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the time warrior

Ship’s Log, Supplemental: A Trekkie’s Tale

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Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It’s Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie’s Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie’s Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it’s had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie’s Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie’s Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie’s Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie’s Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don’t like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What’s the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It’s an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person.…

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“Not so much of that oatmeal, girl,” says Meg to one of the kitchen drudges, “It’s only pikemen we’re feeding, not horses.”

They’re in Irongron’s castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest.  Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron’s stew.

“Don’t the guards on the gate get stew?” she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor’s knock-out potion.

“What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They’ll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet.”

So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.

“I’m not afraid of men. They don’t own the world.”

Well, they kind-of do… but Sarah isn’t discussing actual property relations.  She’s talking about the way the world should work, with no one group ‘owning’ it.

“Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?” she demands.

“What else should we do?” asks Meg.

“Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you’re tired of working for them like slaves.”

“We are slaves,” says Meg.

Wow.  No mincing words there.

“Then you should set yourselves free,” says Sarah.

None there either.

“Oh? And how should we do that?”

That’s a trickier question.  It always is.  But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.

“Don’t you want to be free?” she demands.  Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.

“Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl,” says Meg, “We have our place.”

You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.

“What subservient poppycock!  You’re still living in the Middle Ages!”

Yeah.  We are, in many ways.  We’re meant to laugh at this outburst, but there’s no question in my mind that we’re also meant to be on Sarah’s side.

There are all sorts of problems with this story.  Sarah is – at least in conception – a stereotypical ‘wimmin’s libber’, all touchiness and naivety.  The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we’re meant to think this is funny.  She’s made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement.  For instance, there’s the bit quoted above about the “lusty” guards… it’s obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy.  And so on.  Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism?  I’m not going to argue.

But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves –  and aware of the fact that she’s a slave – by saying “set yourselves free”.

It shines out amidst the crap.…

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Vixens and Saxons

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Some disjointed thoughts about ‘The Time Warrior’.  Is it sexist?  Is Linx really a girl?  And what is the correct Socialist attitude to Irongron?

1.  Men Are From Earth, Sontarans Are From… umm… Saturn?  No, couldn’t be.  ‘Saturn’ is an anagram of ‘Rutans’ for a start…

‘The Time Warrior’ is the chronicle of a failed romance.  Irongron and Linx.  The odd couple.

Made for each other.

The initial attraction. The slowly dawning mutual realisation that they have much in common. They take turns helping each other out. Terms of affection pass between them: Linx is Irongron’s “brother” and will be his “general”. Physical intimacy follows, as Linx allows Irongron to see his face then almost takes his arm as they leave to deal with the android knight. Irongron gives Linx a familiar nickname (albeit a rather unkind one).  Then the inevitable falling out. Linx feels disappointed. He questions Irongron’s commitment. They squabble. There is a physical fight. Violence always changes a relationship irrevocably. An uneasy aftermath. Awkward attempts to rescue and preserve the friendship. “Thanks good toadface… er, good Linx”. Irongron helps the bound Linx in an act of residual solidarity. They stand face to face, close together, Irongron fascinated by Linx’s visage.  “I was struck down from behind,” says Linx, not wanting to lose face in front of Irongron, but also sounding almost as though he is pleading for sympathy and solidarity. Then there is the final drunken argument.  Linx is ready to move on but Irongron doesn’t like the idea of being dumped.  He does the dumping, he doesn’t have it done tohim.  “For the last time Linx,” says he, “let there be no more talk of leaving!”  But Linx makes it clear, his spaceboots were made for walking and that’s just what he’ll do.   Then, of course, the ultimate break.  Linx was going to leave and destroy all Irongron’s stuff in a final act of scorn.  The drunken, spurned Irongron tries one last time to delay the dumping.  He gets physical again.  Linx puts him down.

They were made for each other, but that itself is what makes their union impossible.  That and the inevitable social stigma against same-sex and different-species relationships (talk about a double standard!). 

Am I actually arguing for a gay subtext?  No, perhaps not.  But there is something unusually… well, ‘relationshippy’ about the way Irongron and Linx come together and then fall apart.  Linx even tries to get rid of Irongron’s friends, or at least to push them out of an inner circle which increasingly includes just him and Irongron.  Irongron, meanwhile, does a lot of tipsy complaining to his best mate about how unreasonable Linx is.

“My Sontaran doesn’t understand me.”

2.  Sexism and the Citadel

I’ve argued elsewhere that ‘The Time Warrior’ is actually fairly good on the issues of feminism and sexism (everything being very relative, of course).…

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