THERE IS NO NEUTRAL ZONE WHEN IT COMES TO IDENTITY.

It's the way human society is set up.  Sex--the physical characteristics--isn't really a binary, but gender--the social construct--is an either-or deal.  We're taught from birth via stories and songs and interaction with relatives (and really, no matter how neutral you try to raise your kids odds are you have some relative who fucks things up somehow, or the neighbors introduce traditiuonal gender types) that girls are this way and guys are this way.  This is something that affects our lives from very young ages, affects how we see ourselves and how others see us.  When discussing social interaction of any sort, gender is an angle that's always open for discussion.  Always.  Because it has an effect more times than it doesn't.  It's part of our lives, whether we're male or female.

While I'm at, guess what else we're taught about at a very early age?  Race.  You know why?  Because guess what everybody gets categorized into somehow.  Guess what everybody sees the effect of in stories and interactions with other people.  Our society is still set up for race to have a factor.  That's because we're multicultural, and we're making our way through generations of setting the value of one of those cultures above the others.  There are people who are consciously aware of race, and people who aren't, but the messages of our culture--told in stereotypes in the media and in "common knowledge" from our elders--are affecting how we deal with each other.  This goes even if you have people of the same race interacting, because the chance that the conversation would be different if it was one white person and one Asian person rather than two white people makes race a factor in how they interact.

So when discussing social interaction of any kind, race should be open for consideration.  No one should get eyes rolled at them just for bringing a subject that has such a major impact on their life to the table.

Class, sexual orientation, nationality...  All of these are things everyone has!  All of these are things that cultures place value on, things we get fed stereotyped messages about constantly, things that are the very building blocks of our identities.  These are things people take into account when we look at first impressions.  These are things that affect how people interact with each other.

And yeah, it happens in different levels and there's circumstances where things would happen the same way anyway but there's a lot of circumstances where they don't.  We might end up dismissing it as a notable factor.  But it's an natural thought, and odds are even when the primary reason has nothing to do with the demographics of the players, the identities of the people involved are still a secondary or tertiary reason.  And really, if we're trying to get past snap judgments and prejudiced behavior we have to entertain the possibility that it might be affecting how we deal with each other.  We have to at least fucking talk about it.

Mary Sue--for those of you wondering what the hell I'm talking about (though I'd have to wonder what internet you guys have been surfing for the last ten years if you've never heard the term)--is a word used to describe a character that is "too exceptional." It started out innocently enough as a way to deride an insipid character made for Star Trek fanfiction that constantly saved the day and was beloved by all the other characters but was not in the actual show. It was a way to say "Hey, Author, your fantasies are showing" in a little as two words.

As the term spread to other parts of the fan community began to get out of hand. Now "Mary Sue" is still used for something approaching its original purpose--to describe fanfiction characters who manage to save the day in the story, fanfiction characters that are beloved by the entire character and fanfiction characters with overly complicated/angst-filled/fate-defying backstories. But it's also used to describe a character in the actual show/movie/comic book who is a recent cast addition and outshines the rest of the cast, or a character who has been in the cast for a long time but starts to become considerably more awesome as they mature.

All too often it is used to describe the main character of a series.

And way too fucking often is it used to deride any character that isn't a straight white male but turns out to be just as competent or more central to the story than the straight white male characters are

Here's the thing, folks. This is fiction. Yes, there are forms of fiction where someone needs to be as normal as possible, but I'm reading these rants about comic book characters. I've seen the term Mary Sue leveled at Superman, Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, Reed Richards, Hal Jordan, Luke Cage, Bucky Barnes, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Rogue, Storm, Black Panther, Renee Montoya, John Stewart, Batwoman, Cassandra Cain, Supergirl, Barbara Gordon, Bruce Wayne... Generally anyone in Gotham City, the Green Lantern Corps, the X-Men, the Avengers, the JLA... Any character worth reading about has been called a "Mary Sue" or a "Gary Stu" or whatever nauseatingly cute rhyme the cranky online fans can come up with.

Comic book characters were designed to be the exceptional soap-operatic angst-filled fate-defying odds-beating fantasy-fulfilling author-self-inserted centers of attention from the most unlikely corners of the universe! That's why they're comic book heroes! They're exceptional! Otherwise, they wouldn't be in the freaking book!!

Of course they're somebody's fantasy! The point is that the writer's fantasy overlaps with the reader's fantasy and we all get a good imaginary adventure out the experience!

Of course they have complicated backstories! It's a serial form of storytelling and you need some twists and turns!

Of course this isn't what your average woman is like! She's a superhero!

And here's the considerably more infuriating thing. As I said above, superhero characters were created to be exceptional. Since most established characters in superhero comics will answer "A" to most of the above after being created to be the center of attention and then spending a few decades in the spotlight, we have a lot of characters fall into some sort of "Grandma Sue" clause. And because most of the old center of attention characters are straight white males, we have a lot of straight white male Grandma Sues running around. Now, because most of the characters who aren't straight white males are either rescued from an incompetent/useless or simply very small side-role in the past or are new creations, we have a bunch of people bashing female, minority and gay characters because they don't pass the Litmus test. (The stupid fucking useless Litmus test that the straight white male characters would bomb even more miserably but they get a pass on since they've been around fifty-plus years.)

So not only are the people complaining about "Mary Sues" in ongoing comics missing the point of superheroes, they are also disproportionately rejecting and deriding characters who aren't straight white males.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that there is such a thing as specialness overload. There are characters with just too much crap behind them, too much suspension of disbelief involved. There are characters that just don't connect with the reader. There is such a thing as the writer displaying his/her fantasies all over the page and draining the story of all life. But you know what that is? That's bad writing. We know there are writers out there who can handle these kinds of characters well. We know there are writers out there who can balance their fantasies with the necessary suspense and conflict needed for a good story. That's about the skill of the writer, not the composition of the character.

People use this Mary Sue thing like they can come up with a formula for a good or bad character. Geeks seem to want to measure and weigh the soul and subjectivity out of everything. (That tendency is probably how the rules for D&D came about.) We want to be able to say that if the character has more than 20% angst in their backstory, they're a wash no matter what the setting or plot is. We want to be able to take a test that says if you answer "A" to all of the above, no one will like your story but if you answer a mixture of "C" and "D" you will be an instant success. But writing doesn't work that way. Art is subjective.

Honestly, either we have a bunch of superhero fans just don't like a part of the genre--the "super" part"--or we have a bunch of fans translating "Mary Sue" to mean "character I don't like." The latter is just fucking lazy reviewing. If you don't like a comic, give a real reason why. Say you think the character acts like a jerk. Say the character is superficial. Say you don't think the other characters would react to them that way. Say the backstory comes across heavy-handed. Say they whine too much. Say they're out of character. Say you can see the writer's hand behind the character and their thought process, and that is ruining the ability to immerse yourself in the character.

But for heaven's sake, when you say a character is a "Mary Sue" you're telling us that the character is too much of a superhero. That's not saying anything when you're discussing superhero comics.

Our movie reviewer picked up that startlingly unoriginal insight like a chunk of fecal matter hardened by an early January frost (which to say a number of us are wondered just how he brought himself to actually write and post that thought on the internet) and chucked it into the deceptively still waters of female fandom. The result was a beautiful rippling mess of nearly unanimous disapproval, from readers of superhero comics and superhero fans who prefer other media. The young man is still buried under a wave of comments trying to explain that he was just using generalizations. (Please note that a generalization is a logical fallacy, so that's not a good defense.)

The second matter is currently being discussed on this very blog. I'm referring to Bill Willingham's editorial against what he saw as the cause of wicked superhero decadence, a de-emphasis on old-fashioned values of certain Superheroes that include favoring the USA as a country specifically representing those values. Willingham has pledged to go all out in this matter, which should hopefully only have a positive impact on his run on Justice Society of America. The editorial has drawn many fine and interesting comments on this blog, on the original editorial, and is now filtering out to the blogging/podcasting communities. The comments that get my attention here are the ones wrapped up in losing "the American Way" as the source of decadence and complaining about things like the Avengers being sponsored by the UN or the JLA using an abbreviated name.

And the last matter that drew my attention was the Obama-Spiderman special story, produced in honor of the Inauguration. That's received a certain amount of derision from the conservative side of fandom (on their blogs and in comment sections) including those who feel a need to state that the President-Elect is only a "collector", and judging by the context of the conversation I can only guess that they feel that a center-left political does not count as a Real Fan. (Do they think he's only saying he reads Spider-man to make himself look cool?)

Now, what do these three incidents all have in common?

Well, let's boil down superhero stories to their inherent traits. You have a person who obtains through either luck or their own hard work (or a combination of hard work backfiring on them but luckily not killing them, such as with Reed Richards) extraordinary abilities. They choose to use these abilities to combat a force of evil and make the world a better place. There, we've got the "super" and the "hero" covered.

There's nothing in there about what gender you are, about what nationality you are, or about what politics you practice. It's very simple, someone decides to use their powers to fight against evil and use their powers for good.

Yes, the stories are made up and angled based on factors of background, actual politics of the writer sometimes deciding what's good and what's evil, moral relativism or the lack thereof, character mechanics, narrative mechanics, plenty of times when gender, nationality, politics, race, sexuality, religion, and other such categories come into play. But that varies from character to character and story to story.

The thing about all these incidents that caught my attention was that they seemed to all be discussing superheroes and perhaps heroic action literature in general. And the superhero genre at the base doesn't have a political agenda, or identity traits, it stems from the common human desire to be able to wriggle out of your lowly position and right what you perceive as wrongs, and be able change your life--your world, even your universe--for the better.

That's a universal desire right there. I've seen three instances this week alone where people have forgotten that the genre embodies a universal aspect of humanity and assigned traits that aren't inherent to the genre as inherent to the genre or assumed that only people from certain backgrounds might share this desire.

And that's flat-out wrong.