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

Wow.....I read a Tor book a few of years back that was so deplorably Gary Stu that it put me off reading any fiction for nearly 18 months.

I won't mention the title here lest someone else go out and find it.

Well written, good, deep piece on the topic, cross posting it to where my other writer friends lurk.

I would have loved to see a panel about this at Geek Girl Con this past weekend.

Or at any con (which there may have been -- I haven't been to an SF con in years).

Thanks for a reasoned, articulate summation of Mary Sue-ism and how it's used to undermine female characters.

Thank you for this.

It's -easy- to dismiss a character by calling them a "Mary Sue." But that doesn't mean you've actually identified the problem, or that there's a problem at all.

Doesn't stop me from complaining about Merlin in the second Amber series. But I don't have to call him a "Gary Stu" to explain what's wrong there, nor is that sufficient.

This is a fantastic article and I am going to spread it around Twitter and my LJ for all the writers and fiction aficionados on my flist to read. It's truly the best analysis of what is and isn't a Mary Sue that I've ever read. *salutes*

I once wrote a NaNoWriMo novel, fitting vaguely into the "spy novel" genre, wherein the male lead landed himself in deep doodoo (captured by some very unpleasant dudes) and the female lead - who happened to be his wife - was the one who got him out of it. Any time I think about editing and publishing it, I start imagining the reactions to Yuki's prominence if it actually were to be read by a lot of people. I can guarantee she'd be called a Mary Sue forever.

It's especially infuriating since you're right, it IS largely female characters who get slapped with that label. If the situation in my novel were reversed, I doubt anyone would even consider calling the male lead a Gary Stu, despite the fact that their skill set and significance to the overall story, which spans two books according to my plan, is actually quite equal. Blargh.

I would totally be willing to be a Mary Sue if it meant my hair was always perfect

I would totally be willing to be a Mary Sue if it meant my having way more hair than I currently do. That being said, this is an excellent post, and it does point out the sexism in the Mary Sue accusations. Nobody accuses James Bond of being a Gary Stu even though he was Ian Fleming's projection of himself.

Not to mention Simon Templar, the Saint, who was author Leslie Charteris' alter-ego, if I recall correctly...

Thank you for writing this. I once had a horrible argument with somebody who insisted that Mary Sue could exist outside of fanfiction, and I couldn't explain it as well as you have.

I dislike the term "Mary Sue" even in fanfiction unless it's referring to a character who is introduced into the kind of fanfiction that is meant to be an extension of canon and is aimed at an audience of people who read fic because they want more of the same, more than an author/showrunner could ever realistically produce.

When a fic writer is trying to tell a story that was written with the specific intent to subvert some aspect of canon that the writer is uncomfortable with or wants to critique, then the story of canon is supposed to break a little in very specific ways, but when you do it with a female protagonist, suddenly you hear a lot about Mary Sue.

Mary Sues break stories because the writer doesn't know what s/he's trying to do; when the author of a story is actually TRYING to change how the universe works and one change is introducing another character who changes the way people relate to each other, that's not Mary Sueing, that's subversion. For instance, if everyone loves the character or hates her and does nothing but talk about her, that's a Sue; if on the other hand the character serves to humanise a character with whom they have a relationship (i.e. to show us the character being human when in canon we only see them with their enemies) or to make people talk to her in a universe full of idiot plots created by people being stupidly non-communicative, that's subversion.

Similar problems befall fic writers who are just trying to tell stories in parts of the universe the creators haven't populated, like the past, or the future, or another country/continent/town/part of the world--or even just another set of characters. I had the biggest problem with trolls from a self-proclaimed Sue sporking community because I wrote stories about the villains in a popular book series and among the main characters were women who happened to be related to several of them, because these people presumably weren't hatched in cabbage patches and had relatives (indeed, the author confirmed later that they had had relatives, even female ones, though she chose different names).

Now, I know these characters were not Sues, and so did a lot of other folks (hint: if the story is about a character, of course she's going to dominate it; but the story wasn't about that character dominating the main character's ecosystem--he wasn't even born yet) but it was still annoying, especially since the one time I TRIED to write a Sue as an adult, on a dare, I failed--I produced a self-insert, but she was horrifically flawed and also so successfully self-inserted that I took the story down after a few months because I didn't want anyone I didn't trust to read it! (Oh I wrote Sues at 13. But not as an adult.)

I need a like button...

I was pointed to this post after I wrote one of my own about Mary Sues, and what was said to me when I was linked was that it was frustrating we still have to have this conversation. But if we do have to keep having the conversation (APPARENTLY WE DO...?) then at least we're having it really awesomely, thank you for writing this post.

One of the interesting things about Mary Sue is that we all say "we know her, no need to explain her!" but at the same time everyone seems to have a different definition! My personal one has been along the lines of authorial avatar, but a bit more technically - that the character's viewpoint is equivalent to the author's. I'm... not entirely sure how I can describe what I mean, but when I mentally line up the various OCs I've come up with over the years I can feel that some of the early ones lack a certain independence from me-the-author, that they're not quite characters in their own right because they also sort of serve as my lens into the world. And those are my Sues.

However, I do also very much like and agree with your point that using Mary Sues for protagonists is pretty... inappropriate and what's probably contributed to the word just being used to mean "female character I don't like". That it goes from "this character is so awesome they're warping the canonical world around them, and this is bad writing" to "this character is awesome, this is bad writing".

And just - seriously, I love your post. :)

Great post.

The term is over used as a shorthand for 'female character I don't like' that I completely ignore any opinion that includes it. Actually, from my experience, I will love that character and think she is awesome. In a way I started to expect my favourite characters to be called that.

It doesn't mean there is no bad and annoying characters in fiction (including female ones) but I need some actual reasons for the dislike instead of a term that, by now, lost all meaning.

Wow, I'm really slow - I've only just come across this. Bravo! I wish I'd been able to be this coherant (but the rage! The RAGE! It burned us, my precious!).

I love the way you've teased out the real issue here, which is that many, many female protagonists are being treated like cuckoos in the nest by reviewers - treated as if they don't belong, don't deserve their own stories, as if they must necessarily be idealised author inserts because no female character would get her own story otherwise. It's really sad, and what's most sad is that it's often courageous, honest, self-proclaimed Feminist reviewers who fall prey to this.

It's as if they've trained themselves to be cynical about female characters so well that they can't actually comprehend complex, fully realised, awesome characters if they happen to be female. The programming rebels, it does not compute. We live in a sexist world - therefore there can be no such thing as an awesome female character. Therefore this female character cannot be awesome. She must be a Mary-Sue! The author is a traitor to Feminism! And the irony of the fact that they're spending all their time ripping down female characters and (mainly) female authors is lost on them.

I love Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld books. In the very first volume, Bitten, we meet Elena, the world's only female werewolf, and Jeremy, the current leader of the North American Pack. Both Elena and Jeremy are physically stronger than humans, with super-fast healing, severely slowed aging, and supernaturally good looks. Both of them turn into giant wolves who can eat your face. Elena, despite being the only female werewolf, is a pretty standard werewolf. Jeremy is the only non-bruiser Pack leader ever; is psychic; is rich and artistically talented and smart and his mother wasn't a werewolf at all, but a super-secret special non-werewolf supernatural and also the hottest necromancer ever loves him and and and...

Don't forget how Clay is the hardest werewolf of all the werewolves, the adopted son of the Alpha, a world reknowned anthropologist - despite not understanding people all that well, so he can be clueless to the effect his breathtakingly good looks have on a plethora of female students - has the world's only female werewolf devoted to him, and has proved to be a near-perfect father.

I agree that Armstrong writes all three characters really well, it's just that Clay adds another layer of bafflement at how Elena gets to be the Mary Sue.

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

This, and the bar for a female character being called one seems to be creeping ever-lower.

This post about Mary Sues was linked on The Mary Sue.

I think that means you win the Internet.

Just wanted to say that even over a year later, I'm still coming back to this article and re-reading it. :)

to be honest, mary sue doen't have no meaning and i do understand your post. If people are going to waste there time making realitic characters that are not feminie, they should get a real life or something.
the term itself is cliche because, its mostly pointing out to all female characters to be kick out of fan fics,flims etc. To me i will just ignore this whole diliema and move to make my own fun characters... and btw im new here ^.^

I've always thought that Mary Sue was a meaningless word given its multiple and contradictory definitions. And therefore thought that it was mostly used as an insult---which it is.

But your post made some sense of the more common definitions. It explains (1) why it needs to apply to fanfiction only; (2) why original character is part of the definition; and (3) why this character reconfigures reality around itself.

We're not talking about a character at all! We're talking about a fanfiction genre where the protagonist's privilege is taken away from the canon protagonist and given to the fanfiction protagonist. And since many (popular) canon protagonists are male and Mary Sue is obviously a female name, that suggests to me that these Mary Sue fanfictions are addressing a problem: the lack of awesome female protagonists in popular media. Changing a protagonist's gender from male to female is probably for the same reason.

How else are you going to have a female protagonist in the Supernatural verse that sticks around for every season, for example?

The Mary Sue character *can* *be* a self-insert (but it doesn't have to be); it's *probably* about wish-fulfilment (but not necessarily)---but it's always about assigning the protagonist's privilege to someone other than the canon protagonist.

Beautifully expressed.

I'd love to hear your explain Elphaba being a Mary Sue if she were taken out of Wicked and into a fan-fiction.

The weirdest thing for me about the beginning of this post. Is I"m having trouble visualizing what a Light Saber Baton would look like.