A rant about Black Queen and Mary-Sue Witch Hunt

Ryin here. As an avid Groups of Interest fan, today I am going to talk about one of the two “single-person” GOI; The Black Queen. Aka Alison Chao, Gears’ s daughter.

Oh I know! That girl who is somehow afflicted with every GOIs, has unusual knowledge of Foundation, and is described as destructive, neutral and nice in different documents? She is such a Mary-Sue! How come the wiki members don’t downvote this crappy character to deletion?

Woah. Hold on, put your torches down, get a fire extinguisher, enter the Groups of Interest page after you put out the flame, and gently click at the red color title which says “Black Queen”.

This shall bring you to the Black Queen Hub, which offers tales and background story about this group. And, to save your time, I’ll spoil the whole story out in one sentence, so beware if you want to look at the Hub yourself, ‘cause the whole chunk of words until the Mary-Sue witch hunt session are spoilers.

Black Queen is not one individual, but a collection of individuals with similar experiences.

In many multi-universe, there will always be a man named Gears. He has a wife and a daughter, and one day, he just left without any traces. With her mother devastated, Gears’ s daughter had to fend for herself.

When those daughters grew up, they went different directions. Many become fixated on the idea of finding their father, and bring to account those who broke their family apart. Many remained unnoticeable and mentally-traumatized. Many live and died like any other human beings.

Those who worked to reunite with their father and succeeded, found him working for an extranormal organization and lost his capacity to feel. Sometimes this emotionally-dead stage can be fixed, and sometimes it can’t.

Some of those daughters become murderous and destructive due to their experiences. Some still retain parts of their consciences. Some succeeded and rescued their father, only to found him an empty shell; and some managed to save him and rebuild their family.

Only very few of them discovered the Wanderer’s Library, an extradimensional space that can be accessed through portals called Ways. Entities from multi-universe can all visit this place, and those who entered the Library eventually found out each other’s existences.

Those daughters in the Library referred to one another and themselves as Little Sisters. And, from here, with different motives and different personalities, they walked upon their own paths once again.

Strangely, one leader figure in Serpent’s Hand is only known as L.S, hidden under the effect of an anomaly so no one can recognize him or her, and L.S is just the abbreviation of Little Sister. Is L.S one of the daughters? No one will possibly know.

The daughters are Black Queen. After reading this summary, does she, or them still look like Mary-Sues to you?

Black Queen is characterized as murderous, neutral and benevolent in different reports, because it is not one single person doing these things. It is many different individuals with different personalities being recorded by observers, thus the contradicting descriptions make sense.

Black Queen has unusual knowledge of Foundation and its mechanism, because first, those who are in the Library are literally in a place full of all the knowledges ever recorded in every multi-verse. Within those records and books, it will not be surprising that Foundation intelligences and archives are also among them.

Second, Gears, their father, is always a Foundation employee. For those who know each other’s existences, don’t you think that they will exchange information and gain quite a bit of understanding about the organization that takes their father away? Not to mention that many Black Queens still obsessively seek to rescue Gears from or destroy Foundation, and there are definitely Little Sisters who know the Library among them.

Black Queen is afflicted with almost all major GOIs because of multiple individuals too. L.S of Serpent’s Hand is often interpreted as one such instances.

After those seemly Sue-ish points have been explained by evidences from Black Queen Hub, its most official setting, will you still make the same conclusion?

The moral of this story is, when in doubt, always find more information first. Which in this case, is just one click away and you don’t need to search all over the wiki for it.

However, this do bring me to one thing I were once guilty of:

Mary-Sue Witch Hunt.

What is a Mary-Sue in the first place? My definition, in general, is characters who never encounter any meaningful challenges, is 2-dimensional or unrealistic in terms of personalities, and warp the law of the universe around them for their own benefits. Like how Foundation-verse magic is a very complicated and difficult to achieve, while some OCs can shoot out multiple fireballs with no worries of backslash or efforts made to master it.

You have to admit, there are a lot of Mary-Sues made by Foundation fans who never read Guide Hub or think it is a branch of Creepypasta. Canon Hub, Joke articles, and non-Foundation centered tales not included, one of Foundation-verse’s fundamental elements is its tone of realism when writing about paranormal beings.

They are trying to use materials that actually exist in our world, mundane procedures, and general structures of research documents/government agencies to contain anomalous objects that should not exist. That’s what make Foundation unique and interesting to read, because one can totally imagine one of those objects, produced by some kind of dice-throw in reality, existing in our world and someone trying to deal with it.

What about Mary-Sues? Those whom I mentioned in my other tutorials are not only unrealistic; they violate common sense, writing guides on the wiki and reader’s suspension of disbelief so much, to the point that it feels funny (when the authors want to create a tragic effect), utterly out-of-place in Foundation-verse, or downright inconsistent and boring.

And I tell people to stay away from clichés that create them, because too many bad writings can really be disappointing for fans who want to read a close-to-original Foundation fanfiction. Even good parodies require one to fully know about whatever things they are making fun of to make them funny, isn’t it?

But when people go the other direction, and start to call everything that fit three criteria on the Mary-Sue litmus test abominations that should be killed with fire, it is as bad as praising and defending poorly-written characters’ existence. Proper criticisms and analyzations that tell the creators what exactly is wrong with their works and how they can fix it are good, but this? This is just flaming and possibly trolling under a seemly-rightful excuse.

It is really like witch-hunt. Able? Despite the fact that this skip is one of the heritage works back when Foundation has a totally different writing standard than now, and lolfoundation is almost like canon, it has to be insulted thoroughly and kill with fire just because this article was borne in a time when Foundation-verse has not even fully form. Really?

Iris? Even after Clef had rewritten this article to make it more serious (and a lot of people were unhappy about that), and Resurrection canon is taking Omega-7 of the past to a more realistic and interesting path, STUPID SUPER POWERED MARY-SUE HAS TO DIE! It is okay to not like humanoid skips who can control their anomalous effects, or sapient humanoid skips in general, but this kind of comment contributed nothing useful except for making people feel your petty spite.

Does Iris qualify for not encountering any meaningful challenges? Is the law of the Foundation-verse bent for her? From what I remembered, when she tried to leave, she is captured back and forced to use her anomalous effects again, as expected, and returned to containment. You try that on one of the many Sues out there on fanfiction.net and Wattpad, and their shiny reality-bending power will blast you to ash.  

I have no particular liking for both skips mentioned above, but really, when there is no canon, only generally-agreed tone/setting and 2000-3000+ wiki members to decide whether an article should live, these two old writings survived until today, with several standard changes in between. At least respect them for this feat on a writing website with freakishly high standard, is that asking too much?

Oh, and Black Queen? KNOWS A LOT ABOUT FOUNDATION! HAS CONTACT WITH EVERY GOIS! A CANON CHARACTER’S DAUGHTER! MARY SUE! MARY SUE!

One has to wonder how accurate your understanding of Foundation-verse is when the Hub is just a click away, and you don’t even bother to look at it.

And some people basically FIXED their whole gaze on “how can all those Black Queen be so stupid lol, obsessing over their father and cannot move on” while selectively ignoring the fact that quite a number of them ARE NOT LIKE THAT.

Don’t believe me? In the letter written by one of the Black Queens, she mentioned “Others have walked the ways, seeking out ancient and obscure worlds. Some ignore Gears, some obsessively seek him out. A few have decided that all of this convergence is the work of a god or gods.”

This is quoted directly from the Hub, and clearly showing that not all Black Queens are fussing over Gears while being angry child-woman terrorists with no concern for the world (unlike how some viewed them with rather selective and hateful bias).

You may find some who are simply seeking out knowledge to understand better about their fate, or some Little Sisters that just can’t be bothered with their father because they think he is an absolute asshole. It is more about how a huge turning point in one’s life and shared experience affect different individuals with different background and personality instead of something like “OHHH BLACK QUEEN IS SUCH A BADASS OF THE GOI WORLD”.

On second thought, my dear friend, if you are not satisfied with the current interpretation of Black Queen in their Hub, why not go write a story about a different Black Queen who just wishes to quietly walk the Ways or lived a happy, normal life after coming to peace with herself and never finds out about her father? That would be interesting in my opinion.

Or, if you can’t help but get ticked off by the whole Black Queen group, how about you write a structured, clear critique with evidences from Black Queen-related tales and the general setting in the Hub, and offer some insights on what exactly make you unsatisfied about the idea and concepts?

That is at least useful to authors who write about them on the wiki instead of, well, talking about how you hate them because “She is a clichéd Mary-Sue” and “I can’t believe she is so stupid, obsessing over her father and can’t move on even in different universes”.

That is petty hate speeches that only show, well, anger and how much you hate it instead of ways you can improve it. It is a vent of emotion instead of an actual criticism supported by evidences and careful feedbacks that suggest ways to improve the ideas.

I am that kind of person once, on my native forum, so I kind of understand the rationale behind such behavior. How when people bashed a bad writing with insults and insults until the authors quitted, it can be so empowering and make you feel safe. On the right side, the moral high ground, so you can vent your own anger against someone the group perceived as wrong, or pride yourself for being different and daring to voice out the hatred.

You might have never read much Foundation articles, or write a proper Foundation tale before. But just criticizing a perceived Sue in a writing community with very low tolerance of bad writings makes you feel like you will be supported by the “good” writers, that you are a good writer too.

Or that you are way too high n’ mighty for the stagnant hypocritical community of SCP-Foundation based on conclusions you reached after surfing five minutes on the wiki without reading through the whole thing, or learning basic critique etiquettes first.

But you are not.

I’m also not a good writer.

Despite writing lots of tutorials, I am just an amateur Foundation fan who may never join the wiki or even write an original SCP article on my native forum. And that is why I try to write criticisms about clichés and general characteristics as a reader, because that is most likely to be unbiased. I have my angry moments when I make fun of things and use sarcasm on badly-executed clichés; How Not to Write a Foundation Fanfiction is the best example.

But I still believe in one thing. Criticisms are there to help people improve and create better works instead of driving them away and causing them to stop creating things all together. Of course, really bad writings can make you want to bleach your brain or slap its creator in the face. However, you can at least try to calmly present your opinion to those whom you think may listen and improve. And if they refuse, well, you’ve tried.

I am very irritated when surfing through fandom for GOI stuffs, because Black Queen is already a not well-known group, and people putting Mary-Sue labels on them without reading more materials really set me off. Combining with past instances of character-bashing comments posted under artists’ drawing of humanoid skips and hilarious hate rants against two GOIs, I finally wrote this informative talk.

And guess what, I’m not even a huge fan of the Black Queen, but they deserve some credit that went into their creation instead of a sloppy Mary-Sue impression that so many people seem to get at first glance.

Feel free to write critics on this article, or suggest any tone problems that make you feel uncomfortable.