I’m a little late to the party, here, but I thought I’d jump in. To me, the ultimate Mary Sue character is Nancy Drew (is the rhyming a coincidence? I think not! :)) She is perfect…she’s smart and pretty, always knows the right thing to do, always solves the crime and manages to save lives regularly in the bargain. She is wildly accomplished at an astounding variety of hobbies…I remember that circus bareback riding was one of her many interests. Her level of perfection was only tolerable because of her natural charm and graciousness.
Man, did I have a love/hate relationship with her when I was a kid.
I’m a bit rusty at teen speak but I believe it would translate roughly into “Twilight? Sooooooooooooooo over. What was I tripping on when I was into that?”.
I’ve never heard this term before, and now I’m glad I have.
I used to read this series of Jonathan Kellerman books … with protagonist Dr. Alex Delaware, child psychologist. My mother got me into them, and they really are pretty fluffy as mystery novels are conerned. I wasn’t a very discriminating reader at the time, and after enough of these books I realized that I wasn’t getting the best out of my fiction-reading dollar. It’s when I realized that pop-mystery novels suck in general.
But the thing that always irritated the crap out of me was must how friggin’ perfect Alex Delaware was. Not just in the fact that he always solved the crime through amazing feats of heroism and logic, but just in the descriptions of his every day life …
… he’d come home to his house in the hills (which was designed by some architect I’d never heard of), and grab a special imported beer (that I’d never heard of), and then he’d cook some gourmet meal (consisting of ingredients I’d never heard of), and then he’d pick up his guitar (which was hand-crafted by his equally perfect girlfriend) and head down to his private koi pond to pluck out some incredibly complicated classical piece (that I’d never heard of), where he’d ultimatly come to realize precisely which thin shred of evidence proves that the butler did it.
I’ll give another major vote for Richard Rahl/Cypher. To demonstrate the depth of the Sue-ishness, just look at the “Name” section of the test.
He has two last names. One of those names is an unusual spelling. It is also a common noun used as a name. It is also intended to suggest a facet of his personality. The other name is definitely out of place for a woodsman in a European-style society. And it’s foreign, with an Asian tilt. That’s seven points based on the name alone.
Melanie Wilkes. One of the reasons Scarlett can’t stand her is that she never looses her goodness. Margaret Mitchell may have regarded her as “my heroine,” but she made me want to urp.
Another late entry: The character Arakal from the novel The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun by Christopher Anvil. I adore Anvil’s short stories (he’s sort of a cross between Keith Laumer and Eric Frank Russell), but this piece is thoroughly skippable.
Speaking of Laumer, you could allllmost consider Retief a Mary Sue. (But is it really valid to talk about Mary Sues in humor writing?)
Going back a bit, I suspect even Robert E Howard would probably agree that Conan was a Mary Sue.
I think that Sayuri from Memoirs of a Geisha is a Mary Sue.
[ul]
[li]She has the tragic backstory[/li][li]She’s got the funky silver eyes[/li][li]She becomes a dancer of note[/li][li]She’s got two high powered business men in love with her[/li][li]Her virginity goes for the highest price ever[/li][/ul]
etc, etc.
There’s probably a lot more, but it’s been a while since I read the book.
I think that WAS their rule up to Candy Southern, with whom Spenser had an affair in A Savage Place. And though it was Susan’s rule, it’s not quite as sexist as it sounds, because Susan has serious boundary and intimacy issues. She declined his offer of marriage, and she doesn’t like to think of herself as conventional; thus she gave him this permission because she didn’t want to conceive of herself as monogamy. He clearly thought it was an iffy rule, but took advantage of it exactly once, and discovered that he was right, as that maybe-maybe-not infidelity was certainly involved in their two-year-relationship hiccup.
Ye-up. Ratliff basically writes her as the original Mary Sue, as shown in Ranchoth’s post #51, but he pads his stories out to something like 100 pages each.
You couldn’t ask for a better MST subject, though. While I love the TV series, I have never in my life laughed as hard as I did reading the MST treatments of Ratliff’s “work”.
I’ll go for the low-hanging nerdfruit: Drizzt Do’Urden from The D&D setting The Forgotten Realms.
Germanic makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve always thought that “High D’Haran”, a fictional language in the series, was based on German(the Rahls are the hereditary rulers of D’Hara).
As to Harry Potter, I think the trump card is that he causes the death of his godfather with his own arrogance and bullheadedness. That goes pretty far above ‘clumsiness’ as a character flaw, IMO. You could easily make the case for Hermione, if you restrict the question to book 4. On the other hand, if you allow minor characters, what about Ginny in the last few books? She doesn’t have much in the way of characterization besides being really good at magic and being courageous and having a couple of good lines and getting paired off with the protagonist by virtue of proximity. (Although, now that I write it all out, it looks like the problem is she’s kinda boring.)
I think it doesn’t really matter. The rule for comedy is “is it funny ?”; if a “Mary Sue” type character is funny, then it’s good humor writing.
As for Retief; a lot of his successes are part of the humor. And a lot of it isn’t even his doing; like when he withstands Groaci “torture” that consists of things like getting sprayed with scent or being shown blots of color. Traumatizes the Groaci next to him, but it’s about as effective as the Comfy Char on a human. But the Groaci are just convinced he’s stoic. Or the bit where he impresses a clan of aliens with how badass he is by easily passing all of their initiation tests ( which are all trivial for a human ), while actually getting to each initiation challenge is much more dangerous (which they haven’t a clue of ).
I thought of another … every last character in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto.
It’s been a while since I read it, but every character in it was an expert at something. The young priest, just happened to have the sheet music to every opera ever written, the Japanese executive just happened to play concert level piano, the one young terrorest turns out to be a grand-master level chess player (after only watching a few matches), and then there was the other young female terrorist with a heart of gold who only wants to learn to read. Oy.
Okay, maybe I just didn’t like the book. A female friend insisted I read it – it’s such a chick-flic-book.
Ginny is a playa.