Now fanfiction is mostly made up of teenage girls as young as 12 with some kind of problem with life writing stuff that doesn’t make sense, breaking rules, and making up characters that are not believable. Not only that, they don’t even know how to spell or use proper grammar. If you tell them this, they jump down your throat. I guess they do not teach constructive criticism in school. I would hate to seem them later in life in the real world. They are actually the reason no one enjoys or will read fanfiction anymore. I would love to know what site these educated women who write stories are because ff.net has gone down hill.

“That would be eerie.”
I have a country like that. The only people who are employable are white males. The only people allowed to be seen or heard in the media are white Christian males. The only people allowed on the streets after dark are white males. Women are confined to houses. And the black 50% of the population is considered animals or criminals. It’s an unpleasant country and I’m working on my third book in it.

Thanks for your insight!

“Not all white men are WASPs.”

I got the feeling that most leading white men in the most popular fandoms are rather WASPy, except for obvious cases such as Blair Sandburg from Sentinel (and he’s the sidekick – military, white Jim.) Kirk, too, seems like the all-American hero, and though religious/ethnic backgrounds aren’t specifically gone into, I feel that the audience will assume the WASP profile. Am I wrong about this? I realize citing two examples out of the whole of fandom may not be representative — just the first two I though of. (Oh, and Harry Potter, of course.)

“I will argue when your entire writing world features only white men, then you’ve crossed the racist/sexist line. When everyone from the newstand clerk to the nurse to the grocery owner is white and male, you need to ask yourself why. There are times and places where that works. 1960s, sundown town in middle America, sure. 2010, New York City? not so much.”

That would be eerie and unnatural!

I actually disagree. It occurs when you do that, AND/OR when the character THEN starts to wrap canon around itself completely. Not all self inserts do, and some non-inserts do that and turn Sueish.

Remember, most people who dislike sues actually do so because Sues are completely crappy female characters. They are devalued females: Females who are only good because they are approved by male characters. That’s their point.
Most of us would rather have awesome female characters who are awesome on their own, and are therefore VERY critical of Sues (and Stus, naturally, since those tend to warp female characters).

*Continues writing mostly F/F*

Self inserts are not necessarily Mary Sues. Mary Sue deforms canon and character. She makes Spock cry (literally. The first one, Ensign Mary Sue age 15, died heroically saving the Enterprise and even Spock cried at her funeral) She’s a phase. I wrote my share.

I have trouble writing f/f because I have trouble telling where my sexual responses end and the characters’ begin. With male characters, that problem is less noticeable.

Not all white men are WASPs. I have Italian Catholics, mutt pagans, Greek Jews, Celtic atheists and other. They are all white, but not all of them are Anglo, Saxon or Protestant.

I will argue when your entire writing world features only white men, then you’ve crossed the racist/sexist line. When everyone from the newstand clerk to the nurse to the grocery owner is white and male, you need to ask yourself why. There are times and places where that works. 1960s, sundown town in middle America, sure. 2010, New York City? not so much.

But I totally agree on write what pleases you the most, write the story that demands to be written. And stand tall, because someone WILL find something to gripe about.

At the same time, I think it’s important to understand why you like what you like, especially if you feel weird about it. Perhaps that’s just my scientist’s mindset — we like to break down what we love to find out how it works. People write about what resonates with them, and that usually has something to do with their gender identity (though not always — things like leather fetishes don’t have any inherent gender, do they?)

I agree about the fandoms — sometimes, there just isn’t a lot to work with that isn’t a white male. The female characters are un-identifiable or too stupid to live, so fan writers work with what they got. And women are great at slipping past gender in adventure fiction, which is where many got their start when they were kids (Narnia, LOTR, etc.) Using well-developed suspension of disbelief abilities, it’s not an issue to bond with the male characters.

“Females often get the short end of the stick as characters even when they’re supposed to be important and are repeatedly called strong in the series, only to have events prove otherwise. With the male leads getting to do more interesting things, maybe some people just think they’d be more interesting to write about.”

No kidding. It’s possible for a character to be both female and strong, without being “like a man” or compared to traditional ideas of masculine and feminine. They can just be themselves, and happen to be female.

I don’t know if that’s a valid point — if I’m ignoring inherent gender differences, or whatever. All I know is, in my martial arts class, there were women and men who were lighter and shorter than me. There were women and men who were taller and heavier — not to mention more skilled — than me. My teacher, himself, was “176 pounds soaking wet,” and took up MA to defend himself.

He said something like this to a few of us after class: “You have to work with what you have. There will be people who are stronger and faster than you, but you’re always going to have something over them. You just have to find out what it is.”

I’ve gotten to the point where if I encounter a Mary Sue in fanfiction I might mention it if the author seems like they’d be open to criticism, but odds are just as good that I’ll simply move away from a story and go read something else. Sometimes a person might not know they’re writing a Mary Sue and will appreciate some comments pointing it out, but there are also people who know and just don’t care. It annoys me to see something so flat but I’ve learned to move on and let them write what they enjoy.

I’d say that even people who do enjoy seeing original characters in fanfiction, or at least don’t mind them, hate Mary Sues because they’re perfect and few things are more annoying or boring than reading about a perfect character. Another aspect is that they lessen the canon characters by taking away screen time, becoming the focus of the story, and frequently causing the characters’ personalities to change. Suddenly Heero from Gundam Wing is writing poems at midnight and spitting on Relena just because Mary Sue is the love of his life.

I’m not up for speculating much about fandom in general because I think there’s a lot that would have to be taken into account so I can only talk about myself and my writing habits.

I write mostly about women because I’m one myself and because I’ve spent the last couple of years writing Sailormoon crossover fanfiction, which naturally meant writing about a lot of strong women. I’m not more inclined to read a story just because it includes a female lead anymore than I’m more likely to play a game just because it has a female lead. It all depends on how interesting the premise looks.

If I think I can do it, I’ll write f/m, m/m, f/f, or whatever, but I usually do f/m because that’s what I most comfortable with. I’ve tried writing m/m before; sometimes it sucks and sometimes it doesn’t, but trying to force it always made it worse. I haven’t done f/f but if the story is good, I’ll read it and if I ever had an idea I wouldn’t mind trying it.

A character’s race won’t make me more or less likely to write about them; it just depends on whether or not I find them interesting. I’m also not going to write about someone just because she’s black anymore than I’m going to write about her just because she’s female. The result of writing in that mindset would probably be weak. If I see them as an underrepresented character with potential, well, that’s different.

And one quick moment of speculation: a large amount of the fandoms I know of have males, some of them white, as the main characters (which is a separate problem), getting the most screen time, character development, and the like. It’s possible that some people are more comfortable writing about these characters because they’ve had the opportunity to make a better connection with them – they know that character’s goals, past, and how he interacts with others better than other character’s and because of that they feel more comfortable writing about him.

Females often get the short end of the stick as characters even when they’re supposed to be important and are repeatedly called strong in the series, only to have events prove otherwise. With the male leads getting to do more interesting things, maybe some people just think they’d be more interesting to write about.

That results in really bad storytelling. I’ve tried to do it, too, but I keep saying, “God! I just don’t care!” with every word. Not condusive to good fiction!