Angitha Bright: "Dear Elsa Sjunneson-Henry: A Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy"

Dear Elsa Sjunneson-Henry: A Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy

By Angitha Bright

“Hey, everyone, here’s my self-insert OC! Her name is Anna, and she has long, dark hair, and pretty blue eyes and she’s amazing at sword fighting. Her parents died when she was very young, and so her entire arc is a bloody revenge murderfest where she gets revenge for her parents’ deaths. Did I mention she’s a good sword fighter? She’s the absolute best in the land.” - anna308 on a fanpop.com forum in 2009

            Anna’s name really isn’t Anna but she wishes it was because it’s normal, and feminine, and none of her teachers have ever mispronounced the name Anna. Her name is actually Aamir, and she has brown eyes, but no special person has ever just had plain brown eyes; they’ve had blue, and green, and rainbow-toned-gray-gold, but never just brown, so online, she writes that she has blue eyes. On the cusp of puberty, Anna is not faring well, her voice beginning to deepen before she ever wanted it to, her frame becoming gangly and masculine. Lastly, she’s got a muscular disorder that’ll prevent her from ever picking up a sword, or a staff, or a box that weighs more than twenty pounds because god forbid, she picks one up and her back muscles stop functioning for a week. But she wants to, oh, does she want to.

            It’s 2009. It’s early enough that fandom culture amongst teens is just beginning to get injected with social justice ideals, -- diversity, representation, and just-be-who-you-are sentiment. It’s early enough that Anna, indoctrinated in that culture, made a whitewashed, forcibly censored self-insert OC -- a version of herself that was socially acceptable. A man in his late twenties makes a joke that Anna’ OC is a Mary Sue, a wish-fulfillment fantasy joke, and she takes down her introduction post on the forum. In embarrassment, she doesn’t touch the Fanpop account again.

Flash forward to 2015, and Anna’s taken time away to learn to love who she is. She still goes by Anna, but she’s reclaimed her identity. She’s come out; she’s talked to her family about her heritage; she’s talked to other people with her disabilities. She’s growing up. She’s almost completely forgotten her Mary Sue character from 2009, until she digs up a terrible sketch she did of the character during a room cleanout, and remembers who she wanted to be when she was younger.

Really, though? Did the Mary Sue represent who she wanted to be? Was it her ideal fantasy self, a fantasy wish-fulfillment? Was it truly, genuinely her, or was it an artificially “perfected” copy?

Okay, so this isn’t really about Anna. This is about me, and you, and all the marginalized people out there who obfuscated on their own identities when they were younger. Popular culture wasn’t friendly towards minorities at that time (and still isn’t, but I digress), and thus, so many of us conformed and changed our identities to fit within the generic template provided to us. And when our identities, whether they be real or fabricated, were attacked as being personal wish-fulfillment, or Mary Sue’s, we alienated ourselves from the rest of the community.

But here’s the thing: wish-fulfillment is perfectly fine. Creating Mary Sue’s, especially ones centered around an individual’s marginalized identities -- that is fine; that should be encouraged, even. Loving yourself enough to create something so uniquely you is good. Yes, create that Mary Sue of identity wish-fulfillment, because you are the only person who can tell that exact story of that exact character. By creating diverse media, we are reducing the toxic culture that forces marginalized youth to conform to societal expectations of who they should be. We give a larger universe for authors to play with -- not only swords and spaceships, but culture and identity; a personal touch amist a genre that seeks that often distances itself from the mundane.

Therefore, we should be advocating actively to remove terms such as “Mary Sue” from SF lexicon. These terms, already unnecessarily gendered, are used as weapons to target the intentions of often marginalized individuals. But they forget the nuance of that intention -- it no longer becomes a wish-fulfillment if you can write a story about yourself as you are. In that case, it’s merely fulfillment.