It's clearly derived from "Sue" (in context), but is different enough that it's neither gendered nor something used outside the PPC context, and works as both a noun and adjective. I only use "Mary Sue" in the name of the department nowadays, which we can't really change.

A brief original definition of Mary Sue would be "a badly-written Original Female Character". Over time, different portions of the internet have removed different pieces of that. The concept of a Canon Suvian dropped "Original". The PPC drops "Female", and I think we're better for it. A lot of very obnoxious people drop "badly-written" and use it to attack any female OCs.

Then you've got the various spin-offs of those deletions. The obnoxious people have absorbed the Canon Suvian definition, so now they use Mary Sue = "female character", and use it to attack pretty much any woman in fiction who does anything more than scream for help. The reclamation attempt takes the "OFC" definition and points out that that's not a bad thing. And they're right! The definition they're reclaiming from is not a description of a bad character, because "badly-written" has been erased from the definition.

As you rightly point out, the whole thing makes it impossible to use the term for critiquing; it has too much baggage now. The world being what it is, it's still easy to use it as an insult even in a critical community - just put a sneer on your face. Reclaiming words is hard - it takes concerted effort by a wide community to turn an insult into a compliment, and it would be even harder to turn it back into a nuanced critical description in general use. I don't think it's a battle we can ever win.

Hence, Suvian. :)

hS

Sorry I didn't respond to this very quickly; it's been a busy week!

I like the history of "Mary Sue" that you outlined there. I knew the history, of course, but this is a nice, macro explanation that cuts straight to the general trends. I agree with you that reclaiming Mary Sue through a feminist lens is a doomed exercise, because the character journey of "start out awesome" just can't be fit to any living human of any gender. As we've said more and more around here, lately, it's not the litmus traits of an individual character that make them unenjoyable, but their presentation in the narrative. And we, as real people, have to build our own narrative, and can't just latch onto a god-like figure to emulate and find success. That being said, though, I do think there's a lot of validity in criticizing the knee-jerk reaction to labeling a character like Rey a "Mary Sue" as though she has no complexity or struggle to her character. (And yeah, a lot of those doing the labeling were very much sad young men who felt their hero-fantasizing space being invaded by wOmEnZ, ther'e's no denying that.)

Okay, I know this is going wildly off-topic, but uh. Ayla. I'm four titles deep into Earth's Children, and I have to defend Ayla against the "Mary Sue" label. I know Ayla is good at a lot of things, she's a lady of many talents and insights, but I don't feel that any of her ability is undeserved. Her childhood, at least the portions we see where the narrative picks up in the first book, is absolute hell. I'm not going to bother listing out everything that happens to her, mostly because a good chunk of that is triggering for some folks here, but we see everything she goes through right there on page. She's good at hunting because she eavesdropped on the men, and later was forced to hunt just to feed herself. Her medical talent came from training under a medicine woman and practicing medical care. Her skill at reading body language and facial expression is a result of the Clan culture she lived with, learning their form of communication. Her figuring out "where babies come from" is the result of her own experiences, and observing the behaviors of people and animals around her. (Honestly, for me, Ayla figuring out the rough mechanics behind the process of conception is a lot less realistic than the fact that no human culture depicted in the series figured that out first.) A lot of her inventions, like the needle, are just modifications she made to existing inventions, and really, she doesn't have a monopoly on technological developments: it's Jondalar, not Ayla, who creats the spear-thrower; the Ramudoi carve entire, full-size canoes out of tree trunks; heck, Attoroa even invents fascist dictatorship, not that that was good thing to invent, but it's still a complex idea developed by someone other than Ayla. Really, the only trait Ayla possesses that feels purely Doylist is her attractive appearance, but even that was turned against her for close to two full books, because living with the Clan, and under their beauty standards, convinced her she was ugly until she started interacting with Jondalar. So yeah, I'm team Ayla, and sorry for this whole rant, but I had to defend my girl.

—doctorlit attends a Twilight convention wearing a "Team Ayla" shirt and manages to mutually confuse everyone there

Thanks for posting this. Also, hi. I'm not sure if I count as a newbie anymore because I've been here for over a year.

It was an interesting perspective. I’m not sure the “feminist reclaiming” is nearly as widespread as you make it out to be. And your link to the PPC wiki is broken.

Hey, nice to see you, Calista! I’m Linstar, rather new. Let’s be friends!

—Ls