Mary Sue Keller

[wickedwords]

Unlike the rest of the world, I was not happy about the shrine in that it does push the McKay/Keller romance. I am still working on the idea that John is incredibly in love with Rodney, and Rodney doesn't notice. He dumped Katie, and a couple of weeks later, he'd moved on to Keller; he is determined to marry straight. While I can get a good story out of that for fanfic purposes, in canon, it makes me very unhappy. *gah* I can only see this getting worse as the season progresses, given how the production team pushed Sam/Jack in SG-1. I can't even stick to just the 'old crew Atlantis' episodes as M&M put their stamps on everything.

But it's more than that. They've taken Keller and tried to turn her into a Mary Sue, the 'geek girl' that we are supposed to identify with. Think about it. She's supposed to be smart, sweet, not self-confident, the wallflower of Atlantis. She even calls herself nerdy. She has these amazing adventures, and turns out to be super!competent under pressure, pulling off brain surgery with nothing more than a cordless power drill and a jury-rigged scanner. It's no wonder that all the men fall in love with her.

But to be a true Mary Sue, she has to marry one of the heroes and die in a beautiful and tragic matter. Consumption would be best.

Which...you know, she kinda did. And it looks like she's going to be doing that in the future, too.

Which is where I really burnout on this, as it just digs under my skin, irritating in a way nothing else is because of what it implies about how TPTB see us. While it's clear that Rodney is the Mary Sue of one part of the staff, several others can't help but use him as a punching bag because of their internalized geekophobia issue--which basically ends up balancing McKay out and making him a pretty complex character, for all the talk about how 'superficial' he is. But there is no balancing force for Keller; no one seems to want to write anything for her other than her single perfect flaw: her tendency to babble in a cute but self-depreciating way. So she gets no complexity, and she is given 'the geek hero' for her releationship, the guy all geek!girls are supposed to want. A cute-and-perfect het relationship, where she is smart and determined to be brave, while not really being all that self-confident.

But that's not me. That's not my view of myself. That's not who I am, and I resent being handed that definition of who I should want to be on a platter, with some guy smiling and nodding and congratulating himself on how great he is at portraying the 'perfect' me. I want to shout: She's not a reflection of who I am or what I want in life, and I reject being told that she is my perfect viewpoint into Atlantis.

I'm much rather say that I am Rodney McKay: petty, arrogant, and bad with people. Anything's better than being in the stereotypical smart!girl role. She is not my Mary Sue.