Be very wary of using the same term for "any X" and "stereotypically bad X"

[jack]

Be very wary of using the same term for "any X" and "stereotypically bad X". Everyone recognises it's bad if X is a race or other similar class. You may say "but most of the X I meet are stereotypical. That's why it's a stereotype". Right. This makes it very understandable to blur the two concepts and use the same word for them. It's a natural English usage, to have a word that means one thing, and, by extension, use it to mean "like that, but not stereotypically bad" or "like that, but is stereotypically bad". But it WILL tend to lead you into prejudicial habits of thought, so it's better avoid in advance.

What do you say if you mean "someone kind of like a redneck, but I don't mean that in a bad way!"? Many people have reclaimed redneck to identify themselves in a non-pejorative way. But like notably more vicious slurs, it's a problem for someone else to do that, even if it's hard to think what you should say instead.

The term I saw used today was "Mary-Sue". People are split whether author-darling characters done well count as Mary-Sue or not, which is a clear indication that there's a problem with the term, however innocent it may superficially feel. It either needs to include any apparently Mary-Sue character (in which case criticisms need to specify what that a particular story does badly) or only bad ones (in which case you also need to justify what's wrong with it, not just say "oh, it's clearly an author character"). It's a case where a generally-inclusive community needs to be aware that all communities create out-groups, and be aware of this community is prone to do, not just be proud it doesn't make the same mistakes as western society in general. Even if (or especially if) it DOES have legitimate grievances.

The point is, you have to be really stubborn to be prejudices against people for absolutely no reason (although many people are). You have to watch for cases where you feel you have a legitimate generalisation and then say "hold on, this generalisation, while natural, is going to disenfranchise many real people in my emotions, is that right"?

Comments

[fluffymormegil]

An author-chara is a "self-insert"; an overpowered author's-darling chara is a Mary Sue (or optionally a Marty Stu if male). Anyone who uses Mary Sue to mean any and all self-inserts is wrong :-)

[corrvin]

"What do you say if you mean "someone kind of like a redneck, but I don't mean that in a bad way!"?"

Well, here we say someone is country. One of my co-workers grew up very rural and still has a pretty good twang accent; I'm sorry I can't voice-post this, but I'll do my best:

Doctor calling: "Who is the on call doctor?"
My co-worker: "It's Dr. Juh-tawn."
Doctor calling: "I believe it's pronounced Zhuh-tawn." (It is; it's a French J.)
Co-worker: "I'm country enough that you're lucky to get Juh-tawn, not Jettin." (to rhyme with gettin')
Doctor: "Haha! Okay."

[seryn]

There was a really linguistically interesting fictional book by Jane Lindskold about a girl raised by magical wolves. After the girl is discovered by humans and they begin to teach her standard language including the words for the camping gear the team was using, she asks what the King's giant cloth pavilion is called. When her instructor says, "Tent." She stops thinking there is any differentiation between things and starts thinking that this human language stuff has no detail or specificity. This colors her entire belief system throughout the series and she is constantly surprised when people (who weren't raised by wolves) have any subtlety or imagination what so ever. Even after she learns there were more distinguishable terms for things and the array of adjectives and modifiers, and understands that her instructor was trying not to overwhelm her, her subconscious perspective still considers most humans to be primitive.

So I agree that the words we choose matter. Even if it's just the inside-out tangent of Sapir-Whorf which says, if you're not using the right words, it means you don't understand the concept.


As for the super-charged wonder-characters that have been pervasive in the recent spate of first-person urban fantasy novels, I don't like it at all. But it's tolerable if the characters are not a blatant rip-off of the author's self-aggrandizement. When the characters are quirky and relevant but similar to the author or author's friends, that's fine. When the characters are godlike and infallible they'd better not be modeled off anyone the author knows or I'm going to stop buying the books.

I prefer the non "urban" kind of fantasy novels where the author has to actually do some world-building and invest something into their own creativity. Many of the non-Mary-Sue urban fantasies still read like low level RPG characters were suddenly cast into the normal world. The problem I have with the Mary-Sue ones is that the author's character is level 12 when all the villains and other characters are level 4 or 5. And the author's character doesn't soliloquy, they're meta or OoC.

So. If I, as a relatively oblivious reader, notice it's a Mary Sue character, then the author has failed utterly at their main task which is diverting me from my everyday world.

I don't know what professional authors call the character inserts that aren't Mary-Sue though, I call them "modeled on a real person" if they are a take-off, or "walk-on cameos" if they're accurately reflecting someone. But I want my work getting top-billing, so I make sure the cameo appearance doesn't take over the story and get their name above the title. And I know I'm not the household name, so I want to make sure it's not my name going above the title either like when they remade Dracula but for legal reasons had to call it "Bram Stoker's Dracula".