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TWO: It's overused. Seriously. As time has gone on, the term has, in ignorance of the above failing (which is a critical one to note) been applied to characters who aren't, over and over and over, to the point where it's practically at the point of "character who is marginally overpowered and/or I don't like." Marginally overpowered characters are not Mary Sues. 1d4chan likes to parody this, with good reason.
I cannot rate it high enough. The term "Mary Sue" suffered from the same symptom that happened to 4chan jokes - people use it to indicate that they are "in the know" of "internet culture". They believe that this is how internet age k3wl k1dz should talk. In reality, it only shows that you've spent way too much time on TVtropes.
I will drop five words: the wattpad fan fiction community. I shit you not you will find more Mary Sue's there than there are actual people in the US named Mary Sue.
Also, I see your Fuu and raise you one Yuki Mare/Syrena Mare. Fuu reminded me of this one, and it's the same Sue. Just one of those cross-fandom ones and Syrena was originally called Yuki.
With the Avatar version, you don't even have to look at the bio to tell there's a lot conflicting with canon. There was only one known character who had light hair that I can remember, and it was plot-relevant.
I'm surprised nobody has listed Stephie from Assigned Male, considering the monster thread on the strip here.
Stephie has all of the absolute worst aspects of the classic Mary Sue other than being in a fanfic (I think a bad webcomic is about on the same level though). First, she's an incredibly obnoxious self-insert of the author portrayed in a ridiculously glowing light, despite having done absolutely nothing to earn it.
She speaks and talks exactly like an adult despite supposedly being a small child, and everything she says is pure author's tract.
She routinely insults and talks down to other characters, often contradicting shit said in the very last strip. Despite making no solid arguments whatsoever for the nonsense she spouts, every other character is immediately beaten down and ends up agreeing with her by the end of the strip.
Despite this, every other named character loves Stephie and puts up with all this utter bullshit. They only end up strawmen apparently because of momentary stupidity in daring to deviate from Stephie's rules about everything.
In any comic written by a sane person, this repulsive Sue would be the hated villain and the point of the story would be taking them down.
If we're doing canon webcomic self-inserts, I'd like to add Ethan from Ctrl+Alt+Del, Fisk from Better Days and Drip from Jack as good examples.
Ethan and Drip are more anti-Sues, for entirely different reasons. Ethan's a LOL SO WACKY RANDUMB guy who's stupid enough to apply video game concepts to IRL but is also somehow enough of a genius to build a robot with artificial intelligence out of an X-Box, and Drip is the embodiment of Lust damned to hell for being a serial rapist and murderer, but somehow gets more attention from the author than the title character of the goddamned strip and is shown as being sympathetic despite being a goddamned serial killer who butchers and rapes women.
Fisk is more of a classic Sue, what with being the smartest, most insightful child ever who argues with his dumb liberal teacher and outsmarts her with his conservative logic, and grows up to be the best soldier in Afghanistan ever and is always right all the time and everybody thinks he's so cool.
And oh yeah, he fucks his twin sister. And it's a furry webcomic.
If we're doing canon webcomic self-inserts, I'd like to add Ethan from Ctrl+Alt+Del, Fisk from Better Days and Drip from Jack as good examples.
Ethan and Drip are more anti-Sues, for entirely different reasons. Ethan's a LOL SO WACKY RANDUMB guy who's stupid enough to apply video game concepts to IRL but is also somehow enough of a genius to build a robot with artificial intelligence out of an X-Box, and Drip is the embodiment of Lust damned to hell for being a serial rapist and murderer, but somehow gets more attention from the author than the title character of the goddamned strip and is shown as being sympathetic despite being a goddamned serial killer who butchers and rapes women.
Fisk is more of a classic Sue, what with being the smartest, most insightful child ever who argues with his dumb liberal teacher and outsmarts her with his conservative logic, and grows up to be the best soldier in Afghanistan ever and is always right all the time and everybody thinks he's so cool.
And oh yeah, he fucks his twin sister. And it's a furry webcomic.
How could anyone forget the likes of Ethan and Fisk. The BWW listed them as examples of Mary Sues. As far as they go, Buckley killed Ethan off but for Fisk, what did his creator do to that character? IIRC, the BWW or ED article on Naylor mentioned that Naylor had a falling with a friend. Said friend had Fisk killed off in his own webcomic/story.
Boy, do I have one for you guys. Its nothing on the level of anything else posted here, but I thought she would be interesting enough to warrant a spot here. Also, I have some history with this woman and her special snowflake.
Meet, Chelsea Akora. She checks off the following boxes.
She has the 'tism
Friendless kid
Dead little brother
Bullied in school
KILLED TEN CLASSMATES! All of them have 20 stab wounds in them with a switchblade
An AMERICAN CHILD locked up in a JAPANESE Asylum!
Moar bullying and abuse
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. I tried to help her with her character, but all my advice was ignored or rebuffed. I tried to help explain why she still has the stitches in a not-so contrived way (like its really a tattoo so she doesn't forget what shes been through).
In addition, she's been in A LOT OF FANDOMS...A LOT OF THEM! Go through the gallery, its a collection of nonsense and attention whoring. Now, normally, I don't like to shit on people who have bad characters as long as they are trying, are open and WILLING to take in and apply feedback, I'll cut them a break. This however has no effort or soul to it.
Interestingly, Mary-Sues might be the one case where Flanderzing them is kind of a good thing. That is, Mary-Sues can be fun if you appropriate and parody them to hell and back. For instance, have all of the other characters treat them like shit (and unlike in straight Sue examples, don't have them love her by the end) not because "jealousy" but because "she's really fucking obnoxious". Or play up the perfections to the point where it becomes absolutely laughable like their farts literally sounding like an angel's choir. Or take the Sonichu route and corrupt them entirely.
Sues are usually salvageable, you just need the creativity theirs writers lacked...
I'm kind of of the opinion that Mary Sues are a necessary step for many writers and artists to develop their skills. They're easy to write and offer a very common starting point to measure progress, perhaps first of writing skill (ie going from listing a bio for a character introduction to a short story and so on) and then of character creation. Most authors and artists I know have had a brush with the Mary Sue or Self Insert and that's all it really is, a phase in creative development.
This is why I have trouble poking fun at teens who do these things, be they 13 or 19. People start and their creative skill matures at different rates (it is far more stunningly represented in people who track their artistic skill, but it is so relevant to writing and CC too), so the Mary Sue phase is common in creative pursuits.
When a 25 year old tries to tell me they're writing well when their character is a shallow cutout for themselves, though. You gotta cut that off sometime.
Interestingly, Mary-Sues might be the one case where Flanderzing them is kind of a good thing. That is, Mary-Sues can be fun if you appropriate and parody them to hell and back. For instance, have all of the other characters treat them like shit (and unlike in straight Sue examples, don't have them love her by the end) not because "jealousy" but because "she's really fucking obnoxious". Or play up the perfections to the point where it becomes absolutely laughable like their farts literally sounding like an angel's choir. Or take the Sonichu route and corrupt them entirely.
Sues are usually salvageable, you just need the creativity theirs writers lacked...
A friend of mine did this with the closest thing he had to a Mary Sue on a roleplaying site I used to run on, he played up every trope of the Mary Sue (complete with his trenchcoat/cape moved by itself in a seemingly unfeeling, invisible wind.) He always stood in some kind of funny/dramatic pose and was treated as a celebrity in the semi-fascistic state the guy was from (think Starship troopers) he also didn't age and was rumored to have starred in all of his films about him (supposedly over 500 films) all while still defending the realm from invaders within and without.
I am genuinely doing this character a disservice but he typically turned up in a thread for one of two reasons:
-You were cool with him and thus would have a bit of a joke around with the glorious character of utter manly manliness.
- To Troll the shit out of people who were trying to do the same but play it completely straight.
Chakats are genetically-engineered hermaphrodites, but they look relatively female, with D-cup tits at the minimum. They're telepathically empathetic (with specialists able to listen on your thoughts from a galaxy away). They're the strongest, fastest, and most durable race because they're engineered for it, but they're super friendly and nice and wonderful. They see into the UV spectrum and can see perfectly fine in the dark, their sense of smell is exceptionally acute, they painlessly give birth to their children, and they can psionically cause you crippling pain with their telepathic abilities if you piss them off. They're awesome at absolutely everything forever, and if you hate them (which pretty much everyone in every community worth a damn does) you're a filthy bigoted piece of refuse and need to be either killed or turned towards the sexy side ASAP. And they can mindrape you to do this.
The interesting thing about Mary Sues is that they can only conceivably be enjoyable as the PC in a video game. Take Skyrim, for example: the Dovahkiin is this legendary "chosen one" with a unique power who can kill a literal god and, depending on your choices, become the leader of the Thieves Guild, Archmage, Harbinger, and a Vampire Lord all at the same time. That is excusable in a game setting because the entire point of playing Skyrim is that you can be whatever you want to be, up to and including every goddamn thing at once. Plus your character doesn't have any dialogue beyond a few unspoken sentences here and there, so the lack of real personality helps to alleviate the overwhelming Mary Sue factor.
My favorite Mary Sue used to Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way, until I found out My Immortal was a trollfic all along. It really killed the magic.
Unintentionally bad fanfics are easy to recognize and tell apart from purposefully trollish fics though, I found out some time later. Mostly thanks to Wattpad. I don't know what happens there (I don't really frequent the website), but it appears to be a few steps below Fanfiction.net when it comes to the quality of the works. Perhaps it's the userbase.
My favorite Mary Sues are band Mary Sues, though, or whatever Mary Sue has some sort of musical inclination. I've read hilarious Marilyn Manson fanfics where the main Mary Sue character is this 15 year old who gets exclusively picked by Manson to go on a tour with the band, or fics where she is handpicked in the middle of a crowd of thousands of people to have her first time on the backstage, and "it's magical and pure and he calls me to go on dates". There are also a few where the Mary Sue somehow manages to have whichever band member have sex (and building a happy family) exclusively with the Sue, because he really fell in love with this boring, plain girl.
I'm part of this Zelda group on FB, and this chick in the group has been recently posting shitty traditional art of her self insert mary sue. The character is literally described as "me but better".
She has a weeb name because that's her IRL "nickname", and comes with a fox tail and fox ears because she's a magical kitsune.
I'd post pics here, but I don't know how to strip them of metadata so I don't accidentally dox myself.
EDIT: Also, before she made a massive post of all of her artwork, I pointed out in one of her posts that her character was a mary sue and she promptly deleted the post. I guess she chimped out hard enough to delete fucking everything before reposting all of her shit artwork in one thread.
The "hate" she's referring to is my mary sue comment prior to her posting all of her drawings at once.
SHE'S IN HER FUCKING UNDERWEAR
Also, her current profile photo in all its cringeworthy glory:
I'm part of this Zelda group on FB, and this chick in the group has been recently posting shitty traditional art of her self insert mary sue. The character is literally described as "me but better".
She has a weeb name because that's her IRL "nickname", and comes with a fox tail and fox ears because she's a magical kitsune.
I'd post pics here, but I don't know how to strip them of metadata so I don't accidentally dox myself.
EDIT: Also, before she made a massive post of all of her artwork, I pointed out in one of her posts that her character was a mary sue and she promptly deleted the post. I guess she chimped out hard enough to delete fucking everything before reposting all of her shit artwork in one thread.
The "hate" she's referring to is my mary sue comment prior to her posting all of her drawings at once.
SHE'S IN HER FUCKING UNDERWEAR
Also, her current profile photo in all its cringeworthy glory:
