Oh, of course. I forgot about those.
Need to know questions about Borg books and other Star Trek items
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Oh, of course. I forgot about those.
That is odd, and it really shows the gaps in Memory Beta's coverage of older works. :/
Oddly enough, I actually remember Nguyen best from A Flag Full of Stars--though I'm aware that Dillard heavily rewrote that book and it's really mostly by her.
The author-surrogacy has always been the aspect that most exemplifies a Mary Sue to me, regardless of whether there's any particular "upstaging" involved. Wish fulfillment doesn't have to be about outdoing your favourite characters--if I write a Superman story where the main character is Superman's pal and that character is obviously based on me, that character is a Mary Sue even if they don't have any special abilities. (Kevin Smith's apperances on Degrassi are like this, where he plays what comes across as a Mary Sue version of himself.)
In that sense, analysing what Piper goes through is beside the point--her "obvious author-surrogate" qualities outweigh any particular plot machinations.
Interesting example, since the quintessential "Superman's Pal," Jimmy Olsen, was created specifically to be a wish-fulfillment insertion character, albeit for the young audience members of the '40s radio show rather than for the authors.
I don't think it's beside the point, since there doesn't have to be only one point. Literary analysis isn't about reducing the entire conversation to a single issue and ignoring everything else. I'll grant that Piper herself has qualities in common with a Mary Sue, but I still stand by the premise that Dreadnought! and Battlestations! were intrinsically trying to be more a "Lower Decks"/"Blink"/Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-style approach to TOS, not so much about having a single guest character intrude on the main characters' dynamic as to show the universe from a supporting character's point of view. Maybe the "Mary Sue"-ish attributes get in the way of that to an extent, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there, or that the books weren't a novel experiment in a way that makes them different from other books with "Mary Sue"-ish characters.
The way I see it, there's definitely a difference between a standard Author Avatar and a full-on Mary Sue.
If I wrote a character based on me, with my politics and beliefs, and I made him the ruggedly handsome, super-talented iconoclastic perfect hero who saves the day and is the only person who could ever be the true love of both [insert characters to be played by Emma Watson and Natalie Portman here] at the same time, he'd be a Mary Sue / Marty Stu.
If, on the other hand, I made the same character, but made him horribly nearsighted, kinda pudgy around the waist, emotionally flat, grouchy, annoyingly critical of mostly everything, and, despite any outstanding abilities, generally unlikeable enough that it would likely require divine intervention to keep him from dying alone and unmourned (In other words, more actually like me), and he is, at best, the Lancer of the story, then he's Not a Sue/Stu, but he's still an Author Avatar.
If I wrote a character based on me, with my politics and beliefs, and I made him the ruggedly handsome, super-talented iconoclastic perfect hero who saves the day and is the only person who could ever be the true love of both [insert characters to be played by Emma Watson and Natalie Portman here] at the same time, he'd be a Mary Sue / Marty Stu.
If, on the other hand, I made the same character, but made him horribly nearsighted, kinda pudgy around the waist, emotionally flat, grouchy, annoyingly critical of mostly everything, and, despite any outstanding abilities, generally unlikeable enough that it would likely require divine intervention to keep him from dying alone and unmourned (In other words, more actually like me), and he is, at best, the Lancer of the story, then he's Not a Sue/Stu, but he's still an Author Avatar.
Yes. Again, a Mary Sue is not the general character type, it's the character type done badly. People have forgotten that and used the term to dismiss the entire character type as intrinsically bad.
I think if you take that too far and are self-conscious about it, it can be another kind of Sue in its own right. The key is balance. What matters is that the character works as a character regardless of author-insertion aspects. The problem is when the character doesn't work -- when they're badly written, when they're alleged to be remarkable without actually doing anything to demonstrate that worth, or most of all when the other characters have to be sabotaged and written out of character in order to make them less capable than the insertion figure. To me, that last is the key thing that makes a character a Mary Sue -- it's not just about how that character is written, but about how the other characters are mishandled in order to enhance that character.
Clear examples of upstaging would include things like "Piper nearly checkmates Kobayashi Maru, without cheating, by making the simulation fight itself," or "Piper tells Spock not to bother disengaging the locked automatic helm setting, because she and her friends had already done so." Then again, she emotionally upstaged the regulars even when they reveal that the opportunities she'd seized were opportunities they'd covertly handed her, and they ask what took her so long.
But I disagree with the assertion that "done badly" is part of the definition of a Mary-Sue. "Usually done badly," yes, but the exceptions can be truly brilliant. Then again, I've always asserted that (1) all fiction, including contemporary and historical realism, is genre fiction, because contemporary realism and historical realism are genres in themselves, and (2) the difference between good fiction and bad is that good fiction transcends its genre (without abandoning it), while bad fiction is circumscribed by it genre. Most Mary-Sue fiction is circumscribed by the Mary-Sue genre; the Piper novels transcend that genre.
But I disagree with the assertion that "done badly" is part of the definition of a Mary-Sue. "Usually done badly," yes, but the exceptions can be truly brilliant. Then again, I've always asserted that (1) all fiction, including contemporary and historical realism, is genre fiction, because contemporary realism and historical realism are genres in themselves, and (2) the difference between good fiction and bad is that good fiction transcends its genre (without abandoning it), while bad fiction is circumscribed by it genre. Most Mary-Sue fiction is circumscribed by the Mary-Sue genre; the Piper novels transcend that genre.
I don't agree. As I said, stories that focus more on a guest star than the regulars were a commonplace practice in '60s and '70s series television, and thus should be perfectly valid in tie-in or fan fiction based on a '60s TV series. And there's nothing wrong with having that guest character be female, especially to offset the unfortunate male-domination of the TOS cast. And there's nothing wrong with competence porn, with writing about a character who's really good at what they do. As for authorial insertion, most every character is a reflection of the author to some degree, and many authorial insertion characters have been quite effective.
A lot of early Trek fanfiction, therefore, had stories focusing on female guest characters. The original "Mary Sue" was a character in a parody story written to make fun of examples of that type of story that were done badly, that put self-aggrandizing fantasy over competent storytelling and characterization. It was meant to satirize the excesses of the trope, not to condemn the entire practice.
As for the ratio of good to bad, there we run into Sturgeon's Law -- which itself was coined because of Star Trek. When other writers expressed surprise that Theodore Sturgeon would write for television given that 90 percent of it was garbage, he replied, "But 90 percent of everything is garbage." No matter what category of story you pick out, you can claim that the preponderance of negative examples invalidates the entire category. But that's wrong, because you can find just as many negative examples of any other category of story. Especially in a field like fan fiction, where there are no editors and sales departments to serve as gatekeepers to winnow out the worst. I would imagine that most fanfiction of any category, be it author-insertion or slash or hurt-comfort or alternate-universe or any other trope, can be said to be "usually done badly."
Thank you for answering my questions. I'm still a little confused about what a Vendorian is. What's TAS stand for? Was that supposed to be TOS? Is "Survivor" the third season episode where Spock let himself get hit on the head? Paramount better NOT contradict Data's resurrection in the next series if they want to make money off of me. I won't support someone that takes away my favorite character. They can take away Troi, and that won't bother me one bit. They made it look like she'd be the one dead and Data would still be living in the last episode "All Good Things." Now we know that the timeline of Star Trek got screwed up, so for all we know Data might never have died in the 24th century.
God bless, Jason Irelan
God bless, Jason Irelan
Memory Alpha is your friend.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Survivor_(episode)
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Carter_Winston_(impostor)
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Survivor_(episode)
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Carter_Winston_(impostor)
Thank you. I have all the animated episodes. Those are the only Star Trek episodes I have that are truly mine. I got them at a Wal-Mart. I liked seeing Christopher Lloyd in Star Trek III as Kruge or Kluge. Any chance they might use him in another movie doing another role? He plays a good Klingon, but I liked him better as Jim on Taxi. Maybe they could do a Star Trek movie with him and the rest of the cast from that show: Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Marilou Henner, the guy who played that young actor, and the one who played Latka who was the immigrant.
God bless, Jason Irelan
Andy Kaufman (Latka's actor) died in 1984.
This thread is hilarious. 
So did Jeff Conaway, the actor who played Bobby, the actor character.
Jeff Conaway was in Babylon 5 in the 90s. According to Wikipedia, he passed away in 2011.
Incidentally, Larry Nemecek's ST:TNG Companion mentions that Christopher Lloyd nearly played another guest-role on that series, some time during Seasons 5-7 (can't recall which season, specifically, right off the top of my head).
Full Circle (this is a link) is the first book in the current Voyager series which follows the massive Borg invasion in Destiny (another link).
Full Circle is a Voyager novel, a portion of which covers the events of the Destiny trilogy told from the perspective of the Voyager characters.
EDIT: Damn, ninja'd
EDIT: Damn, ninja'd
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