Bill and Kinukitty both posted fine conclusions to the Mary Sue roundtable. Both of them said they were sick of thinking about it, and intimated that maybe we could stop now, please? But unfortunately for them, I am like the evil terminator…except for maybe without the suddenly appearing from the future in the nude thing. And also not governor of California.
Where was I anyway? Oh right. A couple days ago I posted here arguing that Mary Sues are less venal, and more ubiquitous, than they are usually given credit for being. Several people have protested that I’ve expanded and abused the term to such an extent that it’s useless.
Be that as it may, I think the core of what I’m seeing as Mary Sueism, partially based on Miriam’s post is a character who seems brought into being to be an object of love — either self-love, or romantic love, or a mixture of both. The character is treated the way loved ones are treated; with excessive care and admiration. In some instances this can be annoying; in others it can be moving or beautiful.
My argument is bolstered by this essay by Pat Pflieger Pat Pflieger linked by Cerusee in comments, which argues that, rather than being an aberration, Mary Sue is a central trope of romance:
Mary Sue is more a placeholder, a term apparently used by writers of romance fiction, as mentioned in several essays in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Despite appearances, the essay authors agree, readers of romance fiction aren’t identifying with the heroine of the work; their real focus is on the hero, with the heroine holding open a spot in the novel into which the (usually female) reader can slip mentally. Though this argument may seem simplistic in regard to romance novels, it does seem the basis for the Mary Sue: she holds a place open in the story for the author — and presumably for the reader. She can be successful: fan fiction abounds in examples of original characters who are interesting in their own right. All too often, however, the character is a failed placeholder; her very obtrusiveness keeps readers from slipping into her place and into the adventure they have come to enjoy, as she shifts the focus from the media characters readers want to read about.
I think that who the reader is identifying with is maybe more complicated than this suggests; still, the general point is that Mary Sue is about, or tied to, the romance genre; it’s a device which allows reader and author to have, or which indicates that they have, a romantic investment in the story.
With that in mind, I think I can point to a couple of characters who, despite appearances, really aren’t Mary Sues at all.
The first is Sherlock Holmes. Tom mentions Sherlock Holmes as a Mary Sue on the strength of his hyper-competence; Holmes always wins and always has the answer in a way that is certainly suggestive of Mary Sueism.
However, if you look a little closer something is off. As one example, in the first Sherlock Holmes adventure, Watson, quizzing Holmes, discovers that the detective doesn’t know that the earth goes round the sun. Moreover, Holmes is irritated to have been told this information. Holmes, you see, only cares about information that helps him with detection. Everything else, he tries to forget as quickly as possible.
In other words, Holmes is a a freak. He requires constant stimulation, to such an extent that if he doesn’t have a case, he turns to cocaine. He has no interest in women…and while his bachelor status might suggest homoerotic subtext, compared to, say, Poe’s Dupin, this subtext is really quite muted. Watson, the obvious person to slash Holmes with, actually gets married during the course of the series…and in general, the whole point of the Holmes character is that he’s so obsessed and monomaniacal that he doesn’t have time for any romance, gay or straight.
Nor is that monomania necessarily supposed to be appealing: you get the sense from the books that Doyle is interested in Holmes, that he admires Holmes to some extent…but you never exactly get the sense that he loves Holmes. Indeed, often he doesn’t even seem to like him all that much. There’s more than one Holmes story where Doyle really seems to enjoy giving the detective a comeuppance. And, of course, Doyle tired of the character quite quickly, even trying to kill him off so as to move on to other projects. Yet Holmes survived, not because Doyle stacked the cards in his favor, but in spite of the fact that he stacked the cards against him.
Overall, the point of the Holmes stories always seems to be the adventure much more than relationships, and Holme seems more a plot contrivance than an actual character. The fun is in watching the unwinding of the plot, and the clever, gee-whiz gimmickry of the machine that is Holmes. He’s a dues ex machina, not a Mary Sue. (Hercule Poirot works in the same way; Agatha Christie often said that she didn’t like him very much, and reading the books, that seems clear enough — she often went to some effort to keep him off stage as long as possible.)
Another false Mary Sue is Asterix. Asterix, like Holmes, is super-competent competent, super-clever, and always victorious. Furthermore, it’s clear that Goscinny really does have a good deal of affection for the character. And, of course, through the magic potion and numerous other means, Asterix and Obelix and all the village have a hugely unfair advantage against Romans, Vikings, and any other adversaries who are unfortunate enough to fall afoul of them.
What’s missing, though, is sentiment. Asterix’s prowess isn’t supposed to inspire wonder or pull at the heart strings; it’s supposed to make you laugh. The fact that this little Gaulish village is constantly beating the tar out of the Roman empire is the central joke of the series. It’s hyperbolic French boasting; it’s like when _________ raps, “you’re addicted, to what my dick did, the pain and the pleasure that the whing-ding inflicted!” Romance requires uncertainty and longing, and there’s neither of those in Asterix.
There’s a similar dynamic with Jeeves (who Bill mentions as a possible Mary Sue) and with that ultimate avatar of unfair advantage, Bugs Bunny. Both have God on their sides, obviously…but the machinery of divinity is so clear that it can only be played for laughs. Those characters are there to amuse you by their triumph, not to impress you with it. You don’t envy or desire Jeeves or Bugs Bunny because they’re not designed for that kind of emotional investment. They’ve been given power and brains, but no hearts.
Which brings me to the final false Mary Sue — Mary Sue herself. Here’s the story that supposedly coined the term, (hat tip Craig L.
A TREKKIE’S TALE
By Paula Smith
“Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky,” thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise. “Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet – only fifteen and a half years old.” Captain Kirk came up to her.
“Oh, Lieutenant, I love you madly. Will you come to bed with me?”
“Captain! I am not that kind of girl!”
“You’re right, and I respect you for it. Here, take over the ship for a minute while I go get some coffee for us.”
Mr. Spock came onto the bridge. “What are you doing in the command seat, Lieutenant?”
“The Captain told me to.”
“Flawlessly logical. I admire your mind.”
Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and Mr. Scott beamed down with Lt. Mary Sue to Rigel XXXVII. They were attacked by green androids and thrown into prison. In a moment of weakness Lt. Mary Sue revealed to Mr. Spock that she too was half Vulcan. Recovering quickly, she sprung the lock with her hairpin and they all got away back to the ship.
But back on board, Dr. McCoy and Lt. Mary Sue found out that the men who had beamed down were seriously stricken by the jumping cold robbies , Mary Sue less so. While the four officers languished in Sick Bay, Lt. Mary Sue ran the ship, and ran it so well she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vulcan Order of Gallantry and the Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood.
However the disease finally got to her and she fell fatally ill. In the Sick Bay as she breathed her last, she was surrounded by Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Scott, all weeping unashamedly at the loss of her beautiful youth and youthful beauty, intelligence, capability and all around niceness. Even to this day her birthday is a national holiday of the Enterprise.
The thing about the Mary Sue in this story is that she’s a parody. She’s played for laughs, like Bugs Bunny or Jeeves. Her prowess is supposed to elicit groans and chuckles, not wonder or awe or love. As such, she isn’t a Mary Sue at all.
To parody Mary Sue, in other words, you have to go outside the Mary Sue genre. You may say, “well, of course” — but the fact is that there are a lot of genres where this isn’t the case. Take science fiction, for example; Douglas Adams’ books are science-fiction parodies, but they’re also science-fiction. The super-hero genre is arguably defined by its parodies (and I make that argument here). Mary Sue can certainly be funny (like, perhaps, Elizabeth Bennett) but she can’t be a self-parody. A caricature of Mary Sue isn’t Mary Sue.
I think the reason for this is, again, that Mary Sue is, perhaps, another way of saying “romance.” A parody of romance, one that really sneers at the genre’s tropes and ideology, is no longer a romance — it’s bitter realist screed, or a farce, or something else (though Northanger Abbey does walk the line, I guess.) Romance is just, at its core, fairly earnest. You could say that’s because it’s humorless and stupid, I guess. But you could also argue that it’s because it deals with stuff that actually matters; not spaceships, or giant goombahs in tights hitting each other, but with relationships, and love. I think a lot of the loathing of Mary Sue that Kinukitty and others have discussed has to do with the general discomfort with romance as a genre — a discomfort that seems to extend even to its practitioners. Writing about something you care about is embarrassing. Censuring the Mary in your neighbor’s eye, then, may be a ritualized way of distracting from the love in your own.
An interesting continuation of the debate, even though I can’t follow the final part of this essay for the simple reason that to me at any rate Mary Sue is not a genre, but more a literary device or technique. So I’d compare it e.g. to the deus ex machina or expository dialogue, to use two other devices which frequently become the object of scorn and ridicule and where you can say that if they are parodied (e.g. the former in the ending of the Threepenny Opera) they no longer are actual examples of themselves.
Re. Asterix: Don’t know if anyone even saw him as a Mary Sue, I mentioned him as an example of characters that are (in many ways) hyper-perfect but which avoid being Mary Sues. Apart from the things you mention, one should also not forget the physical aspect. Asterix does not look the part he plays. In his first character designs artist Albert Uderzo had made Asterix taller and stronger-looking, but the late René Goscinny, the writer, insisted that he’d be short, scrawny and not physically attractive. And in the stories no characters fall in love with Asterix and he is not shown feeling (romantic) love towards anyone, except fleetingly, at the end of “Asterix in the Legion” towards a woman in love with someone else. (In that same story a lot more of comedic mileage is distilled earlier from Obelix’ unrequited love towards that same woman).
“Tom mentions Sherlock Holmes as a Mary Sue on the strength of his hyper-competence”
But wait! I said super-competence qualifies Holmes as a MS only because Mandy presented this notion of a second-category MS, the sort who has an endless array of skills equal to any situation he finds himself in. And, come on, that’s Holmes.
Dealing with Mary Sue definitions is like dealing with property law in the Holy Roman Empire. Cross a border and everything changes, and there’s a border to cross every five miles or so. Because it turns out that Mandy’s definition is unique to herself, but your definition is unique to you.
“… in the first Sherlock Holmes adventure, Watson, quizzing Holmes, discovers that the detective doesn’t know that the earth goes round the sun. Moreover, Holmes is irritated to have been told this information.”
That’s just A Study in Scarlet. Pretty soon, as the series goes on, Holmes is quoting the great poets and so on. He’s presented as a man of great culture and general knowledge, not a single-purpose detecting machine.
Whether that makes him a Mary Sue or not is beside the point. The point is that I used to work for a befuddled chowderhead who would cite Holmes’s remark in Scarlet to excuse his own ignorance.
To sum up: to you the essence of Mary Sue is love; to Mandy it’s a couple of things, one of which includes Sherlock Holmes; and I used to work for an idiot.
Writing about something you care about is embarrassing. Censuring the Mary in your neighbor’s eye, then, may be a ritualized way of distracting from the love in your own. I think that’s very much a part of it. When I talked about being sensitive to the nuances of self-indulgence, I was thinking of a theme that I’ve seen turn up very often in anti-Sue screeds–“she’s that perfect character you wrote when you were fifteen”–it’s taken as given that that’s enough to make it bad. There’s often this barely-repressed shame, shame of having had those fantasies, of having indulged in them, back when you were young and callow and didn’t know that fantasies are supposed to be repressed. It’s a shame that can only be purged by zealously avoiding Sues in your reading and writing once you reach enlightenment (and emotional and literary maturity, presumably), and doing your best to combat the scourge by punishing other people who haven’t learned to be ashamed yet.
I know I’m using a lot of loaded language here, but that’s par for the course in conversations about Sue…as noted before, the remarkable incidences of vitriol.
Back in the early 80s an author named Vonda N. McIntyre wrote what was then (and probably still is) one of the better Star Trek novels, The Entropy Effect, and followed it with adaptations of the second, third and fourth Trek films. In Entropy we are introduced to Security Chief Mandala Flynn and Captain Hunter, two strong female characters who are Captain Kirk’s subordinate and former lover, respectively. For my money, both characters — who are for all intents and purposes the same character — are the ultimate feminist Mary Sue. Both possess superb abilities, hair-trigger tempers, intimidating personalities, and a severe animus towards that cement-headed sexist James T. Kirk. Now, there are few fictional characters who could use a good feminist ass-kicking more than our good Captain, but with McIntyre it becomes almost an obsession. In her version of The Wrath of Khan (in which Mandala and Hunter are prominently mentioned) Saavik can barely suppress her burning rage against the Admiral, and Dr. Carol Marcus is simply a milder version of Hunter. In The Search for Spock we meet Scotty’s willful, angry niece Daneen, who gives her uncle an earful about what an asshole Kirk is (her brother was the young cadet who died in the previous film). McIntyre’s version of Gillian Taylor in The Voyage Home is a bit mellower Mary Sue, but still more rebellious and quick to anger than her film counterpart.
If the standard Mary Sue is intended to be loved and/or romanced, Vonda McIntyre’s Mary Sue was intended (I think) in great part to correct or avenge the inherent sexism of Gene Roddenberry and of Captain Kirk specifically. (Spock and Sulu are treated in a gentle and greatly respectful manner by the other characters.) I’m not sure this was at all a bad thing, except for it becoming slightly tiresome to have nearly every female character possess so many similar traits. And often the thoughts and backstories of these characters at times threatened to drag the story to a halt. But if you’re gonna have a Mary Sue, I’d prefer McIntyre’s version over the fan fiction variety.
“And often the thoughts and backstories of these characters at times threatened to drag the story to a halt.”
Forgive me for the redundancy. Very tired today. (Geez…)
Feminist Mary Sues would be a fun topic for a post (though I think I’m done with Mary Sues, at least for a bit.) I’m sure many exist in fan fiction, though…which is what McIntyre was writing, after all.
I was going to comment something like this on Kinukitty’s post, but then I deleted it.
As someone who writes the occasional Mary Sue (amethyst eyes!), I think part of what is going is that Mary Sues are the adult equivalent of loving sparkly unicorns. Look, I adored unicorns. I still might. I had purple unicorn shirts as a kid, and I was ruthlessly mocked by many. Sometimes by other people who also had purple sparkly unicorn shirts.
If we mock our Mary Sues, then we’re saying “We know these are just worthless toys, ha ha ha” and it’s like we’re in on the joke. Even though our own laughter might be uncomfortable and insincere, it’s a way to get the critics to back off. Bold and shameless enthusiasm is simply not considered a serious thing (as a girl, anyway). A more staid, critical approach is more acceptable.
Re. the female characters in in Vonda McIntyre’s novelizations of Star Trek II and III: She was building quite a bit on the stuff that actually was in the screenplays there and, don’t know whether by accident or because she knew what was going to happen to Dr. Marcus and Saavik, her characterizations of the two worked in that they helped explain why e.g. Dr. Marcus was absent from ST3 and why Saavik did not become a permanent member of the crew. With Saavik she also explored something which IIRC was only mentioned in the publicity for “Wrath of Khan”, namely that she’s half-Romulan. (And it probably no coincidence that McIntyre went on to write a whole novel, “The Romulan Way”, about their culture). I wouldn’t call Daneen a Mary Sue necessarily, but she probably acts as spokeswoman for the author and those readers who felt that Kirk’s costly blunder in “The Wrath of Khan”, where his cavalier disregard for Starfleet protocol and procedures cost several lives, was glossed over too much. She could also express the resentment over the death of Scotty’s nephew that Scotty by rights should have felt and expressed himself but was not allowed to because his old friendly relationship to Kirk was going to be preserved in the later movies.
I notice all the characters you don’t think are Mary Sues are male, but all the characters you do think are Mary Sues are female.
Hey, yeahhhhh.
Except, if you mean, Noah, he says that Mary Sue herself is not a Mary Sue. A daring move on his part, and of course Mary Sue is not male.
You might want to scroll back through the archives, if you feel like it. I call everyone from Superman to James Bond to Batman to Wolverine to Snapper Carr to Wesley Crusher and on and on a Mary Sue. And I agree that Michael Corleone is a Mary Sue.
Watson or a romance novel heroine is probably better thought of as an “audience surrogate.” You see the world of the story through their eyes, and they get to ask the questions and make the observations the reader would if they were there. They may be sort of generically good, but not necessarily Mary Sues.
A fully developed character who happens to be extremely (even unrealistically) good and talented is not really a Sue either. That could just be a heroic hero.
A real Mary Sue is a character with no, or trivial, flaws (at least as far as the writer is concerned). This isn’t a character that the writer inserts for the reader’s benefit — this is the character that the writer wishes he or she were.
Instead of the audience surrogate, it’s the writer’s surrogate. More than anything I think it’s a mark of a naive writer. A real Sue has a kind of epic perfection rarely seen in published literature since the early days of the novel.
Yeah, that seems to be one standard take. I don’t really buy it for a couple of reasons. First, I think it’s a lot harder to disentangle author and audience surrogate than it’s often assumed. Second, I think the Mary Sue characteristics are broadly visible in a lot of fiction; I think it’s more useful/interesting/fair to see it as one of the ways that lots of people interact with literature, rather than as a particular failing of naive fan-fic writers.
If you’re interested, a lot of these questions are addressed at varying length and from various perspectives (including in comments) throughout the roundtable, if you click on the Mary Sue label at the end of the post.