Dear Fanboys Angry at Rogue One‘s “Mary Sue” …

To: Angry Fanboys
From: The Mary Sue

You’re right. We did it. We stole your Death Star plans.

Oh, it wasn’t easy. It took years—decades of planning to execute this plan. After all this time toiling under this idea that a woman can’t be a hero, after all this time watching dude after dude duke it out on-screen, we decided that it was time for us to take the story into our own hands. So while you were sleeping, the Mary Sues of the world all got together to hit you in your emotional thermal exhaust ports: your freaking childhood.

We’ve got your Death Star plans right here, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to realize just how much the plot of your favorite movie hinges on the actions of one woman (accompanied by a team full of dudes anyway). I guess it’s kind of like realizing that the name of your men’s rights movement is wholesale stolen from a movie written by two trans women. Oh, the irony. But I digress.

You see, we’ve got more than just your Death Star plans. What we have is this realization that these worlds—these rich, fantastic fantasy/sci-fi/everything worlds—don’t just belong to you anymore. They never really only belonged to you. They belonged to all of us, and always have, despite how hard you’ve tried to erase us from the narrative.

There’s no stopping this, friend, because now that we’re stepping out into the light and being seen for the heroes that we can be, we’re learning that we like it, and we want more. We want what’s rightfully ours, and we’re getting it with Rey, Jyn Erso, General Leia, and Jessika Pava. We’re getting it with Katniss, with Lisbeth, with Ripley, with Uhura, with Black Widow, with Spider-Gwen, with every single Mary Sue in the god damned book, and we’re doing it all while laughing at the very idea of a Mary Sue.

What we have here is the same old story: behind every successful man’s accomplishments, there are the efforts of a tired army of women—an army of Mary Sues. Now that the light’s finally being shed on what these women have been able to do, you can fully expect even more women to come out of the woodwork to keep this veritable Rebellion going. Go ahead and seethe in your anger, wallow in your unhappiness. Because while you do, while you clench your fists in incredulous rage over this subversion of your male power fantasy, we’ll be over here doing work, getting recognized, and overthrowing this Empire-esque stranglehold you have on fandoms. As one prominent Mary Sue once said, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Fanboys: We, the Mary Sues of the world, have your Death Star plans and your lightsabers right here.

Come and get ’em.

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

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Jessica Lachenal

Jessica Lachenal is a writer who doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so she isn’t quite sure how biographical info panels should work. But here we go anyway. She's the Weekend Editor for The Mary Sue, a Contributing Writer for The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), and a Staff Writer for Spinning Platters (spinningplatters.com). She's also been featured in Model View Culture and Frontiers LA magazine, and on Autostraddle. She hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her.

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