Mary Sue is Too Awesome for Your Petty Gender Identities

[4thofeleven]

So, apparently it’s time to discuss Mary Sues again in fandom. Fair enough, it’s one of those evergreen discussion topics, right up there with “So why DO women write slash?” and “Western pop culture has issues with race and gender vs. NUH-UH, it doesnt!”

Anyway, thought I’d throw in my two cents. The thing that confuses me is when did Mary Sue become such an exclusively female concept? I don’t remember when I first encountered the term – it must have been when I first got online, maybe ten or more years ago – but I’m pretty sure I first heard it used to describe Wesley Crusher. And I thought it was a useful concept, and quickly recognised the same sort of bad writing at work in the Star Wars EU’s Corran Horn or in Peter David’s Captain Calhoun.

Of course now ‘female’ seems to be a key element of Mary Sue’s definition – often, seemingly more so than ‘being a smug boring jack-ass who dominates the story and who is hated by everyone save the author who's got too much of their ego invested into the character’. Now, to a degree, that’s understandable – one’s a lot more likely to encounter female Sues in fanfiction than male ones. (Men do write plenty of Sues, of course – check any video game category on fanfiction.net and you’ll unearth swarms of them. But the authors of those stories tend not to interact much with the larger fanfic community. I don’t know if they have their own little communities, or if the stories just sit there alone and ignored forever…)

Anyway. The main point I’m trying to make is that I find the Mary Sue concept an extremely useful way of succinctly describing a particular style of bad writing, and I would like to see the term survive. I don’t think efforts to celebrate Mary Sue are a good idea – they only reinforce the misidentification of Mary Sue as being a synonym for OFC. On the other hand, unless people in fandom do start to remember that Mary Sue comes in all genders and genres, and that being a woman is not an essential part of Sue’s description – well, then maybe it is time to retire the term as useless.

Comments

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is those damn "Mary Sue Litmus tests", which implied that there was some sort of objective method of determining if something is a Sue or not (And, of course, any OFC that failed the test is therefore objectively *just as bad* as the worst, most self-indulgent self-insert characters ever written) - Mary Sue should be a subjective judgement, on the level of "This character kinda gets on my nerves..."

[sodzilla.livejournal.com]

Mary Sue should be a subjective judgement,

Which carries with it the usual problem of subjective judgments. Even if someone is a friend, one who knows me very well, their subjective judgments won't always match mine. More objective assessments - such as "this movie contains the "girlfriend is murdered to motivate boyfriend to revenge" trope, and I know you hate that" - can be valuable in deciding what not to watch and so on, but a simple "I didn't like it" is not.

Also, I find it hard to understand how a term that *is a girl's name* and *is almost exclusively used for females* can be non-gendered, but whatever.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Also, I find it hard to understand how a term that *is a girl's name* and *is almost exclusively used for females* can be non-gendered, but whatever.

Well, yeah, that's why I'm coming around to the "drop the term already" viewpoint. The original sense of the term did seem to be used as much to describe male and/or male-authored characters, and was in reference (I believe) to a specific parody of bad fic in which the Mary-Sue character was called that...

But, yes, of course, we've long since left that point behind, and we're now at the point where any OFC - and practically any canon FC - is going to be automatically labeled a Sue.