wherein Liz thinks about Mary Sues

[edenfalling]

metafandom (or metafandom) has recently been linking to an ongoing discussion about Mary Sues -- about whether the term has any remaining use as a description of a particular type of bad writing (character development failure plus plot warping, mostly), about whether the term's inherent gender bias ruins it, about whether people have expanded it to mean 'any interesting female character ever,' about various kinds of internalized and expressed misogyny, about people using Mary Sue accusations as a bullying tactic, and so on and so forth.

Which, okay. Clearly the term Mary Sue has gender baggage, especially since there has never been a single agreed-upon male equivalent. Also, male Sues seem to get written differently and reacted to differently, which is self-evidently problematic. (For example, if I had a dollar for every time I have seen a canon male character turned into a completely OOC plot-warping, ultraviolent, superpowered, girls-at-his-feet, jerkass karma houdini who makes every opposing character into a whining, ineffective, jealous loser, I would... well, I'd have at least a couple thousand dollars, that's what -- and people love those stories, which is beyond me. And if you want to talk pure male self-inserts, go poke around various anime fandoms for a few hours. They are not in short supply. You can start with Carrotglace and Skysaber, for two of the most over-the-top examples.)

Um. Where was I?

Right, so there are deep issues with the term, and if somebody can come up with a good, short gender neutral descriptor for 'character who warps the universe around hirself to the point where ze coopts all stories as hir own, and is also unrealistic -- ie, has skills and attributes without the effort and consequences such things would require and bring -- and generally badly written to boot,' then I would be very pleased. (That, incidentally, is what I mean when I say 'Mary Sue.')

The bullying, shaming, and self-censoring aspects of the Mary Sue phenomenon are more interesting to me, though, because I have some personal experience with them as a writer rather than just an annoyed reader. I fell into fandom in early 2002, via Harry Potter, and most specifically through FictionAlley and its forums. There was a fair amount of talk about Mary Sues there in 2002-2005, and IIRC, there was even a board where people could post descriptions of planned original characters for other people to check them for Mary Sue warning signs.

I always thought the way people ran those checks was odd. What most writers did was post a list of character traits -- name, age, hair color, eye color, favorite this and least favorite that -- and then explain or change various aspects other posters picked out as unrealistic. So fear of Mary Sue accusations had an effect on what people wrote, but not in any way I consider helpful. All that forum did (full disclosure, I participated there sometimes) was make writers nervous about their characters and fill them with self-doubt.

This is not to say that I think original characters cannot be usefully critiqued. It's just that a list of traits and skills utterly misses the point of what makes a Mary Sue. The issue is not the number and type of traits and skills a character possesses. The issue is whether those traits and skills make sense in context and as a whole, and whether they play out in the story with at least minimal realism and attention to consequences.

Let me give you an example from Naruto fandom. Here is a girl who wants to take the chuunin exam and is supremely confident she will pass. She is partnered with Umino Iruka (a minor canon favorite) and can effortlessly get under his skin. She is related to Orochimaru (a major villain) and shares some of his more distinctive physical traits (golden eyes, pale skin, a penchant for flashy earrings). She has a bloodline limit, she is amazing at taijutsu (she beats several skilled opponents over the course of the story), and she also has a summons contract. At one point, she fights a male ninja who admires her so much they end up dating despite belonging to different villages. Later on, she survives an attack from Uchiha Itachi and actually saves her partner from Itachi's massacre of his entire family, which is the next best thing to impossible.

She sounds pretty unrealistic, right?

Her name is Tonoike Naga. She is a secondary character in my stories The Way of the Apartment Manager and The Guardian in Spite of Herself. Do you know how many accusations I have had of her being a Mary Sue?

Zero.

You can make anything work if you put a little thought into it. Except people don't usually talk about that when throwing around Mary Sue accusations. They talk about traits and skills, not about the integration of traits and skills into a rounded character and an unwarped story. And so writers hear, "She's too this, she's too that, make her less this, make her less that," instead of, "Why is she like this? What are the logical consequences of that trait? How did she learn to do that? How much time does it take to become good at that skill? What does such dedication says about her?" and other questions along those lines.

...

I was not personally intimidated when I started writing fanfic, but that's because I had been writing (mostly bad and/or unfinished) original fiction for years before I knew fanfiction even existed. And one thing you have to do when writing original fiction is create and introduce characters, over and over and over again. By the time I tried writing fanfic, I was confident that I knew what I was doing when it came to making believable characters.

Even so, I worried about how other people might react to OCs I created. I knew they made sense and served the story (rather than warping it), but I had no way to know if readers would give them a chance, or if they'd see the presence of OCs and automatically reject my stories on the 'any OC -- and especially any female OC -- must be a Mary Sue!' theory. I am perfectly willing to believe that pressure has continued or increased over time.

And that sucks.

I dislike Mary Sues (as I defined them above), but I don't want to lose potentially awesome female characters (both canon and original) because people are too afraid to write anyone who has any defining characteristic that raises her above a shabby gray doormat.

---------------

Okay, back to state income taxes. *beats head against desk*

Comments

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I will be giving a talk at this year's WriterCon UK on the subject of 'Creating Original Characters readers don't hate' and some of what you say here is not unlike parts of what I have planned.

[redwolf]

Laurall Hamilton writes the most vomit-inducing Mary Sue fic, yet she has a huge fan base and seems to make quite a tidy living at it. You could also argue that James Bond is a Mary Sue and he seems to have done well for quite a lot of people, even out living his author.

I think way too many people label any OOC as a Mary Sue without actually comprehending what it actually means.

[iponly.livejournal.com]

Oh man, Carrotglace. I remember "Insertion" was so over the top, I sort of took it as something completely new. Ranma fandom had one hell of a tradition of mary-sue'ing the main character though.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

hmmmm. a hem? homo ex machina?

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Oh there is so very, very much I wish to contribute to this on the subject of poor Sue. I have found Pat Pflieger's paper on the subject especially enlightening, for it emphasizes a key point that I think is often missing -- the Sue is characertized not so much by her individual awesome characteristics (which make her an awesome character to read and enjoy), as she is by the reactions of others around her. When she becomes the focus of it all, when she sucks the air out of the room and when the canon characters engage in all sorts of astounding manipulations to accommodate her, she is a Sue. In young writers, she is often the mistake brought on by having not yet learned restraint. The article also makes the very important point that she is not necessarily a romantic character.

http://www.merrycoz.org/papers/MARYSUE.HTM

My two current favorite examples of Sues are Jack Ryan from the Tom Clancy novels (his wife is a Sue as well) and the character Mary Russell (I had no idea, really), from Laurie R. King's mysteries. King's Mary is the most blatant Sue I've seen in published literature in a long time -- I thoroughly enjoy the early stories, but she is undoubtedly an over the top, off the charts Sue.

[issen4.livejournal.com]

But as you say, Tonoike Naga is a minor character. I would only call her a Mary Sue if she took over the story.

[sarraceniaceae.livejournal.com]

This, so much. I dislike characters who warp the story around them as much as anything, but Mary Sues have become an indiscriminate way of bullying people out of creating new characters (especially new female characters) and it really is incredibly irritating.

I remember back when I was first getting into fanfiction, people could even create explicitly self-insert characters and still manage to pull it off well-enough that their fics got recced in their fandom, and actually some of them weren't bad. (Granted, I read them a decade ago so...I could be misremembering, but I am certain I've seen far worse Mary Sues in the way canon characters got warped.) I can't even imagine that happening in the fandoms I hang out in today.

[edenfalling]

Cool! Will you post a summary afterwards? I'd be very interested in reading your thoughts.

[edenfalling]

I read several of his stories a while ago, though it did not take me very long to be reading mostly out of sheer disbelief and a dazed curiosity about what new madness he'd plunge into next. It was frustrating in a way, because he has the gift for making you want to know what happens next, but he has absolutely no idea when to stop. Which is, I think, one of the main things that leads to Mary Sues -- lack of a sense of proportion.

[edenfalling]

What?

[edenfalling]

Fair point! It's just that if you go by those Mary Sue litmus tests one sometimes finds floating around the net -- or by a strict list of traits -- she would be roundly condemned. Which is why I am saying that judging characters by lists of traits and skills is not useful. :-)

[edenfalling]

There were some breathtakingly audacious stories back in early HP fandom, weren't there? With most of them, I think the craft did not live up to the bravery, but still, there is something refreshing about watching people go for broke and not get shut down, whether you actually like their stories or not.

[edenfalling]

Yep. Making everything about herself (or himself), with the full approval and consent of both the author and the other characters, is a prime Mary Sue marker. It's just that you can't identify that very readily from a list of attributes -- you have to see it play out in the story -- which I guess may be why people started judging Mary Sues more by traits, since those are easier to pick out, and often accompany the plot-warping and focus-stealing effects. Except, of course, the traits are a symptom rather than the underlying cause, and then people start focusing on making characters with nothing special about them rather than thinking about how to write awesome traits and skills in a convincing way.

I am not much for military/political thrillers, nor for mysteries, so I will take your word on Jack Ryan and Mary Russell. :-)

[edenfalling]

There is a reason I quit reading Laurell Hamilton. Obsidian Butterfly was the last book in which any character seemed to have a life that didn't revolve around Anita. :-/

But yeah, if a universe is designed from the word go to revolve around a single character who is always right and so on and so forth, it's not as jarring as a plot-warping and focus-stealing OC inserted into a universe that was designed around other rules. It's like... I guess with professional published Mary Sues, you start off identifying with them and so the power fantasy is yours, whereas with a Mary Sue inserted into fanfic, you are generally identifying with the canon characters and so the power fantasy is shutting you out. Or something like that.

rambling...

[deralte.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about Gary Stu's (my preferred term for male Mary sues) the other day while reading the new Dresden Files book. Harry (the gary stu) makes a joke along the lines of, "You mean the universe doesn't really revolve around me?" And I blinked because we, as readers, and the author are perfectly aware that it does. So does acknowledging the fact make Harry more or less of Gary Stu, or was it the author's attempt to gloss over the fact that Harry's powers and skills are getting rather ridiculously overpowered?

I actually find it a lot harder to pick out mary sues/gary stus in canon simply because most authors, by the time they've reached the publishing point, have learnt to hide the more obvious signs that it's a wish fulfilment, self insert. I'm fairly lenient in canon though because characters have to be almost perfect in those cases before they get on your nerves, which often takes a least a book or a whole series to develop (whereas the same thing in a fandom can ring warning bells in seconds). Two examples I read recently - Myrren's Gift which had a main character who was pretty much good at everything, well liked etc etc, but he avoided perfection by being spectacularly ugly. That problem was 'solved' by the end of the book and I rolled my eyes and decided to not read any further. Another example is Rhapsody from the Symphony of Ages series. She started out a well rounded character who was pretty, though not beautiful and had one very useful skill. By the end of the book she was breathtakingly beautiful, adored by all, had several amazing skills she was perfect at etc etc. In cases where they keep it remotely realistic, I'm willing to keep reading (The Dresden Files, the Sookie Stackhouse series, etc), though I know I may have to drop the series for idiocy eventually (Sookie is coming periously close to it these days... I dropped Anita Blake ages ago. And Tom Clancy for that matter.)

[khym-chanur.livejournal.com]

It's just that a list of traits and skills utterly misses the point of what makes a Mary Sue.

I remember someone putting a character from Diane Duane's Young Wizards series through a Mary Sue checklist, and since magic in that series is very flexible, the character racked up a ton of points in the "Can your character do blah" section, since the answer was almost always "yes".

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

I think "man from the machine" a la the plot device deus ex machina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina).

[edenfalling]

Ah! Yes, sort of. Mary Sue always saves the day, even if that's supposed to be a canon character's main trait.

[edenfalling]

Let me guess: Dairine? Although yeah, any wizard would max out the special abilities section. *sigh*

Re: rambling...

[edenfalling]

As I said to redwolfoz above, if a universe is designed from the word go to revolve around a single character, it's not anywhere near as jarring as a plot-warping and focus-stealing OC inserted into a universe that was designed to revolve around other people. With characters who, in canon, display Mary Sue-ish traits, you start off identifying with them and so you vicariously share the power fantasy. Whereas with a Mary Sue inserted into fanfic, you generally start off identifying with the canon characters and so the power fantasy shuts you out and smothers you along with the canon characters.

[sci-frey.livejournal.com]

To be totally self serving, what about offering this as a definition of the M(G)ary Sue?: http://sci-frey.livejournal.com/8706.html

[edenfalling]

Mmm. Interesting points, but I think that your definition is perhaps overly specific. Also, it is completely female-centric, ignoring all male tendencies to write themselves into stories, which bugs me because one of the issues in this discussion has been the gender-bias in the term Mary Sue and the lack of a universally accepted male equivalent. Furthermore, your focus on the inner and sexual lives of young teenage girls -- and your willingness to make sweeping generalizations about said inner and sexual lives -- makes me twitchy, if only because your statements fail to match my own experiences at that age.

But definitely food for thought.

[hoshi-ryo.livejournal.com]

I've always figured that the name 'Mary Sue' actually comes from an early example of the species -- at least one of the terms for the male version, 'Wesley,' comes from an example that turned up in TV series.

I'm not sure I'd count the male version you described as a proper example, though -- where I've seen it, it's usually been part of a pattern of overall horrid writing, while our dear friend Mary Sue has, unfortunately, often been made even more notable by being an island of...solid waste in what is otherwise a rather well-done piece of writing. When it's in a sea of sewage, it's not going to be remarkable.

I actually am inclined to agree with the theories it has something to do with the inner & sexual lives of young teenage girls -- with the understanding that it's only applicable to those who are, well, producing (and giving ravingly positive reviews for) Mary Sues. It's a form of wish-fulfillment...or, at least, it's to be hoped that is its appeal, instead of a complete lack of taste.

[edenfalling]

The male version counts because the character type I described co-opts all stories as his own, which is, as I said in the post, my definition of a Mary Sue: a character who warps the universe around hirself to the point where ze coopts all stories as hir own, and is also unrealistic -- ie, has skills and attributes without the effort and consequences such things would require and bring -- and generally badly written to boot. For him not to count, you must use a different definition of the term. What definition are you using in your description of female Mary Sues as islands of dreck in the middle of decent writing? (I am genuinely curious here, because that is not a statement I would consider well-supported in my own experience -- if anything, I would say stories with male Mary Sues are often better written, at least in the limited sense of giving the world-warping character actual agency, which is one of the things that makes me more likely to enjoy a story. I like characters who make choices and do things, not characters who have things "just happen" around them.)

If you agree with sci_frey that female Mary Sues are related to the inner and sexual lives of young teenage girls, what do you think male Mary Sues have to do with the inner and sexual lives of the teenage boys and adult men who write them? Because there is often quite a lot of weird subtext going on in male Mary Sue center-of-the-universe stories -- harems, homophobia, zero-sum power fantasies (where for one character to be awesome, all other same-gender characters must be beaten down) etc. -- and I would like to see an exploration of that. Also, what about people who write cross-gender Mary Sues -- women writing, to borrow rahirah's terminology, Wottaguy, and men writing Wottagal? What do you think is going on there?

[hoshi-ryo.livejournal.com]

Hm, for my definition? I look at what surrounds the character: if the overall pattern is 'skills and attributes'--as well as events--'without the effort and consequences such things would require and bring' I do not count the character as a Mary Sue. The character simply happens to be 'benefiting' (in a loose sense of the term, anyway) from a systematic problem.

This is part of what made Westley a Mary Sue: he had powers that broke the world it was set in drop into his lap, only once really had anything go wrong for him (and the writers dropped that into a memory hole), and this was in a setting where normally this did not happen so it was not a systemic error that he happened to be a regular beneficiary thereof.

As for the rest? I have not read sci_frey's work, but I would think that the answer Occam's Razor provides of 'wish fulfillment' probably applies pretty well across the board. Cross-gender Mary Sues probably are a reflection of (depending on your school of psychology) either a reflection of the animia/animus (if Jungian) or (if not Jungian, like me) simply what the person writing would like to have sex with. The same may apply in some way to same-gender Sues written by non-straights. I suspect that a detailed exploration of this topic would, however, be best saved for use as a doctoral thesis.