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Date Posted: 23:48:11 01/01/03 Wed
Author: Mercuria
Subject: I Have News That May Shock And/Or Alarm You

Okay, I was talking to my friend Tafadhali about Mary Sues, and I started griping about how my newest fanfic was getting buried in MS fiction (it's only been two days since I posted it and it's already way down at the top of the third page). After I was finished griping, Taf wanted to know exactly how many Mary Sues there actually were, so we decided to run a little test. We went to the ffnet romance section (G->PG-13) and divided the first 100 fanfics there into five sections: Bad fic, Decent fic, Good fic, Mary Sue, and Appears To Have Nothing To Do With LotR.*

Our research turned up some shocking results:

- 1% of these fics had nothing to do with Lord of the Rings (possibly misfiled ... or else a REALLY random AU)

- 4% of them were just all-around awful

-14% were decent, but not particularly good ... in fact, were generally less-than-good, but not painful.

-17% of these fics were deemed by myself and my research partner to be either better-than-mediocre or downright fabulous (one of them written by me, so you can choose to file that one wherever you wish, except Mary Sue, being as it was a slash)

-to our great pain and dismay and horror and terror etc etc and so forth, an appalling 63% of the fanfics perused were Mary Sues.**

This experiment will be repeated as many times as necessary with varying degrees of objectivity ... but until then, isn't that CREEPY?
Peace out!

* Fics were rated Bad/Decent/Good by their grammar, spelling, and overall canon accuracy.

** Mary Sues were dubbed Mary Sues by the presence of an OC (there were perhaps two exceptions to this rule).

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