Thomas Harris: "To Elsa Sjunneson-Henry: Marginalizations and Mary Sues"

To Elsa Sjunneson-Henry: Marginalizations and Mary Sues

by Thomas Harris

 

            The white, straight, cis, and male mentality of prized literature is toxic, and it is diffused by all who cannot experience intersectional disparities. I am going to speak broadly, but I know that cultural, visual, and nonvisual disparities are never the same, even in their own categories.

I am gay, and I come from not so well-off socio-economic origins. I have mental health issues and constantly depart from a past that has dealt with domestic violence.

I just listed off who I am in these ways for a number of reasons. For one, I can tell you that I know that their privileges are not gonna be the standards of any of our voices, even their own. I believe that they bluff compassion on all fronts. The purpose of working and sharing in this way has got to be compassion and equity.  If it is not, it is not worth pursuing. It is evil.

Secondly, no matter what untraditional label in society that I obtain in my life, I cannot represent or say that I know you. And I want to know more about you! I want you to write tales in wholesome and emotional pursuit. In a indifferent and practical world, you have got to write about your differences. When people think they are the same, their words cannot be cultural.

Third of all, they do not care about me. They want success, harmony, and money when I am destined to not know any. They do not care about you. They want to conceptualize the times on clocks and the predetermination of corpses. So who are you? This is why you should tell me.

“Mary Sues” channel personal controversies and original creativity through the same

lens, and they can often protect authors from either admitting or altering their emotions and art as one. It is not always a matter of your contributions being justified or your innocence getting extracted out of pages, but I imagine that it seems like it.

            Actually, I think that I know this is true because I am about to self-publish my own book, full of poetry. It is all about my Mary Sue, and wherein, I am prepared to take both pride in my vulnerabilities and feelings or to simply call them off as a part of a character. Which option I take will depend on who is reading this. But either way, this might be the most liberating thing I have done in my life.

            To me, it is not hard to imagine that authors cite Mary Sues in order to excuse activism or interpersonal motifs in their books. I think that gender but especially disabilities latently annoy a part of the general public; if Elsa uses her rights in the speculative fiction community, some will persecute her for using the same concept, not taking risks, or not fighting the peace therein when this layout of criticism shows precisely what she wants in her own, real life - to simply reconcile.

Then, there may be people in her periphery who envy that attempt at solace, so they could try to spoil her more raw excellence in writing stories with her present, to imitate her rhetoric, or to misplace what she means, where she does not get what she deserves after all.

            Ultimately, I think that the marginalization of speculative fiction, in regards to writers that have experienced social disadvantages and who want to find happiness, is greater than the expectations of the genres without it. I believe that Mary Sues create barriers that protect such writers but also stop powerful discourse depending on what an authors would want from their penmanship.