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A Trekkie's Tale

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42 pointsTomte26 comments

If a male Mary Sue is a Marty Stu, what should one call a national mythos in which one's country is (a) universally loved (except by the villains!), because it (b) possesses all positive qualities, and (c) suffers no negative qualities?

Mauritania Sue? Mary Sudan?

America

Thinking nationalism's limited to one country is, itself, a form of nationalism.

Of course, but can't one snipe just a little at the many many blockbuster movies in which the US comes to the rescue to everyones relief? For an archetype, see Independence Day (1996).

Hollywood only exports what sells.

I'm always on the lookout for films showing other than the US/UK/Japan fighting off the aliens. The furthest off-beat film I know has Inuit fighting the invaders, Slash/Back (2022). It's a very low budget production, but not painfully amateurish. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash/Back)

“Propaganda”

Oceania? (from 1984)

Terra Misu

The term "slash fiction" is rooted in Star Trek too. Back in the 70's, a very popular fan-fiction subject was a Kirk/Spock romance (with other gay pairings popular as well). I believe it was mostly women who were into these stories.

Living in Japan years ago, I was surprised at the huge piles of boy-boy romance manga in the bookshops, given the notable lack of such coupling out and around. It was eventually explained to me that the market for these was mostly young women.

A boy-boy pair of my friends visited Japan once, and said that although they felt like a bit of a curiosity, it was amplified when one of them wore his school sweatshirt (featuring a large "H") and that day they were pursued by muffled giggles.

That's just a gender swapped Wesley Crusher story.

In fact, one of the reasons Wesley got such a bad rep back in the day was because fans considered him to be a genderswapped Mary Sue, introduced to appeal to the younger audience. Ten years later, people would probably have considered him to be a highly-competent Jar Jar Binks.

That caused the character to be abused on-screen, first as a cheap vehicle for audience representation, later as your favorite whipping boy when it became clear he didn't appeal as much as originally intended. And eventually, he was written out of the show.

I'm glad Wheaton still managed to get out of there not completely jaded.

In the first 2 series Wesley was an especially badly written character in an already badly written show, the only reason it survived long enough to become a good show is because it's Star Trek. There are some good moments in the first 2 series, but not many.

Wesley is much better in later episodes as the writing on the show improved a lot, and also because Wheaton's acting improved a bit. "Young cadet struggling with being young" would have been a good regular, not to dissimilar to Nog in DS9, and Wheaton would have been a good actor for it, but I guess by this time the damage had been done.

My guess is that Roddenberry had plans for the character, but as his health declined and his involvement in the show was reduced, the remaining producers did not have the heart to get rid of Wesley. It seemed like Wesley was mostly written out and sent off to Starfleet Academy almost immediately after Roddenberry died.

IIRC (from somewhere/when I don't recall) Wesley was Gene's ideal of what the perfect Federation citizen would be - the template for how humanity had evolved beyond basically everything that made for good drama. The end result came off as an insufferable know-it-all.

It's unfortunate that so much of the hatred for Wesley transferred to Wil Wheaton for so long. He's come out from under it since, but a lot of trekkies hated Wil just because of the role he played.

Fun fact: Originally, Wesley was intended to be female: Leslie Crusher. So the original idea was to not even bother with gender-swapping.

My understanding was that Wesley was supposed to have much less screen time, but due to how syndicated series were run combined with a writer strike what was a bunch of unpolished early drafts (that normally would end up condensed into fewer episodes after a lot of editing and polish) ended going straight to screen due to lack of finished scripts.

Have no proper confirmation of this, though.

Didn't Wesley have at least the story line where they accidentally killed another student with a risky and banned manoeuvre? He didn't came up with the idea, but still he failed to stand up to the guy who had and became an accomplice.

The maneuver was the "Kolvoord Starburst" in The First Duty (ST:TNG S05E19).[0]

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_First_Duty_(episode...

He failed to keep his mouth shut more like it. Picard guilt trips him into confessing, but this was very late in the series. Wesley had already established himself as an insufferable child prodigy so there wasn’t a lot of growth available to him as a character.

The far more interesting leader was the precursor character to Tom Paris. Who was a much better gifted character because he had flaws to redeem at the beginning, not at the end.

Mary Sue reminds me why I don't care for fan fiction. Does anyone enjoy it?

I'm not going to beat up on fan fiction authors though — I can see the appeal for writing it. In fact I think it is probably a tempting gateway for budding authors.

Just be sure to use a pseudonym.

I've read a few fan fiction stories that I think were quite good. Protagonist wasn't superhuman, was effectively foiled as seemed appropriate, had flawed notions and perceptions, etc. That being said, I've read many more fanfics that made me cringe. I've enjoyed finding the good ones (that are good to me, anyway).

Discovered an interview with Paula Smith, the woman who invented the term Mary Sue, at https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/articl.... Lots of good detail there on the world of Star Trek fandom, early conventions, etc. -- and, at the end, the little story that started it all.

Not the tale of the trekkie so put out by Paramount pulling ST:Discovery from Netflix that he vowed never to watch another episode again? (Not that I'm bitter or anything)

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