A thing about Jupiter Ascending and its popularity among fangirls (fanwomen?) that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is: how Jupiter herself is really a marvel just for existing, let alone for being liked. Ok, you’re gonna need some background-
Fandom in the mid-noughties (back at Livejournal) loathed female characters. Like, if you saw someone post a review of a popular movie or the latest Harry Potter book you just had to knuckle down and expect your favourite fictional ladies to be torn to shreds, because they would be, in virtually every arena. Whole forums would spring up sometimes dedicated to hatred of X popular female character. And it could get really nasty. I’ll let your mind fill in the blanks.
Anyway, having your own ‘Mary Sue’ was considered, like…lowest of the low. Writing some silly story about your teen Elf princess getting off with Legolas could open you up to some legitimately quite unpleasant verbal abuse, if you were unlucky. There were massively popular communities dedicated to mocking these wish fufilment fantasies of teenage girls – you’d get Mary Sues sorted by fandom origin and personality (‘annoying origin’ ‘annoying traits’) with the author’s name included so you could go mock them too if you really wanted. It was a clusterfuck…but it didn’t stop there! If you wanted to spew misogynistic garbage about an already established character, there were plenty of massively popular communities where you could do that, too. I can just picture the ‘report’ on Jupiter now:
Full Name, including titles: Jupiter Jones
Full Species(es): Human, reincarnation of space matriarch
Unusual Markings/Colourations: Tattoo to indiate she owns the planet
Special Possessions/Pets: Channing Tatum. Sean Bean. BEES.
Probably followed by a few pages’s worth of her being called useless or a bitch, because (I cannot stress this point enough) olde time fandom really hated female characters.
But anyway-
Basically? Hell yes, Jupiter Jones is that self-insert you made when you were fourteen. Except that now, rather than sitting unloved at the back end of fanfiction.net, raking in four-word reviews consisting of at least one ‘fuck off’, she’s now the central character of a million-dollar movie. Break out the smug, I know I am. Ooh, and you know who else is a glorious Mary Sue? Tauriel. Fanfiction.net used to be packed with Tauriels, badass elf warriors who were BEAUTIFUL and NOBLE and WALKED IN STARLIGHT IN ANOTHER WORLD. People subjected those Tauriels and their authors to endless mockery and NOW. LOOK.
S’like, you know what, I had self-insert characters and I loved them. Why the fuck shouldn’t I go to Hogwarts or Middle-Earth? Why the fuck shouldn’t Jupiter Jones get to have wacky space adventures when Luke Skywalker and Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk have been having theirs for ages? The popularity of Jupiter Ascending in its bizzare glory seems to indicate that yeah, fandom has finally realised what a self-insert/Mary Sue actually is – a shot at playing in the boy’s playground – and reacted accordingly.
I hope that Jupiter Jones was Lana Wachowski’s self-insert as a teenager and I hope she ignored every last bit of the sexist crap about what female characters should or shouldn’t be to be considered acceptable and I hope she’s now sitting in a room full of money laughing her ass off in smug delight. My fourteen-year-old self who angsted for hours about her female characters being too important to their own stories feels downright VALIDATED by Jupiter Ascending. I hope everyone else who ever backed away from posting their female-centric fanfiction for fear of the backlash feels that way too.