Water logged Mona Lisa: who is Mary Sue, and why do we need her?

Theorists suggest that participatory readers create mainstream-based texts - fan crafts - in order to address the ways they are 'hailed' by the themes and subject positions offered by a text by becoming textual re-writers (Jenkins, 1992,2003 ; Busse & Hellekson, 2007; Chander & Sunder, 2007; Willis, 2007). Re-writers force their personal position or opinions into the centre by creating fanworks based in and on established media texts. The 'Mary Sue' is a self-gratifying fan-crafting trope centered on an idealistic authorrepresentative character, a wish-fulfillment device for the re-writer that bridges the re-writer's reality and that of her favoured fiction. This paper is a comprehensive summarizing of the 'Mary Sue' and its precedents. It asks how they can be deployed as Meta Sues to actively investigate the self or marginalized subjects in media texts. It is accompanied