Lauren Oya Olamina from Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower/Talents” - is she a Mary Sue?

Submitted by Pink_Blue1214 t3_11v15wt in books

I know Mary Sue is a pretty hot term, so don’t get me wrong - I love Butler, I love the books, I’m not trying to be accusatory or anything, but want to see if anyone has had similar thoughts.

I’m teaching an intro to literature course at a college that has assigned “Parable of the Sower” as the departmental read - so now matter what you’re teaching you have to fit it in your course somewhere. My students, in general, like the book and it’s theming. But don’t like Lauren. They find her hyper-empathy confusing (feel as if she picks and chooses when it affects her) and have trouble liking/connect with her.

I’m presently reading “Parable of the Talents” and I’ve found myself thinking that perhaps my students don’t like Lauren too much because she’s a bit Mary Sue-ish. A bit too perfect (smart, charismatic, natural leader), seems to be smarter than everyone around her, portrayed as the only character who really GETS what’s going on in the world, and is without any real character flaw (can we argue that the hyper empathy is a character flaw? It’s a drawback, sure, but it also provides advantages - and it is nonetheless a flaw that has nothing to do with Lauren’s personality, so nothing about Lauren’s inner being is imperfect)

I’d be interested in hearing if other people have had these thoughts about Lauren, or have had trouble connecting to her. Or if I’m just an outlier and people think she’s awesome!

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techneton t1_jcrgc6x wrote

I just finished Parable of the Talents last week!

I actually thought that Talents humanized Lauren a little by showing us >!some of her daughter's and her brother's perspective, as incomplete as it was.!<

In the first book she felt a lot more like a Mary Sue because others' wariness of and frustration with her attitude didn't come up as much. She just magically seemed to know more about everything and be luckier and be more successful than everyone else in her endeavors. And she was never really punished for any of her character flaws. Which I guess it would be hard to portray in the first book anyway because it's all from her perspective.

In the second book though she could be said to be punished for her hubris. >!We get snatches of perspectives that validate this from other characters like Bankole, Marcus, and her daughter Asha/Larkin. They all express at various points that she should do or should have done things differently. From their perspectives it can be said that Lauren's dogged pursuit of her goals and refusal to listen to others resulted in Bankole's death, the loss of the community, and the estrangement of her only child.!<

But Lauren would never see things this way. She can’t see it that way because to doubt her judgement would be to doubt Earthseed. And to doubt Earthseed would be to doubt her whole life's purpose. Also from a narrative perspective, the death of Lauren's ideals would unpin the central idea of the books and the story would have to shift drastically to find a new center.

The fact that at the end of Talents we see >!the hurt and emptiness Lauren has created within her own biological family!< makes me think that Lauren is not a Mary-Sue and Butler was just trying to examine what a person who created a new religion might be like.

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13ventrm t1_jcr2utg wrote

I can definitely see it, though I've only read Sower so my view's incomplete. There's some lip service paid by her dad early on about her needing to learn humility which def rings true, but I don't think much comes of that nor does it present much a problem, it kinda just gets softened when she acknowledges that she'll be trying to learn from everyone. Same with her mercenary nature when she Harry and Zara start their road trip, Harry's rightfully unnerved by how different she is from how she presented herself before, but then she just starts softening up. Thoigh to an extent she can kinda control her hyperempathy: if she's not looking at the hurt she doesn't have to feel it.

I think there's something of a wish fulfillment element in her; a lotta folks feel at times that things are gonna go bad and that they're among the few willing to acknowledge it, I reckon that part resonates strongly.

I dunno, I liked her. So often "good" characters in fiction end up willfully ignorant, and I find it refreshing when good is not soft or dumb, haha, which I felt she hit well. Plus she seemed humble in some ways to me, like deferring to Zara, confident in the stuff she could back up. And Earthseed resonated with me.

EDIT: I can also see her frankness as potentially coming across as abrasive, but I do also wonder if that and her confidence/arrogance would be seen as less unlikable in a male protagonist, haha. Gender can definitely be a factor in mary sue discourse/judgements.

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Sorry_Library_7086 t1_jcsvaeh wrote

I have also only read Sower, but I think the importance of Lauren as our protagonist AND narrator can’t be understated.

Everything we are told about her and the world is her opinion, voice, best recollection. I don’t think she is necessarily an unreliable narrator, but she does minimise her faults and maximise the ill actions of others in her narration (particularly regarding Keith for example). I think this adds to her humanity, rather than detracting from it.

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Phanton97 t1_jctbmge wrote

That is a really good point. We shouldn't forget that we are supposed to read her diary. As others mentioned, I think Parable of Talent really adds to her character, since we get the perspectives of other people, like her daughter, who sees her mother in a much different way.

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Express_Papaya_5221 t1_jcqx7ac wrote

I agree on her being something of a Mary Sue, reading Sower I got the sense that she's an idealized version of the author herself. You could argue with the diary-style format that it's part of the main character's personality to exaggerate her insight and competence like a know-it-all teen might in her own journal. But there is nothing in the book to suggest that this is a conscious ploy that gets any sort of payoff.

I had countless issues with this book and only finished it because of how it keeps coming up in this forum.

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awkwardturtledoo t1_jcr7g95 wrote

Off topic from the original post, but I also just recently read it because of how highly praised it was on this sub, and I was a bit disappointed as well. It’s remarkably prescient and I love the world Butler created, but I had a problem with the lack of personality and nuance in the characters. Maybe the second one adds a bit more depth that really enhances the story, but I don’t think I’ll be tackling it soon at least.

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Pink_Blue1214 OP t1_jcr7qek wrote

I read the second one because I wanted to see what happened, or because I particularly cared about Lauren Nothing really happened to change my opinion of her in the sequel

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awkwardturtledoo t1_jcr9wci wrote

As far as Lauren goes, I can see why the students see her as a Mary Sue. She seems to have all the right answers most of the time, and I don’t think she was challenged enough. I think if the character (his name escapes me) who was very critical of her Earthseed ideas had pushed it a bit more and maybe even defected, it would have made the story and Lauren a bit more compelling. On her hyperempathy ability, I honestly kept forgetting she had it. I wanted to learn more about it and see it develop into more than just a problem Lauren/the group has to deal with as they travel/now defend their territory.

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cordelaine t1_jcr87d4 wrote

Yeah, I struggled through the first and DNF’ed the second.

I read Kindred a few months later and loved it. Haven’t read anything else by her yet.

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georgealice t1_jcrp1dk wrote

Wild Seed is amazing but I didn’t care for any of the rest of the Patternist series

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Pink_Blue1214 OP t1_jcqyx7w wrote

“Nothing to suggest this is a conscious ploy that gets any sort of payoff” is how I’d describe a lot of my feelings about the book — particularly Lauren’s relationship with Bankole. My students and I have been uncertain of how Butler wants us to perceive this relationship. Is it meant to be uncomfortable? Is it not? Big question marks

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techneton t1_jctl6e1 wrote

I didn't think Butler was trying to make a judgement about the relationship as much as she was illustrating something about Lauren.

I see Lauren's relationship with Bankole as further illustration that she has a kind of...I don't wanna outsized or inflated...but she has a large perception of her own capability and self-importance. She sees herself as special and so, while she is a sharer, she kind of holds herself above and apart from most people, especially those her own age. It's easier for her to feel that Bankole is her equal because he's so much older and more experienced. The wisdom and experience conferred by his age allows her to see him as more "equal" to her than people in her own cohort.

Now that I think about it, I kind of think Lauren being a sharer could be a way Butler tried to humanize her in the first book. Again Lauren holds herself above and apart from other people. Lauren is an adept reader and manipulator of others and is always thinking about how she and hers can best benefit from a situation. If we weren't constantly being beat over the heat with her empathic capability she could have felt kind of sociopathic.

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Pink_Blue1214 OP t1_jctnqbv wrote

That’s a great way of thinking about Lauren’s hyper empathy! Now that you say this it’s function as a character trait feels clearer to me

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techneton t1_jctqdqe wrote

Yeah! And thinking about it a little more, it also serves in-universe to make Lauren a softer and kinder person in Butler's "what might a person who started a religion as a teenager be like" experiment.

As a person, Lauren is so stubborn and ambitious. She has a huge sense of "destiny" and self-importance even at a young age that leads her to view others kind of as pawns or tools in her grand vision.

If she didn't have experiences (hyper-empathic ones) which forced her to constantly directly confront the pain and humanity of others, it might be easy for her single-minded grand vision and self-righteousness to eclipse her empathy and altruism and lead her to trample others underfoot in pursuit of her own goals and affirmation of her own beliefs.

In that regard you could examine Christian America/President Jarrett and maybe Marcus maybe as sort of parallels to Lauren, or more examinations of how belief, vision, and empathy interact with each other in people and in society.

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Express_Papaya_5221 t1_jcrc0c0 wrote

The possessive nature of Bankole worked for me in injecting unresolved tension. The big wet blanket I felt was the set-up of the cartoon-ish inhumanity of the horde outside of the gates, that seems to play on middle class fear of homeless people, and how in this world religion and not social reform is the one thing that save us. Couple that with a sci-fi device like the "hyper-empathy" that has no real function in the drama, and turning the protagonist into a remorseless killer half way through, it really was an absolute mess of a book imo!

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Pink_Blue1214 OP t1_jctnwu0 wrote

Definitely noticed the antipathy towards homeless/poor people in the first novel. My students and I talked about how Lauren can be a little hypocritical- referring to people who live in the streets as “human maggots” while she lives a comfortable and enviable life inside a gated community

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Express_Papaya_5221 t1_jcudjv7 wrote

Absolutely! I hoped there would be a turning point in the domestic abuse scene when the brother returns after having run away, that it would provide a better metaphor for the state of the world, patriarchal tyranny ruining society or something, empathy being the better tool etc, but that's not what that thing turned out to be :)

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Huggabutt t1_jcsbqpi wrote

A case can be made arguing that most if not all of her MCs are Mary Sues, lol. But I still enjoy her storytelling immensely. Just not so much the individual characters.

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alone_tired_alive t1_jcra5ja wrote

She is sort of a Mary Sue. The introduction of the version I read actually addressed this. I still liked Lauren though. I don't think it is necessarily unrealistic to have a narrator as intelligent and insightful as her, but I found the religion aspect of her worldview off-putting.

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tony1grendel t1_jcs7m9y wrote

I read Sower and Talents pretty recently and IMO Lauren's characterization was pretty flat, especially before the climax. I felt like I was taking crazy pills when my cousin was reading it and she didn't notice. Hearing about your students' opinion makes me not feel crazy.

I also thought the empathy was inconsistent.

This is going to be a tangent but it will be relevant. My wife has really been into the anime Demon Slayer. I watched it and the main character, IMO, is pretty flat to me but I started to realize that a lot of main characters can be like that. Basically a blank slate for the story to drive their development.

Going back to Sower, Lauren seems like your typical boring kid. And another revelation I had, is that there probably exists many real people like that. Yet, the most interesting stories will have a main character with lots of flaws who actually isn't like your typical everyday person.

I liked her character in Talents though.

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georgealice t1_jdmj5ba wrote

I was encouraged at the start of the second book, when Lauren is being criticized by her very own daughter, but >!by the end of that book you find out the daughter really never knew her mother and only met her once.!<

Butler’s character development is not as strong as her world building, although I had no such issues with either Wildseed or Kindred. As for the older man and teenage girl issues, I had a lot more problems with Clay’s Ark then the Parable series in that sense.

By the end of the Parable series, I was really confused: did Butler believe in Earthseed? Did Butler want us to believe in Earthseed or was Butler using it as a plot device?

Butler very clearly thought Christianity was problematic. Obviously a great deal of book 2 shows horrible things being done in the name of Christianity. But also in book one, there is the incident where the one woman looting the compound looks at the dead drug addict, and says to Lauren “she died for our sins” I remember that because it was so odd.

In the book to Lauren tells her brother, something like “most people are not allowed to publicly criticize Earthseed here, but I’ll let you do it” this is not a sign of a community that believes in its religion, not allowing criticism.

But I think what most convinces me that Butler does not want us to take Earthseed too seriously is that the books are titled with stories from the Christian Bible. Butler is literally framing Earthseed with Christianity, and showing how flawed Christianity is.

Although I thought it was hard to pick up, I think Butler is skeptical of Lauren and Earthseed. Maybe in book 3 she was going to reveal that.

I read that they have her notes for what she would have written in book 3. I think there was some talk of asking in NK Jemison to write it, and I would be buying that book so fast if it happened. But, I have seen a quote from NK Jemisin saying that she thinks Book 3 should exist in the imagination of the readers .

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sirbruce t1_jcrnbhv wrote

Yes. Butler's creativity as a writer is overrated.

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