Mary Sue and the Tyranny of Names

[krpalmer]

Back when I was writing MSTings, we spent a great deal of time "riffing" on fanfics that might be summed up as "Mary Sue" stories... but in the process of that, I started to wonder about the connotations packed into that name. Many people found it easy to proclaim that their characters, characters it was at times just as easy to become infuriated at, "weren't Mary Sues." In tossing out the name, we might have been neglecting to shine a proper light on the casual arrogance, pointless one-upsmanship, uncritical love from the characters who had come before, and general rule-breaking that we were attempting to riff on.

Beyond that, at times I'm convinced that to be a "Mary Sue," a character has to be disliked by some of the audience; what can work in creating a protagonist goes way overboard in building up a character elbowing their way into an existing story. That may tie in with my uneasiness when a character not from a fanfic is proclaimed to be a "canon sue," because I can wonder if many of them are disliked because they're "not cool enough." The excessive fanfic characters I've found most memorable tended to come across as too cool to me.

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

fernwithy wrote a really good piece on defining what a Mary Sue is and isn't. In a nutshell, a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu usurps his/her place in canon. I wrote a parody of a SW Mary Sue ("Hello, Jedi Sue") where the main character has more midichlorians than Luke and Anakin combined, Luke immediately falls in love with her, she flies an X-Wing for the first time and leads Rogue Squadron to victory, she pilots the Falcon through an asteroid field AND saves Han from a heart attack, Leia begs to be her best friend, she makes a lightsaber right away and defeats Luke in a mock duel, the Jedi trainees fight to become her padawan, when she dies Leia declares it a tragedy worse than Alderaan, and naturally, she is able to resurrect herself. And she is of course startlingly beautiful.

A canon character can never be a Mary Sue. It's Luke's place to be the hero who saves the day, it's Anakin's place to be The Chosen One, it's Palpatine's place to be the primary villain. They have to be extraordinary or interesting in some way or we wouldn't care.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I should probably add that post (http://fernwithy.livejournal.com/205497.html) to my memories; it seems to keep coming up. Even so, it makes the useful point that to say "Mary Sue" is to imply that there's something wrong with the story, that it exaggerates things that could work in different settings. That may tie in with my thought that it's not enough to just speak the dread name, but that instead it's useful to suggest specifics for further debate.

Of course, even if "Mary Sue" is condemned for breaking the rules of a fictional universe, are heroic protagonists allowed to break the rules of our real world? Some people may not be fond of that in the first place.