Date started: 08/12/19 Date completed: 08/12/19 Date first published: 08/12/19
I'm going to start with a rundown of who Mary Sue is, to give you context:
An observation was made, that Star Trek fan-fiction often featured unrealistically and story-ruiningly over-competent characters. The observer then made a parody of this fan-fic malaise, calling their main character Mary Sue - a 15.5 year old heroine that left all of the Star Trek protagonists in the shade.
And that's Mary Sue - a character that is, to put it in two words of unsurpassable succinctness - nauseatingly wonderful.
You might wonder what's wrong with a character being wonderful. Isn't that the point of a hero/heroine? That they're so wonderful that they save the day, and get the girl, and so on and on and on... Well, no. It isn't. Close, but no vaping pen.
What makes strong characters are not their strengths, but their weaknesses. A strong person in real life always makes the right choices, resists any corrupting temptations, and is so staggeringly vanilla that their only possible reward can be to have a library named after them when they're dead. This person in real life has a strong character, but in fiction, they have a weak character, because they're so boring. Even reading about them, you're probably having an attack of Vyvyan Basterd Syndrome, shouting "I'M BORED" at the nearest wall.
In order to make a fictional person interesting, you have to strengthen their character by giving them traits that, in a real person, would weaken their character. This is why the greatest characters in fiction, are the ones you'd least like to meet. Vyvyan Basterd, for example. Hannibal Lecter. The Sherriff Of Nottingham. Arnold Rimmer. James Bond. Even Lord Flashheart, who's depicted as a kind of Mary Sue within Blackadder's fiction, is the kind of guy you'd have nailed to the wall with a rolling pin within two minutes of his entrance to the room, because he'd be that UNBEARABLE.
All of this has led to the term 'Mary Sue' being used as an insult toward painfully over-competent characters in fictional works. Especially painfully over-competent female characters in fictional works, with alternatives like 'Marty Stu' being used for male characters. Inevitably, it has sometimes been used wrongly. Female supremacists are a population who can easily be relied upon to use words wrongly. Generations of them have strived to change the world, by writing stories about the world that aren't true. And as a result, the term 'Mary Sue' has become the subject of feminist hatred. Well, if they will keep putting Mary Sues in their stories, people will keep deriding them for putting Mary Sues in their stories, won't they. But they don't seem to understand that. Armed with deliberately-encouraged misunderstandings of the term, however, they've actually had success at persuading people to treat the term 'Mary Sue' as taboo.
Most recently, and most certainly receiving the ire of feminists, the name Mary Sue has been applied to the character of Rey, in the latest Star Wars cashgrab trilogy. She appears out of the desert, with unsurprisingly deserty skills, but then she's revealed to know how to wield a lightsaber, without ever having been shown which is the pointy end (and let's face it, that's a 50/50 chance of the trilogy ending in part one) and that they can use the Force without ever encountering it before, and can even employ Jedi mind tricks, and so on and on and on. Her character arc is basically this: random kid becomes most powerful wizard in the galaxy in one hour of movie. If she's not a Mary Sue, then i'm a dinosaur.
We must be clear, given the deliberate misunderstandings that frequently happen, that it does not matter whether a character 'has a backstory' (translation: excuse) for being nauseatingly wonderful, or whether another character in the same story is also nauseatingly wonderful. If a character fulfils the definition of being nauseatingly wonderful, then they are a Mary Sue. QED.
However...
Don't make the assumption that the use of Mary Sue characters is always bad. The story in which this kind of character's name originated, was a very short, but very amusing story, in parodying its now-eponymous phenomenon. And i can actually give an example of a really good story that deliberately employs a Mary Sue for entertainment's sake, and does it well. I've already mentioned Arnold Rimmer, and it's their fictional universe that we're going to now.
In one episode of Red Dwarf (Dimension Jump) a Mary Sue character jumps from one dimension to another, where they bump (quite literally) into the crew of Red Dwarf, aboard Starbug. Who are they? Ace Rimmer - a character deliberately made to be brilliant, like a hero of comic strip proportions, so that they would contrast with the 'normal' Rimmer. If you can call Arnold Rimmer 'normal' without wincing.
Arnold Rimmer, Rimmsy, Big Arn, or Duke, as he is never known, is a "gutless, spineless, gormless, directionless, neurotic, underachieving, snivelling, cowardly pile of smeg". And that's a description provided by his best friend in the whole universe! He's pompous, he's anally retentive, and is, in the words of Kryten, who cannot lie: "an overzealous, trumped up little squirt, and an incompetent vending machine repairman with a Napoloen Complex, who commanded as much respect and affection from his fellow crew members as Long John Silver's parrot".
The whole point of Ace Rimmer, was to provide as sharp a contrast to Arnold Rimmer as possible. In the context of the story, their extremity of wonderfulness was what made them so fantastically funny. As a regular character, they would be awful. As a serious character, they would be awful. But Mary Sue finds herself a place, in that episode of Red Dwarf, because characters as cartoon as her are apt material in an outright comedy. And let's face it - Star Wars just isn't that funny.
This mini-essay, suprisingly, was inspired by Thunderf00t. Not surprising on its own, but if you know Tf, you'll understand what was surprising about it.
P.S. The title is a reference to 'We Need To Talk About Kevin'. We didn't really need to talk about Mary Sue, but i hope you found it interesting and/or amusing anway :-D
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Date started: some time in July 2018 Date completed: about July 2018 Date first published: 08/06/19
Hello folks. I'm back, and i'm doing it again. [link: last time i did it] Here's an advert for the lovely Doctor Ed Hope [link: YT video] this time - the original Dr Mike, and with less of an ego.
I'm going through the quiz and adding interesting information (including the right answers) with the huge advantage of INFINITE TIME. But this one's different. This one's correcting the quiz - not the quizzed.
The video was published back in July 2018, and i wrote most of this soon after. So yes, this is one of those posts that sat around for ages before being finished off. Sorry if that bothers you :D
1) Which of the following was not included in the original Hippocratic Oath?
As Dr Hope points out, Germ Theory did not exist when the HO was written, so they could not have known about all the microbiota - all the creepy-crawlies - that lurk in water, and on surfaces, and so on. [link: pond scum] Germ Theory is one of the exceptions that i get to point at, as a trend-bucker of the 19th century. That time period hosted the ideation of a panoply of superstitions - many of them pseudo-medical. Homeopathic fraud, chiropractic, reflexology, palmistry, hypnosis, spiritism and spiritualism, and so on. Germ Theory FTW :-D
2) What tree does Aspirin come from?
Here, the answers are all wrong. And this is the trouble with multiple choice - getting your choice right doesn't necessarily mean getting the answer right. If the right answer isn't there, you can't select it.
You can't get aspirin from ash, beech, oak or willow, because aspirin is a synthetic chemical invented (at least) twice: in Germany, and then in England. Why twice? Not by accident - all stocks were previously imported from Germany, but then a world war happened, so a lab in Nottingham [link: Nottingham] had to reinvent it. Aspirin is a chemical derivative of salycylic acid, called acetylsalicylic acid, which means various chemicals were attempted, and none of them had a desirous effect, until SA-plus-an-acetyl-group: Aspirin.
Why bother developing it? Because the desired effect - analgesia (painkilling) - is not a property of salycylic acid. [link: SA's effects] SA is, however, a mild anti-inflammatory (Aspirin is too) and a mild emetic. So you can chew on willow bark all day long, and it'll only make you sick - it won't make your pain go away.
3) What condition was the drug Viagra originally developed to treat?
The answer is right, but this is an interesting and easily-misunderstood subject. Sildenafil's effect [link: sildenafil] (Viagra's a brand name, like Aspirin) is to widen blood vessels, which includes the vessels in the penis. And yet... erections are not achieved by widening blood vessels. Counterintuitive, huh? What makes erections happen, is restriction of blood flow out of the penis. This is how men don't get faint, trying to pump huge amounts of blood into their phalluses, like pouring water into a leaky bucket. And it's also how men don't have obvious boners, when they're taking sildenafil for high blood pressure!
Without arousal, blood leaving the penis is not restricted, and so an erection can't happen. So if you get aroused by taking Viagra, that's actually a placebic effect. It's purely psychological.
Incidentally, arousal and blood flow are mildly connected, as the sensitive tissues in the genitals are made more sensitive by increasing bloodflow through them. This means that there's no reason to think women couldn't benefit from mildly increased arousal, if they took viagra too.
4) What is the recommended maximum daily level of salt intake in grams?
This is another question that isn't really about medicine. The first was history, the second was chemistry, the third was, well, history again, and this one's about... law? Recommendations, of course, vary around the world. As i've said before, on this blog, recommended fruit intake varies according to how much the local medical organisation thinks it can persuade the local people to eat. [link: fruit] So in some places it's 10-12 pieces per day, and in Scotland it's 3 pieces per day. 4, 6, 8, and 11 grams of salt, could all be the right answer somewhere in the world. In the UK, it's 4 for women, and 6 for men.
The reasoning for advising reduced salt intake, is that sodium damages the cardiovascular system, especially the heart. And because salt (table salt) is made of sodium chloride, it's a plentiful supplier of sodium. So, as per usual, the bigger your body the more diluted it will become, and the smaller you are, the less sodium you should consume, if you want to maintain a healthy heart. Salt is often added to pre-made food to compensate for the loss of flavour compared to freshly-made food. The second biggest source of sodium is in baking soda (bicarb/sodium carbonate) so you might find it worthwhile to peruse cake packets too.
5) Why does the room start to spin when you've had too much drink?
Easy: you're spinning. Next?
Oh, that's not an option. They say the true answer is that the density of the fluid in the inner ear drops, causing it to misjudge motion. The first thought in my mind is: what difference would density make? It's the feeling of fluid on the cilia, in the ear, from which the sensation of motion comes. Maybe if alcohol were less viscous, though? If the Vestibular Disorders Association is to be believed, then the effect is real, but it's more likely to be the "composition" of the endolymph (inner ear fluid) that produces the effect, which would mean its viscosity rather than "density" that matters. [link: VDA]
Secondarily, one of the 'wrong' answers was that the alcohol causes regions of your brain to "short circuit". Well, ethanol (the kind of alcohol that gets called 'alcohol' when it's in drinks) is a psychoactive drug - it has a debilitating effect on mental function. People lose physical control of their bodies, their reaction times are worsened, and they lose track of what they're doing. Under these conditions, the term 'short circuit' would have to be idiomatic, but true.
So is the room spinning because you're dizzy? Or is it because you're spinning, due to ethanol-caused loss of motor control? Discuss [10 marks]
6) How long does an average, healthy, red blood cell live for?
Erythrocytes (red blood cells) [link: RBCs] can not reproduce on their own. This factor discounts viruses from being classed as 'alive' in the minds of most biologists. Except viruses have DNA, whereas erythrocytes don't. That's another factor that discounts things from being classed as 'alive' in the minds of most biologists. So are viruses more alive than red blood cells? Discuss [20 marks]
It's preferential to refer to individual cells, and viral particles, as 'denaturing' rather than 'dying' because of this classification. If you were never alive, how could you die? But on the subject of erythrocytic longevity, i've seen a broad range of estimates for how many of them are made and disposed of, every day - orders of magnitude, in fact. And people don't vary in size by that much! Wiki goes with 200 billion per day. So if that figure varies so widely, how reliable can this estimate of RBC 'life' be? [link: estimates of life length]
7) What is the common name for the vitamin B3?
Well, i can't argue with this, can i. The question clearly states "the common name" and then lists some rather uncommon names for B4, B6, B2 and B1 respectively. What could i possibly have to comment on, here? Other than this: don't mix up thiamine [link] and thymine [link]. It's too easy to do :-P
8) Where is the patella bone situated?
Dr Hope jokes, but if you kneed yourself in the head during gymnastics practice, then he wouldn't actually be wrong :-D
9) What is the least common form of skin cancer?
Well, the answer to this one's obvious*, but i'd just like to point out that melanomas are usually very aggressive tumours, in which melanocytes have gone rogue. But you're no more likely to get them** if you have dark skin than pale, because 'melanic' skin doesn't contain any more melanocytes than pale skin. The melanocytes in dark skin actually work harder, to produce more of the same two forms of melanin - eumelanin and pheomelanin - that exhibit brown and red colours respectively. [link: melanin]
I'd also like to point out that these same pigments colourise hair aswell as skin, so blondes are really just pale brown. Pinky skin is produced by the same pheomelanin that makes people's hair ginger or strawberry blonde. So if you've got ginger genes, your hair might not be red, but you might have a red mole or two, and you might have pinkish palms or nipples, where it's common for pigment to collect. People around the world have these genes, without realising it, as it's only in pale-skinned people that ginger genes are really obvious - eumelanin easily drowns pheomelanin out, when it comes to colouration. [link]
*sarcasm
**based on evidence available at time of writing
10) What part of the body does an otolaryngologist specialised in?
Is this question supposed to be hard for physicians? Or is this one supposed to compensate for the non-medical nature of the first four questions?
11) Which dangerous infectious disease has been 'extinct in the wild' since the late 1970's?
Well, sidestepping the egregious greengrocer's'' apostrophe' for a second [shakes fist] let's just question that "in the wild" clause. Smallpox has genuinely been eradicated from the world, beyond a laboratory somewhere on Earth, and some people are paranoid about it getting out. Personally, i think they've been made paranoid by smoking cannabis, because it's not that hard to control a smallpox sample. When you consider what could be learned from it, with currently-mid-development techniques, the potential benefits clearly outweigh the potential costs. Smallpox did not mean certain death when it was 'in the wild' before, and it wouldn't if it escaped in one person, in the future.
Another incidental: smallpox is small, because syphilis was the large pox. When Europeans migrated to the Americas, they swapped smallpox for syphilis. The latter is still among us. As are diphtheria, when it's spelled correctly [shakes fist a second time], leprosy, and tuberculosis.
12) Which of the following diseases is not hereditary or genetic?
This question is self-defeating. Hereditary means passed from parent to offspring. By whatever mechanism. That can include pathogens like HIV (transmitted in the womb) or the Epstein-Barr Virus, which causes Glandular Fever (transmitted from mother to child in saliva, because they can't stop kissing them) and which also causes mononucleosis. And that's supposed to be the right answer. If they'd left "hereditary or" out of the question, then it would have been the right answer. Sorry, Dr Hope, but parents do give their kids mono. Like with leprosy, chance of transmission is actually low, so extensive exposure to saliva in a domestic parent-baby context is actually one of the most potent mechanisms of transmission. [link: E-BV]
13) What is the definition of congestive heart failure?
There's an anecdote about perpetually-overweight comedian and actor Fred Emney, who was probably least well known (while alive) for playing that guy in The Italian Job who put interruptors in bins under traffic lights pre-heist. [link: Fred Emney] [link: Italian Job scene] The anecdote goes that he complained of putting on weight if he went uphill. In a TIJ documentary from a decade-or-so ago, members of the production crew attested to this. They went up into the Italian Alps for filming, and soon he had to take his shoes off, and then his socks, and then he ran out of room in his trousers.
This is almost certainly the result of heart failure, in which his heart was incapable of pushing his blood around his body, and so oedema occurred (fluid collection) starting in his lower body. This gave the impression that he was putting on weight. The solution: go downhill, where air pressure is higher, the partial pressure of oxygen is higher, and therefore the heart is more able to do its job of pumping blood.
14) Which of the following anxiety disorders is a fear of failure?
The longest one. Apparently.
15) Which of the following discoveries happened most recently?
This is actually a medically salient question. It's part of the job remit of a medical doctor to keep on top of research, in order to inform their decisions about what interventions to employ or to advise to their patients. This means it's useful to know how long a product's been on the market, or how long an operation's been performed, as time is proportional to experience, and experience is proportional to reliability. Something that's only been done since summer last year is less reliable, as an intervention, than something that's proved its worth over many decades.
This applies to drugs and to surgery, as familiarity with rare effects of pharmaceuticals won't come until they've been widely used, and surgeons become better at surgical procedures with practice. A new procedure will not look as safe, in the stats, as it will after years of practice, making new procedures look worse in comparison than they really are.
In practice, it's not effective for doctors to do all of this research-poring themselves, which is where epidemiology comes in.***
16) What is referred to in the term 'good' cholesterol?
Here's one of those famous proxy values (or 'surrogates', as they're called in medicine) that are used as substitutes for things that actually matter. The argument in favour of lowering 'bad' cholesterol, or even raising 'good' cholesterol, is that they're associated with heart problems and conditions that are associated with heart problems. [link: surrogates]
But are things like cholesterol, blood pressure, and body temperature, causes of harm, or barometers of it? Fevers are popularly assumed to be consequences of infection, but they are actually beneficial, and deliberately made by the body, because they increase the effectiveness of the lymph nodes, thereby improving the body's defences against pathogenic invasion. If you've only got a cold, however, you don't really need the fever, so taking a paracetamol is probably the wiser thing to do.
Blood pressure goes up and down like a yo-yo as you get up and run around, and then sit down and relax. Doxazosin has been shown to cause heart attacks and strokes, even though it was prescribed to reduce blood pressure. And cholesterol? Well, your body makes it if you don't have enough. So even if fake butter did work, would it help you? You're much better off pursuing a lifestyle intervention that causes your cholesterol to change along with other things: sure, eat less fat and red meat, but also get more exercise, and avoid smoke, alcohol, and major stresses.
The concept of 'good' cholesterol is a medically mysterious one, so how can it really be used in a helpful way, when trying to communicate health problems to the public? Discuss [1 mark]
17) Gout is a form of which illness?
This was a really good explanation of gout, by Dr Hope. Dr Ed? Are we on first-name terms yet? If you've been reading my article through without watching the video, then go back to the top of the article and click the link. Second thoughts: here it is again. [link: YT video] Now you won't lose your place :o)
18) How many people have been estimated to have died from AIDS since it was first recognised in 1981 to January 2006?
Fun fact: AIDS doesn't exist. Unfun fact: HIV does. The 'S' in 'AIDS' stands for 'syndrome' and a syndrome is a bunch of symptoms that consistently occur together, but have no known common cause. Like Gay Bowel Syndrome. [link: GBS] The observation was made that MSMs (men who have sex with men) exhibited much higher frequencies of genito-rectal infections and cancers than men who didn't (viruses can turn cells into tumours, which is how the cervical cancer vaccine is a thing that works) and so this syndrome was named. [link: cervical cancer vaccine]
With the increased use of contraception, and the curtailing of HIV, Gay Rectum Syndrome has gone away, and is now regarded as obsolete. As soon as HIV was proved to be causing the symptoms defined by AIDS, the name 'AIDS' became obsolete too. Anti-HIV campaigners continue to refer to 'AIDS' or 'HIV-AIDS' simply because they don't want to fail people who aren't aware that 'HIV' is the initialism they should be looking out for.
Aside: it's rather irritating that genetic conditions are often referred to as being syndromes, even though their cause has been known for a very long time. Down, or Down's, for example, is still referred to as Down/Down's syndrome, even though the cause has been known to be a whole or partial duplicate of the 21st chromosome since the 50s. Rather confusing, huh? [link: Down history]
19) What effect does the hormone oxytocin have?
An interesting answer. Most people think of oxytocin as the 'cuddle chemical' for its supposed effect in making people really caring, after the birth of a baby. The endocrine function is not something i'm going to argue with, but the behavioural effects are certainly quibblable. Other research has found that oxytocin makes people more spiteful, which conflicts with the finding of increased affection. The most logical conclusion is that really it's a 'factionalism chemical' rather than a simple 'cuddle chemical' with those experiencing a large blast of it internally, in turn subjecting anyone they're fond of to large doses of affection, while excoriating anybody deemed to be 'an outsider'. [link: effects]
20) Whose was quoted as saying "Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization"?
Setting aside the bads grammars, it's clearly always the longest answer. Silly Ed. Ed? {Ed: Ed}
And that was the end of the quiz. How did you do?
*** Ben Goldacre mentions doctors reading studies in this talk. They really shouldn't be the ones bearing the burden of all that work. The task should be deferred to epidemiologists and done properly. In fact, it's not possible for GPs to read all of the salient medical literature, because their domain is so broad that it would take more hours than there are in a day, to keep up to date on it all!
'Dr Ben Goldacre: RCGP AC 2018'
https://youtu.be/MJppm_h0a9Y
Ben Goldacre's fantastic, so here's another link to something he's done, too:
'Guest Keynote: Challenging Status Quo'
https://youtu.be/7RGqY8YirNo
And here's that web-site he mentioned. I've looked up my local surgery, and i have to say [adopts smug expression] they're doing pretty well :-D
https://openprescribing.net/.
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