Sunday Special – Mary Sue in Halloweenland

Title: Mary Sue in Halloweenland
Author: Talia
Media: Movie
Topic: Nightmare Before Christmas
Genre: Parody!
URL: Mary Sue in Halloweenland
Critiqued by Ghostcat

Regular readers of the Library (both of you) will notice that the Snark Crew uses the term Mary Sue quite a lot but might not be completely familiar with the concept.

A Mary Sue, or Gary Stu if it is a male, is a character who is absolutely, flawlessly, perfect. They are more beautiful, more talented, more anything than anyone else in the history of forever and will often complain about how difficult it is to be so [insert superlative here] and that they just want to be a normal person. They are almost always author insertions, an idealized version of the author plunked down in the fanfic so that she or he can interact with their favorite characters as if they were their private playthings.  Mary Sues are the bane of fanfiction.

There are many trollfics written by trolls attempting to mock the fanfiction community or the original source material – the Mary Sues that show up in these trollfics are often ten times worse than the Mary Sues they are trying to mock. Most of these trollfics claim to be parodies, but a good parody is very hard to find.

That is why I rejoiced when I found Mary Sue in Halloweenland. It is a The Nightmare Before Christmas fanfic that pokes fun at the despised Mary Sue in a way I find hilarious.

For those unfamiliar with Tim Burton’s stop-motion masterpiece The Nightmare Before Christmas – first of all, shame on you. It’s a terrific movie – it is the tale of Jack Skellington, a living skeleton who is the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town (he is in charge of the annual Halloween festivities that occur in the “real world”) and what happens when he decides to hijack Christmas. Since the denizens of Halloween Town (a macabre medley of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and lake monsters) see nothing wrong with giving a small child a shrunken head as a Christmas gift or making a stylish hat out of a dead rat, you can imagine how well this goes over. The bulk of the movie takes place in Halloween Town – it  is very gloomy and Gothic place, but in a light-hearted and almost innocent way. (There are a lot of spontaneous musical numbers.) The movie was moderately successful when first released in 1993, it has since reached cult status and has a very large (and obsessively devoted) fanbase. (It’s also popular among certain goth and emo groups who like anything with a skull on it.)

Mary Sue in Halloweenland is prefaced with a disclaimer that the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors are all deliberate and meant to make fun of horrible fanfics. I’ve read some of the author Talia‘s work and it is, for the most part, pretty good with none of the mangling you normally see in bad fanfics so I’m inclined to believe that it was written deliberately bad.

It opens with one of the longest run-on sentences I’ve ever seen.

Mary Sue ran screaming though the streets attemopting desperitely to escape frm her home becaue her father had trioed to rape her again since he was always coming home drunk and doing things like that but not anymore because she was going to run away and so she did and she was running farther and farther away from her home into the semetary across the street from it until she founf a large angel statue made of concrete which she hid underneath it.

Just reading that makes me short of breath.

Mary Sue finds a “bottomless nothing” at the bottom of the statue and, of course, decides that it would make an excellent hiding place. We are also treated to a couple of amusing pronoun shifts.

​ “Oh” she said to herself as she gazed inside “I bet that would be a goodplacec to hide.” So she crawled inside it and I fell into the blackness, screaming for help.

Finally, when she hit the bottom, she found herself in a strange place. It was dark and had weird buildings everyplace. “Where could I be?” she asked myself.

She stood up while tossing her long, blonde hair like the color of the sunlight upon a secluded lake on an autumn day in the year 1974 back over her shoulders. And she headed into town.

The descriptions of Mary Sue alone are worth reading the fic – they are so over-the-top that they are halfway up the next hill.

Mary Sue sits down on the edge of the fountain in the town square and Jack walks by, instantly attracted to her incredible beauty, which is described like so –

Her eyes were like two large ocean pearls freshly pried from their encasing oysters and then fitted with stunning sapphires the size of a sperm-whales scrotal sack till finally being finished with drops of pure lead, topped with eyelashes like long and lovely lengths of lascivious wheat, only black. Her lips were pouty and red—red like the sunset over the rocky mountains as viewed from inside a darkroom—as if they were waiting for a kiss. Her complexion was perfect, without a spot of any kind mauling her lovely skin, which was like ground almond shells. Her face was framed by that yellowish hair, like strands of alchemical gold rolled to fine lengths that fell past her shoulders. She smelled of apple pie and vanilla. And even though she was only 16, she looked 25.

If there is anyone who can get through that without cracking a smile, they are a far better person than I. I can’t even make it past “scrotal sack” without breaking into giggles.

Jack speaks briefly with Mary Sue and she gives him a smile “reminisint of happy young lambs grazing in a Scottish pasture” (snerk) before Sally the Rag-Doll emerges from the Situationally Dependant Quantum Flux in order to be introduced to Mary Sue. Jack and Sally then show Mary Sue around town, where she is instantly “ardoured” by everyone. (Except Sally, who hates her because she is so beautiful.)

Mary Sue spends the night in Jack and Sally’s guest room, but Jack cannot sleep because he is thinking about how beautiful and talented and etc … Mary Sue is. The next morning at breakfast Mary Sue sings for them – Jack tells her over and over again how talented she is, but Sally says she didn’t like it and abruptly leaves to take a walk.

Once Sally is gone Jack and Mary Sue declare their undying love for each other, but before she can run dramatically into his bony arms Oogie Boogie bursts in carrying Sally. He kidnaps Jack but does not seem interested in Mary Sue, leaving her to formulate an escape plan:

…she knew it was up to her to save them and perhaps her 10 years of ninjitsu training might finally help her now so I followed them.

Ninja Sue uses her “high training” to beat up Oogie Boogie, but before she can deliver her “ninja death touch” he pushes her into a convenient vat of lava. She grabs him as she falls and they both die tragic (and hopefully painful) deaths.

​ Jack and Sally watched in horrible. “I hated her, but she died to save me anyway” cried Sally. They began singing a sad song about how wonderful Mary Sue was and were joined by all of Halloween and valkyries.

Every fanfic should end with Valkyries.

I will mention in closing that it is a very bad idea to do a Google image search for “Jack and Sally” – there is a massive amount of very odd fan art out there for the pairing.

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