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

[sodzilla.livejournal.com]

One of the peripheral topics that have come up around the main discussions this round is alternative terms. One was "Jonathan", which makes perfect sense if you've seen the Buffy episode "Superstar" - a dull, mildly unpleasant kid is suddenly the center of attention and beloved by all, because he has magic (= authorial fiat). Of course, I'm not sure if the term is perfect because Super-Special Characters tend to 1) actually *be* very good-looking instead of just be considered so, and 2) be amazingly competent at something besides making everyone think they're amazingly competent.

Stranger In The Living Room (SITLR) has also been suggested; I think the original coiner of the term mentioned feeling that a good fanfic read is like a get-together with old friends, and having a Super-Special Character intrude feels as though someone invited themselves along (or got invited along BY those friends who are suddenly and inexplicably smitten) and started dominating the conversation.

I'm not sure either of them is perfect. But I do dislike Mary Sue as a term, because it *is* gendered, and also carries so much negative baggage and so many muddled definitions that I think trying to "reclaim" it is more effort than I want to make.

Also, it's interesting that you bring up the examples you do, because all the most egregious male (and male-written) Super-Special Characters I've ever seen were... canonical. Which possibly says something about how accepted it is for men to be awesome and to want to be awesome, vs. women doing the same.

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

I mainly continue using the Mary Sue term because, well, it's the one I'm familiar with, and, as I said, it wasn't gendered when I first encountered it.

(Plus it's an old-school Trek fandom term, so it's got the weight of history behind it... *grin*)

I'm not sure I've ever actually seen a female-authored Sue on the same level as the examples I gave - whatever problems Twilight had as unadulterated wish-fulfilment, Bella didn't set off any of my Sue alarms.

[deaka.livejournal.com]

I think one of my major problems with it is with the fact it has become so bastardised in some circles -- where, rather than denoting a particular type of character in a particular setting, it's instead used as a lazy shorthand derogatory for any female character a person happens to dislike for any reason. It's the quickest and easiest way to condemn both a character and her fans -- clearly they're too blind to see her for the stunted and flawed creation she is.

Years of seeing this kind of misuse have made me very wary of the term -- which is a shame, because in its original, fanfic-derived form it had recognisable meaning.

[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..."

[sunnyskywalker]

I'm fond of using "Gary Stu" for the male examples, to keep things from sounding too gendered. Because yeah, plenty of bad examples there too! But I like the Jonathan suggestion too, because even if real Sues/Stus are supposedly actually that awesome, most of the time it's informed attributes (no, honest, they're really smart! even though they've been acting like idiots the whole time!), and they're a lot more Jonathan-ish than the author probably intended. Plus, my main criterion for Sueishness is the ability to warp the universe and change all the rules to make them the center ("And suddenly Snape washed his hair and forgot about Lily in two minutes and Dumbledore told everyone in the Order everything he knew about how to defeat Voldemort and Hermione failed an exam but didn't care and Voldemort realized he just needed a hug and [eleventy more improbable things], because Our Hero/ine was just so SPARKLY!"), and that's Jonathan in that episode.

[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.