The idea behind this question is that people are accusing far too many female leads of being Mary Sues and far too few male leads of being Gary Stus. This can be solved by having a concrete definition of Mary Sue/Gary Stu. Which we do! :D Also, I'd like to point out that in fanfic, there are in existence many more Mary Sues than Gary Stus. That is not because women write worse, but because women write more fanfic in general. So that disparity isn't a disparity at all.

I'll leave the oldbies to talk about the rest.

-Twistey

There's no way we're going to know each other as I only joined last year. Have a Generic Heavy Object. Useful for dropping on your enemies, but don't try and lift it!

I... guess you're sort of right with the quote, but there is a difference between "Gary Stu" and "protagonist". If you're being optimistic, I'd say it's the same as the difference between "Mary Sue" and "female protagonist".

(If you're curious, the first record of you in the Board Archives is April 2005, and the last is December of the same; doesn't mean much, though, because the Archives are pretty patchy before '08.)

The way I think of it, the original definition of a Mary Sue was 'a badly-written female self-insert'. Over the years, different groups have focussed on different parts:

-The worst kinds have honed in on 'female', and they're exactly what you're talking about. The 'Rey is a Mary Sue!' crowd hit this button (especially ironic since this is the same canon where a nine-year-old flies through an entire hostile fighter fleet and blows up a military starship back in Phantom Menace), and while I'm not going to say they're awful people, their views stink.

-Almost as bad are the ones who focus on 'self-insert' - ie, the 'Rey can't be a Mary Sue because she's definitely not a version of Abrams'. This is not only a tool to put down any OCs in fanfic - most of which is still written by women & girls - but is also disproportionately used against female writers in published fiction. The issue, really, is that it's kept just enough of the 'badly-written' connotation to keep being used as a negative word, while not actually requiring you to check that bad writing is present.

-The PPC has taken what I think is the only reasonable approach: to focus on 'badly-written'. I've personally been advocating the use of Suvian, to refer to both Mary Sues and Gary Stus. Our definition doesn't care about what they're based on or even, specifically, what they look like (the Mary Sue Tests of the past, with 'falls in love with Legolas' and 'astoundingly beautiful' and the like, aren't really used any more); it's all about how they fit into the world - or rather, how they don't.

If you want to see what my approach to this looks like, PPC: Driftwood is the series where I've put it into practice. It's not the PPC of the old days, which did often take the easy path of saying 'she's a girl, she must be an author fantasy and a Sue'; but I like to think things have changed since then.

hS

I don't know if we ever interacted much, but anyway, welcome back!

As to the... joke? Is that a joke? Well, my answer is "a Suvian by any other name smells as poorly written."

And, I must contradict Delta, the definition we're currently using definitely can encompass the likes of Eragon and Drizzt do'Urden (and yeah, Bella Swann, too). While original characters in original works can't pull other characters and settings out of character in the same way as an original character in a fanfiction, they CAN receive incongruous treatment from other characters and break the rules of their worlds in ways that disrupt our ability to suspend disbelief, which amounts to the same thing: a protagonist with poor characterization and no real struggle placed in their path.

And we certainly spork male Suvians, if that's in question. Some examples are listed on the Gary Stu page that 61516 linked.

Not that there isn't bias in favor of male protagonists over female ones out there in the Serious Literature world, and probably in fanfiction, too. But fanfiction has always been more of a female hobby, as far as I'm aware. Speaking of OC protagonists in fanfic, then, you get more female protagonists than male protagonists, and therefore—talking strictly numbers—more badly written female protagonists than badly written male protagonists. Percentage-wise, though, I reckon it's exactly the same. The old saying, 90% of everything is crap, applies to fanfiction and Serious Literature, male and female and everything else, all alike.

~Neshomeh

I was, in the Elder Days, known as Techno-Dann. A few things have changed since then. :)

That's a great question, and one that's come up in discussion here too. My thoughts go something like this:

First and foremost, we specifically only use Mary Sue to talk about fanfiction characters. The measure of a Mary Sue is not how tragic her backstory is, it's not how much power she has, it's how much she warps the story around her. It's how far away from canon she pulls characters, settings, and themes.

We've stuck to that definition pretty hard, too - even in the face of Eragon, Twilight, Fifty Shades... the list of bad published fiction goes on, but those characters are by definition not Sues because the world exists for them, and their themes are the world's themes. Likewise, there are some truly good ladies in fiction out there who also cannot be Sues, because the story is their story: consider Imperator Furiosa from the latest Mad Max, for example. (Innuendo Studios does a really good feminist breakdown of Mad Max and tropes around women in action movies. (CW: violence, discussion of very violent tropes))

To get into some more personal thoughts: I've totally dreamed up wish-fulfillment self-insert fanfiction. I've written more than a few, although I usually lean on original settings instead of fanfic. I recognized them as things I was writing for me rather than the world, and I chose to not put them on the internet. (The earliest sign I have that I wasn't the guy I thought I was? I stumbled across a cache of my really old writing, 2005-6ish, and in every single piece, the character I identified with most... was a girl.) And yeah, it'd hurt to see someone go through them with a pair of Agents and mock them to fictional death, and yeah, I'm not sure if "having the self-awareness to recognize that this isn't something I'm writing to be good writing" is the best test for whether something should undergo that level of commentary.

(Quoth one of the hypothetical agents: "Oh bright Athena, Juliette, will you finish a scene for once?")

Anyways! I don't have any conclusions, but there's some thoughts. The joke is sadly accurate, "Mary Sue" has been an insult thrown at a lot of women in fiction who dared be competent/interesting/capable, and that's rather uncool - but it's also a misuse of the term, and we've been careful with its meaning here. And, yeah, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable making "this is bad art" the punchline of mine? But I've also only written like one mission in ten years.

So, hi! There's a lot of words, I hope you find some of them interesting.

-Delta Juliette

And... yeah, guys do tend to get off a bit lighter. However, the PPC have a pretty stringent definition of what a Sue *is*, which helps us avoid this.

Although I will note some articles I've seen online about this are just... wrong. Like one that claims Paul Atreides is a godlike Stu and that's bad writing nobody noticed when Doom as a series (and particularly Doom Messiah) was all about deconstructing the Messianic Archetype: Making Paul like that was the point, so Herbert could show all the problems with it.

Have a laser pistol.

We currently call male 'sue a Gary Stu.

We have some examples on the wiki:
http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Gary_Stu