Mary Sues

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I don't fault them for being flat Mary Sue characters, nor their creators for creating them as such because they're meant to appeal to people of not great literary depth, and hit the mark spot on. (Whether it was by design or accident is another discussion)

Implicit in a "true" Mary Sue, at least to me, is the inability of the author to understand what he/she is doing wrong (creating an unlikable character that doesn't fit the story) and a ferocious resistance to change.

Creating a bland and perfect sex partner in a book meant to appeal to bored housewifes or emo teens is genius, doing it in a vanity political soapbox webcomic is just plain annoying.
 
Okay, so the Ganondorf chick made her own page for her shit artwork. She shared one of the posts to the Zelda group I was in.

Needless to say, I'd had enough and shot her down.
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autisticdragonkin said:
Why doesn't she at least make her character gerudo
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:autism:

She keeps posting the same artwork over and over again. The most likes she ever gets are like, 4.

EDIT: She finally blocked me. On the bright side, I no longer have to see her autistic art anymore.
 
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autisticdragonkin said:
Why doesn't she at least make her character gerudo
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:tumblr:

It's been a while since I've read this thread, and I dunno if it's been mentioned, but people who tend to despise Mary Sue characters wind up making or having Sue characters.

Sue-shielding?

:powerlevel: I used to be like that, but it's really stupid to get pissed off over Sues. They're pretty entertaining once you get down to it. I mean, without Sues we wouldn't have this thread or as many cows. Every character is a Sue in some light anyway; it all depends on the context. :powerlevel:
 
Jaimas said:
"Mary Sue" has three critical failings with the term.

ONE: It's relative. What makes a character a Mary Sue in one work of fiction won't necessarily in another. Putting it differently a character who would be a flagrant Mary Sue in one setting would be right the fuck home in another. A character in the DBZ universe, or Touhou can get away with a lot of crazy powers and bizarre motivations; bring that to another work of fiction and it just won't work. People like to ignore this and forget that a given work of fiction provides its own context, which may or may not mitigate, if not completely excuse that aspect of a character.

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.

THREE: The initial term was to specifically apply to fanworks, RPs, Video Games, and similar. Not conventional works. This is critical because unless a specific work is slashing and burning its own established canon (Hi Mass Effect) it usually won't come up in a work of fiction unless the writer is fucking terrible (Eragon, Maradonia Saga, Twilight, Socially Unconscious).

Mind you, even the worst Sues you can think of have nothing on what the is unquestionably the worst of the lot. That award was, is, and forever shall be Bernard Doove's Chakona Space, and this is the Ultimate Sue against which all Sues must be measured.

Now that said, I need to discuss this thread. This thread isn't covering a bad topic, and honestly it has some good shit to discuss. However, there's no lolcow community around Mary Sues. As such, I'm moving this to the off-topic boards, specifically the writing board. We can continue to discuss the matter there.
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I have to agree with Jaimas. The term doesn't apply evenly in all fiction.

A good example is if you wrote James Bond into a different story he would easily qualify as a Mary Sue. But millions of people line up around the world every time a new film comes out. Superman is a character who the writers literally wrote a "critical weakness" without which he is completely immortal. And he's the face of super heroes. Harry Potter has very few actual flaws, and what little flaws he does have serve to highlight the more pronounced flaws in some of the other characters like Ron Weasley or Draco Malfoy. Luke Skywalker is a character with very few flaws other than naivete.

One noticeable common theme between all of these characters are they serve as fantasies the viewer can project themselves onto. James Bond films almost universally explore exotic locations and deal with the idea of espionage. Which is very romantic and keeps the story constantly shifting and ramping up the stakes. Superman has been credited as a power fantasy for children, which is in-part why he is so popular universally around the world. Harry Potter was designed as a straight-man to allow the reader to project themselves onto him, which is very common in children's books.

I think one big difference is context. In a typical Mary Sue story, everything is played straight and the idea that the character lacks flaws isn't brought up. In a good James Bond film they will play with the concept of the character in unique ways. In Skyfall James Bond suffers an injury and realizes he can't shoot properly, and fails all of his tests at MI6. This leads to more inventive storytelling later on in the film when he's confronted with the villain. In Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back, Luke has his hand sliced off and loses his lightsaber. And in the subsequent film Return of the Jedi he comes back stronger and less naive.

It really depends on how a story is written to me, a character lacking flaws can be just as interesting as a character who has nothing but flaws. But it depends on the plot of the story as to how interesting they really are. And you can forgive a weakly defined character if the story they go on keeps your interest.
 
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Atlantiana Rebekah Lauren, our hero from Forbiden Fruit, The Tempation of Edward Cullen.

She is Enoby but in Twilight. She's an adopted girl who has a Playboy model figure with a scorpion tattoo who falls in love with Edward Cullen, but he's with Bella, but he almost fucks her in the school hallway. Then her parents leave her with an uncle that rapes her in public for hours. She can also sing very well, turn into a vampire and drive drunk while her gay friend engages in a gay threesome with a Panda.
 
There's a character in a Fallout New Vegas mod called "Courier's Cache" named "Marty Stu"
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I think a Mary Sue is a character who breaks the conventions and foundations of a universe for no good reason, which can include causing other characters to act unreasonably out-of-character. Whether powers and abilities have anything to do with their Sue-ness depends on whether it makes sense or not.

"Perfect", near-perfect, or overpowered characters like Saitama and Izuru Kamukura work because they make sense in their worlds. But these days, a lot of people seem to call a character a 'Sue for so much as dying their hair an unnatural color, being friendly, having a talent, or having had something bad happen in their past.

On the flip side, some creators/fanfic writers like to stress how terrible/ordinary their character is, even if their character is an obvious 'Sue. Like those Touhou fanfics that NEETs write where their ordinary human self-insert stumbles into Gensokyo and promptly starts fucking every girl there, even if realistically they'd get torn apart and end up on some youkai's dinner plate the minute they stepped in.
 
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Urban Superstition said:
Sorry for the double post, but here are a couple of people who think Mary Sues are not boring, illogical characters with no depth but get what they want anyway. Rather, Mary Sues are "strong, independent women lovingly created by aspiring female writers, and their haters are just jealous, scared, sexists!"
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Those posts gave me cancer.
 
What about Mary Sues that only exist to be the sex partners of your fictional crush/Husbando? Are they strong independent womyn too?

Give me classic Mary Sue writers over feminist Sues. At least they're fun in a bad way and aren't preachy or accuse you of being sexist/racist for not liking them. Like, jfc woman just admit you like your Barbie doll OC taking it up the ass with your husbando and move on with your life, not everything has to be the Great Feminist Essay (TM).
 
Watcher said:
I think one big difference is context. In a typical Mary Sue story, everything is played straight and the idea that the character lacks flaws isn't brought up. In a good James Bond film they will play with the concept of the character in unique ways. In Skyfall James Bond suffers an injury and realizes he can't shoot properly, and fails all of his tests at MI6. This leads to more inventive storytelling later on in the film when he's confronted with the villain. In Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back, Luke has his hand sliced off and loses his lightsaber. And in the subsequent film Return of the Jedi he comes back stronger and less naive.

It really depends on how a story is written to me, a character lacking flaws can be just as interesting as a character who has nothing but flaws. But it depends on the plot of the story as to how interesting they really are. And you can forgive a weakly defined character if the story they go on keeps your interest.
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This argument entirely tho.:heart-full: Other characters with Sue traits like "enduring innocence, never having a meltdown" I'd attribute to a literary trope if the reason makes sense or it's amusing/engaging enough in its execution.
Mary Sue/Marty Stu, thankfully, can still be used as descriptor for when the character is really really poorly written and an obvious wish-fulfilling self-insert.
The term was also a laser-focused atom bomb of literary overkill to be hurled at someone in writing circle during highschool english. ;)

-That said...Half-everything-an-a-bag-of-chips vampire peeps are total 'sues and should be nuked from orbit.
 
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I think the definition of 'Mary Sue' has gotten too vague and all-emcompassing through the years, and I agree with those who feel like you have to watch how you write your main female protagonist. As an avid reader who also writes, I know what's a turnoff in a main female (or male) character and what isn't.

What can cure the main female protagonist of 'Sueness' is being RELATABLE and LIKEABLE in many ways. For example, one of my best reads this summer was a crime mystery novel featuring a female investigator/detective. This girl had the special gift of having clear, detailed memories of any random day in her life. She was also a 'kick-ass' character who physically fought off the bad guys in action scenes. She was described as young and pretty. Mary Sue, right?
Not completely, because some of her memories were painful, (losing a sister) and the author wrote her in a way that me as a reader wanted to be on her side and wanted to STAY with her through the storyline.

On the other hand, if I read the first chapter and I just don't like the main character because she just 'rubs you the wrong way,' isn't relatable, and demands your attention to a point where you'd rather read about the other characters and NOT her- than I'm more likely to feel totally Mary-Sue-weary and not finish that book.
 
One I'd like to nominate for self-insert Canon Sue status: Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, Battlefield Earth. The film is notorious, but the book is, if anything, worse. Like, the film stank like a dead sewage worker, but it at least had so-bad-it's-good in its favour.
Jonnie is the protagonist of the book. When we meet him, the Earth has been dominated by an evil-for-the-sake-of-it species named Psychlos for a thousand years, and humanity has been reduced to a handful of stone age tribes. Jonnie is the best hunter in his village, not to mention the best fighter and the most intelligent member of the tribe. Everyone loves Jonnie, except the tribesmen who are jealous of him (who later become Hitler fanatics). It later transpires that he's pretty much the only one keeping the village going.

Over the course of the book, he masters the use of alien technology. He meets a bunch of Scotsmen who make him their leader (and fight over which clan he belongs to). He meets a bunch of Chinese who decide he's their Emperor. He kills all the Psychlos. He outsmarts every other civilisation in the multiverse. He gets worshipped as a god. He undergoes no significant setbacks, because the only people who don't like him are useless and eeevil.

He's utterly flat. We never find out what he wants or likes. He has a wife, but there's no real indication that he loves her, and the affection seems to be purely one-sided. He has no weaknesses or flaws, other than the meta one of being really dull.
The book was written by L. Ron Hubbard, who was basically a psychological mess. This is one of his later works, coming out in 1982, after he'd abandoned fiction for his more profitable Scientology. Hubbard claimed that this was simply to "keep his hand in" as a science fiction writer, so only a cynic would suggest that this was a cheap cash-grab in the wake of the unexpected success of Star Wars. By this stage, Hubbard had his own vanity publisher and literary agency, staffed by Scientologists, so he was effectively protected from any form of editing, and my God it shows.

Hubbard was a narcissist who literally wanted to "stamp [his] name into history." He always portrayed himself as this larger-than-life figure, and claimed among other things to be the reincarnation of Buddha, a war hero, one of the first nuclear physicists ever, a stunt pilot, a blood brother in the Blackfoot Tribe at the age of 4 and the most important scientist in billions of years. This is before you get into his really crazy past lives stories (seriously, look them up, they're fucking insane).

The Psychlos and their even-more-eeevil masters, the Catrists, represent Hubbard's bizarre vendetta against psychiatrists (there's a subtle clue in the names). This was because the American Psychiatric Association slammed his book Dianetics, which is the basis of Scientology, on the grounds that it's fucking shit.

So yes, Jonnie is basically Hubbard's own narcissistic wank fantasy in which he's this beloved superhero god fighting epic battles against his enemies. Now I come to think of it, it's not so different from Sonichu in that sense.

To cap it all off, the first edition's cover illustration portrayed Jonnie with a face (though not a body) strongly resembling the young L. Ron Hubbard.
 
Tragi-Chan said:
One I'd like to nominate for self-insert Canon Sue status: Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, Battlefield Earth. The film is notorious, but the book is, if anything, worse. Like, the film stank like a dead sewage worker, but it at least had so-bad-it's-good in its favour.
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Also you can watch the movie in less than two hours with friends while making fun of it, while the book is a self-indulgently huge pile of ponderous unreadable wank. It's also too thick even to fix a wobbly table leg.
 
Every day, I become more confused by the fact scientology is a thing that people believe.
 
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