I know a little girl and her name is Mary Mac: The Misuse of Mary Sue.

Hermione is a Mary Sue in the sense that she's a modified version of the author; Rowling has talked about this in interviews.

No, that just makes her a modified self-insert. It takes more than self-insertion to make a character a Sue or a Stu.

Mary Sue is misunderstood. She's a cuckoo egg left in a starling's nest, hatching into something big and bright and demanding that doesn't belong where it is. In her own story, she would be something else altogether: she would be a protagonist, she would be the biggest, brightest thing in the room because that's what a protagonist is. But because she's trying to be a starling instead of a cuckoo, she's out of place. She doesn't work. That doesn't make her welcome where she is...but it does mean that maybe all Mary really needs to do is fly away home.

This is possibly the best explanation as to what a Mary Sue is I've ever read, and also I think a good way of making sure original characters in fanfiction don't break the universe. I have an OC in one of my fanfic!universes who sometimes I do worry about - she's one of the canon character's younger sisters, she's beautiful and competent and was an escort to help pay her college fees and I do worry about her, sometimes. But she's there to serve the story, not break it. And I hate the niggling little voice which doesn't say 'is this a good character, does this character serve the story', but 'is this character a Mary Sue'. Not helpful, that little voice.

But this essay is wonderful, and has wonderful links in it, so thank you for that.

I hate the niggling little voice which doesn't say 'is this a good character, does this character serve the story', but 'is this character a Mary Sue'.

This. All of this. I hate that little voice, and I hate the way it makes me want to tone down original characters in fan-universes. No, dammit, my original characters can be awesome too. They don't have to stand in the background. They can be brave and bold and beautiful, because those universes are big enough to have people besides the canon characters doing awesome things. (People may not read these stories, but that is their problem, not mine.)

*rises, applauding* Brava!

I decided "Mary Sue" was not a helpful term when I saw people arguing that the Dorothy Sayers canon character Harriet Vane was a Mary Sue in the book where she is the protagonist and viewpoint character.

Not how it works.

I agree.

This post is feeding thoughts I've been having lately about Strong Female Characters and what Makes A Strong Female Character. Because we want those, yes, yes, of course. But then, I see the prescriptive explanations of what is and isn't a strong female character, and I start to wonder if the instructive analysis is being influenced by sexism and/or internalized sexism, thus resulting in a double-bind.

For example, I often see people have lovefests over male characters, about how well they were written, etc etc etc. I very rarely see the same about Strong Female Characters - no matter which example is brought up, there's always someone who disagrees. Is she a Strong Female Character? No, because the writer tended to be sexist in their other work. No, she had too many flaws. No, she didn't have enough flaws. No, because I, personally, didn't like her. No, because she was kind of a bitch. No, because she didn't meet MY personalized set of standards that somehow only apply to women and never to men in fiction. No, because she didn't meet MY personalized set of standards that do apply to both women and men in fiction, honest, I just didn't say anything about the 15 male characters who pissed me off.

So, I worry that, as in real life, fictional women are being held to higher and more unfair standards than fictional men. I don't want a "SO EVERYBODY GETS A FREE PASS" because, yeah, we still get the fictional women who are really just MacGuffins with boobs and/or The Love Interest (Sex Object). But, I wonder about the kneejerk tendency to name any marginally competent woman protagonist "Mary Sue" so we can get on to the very serious business of what the boys are doing instead. Or to pick apart any female protagonist because if you look hard enough you can see where the writer went wrong, and so, no, there are no Strong Women in fiction after all.

Again, I don't think we should stifle well-thought criticism, but I do worry that it's another situation in which the girls have to jump through a few more quality control entry hoops while the boys are getting applauded for showing up.

I often think the Mary Sue thing revolves around sexism, so I'd be inclined to agree with your Mary Sue/Marty Stu observations.

I once heard someone criticize a character they were accusing of Mary Sue-dom that "nobody is that interesting." Which is kind of unkind. Lots of male characters are impossibly interesting: they may get accused of boring white knight paladin-ness, or utterly bland heroic whatever, but they're rarely accused of being Marty Stus.

No, it's interesting *female* characters who are Mary Sues, and this leads me to believe some people on some level don't believe a woman can be interesting.

Alas, this is distressing news for poor Ada Lovelace, who is so totally freaking awesome that if she didn't actually exist we would be forced to invent her. And then her poor inventor would be accused of making a Mary Sue.

I've never had a problem with a character being a Mary Sue, provided that said character is entertaining. A boring Mary Sue is not worth reading about.

You're right about there not being Mary Sues in original stories. Some people just don't get that.

Thank you for this. Very thought provoking. i don't think I've ever used the term Mary Sue but I know in the future, I will definitely be more critical of how I look at things before I even think of using it.

Plus? You've given me another author to check out. I just went out and bought Kelly Armstrong's first book.

Thank gods that someone is saying this so well.

THIS IS THE BEST POST. thank you for writing it.

Absolutely true. Sexism plays a big role in many readers' acceptance of a character's competence.

I think it's going a bit far to say Hermione isn't "talented" at magic. She works hard, yes, but she picks things up very quickly and is good at almost everything magical she tries, and encounters no subject that gives her actual trouble. At the start of the story, with no magical mentoring, she's succeeded at every spell she's tried before she even gets to school. People can work equally hard with varying results; hers are, Quiddich aside, universally awesome (the only reason she's ever not the best at something is so Harry can be better at it), and I'd call that some serious talent. Harry does benefit much more from gamemaster fiat than she does, though, and is a lot worthier of the kind of criticism being discussed.

But, yeah. Plenty of evidence of the pervasive discomfort many even supposedly enlightened fans have with female character awesomeness can be found prominently displayed on the shelves of anyone's local comic book store.

The term Mary Sue is used inconsistently, and sometimes unfairly.

It would never have occurred to me that it was a gender-specific term, despite its etymology.

I tend to think of 'Mary Sue' as a term for 'a character that that avoids conflict due to his or her own virtues.'

Conflict is what makes a story interesting.

It's why they invented kryptonite, to keep Superman stories from being dull as dishwater.

Myself, I've noticed that when I write a character that physically overmatches his problems I have tendency to make him something of a cad. I find its easier to keep a character interesting if he's at least a bit of a bastard.

I recall at the Arisia panel where the subject first came up, you mentioned that you, personally, failed the Mary Sue test. That really hammered it home for me. You can sing, write songs, draw, write books (LOTS of books), you know a ton about a lot of different subjects, and you don't state an opinion without an eloquent and well-thought-out statement to back it up. From where I'm sitting, you're quite well-loved, and your awesome cats need to count as a checklist point on here somewhere.

And yet, you're a real person, existing out here in the real world. How can I accept that, and yet scoff at a fictional lady who's studied up or dedicated herself or been born with a gift? It's not a stretch.

I think sexism plays a huge part. If people don't realize awesome women exist out here in the real world, it's much more of a disconnect.

I know I commented earlier, but I do have a question I really wanted to ask. Do you think the protagonist necessarily *has* to be the biggest, brightest thing in the room?

I can't answer for Seanan, but personally the answer is NO.

It depends on the scene, certainly, but quite often, the point is for the protagonist to be the SECOND biggest thing in the room...

Either it's a scale thing (this evil is bigger than Max Fightmaster!) or it's a conflict thing.

If the hero is inherently bigger and badder than everything... then there's really no conflict at all (which is why I hate Superman).

There's no success in overcoming something less than you.

Also, you need to protag to take a back seat to supporting characters from time to time... otherwise they have nothing to support. The role of supporting characters is to support in the things they do that the protag doesn't.

Toby is the center of attention, for instance, because it's her story.

She very rarely is the biggest, brightest thing in the room.
Most of the time, she is surrounded by beings vastly more powerful and competent than her, and she uses them to do the heavy lifting that needs doing, but she can't herself.

Everyone else is bigger and brighter. Everything she ends up involved in is WAAAAAAY bigger than her. She mostly just pulls a few things together, and then jumps out of the way as the giants topple.

I always find it interesting that the mystery and espionage genres don't get hit with the Mary Sue assignation as often. Robert B. Parker's Spencer fits pretty much every bullet point on a list of Mary Sue definitions, and Jack Higgins' Sean Dillon is so Suey that his eyes are of no particular color.

In fact, a good 90% of all the mystery I've read has been Suey to some degree or another.

And Lestat is a Sue. I just wanted to have that written down somewhere so future generations could know.

No, Lestat is the protagonist, and he does screw up now and then.

This is really interesting. I'd never thought about Mary Sues beyond my basic definition of obvious author wish-fulfillment self-insert. But you've really hit this right - it's true that people call "Gary Stu" so very less frequently than "Mary Sue." I will be more aware of that in the future and try not to use the term "Mary Sue" recklessly.

Saying "This character is just a Mary Sue" is a way of dismissing them that isn't fair to reader, writer, or character.

Yes! It's too easy of an excuse not to engage with the text. If I can't just write the character off, I might actually have to examine the reasons I don't like her.

And thanks for pointing out the inherently gendered nature of all the Mary Sue hate. Whenever I hear someone invoke her name, it makes me think of the scene in Mean Girls where Tina Fey points out all the "girl-on-girl crime." (In my experience it's usually women calling out characters as Mary Sues, which I think is a particularly unfortunate trend.) Female characters, talented and flawed and everything in between should have some room to just be.

Linking this. Terrific analysis.

I think Cracked accused the hero of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series of being a Gary Stu since he's the heroic financial reporter who takes down corruption and despite being a middle aged overweight guy, every single woman that meets him wants to shtup him - probably because he's the only man in Sweden who isn't a serial killer or a rapist.

Hrm...that means I've always thought of the term incorrectly.

To me "Mary Sue" has been the wish fulfillment character; the not-so-cleverly-disguised author character to whom everything good happens to, or at least gets to do all of the stuff the author wants to do. Whether they're a main character or not.

So be it. I'll have to find another way of describing that character, then.

Hm. I've used the term "Mary Sue", possibly incorrectly, to refer to various Arthurian knights. Basically, there's this pattern that shows up again and again of a new knight coming to court and showing how awesome he is by defeating whoever the previous audience favorite is. (You see Gawaine outclassing Kay, who used to be awesome. You see Lancelot outglassing Gawaine. You see Galahad outclassing Lancelot. And that's before we get to where Perceval fits into the cycle and the more obscure knights.) (Whether this use is or isn't correct may depend on how loosely one defines fanfic.)

I've used it almost certainly incorrectly to refer to King Arthur, given that the story of the sword in the stone is his story. I've used it to refer to James T. Kirk, which is almost certainly incorrect for much the same reason.

There's a character I loathe from the X-Men / New Mutants comics from about twenty years ago, Selene. But, it would never occur to me to call her a Mary Sue. I think this is because she's a villain, but it may also be because she's clearly not an author-insertion character.

Toby and Harry Dresden don't make me think "Mary Sue". The heroine of Sunshine did. That's almost certainly an incorrect use of the term because it is her story, so I need to find a better term for "the heroine protests how ordinary she is, but she is actually totally powerful, gaining new powers whenever the plot requires it, and in ways that make me roll my eyes because this just came out of nowhere". (This is part of why it would never occur to me to use the term to describe Toby. When she grows in power, I can see the buildup.)

Let's see... what term would I use for a male equivalent of Sunshine's heroine? The closest I can come is "His power is bought with the GURPS limitation: Only works to advance plot." And, that's not quite the same.

I tend to notice another pattern as well. In books and movies, a woman's actions sometimes count for less. The two examples that come to mind are two versions of Dorian Gray and two of Parke Godwin's novels.

There's a movie called The Sins of Dorian Gray, with a female Dorian, a model. It has a lot of clever bits, but I'm not going to talk about those. When she realizes how evil she has become, she spends ten years working with sick kids. (Well, maybe doing a lot of good things, but we see her in what looks like a South American country, sitting by what looks like a hospital bed, wiping the sweat from a child's brow.) This is apparently the equivalent of male Dorian deciding not to ruin a girl because he feels like being virtuous that day, but only succeeds in being hypocritical. Ten years of hard work from a woman is the equivalent of passing up an evil deed on a whim for an afternoon. Yuck.

In Parke Godwin's Firelord, King Arthur learns compassion after maybe a year (maybe just a season -- I forget) of "captivity" with the Picts. Said captivity involves becoming a part of a Pictish family and the lover of one of the women in it. Queen Guinevere learns the same lesson in Beloved Exile, after ten years as a Saxon family's slave. Oh, except that she still doesn't really get it, because she's a bit too optimistic about other people. (The two books make a fascinating study in gender expectations, and I babbled quite a lot about this years ago, in my dissertation.)

Ooh, Arthurian myth.

Lancelot is totally a fanfic creation which happened when the French decided to retell Arthurian myth. Prior to that, the badass of the court was Gawain, whose power came from the sun (little bit of sun-god carryover, that one), Arthur's best friend was Bedivere, and Percival was the Grail Knight (because Galahad was also a French insert.)

I only recently found out that the jousts were the result of medieval cosplay. Sir Ullrich von Lichtenstein, tournament champion, went around with a bunch of his pals as King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, visiting various courts in character and trouncing everybody in the jousts. So that's why an early medieval warlord gets mixed up with high feudalism.

You really have to wonder how bad history teachers have to be when so many kids hate history. History's full of fun, bizarre stuff.

Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be plausible.

I think this may be relevant to your interests:

http://globalcomment.com/2011/in-praise-of-hermione-granger-series/

I wonder how much of the gender discrepancy is from the female variant being identified first? Even now, "Mary Sue" is the standard identifier, with "Gary Stu" being the minor male variant.

In Elena's case, particularly, I think much of the focus on her comes from all the fuss being made in the books that she is the Only Female Werewolf In The World (tm), and that this something that's just Not Supposed To Happen At All Ever. She's a great big honkin' anomaly in that universe.

I was about to say "in much the same way as Paul Atreides is the only male with Bene Gesserit powers in the Dune universe", but there's a difference - the Bene Gesserit were deliberately trying to breed a male variant for a very long time, so there was a pre-existing story niche for him in that universe.

A better version might be The Mule, from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, although he's more plot element than protagonist.

Yes to all of this, but especially this:

Half the time, "Mary Sue" seems to mean "female character."

This drives me insane. In urban fantasy particularly, it seems that Mary Sue is a catch-all term for "the heroine." Regardless of whether she actually fits the definition (and usually she doesn't), she's labelled a Mary Sue because she's strong or clever or tough or magically gifted. And you know what, if I was going to spend my life fighting vampires or laying zombies to rest, I'd want to be strong, clever, tough, and magically gifted too!

This is clarifying and great; thank you for writing it.