What is a Mary Sue?

Cafe Society
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Incidentally, if one wants to look for Ayn Rand writing herself into her books, there’s a minor character among the strikers described as an author whose works aren’t read in the outside world, or something to the effect. She’s working in Galt’s Gulch as a fishwife and looks at Galt in awe and wonder and respect and is not described as a beauty, but as somewhat disheveled. The unnamed character, apparently, played a much larger role in earlier drafts of the novel and I’ve no doubt she represented Rand herself.

The character appears (as I recall) in the first chapter of the third section, after Dagny lands in the Gulch, meets Galt, and starts asking about the other inhabitants.

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A Google on “Atlas Shrugged” +fishwife shows I’m definitely not the only person to have noticed this.

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[QUOTE=WhyNot]
I don’t know if Margaret Mitchell saw herself as Melanie or not. Considering that she’s so romanticized the whole civilization, and Melanie’s the only lovable character in the book, it’s a good guess Mitchell at least wanted to believe she was like Melanie, but I have no cite for that.
[/QUOTE]

If Mitchell identified with anyone in the book, it was Scarlett.

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shameful confession time, ladies and gentelmen! :o

My first character was most definitely a Mary Sue. (The ones that followed were also pretty cringeworthy, but they at least can be salvaged.)

She was named Shelly McLaughlin, and she was the sweetest, purest, nicest, kindest person you could ever meet. Good guys loved her, bad guys hated the fact that she would thwart their evil plans but respected her. She, of course, got mixed up in some nasty business and crossed roads with this one Really Bad Dude who le gasp wanted her dead.

(Otherwise, she was unremarkable. She pretty much looked like me, except she wasn’t nearsighted. And she eventually got a Giant Ass Sword that she wore across her back like in those old Chinese martial arts movies. Oh, yes, a psychiatrist would have had a field day with my writing journal.)

But of course she would not stay dead. She would always miraculously come back to life somehow, even if she got reduced to her component atoms. This, of course, just made the Really Bad Dude that much more determined to destroy her.

Still, I did get annoyed with her because, as a character whose personality had no flaws to overcome, she was essentially nothing more than a plot device.

So I eliminated her in what I thought would be a permanent manner and moved the original villain of her stories into her job. (And that guy has since come alive in ways I didn’t expect and is now one of my favorite character concepts. It helps that he’s sort of my Jungian shadow. :D)

But I still find myself wondering if I could “resurrect” her character concept somehow, and she does keep sneaking back into my stories; so far, her appearances have been restricted to backstory/flashback/tragic traumatizing deaths to give another character emo angst, but my mind keeps going back to wondering what I can do with the first (and only) one of my characters that I’ve murdered in such a brutal fashion.

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[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
By the colloquial usage of “bug.” But to an entomologist, all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs. Hemiptera - Wikipedia
[/QUOTE]

What about Nits—what do they count as? :stuck_out_tongue:

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[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
Wikipedia makes several points about how much Harriet Vane resembled Dorothy Sayers:

I’m not sure I would say that Sayers was “a very no-nonsense woman . . . [about] her life.” She wasn’t very pretty and basically threw herself at a couple of men who she should have realized didn’t actually love her. She then married a man mostly because he was willing to live off her income.
[/QUOTE]

The affair that led to the birth of her son was at a young age, when most women are willing to do something that foolish. Once she found she was pregnant, she made arrangements to have the child raised by a friend of hers (who made a living at it) because she didn’t want her parents to be ashamed of having a daughter with a bastard son. Pretty no-nonsense there.

If you look at her correspondence, she was also pretty hard on the guy, who had advocated Free Love and no marriage, then turned around and got married after he and Sayers parted. She also exhibited this same attitude toward her Anglican religion, for which she was an apologist on a par with C.S. Lewis at the time.

That’s why – while it would be amusing to call her a Mary Sue – I can’t jibe it with what I know of her life and works. Also, I’m afraid she’d cast a lightning bolt in my direction!

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I’m tempted to call Ariadne Oliver Christie’s Mary Sue. She’s obviously meant to be Dame Agatha within Poirot’s world and her character flaws (of which there are quite a few) are “endearing” ones. Working against that is the fact that Oliver is a very minor character, who only shows up in eight of Christie’s novels and never in a central role.

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Confession: I’ve definitely thought out Mary Sues, even imagined being them.

I wouldn’t dare commit them to paper (or hard drive), though. The damage inflicted on the world… shudder :eek: :stuck_out_tongue:

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[QUOTE=pesch]

If you look at her correspondence, she was also pretty hard on the guy, who had advocated Free Love and no marriage, then turned around and got married after he and Sayers parted.
[/QUOTE]

Isn’t this exactly what happened to Harriet Vane? I never thought of Harriet as a Mary Sue before, but this thread is making me at least ponder the possibility.

I’m still leaning toward Harriet NOT being a Mary Sue, though, because I’ve always understood the term to include another element – it’s a manifestation of the author, who is too good to be true, to the detriment of the story.

To me, this eliminates Melanie (her character is serving a real purpose in the novel, as WhyNot showed) and Beth (really, can you imagine Little Women without Beth?).

Kay Scarpetta is a great example (and, uh, very vivid image there, pokey!)

Anita Blake from Laurel K. Hamilton’s vampire porn books is another Mary Sue that comes to mind. Men (human and otherwise) lust after her, she masters every weapon she comes across – and the straw that broke the camel’s back for me – she’s tiny and eats like a bird but her vampire boy toy just forces her to shovel in the rich desserts, oh boo hoo. That is when I started to wonder if Ms. Hamilton ever emotionally progressed beyond the 8th grade – Anita is *so *virtuous that she turns down dessert, yet out of the goodness of her heart she will bring herself to eat it to please others. Talk about noble sacrifice!

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Okay, so, checking things out, it seems I have a Mary Sue in the RPG I run. sigh I try to keep away from these things. In fact, most of my NPC’s are either people I know, or manifestations of parts of myself that I -don’t- like.
On the upside, due to her unswavering loyalty, said NPC is about to turn into a villain. Does that break her Mary Sue-ness? Just curious.

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Quoth kaylasdad99:

No, but the Kinnisons do. You know where he’s tracing the Kinnisons throughout history, showing how they’ve always been the Saviours of Civilization? Remember the bit about the one in the 20th century, who insisted on running his factory up to safety standards, or whatever it was (and thereby Saved Civilization)? That was Doc Smith’s dad.

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[QUOTE=dotchan]
shameful confession time, ladies and gentelmen! :o

My first character was most definitely a Mary Sue. (The ones that followed were also pretty cringeworthy, but they at least can be salvaged.)

[/QUOTE]

Most of my old characters were Mary Sues… My first one was the sue-y-est of the sues.

She had a name I always wished I had, she was always my age (she was eight when I was, etc.) and always did stuff that was very abnormal for people my age to be able to do. She had my features, only beautified. She was sometimes a princess-who-didn’t-want-to-be, sometimes a young sorceress, usually a bit of a tomboy… she had lots of cool pets and was kind to animals and loved children and could beat grown men in swordfights and was a real smartass, She was an orphan or a runaway…

Then of course, she met her best friend who was a Sue Two. She was the opposite of my first character in appearance (features-wise, at least. She was still gorgeous, but had dark hair instead of blonde, hazel/green eyes instead of dark brown, and olive skin instead of pale with freckles.) She was a lot quieter than the first character, sweet and shy and peaceful, not as witty as I imagined the first character to be or as athletic, but she was, of course, the only one who understood my first character. She- you guessed it- died tragically when she tried to help her friend in a battle (which was two nine-year-old girls against twenty or so grown men with crazy powers. Our Heroine survived the battle with only a wounded arm, the enemy retreated so that th best friend could have her last heart-wrenching words and die, and our enraged and grief-stricken heroine chased them down and sent them all to a cave or something without killing them. Gimme a break. I was a kid.)

None of them ever got it on with characters from my favorite books or shows though. I think the first one might have met Buffy the Vampire Slayer once, but I’m not sure. I wrote a LOT when I was a (younger than I am now) kid. I still find bits of stories that I don’t remember writing.

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I’ve seen the concept of Mary Sue mentioned in the context of hgih fantasy novels. It gets lobbed at a lot of female main characters: Rhapsody from Rhapsody, Rani from The Glasswright’s Apprentice, Phedre from Kushiel’s Dart, and many others. I think there’s some validity to those claims, but the problem may be that there aren’t many prior examples of good female characters. Emerging authors makes their leading ladies boring just because that’s what they’ve seen from earlier leading ladies.

There does seem to be a rather blatant double standard, however; readers are much more willing to tolerate male leading characters who obviously meet the “author’s warped self-image” definition. Richard from Wizard’s First Rule, Tristan from The Fifth Sorceress, and what’s-his-face from Heresy are the standout examples. They obviously exist only to live out the illusions of their respective authors. They have kinky sex with a different beautiful woman every twenty pages, they single-handedly kill off bad guys by the million, they master every necessary skill in a matter of minutes, and they earn the unqualified adoration of entire nations. (Or, to be precise, they get that unqualified adoration despite doing nothing to earn it.)

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[QUOTE=Sternvogel]
A vdry early Mary Sue, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was Evangeline St. Clare.

The saintly girl died because she was basically too good to live.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think you can stretch the “Mary Sue” thing back that far. Victorian popular fiction was awash with sweet, innocent children (girls really) whose purity contrasted with the bad ol’ world. I don’t think you can claim Little Nell to be Dickens’ Mary Sue.

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pesch writes:

> The affair that led to the birth of her son was at a young age, when most
> women are willing to do something that foolish. Once she found she was
> pregnant, she made arrangements to have the child raised by a friend of hers
> (who made a living at it) because she didn’t want her parents to be ashamed of
> having a daughter with a bastard son. Pretty no-nonsense there.
>
> If you look at her correspondence, she was also pretty hard on the guy, who
> had advocated Free Love and no marriage, then turned around and got married
> after he and Sayers parted. She also exhibited this same attitude toward her
> Anglican religion, for which she was an apologist on a par with C.S. Lewis at the
> time.

I’m not going to get into the matter of whether Harriet Vane was a Mary Sue for Sayers, since the definition has now gotten so confused in this thread I no longer know what it means.

O.K., you’ve confused two men here. One was John Cournos, who Sayers lived with for a while. She was pretty naive here I think. She accepted his claim that he didn’t believe in marriage and moved in with him despite her own misgivings about living together without marriage. Eventually it became clear to her that he didn’t really love her. She moved out and later he married someone else.

Then there was Bill White that she had a brief fling with. He wasn’t much of a partner for her on any level except a sexual one. When she discovered she was pregnant, he dumped her. White was the father of her child, not Cournos.

Later, she married Mac Fleming. He didn’t have much going for him either. He basically lived off her income.

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[QUOTE=Kythereia]
Randomly off-topic: does anyone else find that picture vaguely creepy?
[/QUOTE]

Her eyes, they follow you.

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[QUOTE=delphica]
Anita Blake from Laurel K. Hamilton’s vampire porn books is another Mary Sue that comes to mind.
[/quote]

Oh God yes. I started reading the series back in high school, and I more-or-less enjoyed it then. I stopped after book seven, and just recently picked the series back up. Wow; the books started getting really, really lame. Anita just keeps on acquiring power after power after power, and it sometimes seems as though every not-evil male in the series has had sex with her (except, of course, for Edward, who views her instead as being his only equal, and that’s really not a whole lot better).

In one of the latest books, she has sex with two beautiful men in order to help out her boyfriend. Er, yeah. For a series that went almost six books without a single sex scene, it sure went downhill fast. But I digress.

[QUOTE=ArrMatey!]
Okay, so, checking things out, it seems I have a Mary Sue in the RPG I run. sigh I try to keep away from these things. In fact, most of my NPC’s are either people I know, or manifestations of parts of myself that I -don’t- like.
On the upside, due to her unswavering loyalty, said NPC is about to turn into a villain. Does that break her Mary Sue-ness? Just curious.
[/QUOTE]

It probably does eliminate the Sue-ness, but, really, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. Mary-Sue-ing isn’t as big of a deal as a lot of people make it out to be. Good ol’ Laurell K. excepted, most Mary Sues are fairly harmless. In fact, some “Mary Sues” are really archetypes, not wish-fulfillment, which kind of puts a damper on the whole mocking them thing.

It pisses me off when a fan-fic (or other) community has nothing better to do than to pick over every new author’s characters, looking for hints of Mary Sue-itis. The whole thing pissed me off eight years ago (when I first started writing fanfic) and it pisses me off now (a few years after my last fanfic). If your players are having fun, or if other people think the story works despite a few Mary Sue tendencies, then don’t worry about it.

Also very true. If a male character can get all the girls, he’s a cool ladies man (ala James T. Kirk). If a female character can get all the guys, she’s a Mary Sue. Or, you know, evil. Science fiction seems to be particularly bad in this regard.

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i don’t know if it counts as a “Mary Sue”, but when Philip Jose Farmer worked a character into his stories who was obviously him, he went so far as to give that character his own initials – like Peter Jairus Frigate in his Riverworld series. He did it in the World of Tiers series, too.
Both Spike Lee and Danny de Vito have been accused of introducing narcissistic characters that are really themselves (and don’t correspond to real-life people) in their biopics X and Hoffa.

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[QUOTE=Angel of the Lord]
If a male character can get all the girls, he’s a cool ladies man (ala James T. Kirk). If a female character can get all the guys, she’s a Mary Sue. Or, you know, evil. Science fiction seems to be particularly bad in this regard.
[/QUOTE]

Sexual double standard, mainly. We see men who acquire a lot of partners as ‘manly’, whereas women who do so are considered ‘slutty’ (or use what euphamism you chose).
Luckilly (some say) we now at least see that women tend to be taking the ‘warrior’ role more. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Zoe from Firefly. The Bride from Kill Bill. It’s levelling the playing field a bit, although some feel it’s now swinging a bit -too- far (I’m told that the only recurring male characters in Buffy are either physically incompetent, dead, or obsessed with the lead). The ‘competent’ woman is certainly expected now, although the ‘sex’ part of ‘sex roles’ is still inequal.

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[QUOTE=AtomicDog]
OMG! Lazarus Long is a Mary Sue! :smack:

Actually, as slow on the uptake as I am, I figured that out in the first chapter of Time Enough For Love.
[/QUOTE]

Aren’t all the male Heinlein characters Mary Sues? Some are RAH as a young man, some as a mature man, and some as an old man. Sometimes he’s even a woman, but almost all the interesting Heinlein characters are Heinlein.