Via Dustbury, I was led to this wonderful paper on the phenomenon of the Mary Sue character, both in and out of fan fiction: Too Good To Be True: 150 Years Of Mary Sue.
What turned it into a lengthy and fascinating time sink for me is that I've never watched, for instance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Highlander: The Series (or any of the Highlander movies apart from the first, actually, since There Can Be Only One,) or the various Star Trek spinoffs after the one with the bald guy as captain, so every time I encountered an unfamiliar character or series, I turned to that handy black hole on the internet: Wikipedia.
And it is flat amazing the time and effort fans of these various shows have put into their respective chunks of Wikipedia. There is probably a larger and more detailed web of articles on the TeeWee series Highlander than there is on the actual Scottish Highlands. It is just unreal. Literally.
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If wikipedia is a time suck for you, avoid tvtropes.org at all costs.
Way too late for that. :)
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=46764912
Talk about endless gobs of ironic minutia...
They've since cleaned up the article, but you can find it if you look way back in the archives from 2008.
In the Wikipedia article for "White & Nerdy", by "Weird Al" Yankovic, there's a 2 second scene where Al sings "...X-men comics, you know I collect them..." while holding up a handful of comics. In the W'pedia article, of course, they go into exact detail over which exact issues are held in what exact order in each hand.
(Then they explain that it's not actually possible to edit Wikipedia to say "you suck" in that large of a font...)
Certain very cruel persons have on occasion threatened to unveil hoarded bits of my Sailor Moon fan fiction. Naturally, no jury in the land would convict me of their murder.
There is probably a larger and more detailed web of articles on the TeeWee series Highlander than there is on the actual Scottish Highlands.
I'm trying to read John Buchan's biography of Montrose, but it's awfully floridly written so far. I am having to turn to C.V. Wedgwood's biography and Stuart Reid's account of his campaigns.
Has anyone ever seen Tom Clancy and Jack Ryan together in the same place at the same time?
Or what about John Ross and Henry Bowman?
Those are technically "Gary Stus"... ;)
Yeah, but....but.. Duncan MacLeod. It's like getting seven seasons of Maximus or Aragorn.
:)
That is the very safe, shaved, showered, and sane face of fandom.
Try Fandom Wank.
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/ask-correia-8-the-evils-of-mary-sue/
Those are technically "Gary Stus"... ;)
Christopher Paolini, call your office.
I'd heard them called "Marty Stu's and heard that Ensign Wesley Crusher was secretly thrilled when his character was Put On A Bus
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PutOnABus
And troperville is a wonderfull place to waste hours at a stretch.
Sorry, I guess he's an example of a Cannon Stu (or Sue)
Word Ver "spulats" LOL
Ah, yes. The bald captain of "Middle Managers In Space". I quickly stopped watching that show.
Will,
I liked the show; I just had to block off the corner of my mind that kept screaming that there was no place for a daycare center on a Federation heavy cruiser...
The show had two outstanding actors (Stewart and Spiner) and some great story writing and production values. It was just completely tone-deaf on matters military.
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