And for such a complex and gifted character he is quite incredibly uninteresting. That’s a mark of a Marty Stu.
Michael Blomqvist of the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series. I’ve read the first two books so far. All the women just fall into bed with him, his magazine is doing awesome since his fabulous scoop against a super-evil corporate bigwig, everyone agrees that he’s a great guy, except for other reporters who are jealous, and his big flaw is he’s too stubborn in his pursuit of bad guys.
The series in general is well written enough though that his Gary Stu-ness is more amusing than detracting.
She’s an example of what I was talking about earlier; a larger than life hero. Yes, she’s incredibly skilled and successful and heroic - and acknowledged as such in-universe; but a larger than life hero by definition isn’t just one of the crowd. She’s also undergone quite a lot of trauma, taken a lot of damage and suffered a lot of loss.
And as far as her being twice as good at everything than everything else; when you get right down to it, she has a fairly narrow range of demonstrated abilities. It’s not like she’s a genius painted, engineer, architect and scientist. She’s not even all that great at politics, and most of her wealth is from being appointed a noble & getting in at the ground floor of the Grayson domestic expansion, and she had a financial expert to manage her financial affairs as well; she didn’t do it all or even mostly herself. And the things she really are good at are her athletic & military pursuits that she’s trained and performed in literally for 50-60 years, and unlike a real world person she still has a young body to use all that accumulated skill.
Larry Niven. David is the frightfully urbane actor. The conflation of the two is making me giggle.
I can’t believe I missed that.
For those who get confused: Larry Niven wrote Inconstant Moon. David Niven wrote The Moon’s A Balloon. Which one sounds like the science fiction writer to you? 
The main character in every TV show made by Donald Bellisario; Black Sheep Squadron, Battlestar Galactica (1978), Tales of the Gold Monkey, Airwolf, Magnum, P.I., Quantum Leap, JAG, and NCIS.[sup]*[/sup]
Seriously, it seems to be what he does.
- Does anybody remember anything about Tequila and Bonetti or First Monday? I don’t, and am fairly confident that I don’t have to.
David Stone actually wrote a book titled the Mary Sue Extrusion, which seems to be simply begging for a put-down or something. According to the reviews, it’s actually pretty good. I haven’t read it, but I stumbled across the title while hunting for entertainingly bad science fiction:
Well of course I meant Larry Niven. Mistakes can be funny.
Nitpick: Bellisario directed 2 episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica, but otherwise had nothing whatsoever to do with it. It was created by Glen A. Larson.
The Far Side guy?
You know, I thought it was a little less women-want-him-and-men-want-to-be-him than the others. Thanks for the correction.
No, that would be Gary Larson.
Happy to help.
Of course you are free to define the term “Mary Sue” any way you like. And I agree with the implication that there is nothing necessarily wrong with a book who has a “larger than life” hero who is totally awesome and kicks ass.
I do think that if the author goes too far, the hero can start getting ridiculous and the story and characters can start becoming less interesting. I think this was starting to happen with Honor Harrington.
For example, she lost an eye and had it replaced with a bionic eye which is better than other peoples’ eyes.
Here’s a question for you: If Honor Harrington decided to take a break from the military and start managing her personal fortune, do you think she would blow it all with foolish investments? Or do you think that by the end of the story she would be the next inter-galactic Warren Buffet?
Of course she would be the next Warren Buffet because she never fails at anything she tries, a classic Mary Sue trait.
Another (IMO) classic Mary Sue “flaw” is that he is so honest and principled and loyal and incorruptible that he has problems with politics and such. For example Edeard in the Void Trilogy.
She didn’t practice dueling for 50 years. She didn’t practice the art of being nasty for 50 years. And yet she out-dueled and out-nastied the number 1 dueler/nasty guy in the galaxy.
Oh, I forgot to mention that by the end, she enters into a polygamous marriage and the other wife is totally cool with it. :rolleyes:
Does anyone happen to know how many titles and honors she had received by the of the most recent book?
Found this on Wikipedia:
But wait, there’s more!
Imagine how much bling she must have on her uniform. Probably she would put Idi Amin to shame.
Both protagonists, really, have more than a touch of being the author’s “perfect woman/perfect man” about them, though there are many redeeming factors as well. (It’s hard to imagine any true author of a Mary Sue putting their prized creation through what either Blomqvist or Salander endures in “Dragon Tattoo”, and Blomqvist doesn’t even solve his problem himself.)
I came here to yell at someone from three years ago, though. Rand al’Thor as a Marty Stu? No way! Yeah, he gets away with a ton of crap that a normal person would not get away with due to his status as a figure of prophecy, and yes, he got three women to fall in love with him. But he also spends half the series half-insane, literally hates himself most of the time, and is thwarted by his own allies almost as much as he gets his own way or is thwarted by his enemies. To boot, even his most loyal and loving friends and allies mostly maintain that status by staying as far away from him as they can, and those who do remain with him treat him generally with contempt (many of the Aes Sedai) or just plain want to smack him all the time (Nynaeve).
Yeah, he kinda sucks as a character most of the time, but he’s not a Marty Sue.
Nurse Annie from Chuck Austen’s stint on Uncanny X-Men.
Named after the writer’s wife.
Beautiful, selfless, loves children, etc.
Tragic backstory (husband was an insane, powerful mutant who tried to kill her and their son).
Becomes confidant to most of the mutants around her, BFFs with one of the team’s most prickly members, has two long-time X-Men in love with her by the time the writer left the book.
Falls in twu wuv with the writer’s favorite X-Man, who leaves his long-time girlfriend (made unsympathetic by plot-convenient cray-cray) at the alter to be with her.
God, I hated that run. It was so awful that I stopped buying Marvel comics for about five years.
“A character someone doesn’t like”. I don’t use the term myself, and have seen it used to bash such a wide variety of characters that I consider the term effectively meaningless.
FWIW that’s not how I would define the term. I did enjoy the Honor Harrington series quite a bit, and I do like her character. Masturbatory fantasies and adolescent escapism can be fun sometimes.
Well do you agree that some characters in fiction are so Totally Awesome that they start to become ridiculous and/or uninteresting? Do you agree that sometimes authors insert an idealized version of themselves (or of their dream girl / dream guy) into their fiction? Do you agree that this phenomenon is common enough that it is reasonable to give it a name?