fansplaining:

But just as fanfiction writers are fighting back against historical scorn towards the practice at large, in recent years fans have been standing up for Mary Sues, too. Critics of the term are working to excise it from discussions around professional works, where it disproportionally targets women writing novels about female characters. In an act of reclamation, one of the most popular female-led geek sites on the internet took the term for its name. And within fan writing communities, people are going to bat for even the most self-indulgent Mary Sues, questioning why we shame young fans for making themselves the heroes of their own stories. But is a long-embedded stigma that easy to shake?

@elizabethminkel​ takes on Mary Sues, OFCs, self-inserts, and imagines: some of the ways “young women write themselves into the narrative.”

Read more writing from Fansplaining // Support our work on Patreon 

Leave a comment