Socrates as Mary Sue

Thanks, Belle. Great stuff.

I know most people hate Socrates — the one in Plato’s dialogues — but I love him to bits. Ever since the first time I read him, in the Apology, and then the Meno, I’ve loved his ability to bash people’s wrong arguments to bits, kick them aside, and set up better arguments in their place. It’s so *lovely.*

When I read The Just City for the first time, I literally shouted aloud for joy when Socrates showed up.

The Socrates of the Thessaly books has a lot in common with the Socrates of Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, which is a much more attractive depiction than the Socrates of either Plato or Xenophon imo (and everybody, everybody should read this book and the rest of Renault’s work if they haven’t already – just so good).

I don’t think every wish-fulfillment character is a Mary Sue. I think it’s limited to an adolescent character who finds her/himself in a strange and challenging situation, where he/she conquers all adversity and is the object of adoration by all around her.

Horatio Hornblower, for example, is no Mary Sue. He’s poor, skinny, moderately ugly, oddly named, cripplingly shy, lonely, tone-deaf and without rhythm (at a time when dancing was a crucial social skill), prone to seasickness (!), and plagued to the point of agony by class insecurity. But he’s got a physical courage that is a sort of fatalism, mathematical ability (he’s superb at navigation and at cards), strong logical reasoning, and a modesty born of self-doubt that saves him from the tyrannical sadism then common among naval officers.

I suppose nerdy boys might find HH to be a wish-fulfillment character in the sense that he is a man with the flaws of a nerdy boy who eventually succeeds brilliantly. But no one would want to be Horatio Hornblower if they had a choice.

Unlike, say, John Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. You could administer a revealing psychological test by asking, who you would rather be, Aubrey or Maturin?

Not read The Just City, so avoiding this like the plague for fear of spoilers but thought I’d pick up on:

“Can Socrates be thought of usefully as a Mary Sue? I would say yes. His many straw enemies make for a lot of unsatisfying triumphs.”

This, perhaps ironically, makes Socrates the proto-typical Ayn Rand hero, who triumphs, not due to their brilliance (though we’re assured it is immense) but because their opponents make such awful arguments.

@delagar (11)

Well I was being a bit tongue in cheek :p

On the serious side, as I recall from the Republic Thrasymacus had the better of most of their engagements, and Socrates only got out of it by ‘plot armour’. After he left Glaucon carried it on but most of it devolved into fairly poor arguments that were easily refuted; or else arguments that were conceded very cheaply. Been a long time since I read it, or anything Plato though, so I might be being retrospectively unfair.

Belle—I’ve been regretting the dilution/appropriation/MRAification of “Mary Sue” for a while now, and “Louis Wu” is absolutely the best possible replacement. (So perfect that I can’t help wondering whether Paula Smith might have had old Louie in the back of her mind when she named her precocious Starfleet lieutenant.) You’re a God-damned genius. Thank you.

Probably not going to read the series–some of the harsher Amazon reviews sounded pretty convincing and I lost interest. So spoil away.

But what’s that about unfogged? Haven’t visited in maybe a decade and don’t remember it being that weird. Maybe I didn’t visit it enough or wasn’t paying attention.

Speaking of fan fiction, I wonder if there has been a Mary Sue/Louis Wu analysis of Fifty Shades of Gray, a book that sounds in general as though it’s male wish fulfillment, but whose huge fanbase seems to be entirely female.

Propose Mary Sue/Louis Wu both as the yin “feminine”, whereas the yang “masculine” is the character who achieves victory entirely by persevering in great suffering, a thirsty scarecrow crawling across the desert. James Bond. Travis McGee. Jesus, in some interpretations, although others think he is a more complex character than that.

My reading, of Walton, Plato, Xenophon and Renault, is that the wish-fulfillment is to be acknowledged as a close companion, to get to discuss philosophy with Socrates rather than to be Socrates, to be allowed to travel with him. Socrates is actually Gandalf.

That’s pretty good.

“In the genre of the Folktale the hero has a very specific role: he slays the dragon and marries the princess. He, moreover, is very much the expected gender of the hero.”

There has been quite a bit of work that shows that the published folk tales by collectors in the 19th C were unrepresentative of the actual folk tales collected, which were less constrained by 19th C middle class gender norms and good manners etc. Although lots of them were unsuitable for children as they were originally told so they had to get bowdlerised to be children’s books like they were turned into. There are quite a number of articles on this, e.g:

“Schönwerth’s tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, collectors who gave us relatively tame versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel.”

Schönwerth gives us a harsher dose of reality than most collections.

His Cinderella is a woodcutter’s daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun. His miller’s daughter wields an ax and uses it to disenchant a prince by chopping off the tail of a gigantic black cat.

The stories remain untouched by literary sensibilities. No throat-clearing for Schönwerth, who begins in medias res, with “A princess was ill” or “A prince was lost in the woods,” rather than “Once upon a time…”
….
Our own culture, under the spell of Grimm and Perrault, has favored fairy tales starring girls rather than boys, princesses rather than princes. But Schönwerth’s stories show us that once upon a time, Cinderfellas evidently suffered right alongside Cinderellas, and handsome young men fell into slumbers nearly as deep as Briar Rose’s hundred-year nap.”

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/cinderfellas-the-long-lost-fairy-tales

Bloix @ #8 writes: You could administer a revealing psychological test by asking, who you would rather be, Aubrey or Maturin?

Wow, it literally never occurred to me that anyone might answer Aubrey. That’d be like admitting you’d quite like to be Boris Johnson.

To be myself in Aubrey’s shoes, perhaps, but then I would be dead several times over and so would everyone else on board. But to actually be Jack Aubrey instead of myself? An appalling vista.

for the love of Socrates I propose to make myself the target of a lot of resulting ire:

What this discussion shows is that Plato has a different conception of philosophy than analytic philosophers do. Worse, the analytic philosophers don’t understand that they are themselves making a lot of assumptions about what philosophy is. Many of the respondents here don’t seem to realize what your assumptions are, and are faulting Plato (more broadly, you guys are in truth faulting all of, or much of, of classical philosophy) without working to understand what philosophic dialogues might be up to.

Plato was writing something new: the dialogues are something like plays, but at the same time they are not plays. (We should not forget that the first literary depiction of Socrates is within Aristophanes’ Clouds, and it is a fairly negative depiction by one of the greatest comic poets of history.) That is, Plato’s dialogues (and the rest of the dialogue writers of the early Socratic circle like Xenophon and Aeschines of Sphettus) inhabit some sort of genre we still really don’t have a conception for. What we can perhaps intimate is that Plato is dubious about writing – the famous discussion of writing in the Phaedrus, for one example. The actual Socrates seems to have shared this opinion, bolstered by the fact that he himself wrote nothing.

What this seems to indicate is that how a Platonic dialogue operates is – intentionally – entirely different from how a treatise or essay operates. That most (but not all) of Socrates’ interlocutors advance mediocre to bad arguments isn’t Plato loading the deck for Socrates. Much of the time Socrates doesn’t “win” anything, and only sometimes offers a concrete conclusion of his own. We often don’t read back into the dialogues that the early Socratic circle generally produced works that show Socrates’ trial, which he loses and then is executed (Xenophon and Plato both write Apologies, and Aeschines of Sphettus seems to be arguing against the charges that Socrates is executed for). Socrates is, at the end, not some Louis Wu – he gets executed in a jail cell (the archetypal Louis Wu or Mary Sue wins, of course). And we note that his pupils worked hard to avoid the same fate (some left Athens, others wrote things that are difficult to understand, others simply fell silent).

The intellectual weakness of many of Socrates’ interlocutors isn’t, I think, a stacking of the deck against them. Their intellectual weakness usually points to problems or flaws within their own psychologies and characters that prevent them from being stronger adversaries. The point of many of the dialogues seems much less to convince us of some particular conclusion but rather to guide us into doing the work of philosophy ourselves alongside of the written work. Lots of people have made this point before, but: the dialogue form forces the reader to think in ways that are different than the treatise or essay.

Further, the dialogues of Socrates’ students can be viewed as a sort of reinactment of Socrates’ life, perhaps to achieve catharsis for Socrates’ pupils after his traumatic death. (Both Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues can viewed as a tragic dramatic cycle that end in Socrates’ death.) And this in turn means that a primary purpose of the dialogue is less to argue for advanced particular philosophic conclusions than to have the readers re-experience or re-live what being around Socrates was like. That, in turn, means focusing on how philosophy or philosophers interact with non-philosophers, as most of the citizens of Athens were. Dialogues where two philosophers (or let’s just say, two extremely adept thinkers) converse would be beside the point of what dialogues are supposed to do under that interpretation, because dialogues like that wouldn’t move us toward the dramatic endpoint of the cycle (philosophers presumably wouldn’t try to use public opinion to murder each other).

When I read Plato, I tend to imagine it as performed by Monty Python. When someone takes the bait and objects to something Socrates says, everyone in the room standing behind him is rolling their eyes, and John Cleese is mutely shaking his head, staring at the questioner in panic. Then Socrates’ opponent catches the drift, and goes into the “Why of *course* Socrates, it’s so obvious once you explain it” routine.

“I’m interested in what makes a character a Mary Sue. It’s a useful term (though problematic as I will say below).”

Let’s start with an attempt to define Mary Sue. There are a few competing definitions:
(1) Audience insertion character designed to have broad appeal. A character who is deliberately designed as a bit of a generic blank slate, undercharacterized, but with characteristics designed to seem attractive to most of the audience so that the audience wants to BE her. (This is my preferred definition.)

Example: every single companion ever on Doctor Who, including the robot dog.

Extreme example of a Mary Sue: main character in a traditional computer adventure game like Zork or a Choose Your Own Adventure Book — the completely uncharacterized “generic adventurer”, referred to occasionally as the Ageless, Faceless, Gender Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person or AFGNCAAP.

(2) Author insertion character. Unless it’s very subtle, this tends to annoy every single audience member other than the author, which is why it’s considered a bad idea. (It’s easy for a bad author to try to do #1 but slip into #2 by assuming his own idiosyncrasies and biases are universal. Sorry, Larry Niven, you did this. Sorry, Plato, you did this.)

(3) Character who is given more-awesome-than-really-plausible powers, luck, abilities, etc. — wish-fulfillment. This tends to be an automatic side-effect of #1 or #2, for obvious reasons. The audience often wants to identify with a character who is a “better version of themselves” and fulfills their wishes, and authors often have inflated self-images.

This is not a good use of the term because if the character is neither author insertion nor audience insertion, this definition includes characters like Superman — or God in the Bible — who few people think of as Mary Sues, because nobody expects to identify with them. Superman is pure wish-fulfillment of a very simplistic variety, but it’s the wish that someone else will come save you (from whatever), so nobody identifies with him.

Also, I’d argue that a deliberately blank, undercharacterized character who is exceptionally and consistently incompetent or unlucky but designed as an audience identification character (for depressed people) should be counted as a Mary Sue. Targeted at Goths or emo types. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

(4) Arbitrary term of abuse against strong female characters. You can spot when some misogynist is doing this.

Mary Sue was originally a derogatory term because it arose in the context of Star Trek fandom. And Star Trek, structurally, *has no audience insertion characters*; you’re not supposed to identify with any of the characters in that generic, undercharacterized manner. It’s a very “you’re watching from the outside” show. Star Trek as a whole also has a weak and inconsistent authorship and no author insertion characters. So Mary Sues in Star Trek fan fiction are *inappropriate*. Star Trek actually has lots of wish-fulfillment, but it’s *societal* wish-fulfillment, not personal.

Nobody has to my knowledge ever complained about Mary Sues in Doctor Who fan fiction (unless they’re just using it as a term of arbitrary abuse, and that happens very rarely). This lack of “Mary Sue criticism” is unusual for a sci-fi fandom. Why is this the case? Because Doctor Who’s format *requires* such an undercharacterized audience insertion character. Writing a story with a brand new companion who is Earth Human with a few hobbies who gets picked up and goes on fabulous adventures saving entire planets by being awesome… that’s the *format*. If there isn’t a Mary Sue, it isn’t proper Doctor Who. And the canon Sues are mostly female.

Socrates is an author-insertion character (#2), not an audience-insertion character (#1).

Of course being a huge Doctor Who fan *and* a fan of classic computer games and Choose Your Own Adventure books, I personally *like* the undercharacterized Mary Sue protagonist. In the original Mary Sue story, which I’ve read, it’s funny how inappropriate it is for Star Trek, but honestly I think she’s still likeable.

I don’t consider a character a Mary Sue if she’s sufficiently well-characterized to make large portions of the audience go “ick” (typical of author-insertion characters like Louis Wu or Socrates) or fully characterized. If she’s fully characterized and ridiculously awesome, she’s a wish-fulfillment character but a *very specific* one, as opposed to the more generic Mary Sue designed to fit everyone’s fantasies.

Dante in Dante’s Inferno probably does qualify as a Mary Sue. Despite being an explicit author-insertion character, he’s actually undercharacterized and a bit blank, really intended for the audience to identify with.

Anyway, that’s my piece on Mary Sue. Better technical terms include author-insertion character and audience-insertion character.

OK, I guess they have Audience Surrogate now.

HOLD IT!!

Are you saying that Platonic Dialogues–Plato’s real dialogues–are Unlogged comment threads, but that Plato has taken out comments he thinks are too persuasive but doesn’t agree with and replaced them with weaker versions of the arguments?

225 ZM “‘But Schönwerth’s stories show us that once upon a time, Cinderfellas evidently suffered right alongside Cinderellas, and handsome young men fell into slumbers nearly as deep as Briar Rose’s hundred-year nap.’”

Just so. It’s the cultural expectations, not the formula of the genre, that’s fucked up.

I just don’t think Mary Sue is useful term outside of fan fiction. To me a key element is that instead of writing a story about the canon main characters, those characters are reduced to admirers of the author insert character who is awesome and wonderful and special.

I think that attempts to expand it’s meaning beyond that original context have resulted in a term that everyone agrees is derogatory but no one can agree on what exactly it’s meant to criticize. Another specific term with a precise meaning that got overused by people who didn’t completely understand the original purpose and overapplied because it sounds cool. See also macguffin.

If you think a character is too perfect, or underdeveloped, or doesn’t earn their dramatic successes, why not just say that, instead of trying to hang a lable on it that will just confuse the issue anyway?