example, the author Jane could write the character Jade. Or the author Mary could write the character Maria. It's a definite indicator of the author wanting to insert themselves into the text.
We can push this even further in the case of Twilight with Meyer providing evidence herself on her websites FAQ section. She states that Bella isn't described in the book so other readers can step into her shoes (basically insert themselves and pretend a sexy vampire loves them instead) but she also explains how she believes Bella to look.
Stephenie Meyer -
"In my head, Bella is very fair-skinned, with long, straight, dark brown hair and chocolate brown eyes. Her face is heart-shaped—a wide forehead with a widow's peak, large, wide-spaced eyes, prominent cheekbones, and then a thin nose and a narrow jaw with a pointed chin. Her lips are a little out of proportion, a bit too full for her jaw line. Her eyebrows are darker than her hair and more straight than they are arched. She's five foot four inches tall, slender but not at all muscular, and weighs about 115 pounds. She has stubby fingernails because she has a nervous habit of biting them. And there's your very detailed description."
Now go look at a picture of Meyer herself. See the similarities? Same kind of hair is fair enough. There’s only so many types of hair in the world after all. Brown eyes are also very common. A lot of the other details could be considered coincidental but by the time you get to "Her lips are... a bit too full for her jaw line" it just starts to sound too familiar for anyone who knows how Meyer looks. Clearly she is writing a version of herself into the book and living out all her fantasies of boys desiring her at school, though not in an overtly sexual way, getting the one guy that no other girl can get, being the damsel in constant distress.
Maybe a self insertion wouldn't even be so bad if she inserted herself and showed her actual flaws as being flaws or if she inserted herself but herself was, for lack of a better term, a badass. Meyer really is living the fantasy with this one though. Bella is an instant star at Forks high which is very unrealistic. Kids move schools all the time without a lot of drama. Even in a school like Forks where everyone knows everyone it's unlikely that supposedly ordinary Bella would make the impact she does. Curiosity makes sense, especially since she grew up in such a different kind of place. I mean compare sunny Phoenix to rainy Forks. Anyone who hasn't left Forks (though how would no one in the school have never ever been on holiday?) would be interested in stories of Phoenix but no one actually asks her about it. they're too busy drooling all over her. This is what makes her sudden popularity so unbelievable. A boy crushing on her instantly is also believable since she is a new face to look at and stranger things have happened in real life but 3 (at least) at school as well as Jacob and Edward. That's a bit much. Apparently it's true to life for Meyer. Let's go back to her FAQ.
Stephenie Meyer -
"I mentioned in my bio that I went to a high school in Scottsdale, AZ, which is Arizona's version of Beverly Hills (picture the high school in the movie Clueless). In high school, I was a mousy, A-track wall-flower. I had a lot of incredible girlfriends, but I wasn't much sought after by the Y chromosomes, if you know what I mean. Then I went to college in Provo, Utah. Let me tell you, my stock went through the roof. See, beauty is a lot more subjective than you might think. In Scottsdale, surrounded by barbies, I was about a five. In Provo, surrounded by normal people, I was more like an eight. I had dates every weekend with lots of really pretty and intelligent boys (some of whose names end up in my books). It was quite confusing at first, because I knew there was nothing different about me."
I think she is still confused. I can understand not being much desired and ignored by the male population of a high school if you are the ordinary one amongst barbies *cough* once again Meyer's life and Bella's are scarily similar here *cough* but switching schools and going to college are very different beasts. In college, for one, boys want sex. Now they may not have got it from Meyer (which may in part explain why she had a different date each weekend instead of a steady boyfriend) but certainly the majority want it and, not living at home and being legal adults, they know it is much easier to get and is more expected of them to actually be having sex.
The fact that she dated someone else each weekend also represents a difference between her version and Bella's version. The guys after Bella are near obsessed. They fight over her and follow her around from the start. Having 3 school boys wanting you is different to dating a different guy each week. Clearly none of these guys were obsessed with Meyer like the boys who like Bella are obsessed since Meyer only went on a date with each one and didn't get hounded by them like Bella portrays.
Meyer's explanation also tells us that Bella is indeed ordinary. She was too subtle and quiet to be noticed in flashy Phoenix but she is indeed beautiful for if she wasn't then she wouldn't be one of the hottest girls in Forks (unless the population of Forks high are all swamp monsters.)
Now back to the start and the story of Jonathan from BTVS. That was an example of how a Mary Sue can essentially destroy their own reality because they are too perfect to ever exist. This is the basic problem with a Mary Sue. And it is a problem which pulls down so much of Twilight. It's unrealistic that Bella is suddenly the hottest girl in the world of Forks, especially when it has nothing to do with the story. There is no relevance for Mike, Eric and Tyler to like her. They only serve to reinforce the idea that Bella is the best of the best. It's even more unrealistic that none of her many faults are shown as faults or have consequences. She accuses other girls of superficiality but constantly talks about how beautiful Edward is without mentioning much else about him. She walks down dark alleys alone and runs to meet an evil vampire without telling anyone but gets saved each time by Edward. She never seems to learn from her bad decisions or even get told off for them. Edward forgives her for not doing the smart thing and asking for the Cullen's help at the end, her dad says nothing about her being overly cruel when she leaves Forks and no one tells her it was pretty stupid to walk down dark alleys alone.
Characters always have flaws no matter how much you want them not to. The problem is that Bella is such a Mary Sue that all the characters let her flaws slide. The author appears to want all the other characters to either love Bella or show Bella as being perfect in comparison. She ignores anything that would make Bella be a believable human and in the end this destroys the novel in a lot of ways. I personally, cannot help but notice every time Bella does a stupid thing and gets away with it. It takes me out of the world of the story. I question what is happening just like the characters on BTVS did with Jonathan because it is so unrealistic and illogical.
This is just one of the many flaws of Twilight but it's a big one. It takes away from the story so much. Self insertions are fun for the author but serious novels should be about more. They should have more structure and make more logical sense and even with fantasy books the characters should be 3D and relatable to the human readers. If you have a Mary Sue self insertion as a main character, then these things are damn near impossible to achieve.
 k a c i e ilu · Wed Jul 02, 2008 @ 01:32am · 0 Comments |
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