Subject: That reminds me...
Author:
Posted on: 2011-09-04 10:15:00 UTC
What about a Division of False Mary Sue Accusations? It could function quite like the Intelligence Department, going into fics and explaining just why the OCs there avoid Suedom, or enumerate redeeming qualities in the story that override the Sue's presence.
Partly, I really want to start a discussion on all of the above! The poking and prodding of various factors on the "The label of 'Mary Sue' is being used as a bat for sexism" camp is making more sense to me as time goes on, and I see female characters get bashed for things they shouldn't, and male characters given a sort of pass on the whole thing.
And part of me just wants company to snark mightily at this ridiculous Canon Stu. Seriously, can you say wish-fulfillment self-insert fantasy? He keeps using the word 'druid,' but I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
But seriously, I've been talking this over with a friend a lot, after Tamora Pierce linked some very, very interesting things on her Livejournal. I've been a fan of her books for ages, they're part of what got me into fantasy, and she has earned a great deal of respect from me. So when I see her snarking at users of the term Mary Sue*, openly, in a comment thread, part of me shrivels up into a dark corner. And when I see novels like this praised and exalted, while I know-- know that a female protagonist doing half of that would be laughed out of the genre, it stings. And it makes me wonder.
And then I go onto the IRC, and talk to people, and get into passionate arguments about why, precisely, being Teh Awesome does not a Mary Sue make. What it comes down to, for me, is this. Does a character matter? Are they their author's best traits and tragically misunderstood traits 'flaws' welded onto a fantasized face and body, and dropped into a universe of the author's choice, where all who surround them seethe with jealousy of swoon with adoration? That's the key, for me. In 'Suedom,' by Andy and Saphie, where the two people get dropped into LotR and discover that they themselves are Sues-- the wilver hair and giant mammary glands only come in the second chapter. The real "Oh God We're Sues" moment comes when Bilbo drops to one knee and begins to recite bad Shakespearean at them. (Also he's lacking in the sniffles and in the wrong time, but you know what I'm at.) It just burns-- I see close friends, feminists, talking about the sexism of the Sue label, and then I come back to the PPC and find someone has changed "A Suethor will put his/her whatever" into "A Suethor will put her whatever," with the explanation that a lot of Suethors are female.
I like this community, because for me it's always been a bunch of fringe-loving geeks (I mean, come on-- we're on the fringe of a subgenre of a subgenre), a supportive place for people looking for concrit and help growing as writers, a place to cower from the awful standards of most fiction, fan-based and otherwise... the works. It's home. But when Tamora Pierce is gnashing her teeth about the word Sue being sexist, and I come back to people going "Well, this girl's a Stu, she's really powerful and beautiful and an orphan and that just says it all, doesn't it?" ...I wonder.
So, I guess this is part rambling, as per the Constitution, part plug of a seriously-wtf series, and part legitimate question. What is it that makes a Sue a Sue, a Stu a Stu?
For my own answer, I'd say the character. I think it was DML who posted the best litmus test I've ever seen, seriously-- I don't care that your OC's got rare and uncommon beauty, is a good fighter-- hell, if you've got a good explanation as to why, special powers. But that's the key, for me. What makes a character good isn't their normality and ability to not outshine or bend anything or anyone, ever. It's in the word: character. If she's got a name like Chiannariel Moonswaternight, but she's believable, her story works, she's got depth and personality and character, I don't bloody care, she's not a Sue in my book. If an OC has the unremarkable name John Doe, he doesn't have any special powers or overshining beauty, but he's flat and floppy and clearly the self-insert of an unimaginative high-schooler... he's a Stu!
I don't know, maybe I'm getting too worked up for this; I definitely don't have the spoons to post it, and there's a huge number of brief threads up already-- hey, Huinesoron's goodfic-crit-thread is off, I'm sorry I never got a chance to post there. Ah, well. I'm done rambling.
...Thoughts, anyone still reading?
*For reference? A snippet: And people who characterize those non-mainstream characters as Mary Sues don't read, don't know their literary history, don't know their social history, and don't know their feminist history. Until they know any of these, and perhaps political history as well, there's no point in talking to them, because they don't even speak the same dialect as a person with a modicum of education in the real world.
I was just reminded about this awesome post by the creator of Manly Guys Doing Manly things that I figured I'd share.
http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/589
...is probably already here.
In a nutshell: just because some people misuse terms like "Mary Sue" doesn't mean we should stop using the term altogether. We have our own definition, and it fits the general definition that's in Wikipedia, so I don't think a terminology change is in order.
What makes a Sue? For me, it's proportion. Does the character have mighty powers? Okay. Does no one, not even the antagonists, have powers as great? Not okay. Is the character gorgeous? Fine. Is the character the only person so described in the entire story? Not fine. Does the character have legendary weaponry? Great. Does the character have legendary weaponry, amazing looks, a cute animal friend, magical abilities, and an angsty tragic past...a combination of which none of the villains could hope to match? Why hello there, Drizzt Do'Urden. What a surprise that you always come out on top!
The analogy I like to use is the SIMs. You know how in the SIMs game you have a certain amount of skill/personality points to begin with, and you have to choose how to distribute them? For example, your SIM can be a social butterfly...but will then have to be a total slob to compensate. You can't just have all of the personality traits be set on maximum, because...well, because then everyone would do that! And then all the characters would be *gasp* the same! Suethors (of whatever gender) do the equivalent of using cheat codes to create a "SIM" for themselves that really shouldn't be possible. And when they put these characters in with other SIMs whose creators have actually followed the rules of points distribution...well, no wonder other SIMs get outshone, and no wonder everyone hates the cheatcode!SIMs.
As for Suethors and the use of female pronouns...I would be worried if we changed the pronouns to female for Suethors, and kept the pronouns gender-neutral when talking about goodfic writers. If that's the case, that has to change. BUT, if we talk about both Suethors and canon purists using female pronouns, well, isn't that a good thing? I mean, if this were anywhere else we'd be complaining about the ubiquitous use of male pronouns in the English language. I say use 'em! Just use them for goodfic and badfic authors alike--and if that bothers people, just remind them that this is the Internet, where authors might very well be lying about their gender anyway.
As for this: "And when I see novels like this praised and exalted, while I know-- know that a female protagonist doing half of that would be laughed out of the genre, it stings. And it makes me wonder."
So, a lot of people praise flat, unrealistic male characters and criticize flat, unrealistic female characters. Yes, that is indeed wrong and unfair. But why would the solution be to praise (or fail to criticize) flat, unrealistic female characters? You'll just wind up with a double-dose of bad literature! Wouldn't the solution be, rather than letting up on Mary Sue criticism, to toughen up on the criticism of the every-present Marty-Stu?
More Stu-mocking for everyone! That can only be a good thing. :P
Finally, to this: And people who characterize those non-mainstream characters as Mary Sues don't read, don't know their literary history, don't know their social history, and don't know their feminist history. Until they know any of these, and perhaps political history as well, there's no point in talking to them, because they don't even speak the same dialect as a person with a modicum of education in the real world.
I'd really have to read more of this to form a sound response to it, because as far as I can tell, we don't characterize "those non-mainstream characters" as Mary Sues. Being non-mainstream is not a requirement for being Mary Sue. If anything, in fanfiction Mary Sue is mainstream.
And for the record? Tamora Pierce is herself a Suethor. But not because of her warrior women, oh no. Because of *snicker* Veralidaine Sarrasri, and let us count the ways.
-Beautiful, such that all the boys are queuing up to be with her
-Angsty tragic past due to being illegitimate
-Demigod
-Speshul nickname that no one else has - "The Wildmage". (Note that this isn't the same as the nicknames that the Shang warriors, both male and female, get, because those names are part of the Shang culture, and Daine's nickname is the only one of its kind in existence)
-Has more wild magic in her than anyone in the history of ever
-Had not one, but SEVERAL cute animal friends, and at the end of one book actually controls the actions of all the animals in the land
-Is able to shoot a bow and hit three moving targets in the dark--which even Alanna, who is much older and more experienced with a bow than Daine, can't equal. She is, at most, fifteen years old at the time.
-Is beloved and adored by ALL the protagonists (at the end of the first book, everyone and their pet bunny wants to take her in)
-Impresses everyone she comes across, especially with her l33t archery skillz - keep in mind that she is fifteen years old!
-Is only held in contempt by people who judge her by her illegitimacy, who are all naturally mean and nasty people
-Is beloved and adored by the VILLAIN (no, really), until like the last twenty pages of the last book, in which he becomes one of the mean, nasty people who judge her by her illegitimacy! (Gee, the author wouldn't happen to have an axe to grind about that particular topic, now would she?)
-Makes a man who has been sleeping around since she was four years old want to settle down and marry her
...and I'm probably forgetting some. Again, proportion. You could get away with one of those character traits, maybe two, but twelve? The author is trying waaaay too hard to make her character likable.
My point being, although Tamora Pierce has created some of my favorite childhood characters (Keladry and Buri being my favorites), I wouldn't hold her up as an expert on Mary Sueism. (Consider Liam "The Shang Dragon" and his mood-ring eye colors. I haven't read "Lioness Rampant" in a decade and I'm still giggling over them.)
My first was Drizzt Do'Urden.
I loved both series. They're a Sue and a Stu, respectively, but they're good stories. Which I think proves Phobos' point, below.
We shall have to disagree on whether Daine's series is a good story; I personally found it and her to be very bland even as a child, nowhere near The Lioness Quartet. But let us take Drizzt Do'Urden.
I shall give you a quote from my first PPC mission:
"And there are a handful of good Mary Sues out there. When I was younger, my hero was Drizzt Do'Urden. He's good looking, has violet eyes and white hair, is different from the other drow, doesn't age like humans do, is the best of the best with weapons, has a tragic past, is noble, wise, compassionate, yadda yadda yadda. He's a regular Marty Stu. But he's a plausible and well-written one. It's when Sueish or Stuish characteristics neuter good writing that it gets messy."
Now, I shall give you a quote from Mythtaken, in response to my saying:
"Ultimately, Mary Sue is bowling-with-bumpers safe as a way to experience a story. She is unrealistically beautiful, inhumanly powerful, and always gets rewarded for everything she does with only the barest of struggles. She can’t fail. She can’t get humiliated. The story itself will dutifully remove all real obstacles from her shining path. And a character who needs her author to do all that work for her is not a character who has any sort of power. On the contrary, that character is weak."
This is such a wonderfully succinct definition of Mary Sue and why she's an example of bad writing! I keep seeing people say stuff like there's nothing wrong with her if she's well written, and being totally perplexed, because as far as I'm concerned she can't be well written. That's the whole point.
At this point in time, my opinion is somewhere in the middle of the two of these. Can a Sue be well-written? In rare instances, yes. Can a Sue be well-written because s/he is a Sue? Absolutely not. The thing I remember most about Drizzt is not how he had "Twinkle" and "Icingdeath" as his speshul swords, but how he hesitantly forged his first human connection with Catti-Brie. And to borrow from Phobos again, if I feel fondness for Rapunzel from Tangled, it is in spite of the fact that rough-and-tough barbarians are all nice to her and she splashes through a puddle without getting dirty.
But then I compare Rapunzel to a character like Mulan, who was clumsy and awkward and didn't fit in, and worked harder than anyone else to become a warrior, and suffered through several humiliating moments before she found her stride, and got badly hurt saving the day, and who found her self-realization not in seeing something shiny, but in helping other people, and I think...oh. Oh, this is how it's supposed to be. This is a character I can really love.
The message that Rapunzel learned was: "The world isn't such a big, scary place, after all, and you are more than equipped to handle it." But it could have been: "The world is such a big, scary place, but it's totally worth it even if you get hurt." It could have been: "There is no WAY you are equipped to handle the whole wide world on your first sojourn outside...no one is...but you can learn." Wouldn't those messages have been so much better than what we got? And wouldn't they ring so much truer to the audience's (even kids') life experiences?
Mary Sueism is a mark of poor writing. Some characters are just strong enough to be liked anyway. And in the long run, their being Sues doesn't really do them any favors, because the fact that they are so speshul calls all of their achievements into question. Rapunzel might be fun to pal around with, but if she didn't have her Aura of Smooth, would she really have been able to go through with everything her adventure asked of her? I guess we'll never know.
~Araeph
I'm totally with Araeph (and Neshomeh down below) here - real feminism doesn't have anything to do with removing every term that /might/ be politically incorrect, it's about equality.
In the context of the PPC, this means equal mockery of both Mary Sues and Gary Stus, so why tiptoe around the females and further ignore the males?
As a woman, I personally feel more offended by the /existence/ of Mary Sues in general than what they're called. We could call them, I dunno, "Sparklesmores" and still offend people because we won't treat those characters any differently from before. They're characters that are based on warped female ideals, so the name is the least of our troubles.
I don't think we should change our lexicon just for the sake of appearing politically correct. "Mary Sue" has been part of fandom terminology since the seventies. It is a word, and we, as thinking humans, have power over words; it is not the other way around. Other groups may be using the term incorrectly, but I think it's safe to say we are not. Also, since we typically (hopefully, preferably) have very little interaction with other internet groups, we don't need to worry about how the PPC is viewed.
As I side note, I personally dislike the Gary Stu/Marty Sam whatever distinction. To me, any character with Sueish qualities is a Mary Sue, in the same sense that any animal with feathers is a bird (or archeopteryx). I don't see the need to use a different term for a male Sue because the gender of a Sue is irrelevant. A Sue is not a Sue because she or he is a she or a he; a Sue is a Sue because of their role in the story and their interactions with other characters. Gender is a secondary detail, eclipsed by all the rest.
So, personally? Even if we reach a consensus for a new, gender-neutral term for Sues, I will continue to call the lot—female and male—Mary Sues. Because that is what they are to me.
Oh, wait! I just thought of one: Plot Vacuums. Eh? Eh?
I am a big fan of the Duck Analogy, as you may all remember from previous discussions. If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and acts like a duck...well...it is probably a duck. Or Sue, in this case.
To go further, I will say that not all Sues are bad. You can have a well written Sue. Take Rapunzel from the movie Tangled. While watching that movie with Nesh, I remarked that any litmus strips in the area would be bursting into flames. She ticked just about every box for Sue traits. Unique magical powers, cute animal friend, everyone instantly likes her for no discernible reason, her hair was a Deus ex Machina, etc. However, she was fun to watch, and you could feel for her. She was definitely a Sue, but she was a well written one.
The problem with a Sue comes from the fact that it is a difficult character type to write well. It takes a lot of skill and effort. It is very easy to write a bad Sue.
I don't think that ticking off the boxes in a litmus test, makes the character a Sue. Ticking off all those boxes, are generally symptomatic of having written a Sue. I am agreed that hitting all those boxes does make for a very difficult character to write well, so most of the ones that hit those boxes are awful Sues, but I do not agree that a well-written character that hits those boxes is a Sue.
If the character disrupts the story--If the character destroys all possible enjoyment and breaks even the most willing suspension of disbelief then that character is not well-written. Whether the character is teh awesum! and hits every mark on the litmus test, or the character is the clumsiest loser on the face of the planet (or wherever the story is set), that character is a Sue. Going by that there can be origin!canon Sues (a concept I fought against believing in for a long time), there can be fanfiction Sues, and there can be Sues tacked onto existing shows as newcomer!canon Sues.
Anyway, I guess I am basically agreeing with DML's definition, just in less precise language.
It's possible to have a good STORY with a Sue in it, and canon Sues can build the story rather than break it.
But Sues are always bad. It's just that a story could be good enough to INCLUDE the canon Sue so that she's not hurtful or annoying, or harnesses her story-warping powers to drive the narrative in a good rather than hurtful direction.
Some canon Sues... don't do that.
Canon Sue that builds more canon than it damages: Rapunzel, Mara Jade, Drizzt...
Canon Sue that damages more canon than it builds: Bella Swan, Eragon, Wesley Crusher...
(I think this is why we can't kill canon Sues. Because some of them do manage to build the canon they live in, rather than tear it apart.)
If a Sue builds on the canon rather than destroying it, doesn't that make them a good character? Isn't that what a good character is: a character that adds something to the story?
Also, I don't believe that you can divorce a character from the story. If you took Rapunzel out of the story and put a less Sueish character in her place, it would not be the same story at all.
A Sue character is one that warps the story around them. This is always a little bad. But in a canon Sue case, because the story is THEIR OWN STORY, it's not always a horrible thing... or at the very least, the damage is minimized. The Sues the PPC kills are dangerous because they do this while stealing the story from other people.
Sure a story's quality and a character's quality can be divorced from one another. A story can have riveting style, good language and diction, and interesting turns, yet contain a character who is unrealistic. It's perfectly possible to find a good book with a somewhat borderline character.
In other words:
Sues as a general concept are always bad, but a story with a Sue is not always bad... because the quality of writing and the 'badness' of the Sue can vary. A marginal Sue with good writing can make us overlook how she hogs the spotlight because we're having fun and enjoying ourselves. A marginal Sue with bad writing has nothing to disguise that everything about her is deus ex machina. A terrible Sue with any writing always makes us gag, though...
Sure a story's quality and a character's quality can be divorced from one another. A story can have riveting style, good language and diction, and interesting turns, yet contain a character who is unrealistic. It's perfectly possible to find a good book with a somewhat borderline character.
All of those things you mention are stylistic; none of them have to do with the actual story, the basic plot. I haven't seen Tangled, but there's one example Calista brought up, earlier: Drizzt Do'Urden. He's very much a Stu, and he's very well-written, and the story would absolutely not be worth reading with John Doe the un-special OC in his place.
Alright, I'm going to go off on a really weird analogy here.
So, you may be familiar with Gary's Mod, a simulator where you are basically God. You create and destroy things instantly at will, can't be hurt, can't be killed, and can do absolutely anything with the world around you. But, after awhile,it gets very boring. You never feel like you're accomplishing anything because there's no effort in it. This is what I think defines a mary sue. You just get the feeling that if the character wasn't there no one would be doing anything. The whole world gives itself to him/her, so it never feels like they have accomplished anything.
Well developed original characters, on the other hand, are more like Minecraft. It's still a creativity tool, yeah, but you have to work hard for every accomplishment and improve yourself in order to achieve your goals. It feels like the world stretches out forever and that there could be things going on that have nothing to do with you. This is how regular characters work, interacting with a world instead of controlling it, and showing development and growth as the story progresses.
That is mainly how I judge original characters. Are the playing Minecraft or Gary's Mod?
Alright, end of horrible analogy now.
I understand that this is off the central point of the discussion, but I'd like to explain a bit about Garry's Mod. Yes, you have all the materials at your disposal. You can switch on God Mode and shoot down NPCs all day long. But the point of GMod isn't the tools or the resources, it's what you make with them.
I'll admit, I was never a Lego fan but I don't see the appeal of Minecraft. To me, it's blocky and there's not much I can do with it. The resource gathering is a grind(in the case of common materials like stone) or a blind hunt(if you're looking for things like diamonds). You can't build this or this or this or make this(NSFW) in Minecraft. Take that turret, for example. One of the best things about GMod is that you aren't given perfect tools. You can download standard shapes and tools that allow for perfect connections if you want to, but it's never required. The creator had a locker, some wheels, a tire, a dumpster, and some dock poles and thought "what can I do with this?" In Minecraft, everything's a square. It fits perfectly in a square block with all the other squares.
---GMod white knighting over, actual related discussion imminent---
So I guess, if I were to compare it to the central point, I'd say a "Garry's Mod character" has, or can acquire, all the tools they need to accomplish what they want to do. The tools might not be perfectly suited to the task at hand, but it's how they use those tools along the way, what they accomplish with them and how they combine the irregular shapes they're given to make something great that makes the story. Like you said, a "Minecraft character" works for everything they get, and they're rewarded with exactly what they wanted.
I guess if you imagine yourself something of a MacGyver you might find Garry's Mod more appealing. I don't, but I still got more out of Gmod than I got out of Minecraft.
I dunno. I guess it's all up to your individual writing style and what you like to see in a character.
Isn't that the one where disaster is never more than one wrong-object-touch away?
(Of course, sand-ceiling traps can still be built, but these days, sandstone spawns on the bottom of any expanse of naturally occurring sand, so it's an easy thing to deal with. If you find yourself digging up through sandstone, you're in a beach, desert, or at the bottom of the ocean.)
I haven't played Gary's Mod myself, though I have seen my friends. I AM an avid MineCraft lover, and can agree that the fun comes from collecting the materials.
I like this analogy. Having a person with powers who bulldozes through the world would get boring, usually. To make an example that DML gave to me, and I used, he was helping me with ideas, and he suggested not using a portal in the HP mission I last posted, and doing a travelogue thing to the destination. Well, lo and behold, I did, and I had a LOT more fun with it.
While I will not be dropping portals completely, doing things the hard way, or at least not the easy way has a definite satisfaction to it.
What can I add to this discussion?
Well, I noticed that Maximum Ride is on the list of Canonical Sues. I disagree with that. She puts on that act because she needs to be tough and play the part of a leader. But her internal monologues show that she's just a teenager who has had a terrible life for as far back as she can remember, and it really SHOWS. Her she reacts believably, putting her family first even though she really disagrees with them sometimes. Yes, she's bad ass and she has had two good looking guys vying for her at the same time. One of those guys was BRED to want to have her children. It's stated in book, that this guy was made to be her "perfect other half". As for being speshul, she acts like its a blessing and a curse. She's part bird(she has wings) but is sensitive about showing them due to being in hiding.
Now then, lets talk about her "perfect other half". This guy is described as being "super model gorgeous"(or something to that effect) and everyone swoons when they see him. He can see the future, everyone but Max and the other guy who wants her take right to him, he can heal his own wounds, and what pisses me off the most is that he KNOWS that he was made to want Max's babies, but isn't shown to be all that distressed about it.
If I was put into that situation(which I am in my own way due to my OCD and the compulsions I have where I KNOW that it's not necessary to repeat my actions over and over and over again, but if FEELS like I should and then I get all distressed about feeling helpless over the whole thing, please pardon the run on) I would be pretty upset about it.
Yet this guy isn't. His entire existence is based around having Max's children, he knows that, and yet the most we see him angst over it is the occasional frustration.
Now you could argue that he was brain washed into it not bothering, but here's the thing: If this were true, why hasn't the flock tried to help him out? Point out when he's being all horny towards Max, have Max reject him as part of helping him, heck she doesn't even do THAT to his face! Max just sort of goes along with it, is confused about her feeling for a bit, then her boyfriend oh so conveniently leaves the flock because "thats whats best". The next book she and her "perfect other half" are having sex. At the Eifle tower. "Silhouetted against the night sky".
Who the hell is the Stu here?!
To sum up, Max is a believable character. This other guy is a Stu.
I don't know the continuum you're talking about, but I do have two cents here, which may or may not apply to that particular character...
You get characters that are really, really obvious Sues and Stus. A toddler could point them out. And then you get characters that are less obvious, and less annoying.
Non-annoying Canon Stu example: Drizzt Do'Urden. He's got all the sparkliness and angst going on; but he's not nearly as annoying as he could be, because he's well-integrated into the story. The story usually exists somewhat to serve him; but he gives back to the story, too; most Stus don't. Despite the obvious Stu traits, his glitter level stays pretty low, and the stories stay readable. A writer with less skill would have made him insufferable, but as it is, the other characters are just as interesting as Drizzt and the biggest annoyance has actually been due to copycats who have turned the entire drow species into a bunch of self-hating angsty atoner types rather than the downright scary, cold-hearted, back-stabbing subterranean elves they should've been.
The more skill you have as a writer, the more Stu/Sue traits you can get away with without annoying your readers. It's really a spectrum.
This is why we can recruit ex-Sues to the PPC, right? Because the ones that aren't as annoying as the average, the ones who have some kind of a personality and don't twist the canon as badly as usual, have some hope of becoming full-fledged characters that are contributing to the story rather than just leeching off it. It's good to recognize that.
If the character is the uncanonical child of someone, and it's kind of obvious from the story that the author made that connection just to make their character special (daughters of Aslan or Sauron come to mind), then I'm far more likely to call them Sue than if the author has better reasons.
If a character has special powers and there's really no good reason for him/her to have them, and everybody respects them for it, then I'm more likely to see the character as Sue. E.g. a LotR character doesn't need powerful elemental magic. Double points if the powers are mentioned and then either only used once or never really used. Pointless powers are one thing that cause suspicion for me. A Narnia Sue I came across was given a pair of golden wings that she can bring out or put away when she wants, and the title of the first book in the trilogy is "Her Golden Wings," but I don't remember her EVER using them as anything but battle decoration. Don't give a character something they're not going to use.
For me, Sues have little character depth and (talking mostly from Narnia experience here): often have unduly tragic pasts, almost instantly fall in love with their authors' lust object, often have poorly-written prophecies about them, might have ridiculous or uncanonical powers, throw people OOC, might cause unacceptable canon breaks, don't act like real people, are often written in first person, often defeat trained canon characters in a duel (often with martial arts), have undue attention paid to them, change the way the world works...
Let me explain better. No, there is too much. Let me sum up:
I see Sues as unrealistic characters, often without much character depth and no logical reasons for anything, who warp canon (and its rules) to revolve around themselves.
I personally think that if an author offers a reasonable explanation for a Sue trait, it becomes non-Sue. There's also the fact that a few Sue traits do not a Sue make:
Once again we're falling into the exceedingly wanky trap of "any female character who's the center of a story and has good qualities MUST BE A SUE." We need to set our radar a little higher (lower?). Otherwise every heroine ever invented can be called a Sue, and that's ridiculous.
To whit:
Beautiful = not a Sue.
Loved = not a Sue.
Brilliant = not a Sue.
Powerful = not a Sue.
Plot-central = not a Sue.
Related to another character = not a Sue.
Love interest = not a Sue.
Needs to be rescued = not a Sue.
Kicks ass = not a Sue.
Whines = not a Sue.
HOWEVER. Combine three or more of the above, throw in "makes other characters act like idiots" and "warps logic and/or plotline to suit HER," and...you might have a Sue!
PS: Flavor to taste with optional ingredients such as "author apparently types with elbows" or "creator cries when criticized."
(redpanda on LJ)
I find that does a good job summing up as well.
I've known real people with four or five of those traits-- who could, yes, turn fairly reasonable folk around them temporarily into idiots (ah, hormones). And yes, I also have something of an issue with the specifically noted 'female character,' rather than any character. I find glittery male OCs just as annoying. To whit, The Chosen One or whatever it is, Caddy probably remembers. The fact of the matter is, I don't think there's any magic formula that we can apply to every character and go "Aha! This is a Sue/Stu!" At all. As a wise fraa once said, it's a useful theorical device, but all kinds of real things fail it, including you and I.
It just seems like an oversimplification-- that's why I have such a huge problem with most litmus tests. I'm not interested in any single trait, I'm interested in whether the character works. Last night in the IRC I used the Steelsings method for reference-- we'd link to litmus tests, but it was a team of mentors that determined the character and approved applications. Someone would come in with a pickpocket who had the Gift (in, say, dark reddish-orange), but could do no more than light small fires. The mentors would point out it wasn't necessary, given his profile, and ask for reasoning/elaboration. If the applicant said something like "Well, when he was a kid his best friend was afraid of the dark, and he used to hold fire to help her out-- now he makes a practice of keeping the areas around him lit, in her memory," it made sense, fit, and generally was given a pass. If the applicant sort of trailed off and couldn't find a reason, the reason generally had to do with "I thought it sounded cool." Which is what makes a Sue/Stu. Not the coolness of the ability-- someone mentioned Harry Dresden, further down-- but how it actually effects the character, and the story around them.
I'm kind of intrigued - what is this thing you speak of? I mean, litmus test mentors? Sounds like a nice way to test the Sueishness of a character.
It was a roleplay, chat-based (but with attached forums), and set in Tamora Pierce's Tortall books, shortly before the Trickster books, or around the same time. The mentors were older members who judged applicants to the RP-- basically, they looked over a profile, asked questions, and either gave the person a link to the chat, or told them to try again. It was a good RP, mainly because so much attention was paid to the quality of application characters. Spelling and grammar were heavily stressed; it was there that I learned that no, it is never cool to suppress a natural understanding of English 2 talk lyk this.
About two years ago, though, the site folded in on itself-- membership had been dwindling, people had been paying no attention, and there was no traffic, so the admin eventually closed the whole thing down.
There would be more male OCs. (I was presented with one a few weeks ago, but he's in the Bones fandom, and I don't know that.)
I think Calista made most of the first point I wanted to make: I feel that we as "Suehunters" (or people who stick the label Mary Sue on some female OCs) are accused of sexism to make us shut up. The real problem we have with characters are not addressed. Instead we are pushed in the corner of people with whom it's not possible to have a normal conversation, because we are "sexist" and can't therefore have any valuable opinions.
Do I hold female OCs to a higher standard than male OCs? i.e. do I let male OCs get away with things that I won't let a female OC get away with?
Hard to say, I haven't actually seen that many male OCs. Off the top of my head: all the male OCs I've come across in A-Team and Voyagers! fandom are Stus. That's 100 percent. I have not seen a 100 percent rate of Suish female characters.
There are probably about 20 or 30 times as many female Sues as male Sues. I'd like to think that I won't let the males get away with things I won't let the females get away with.
Description of an OC in an upcoming mission:
US Marshall arranges friend A will watch their niece for a while while they are away on a job. US Marshall doesn't make arrangements with set friend about when and where to drop off the kid, and manages to misplace the kid in a building they have never been in. The Marshall seems to be dumb as soup. Later, when the US Marshall learns the kid has met some old friends from her father, the Marshall drops everything to confront friend A in the workplace. In the process of which they threaten that friend in words, with a knife and with a gun. Friend A is a federal agent.
Does it really matter whether that Marshall is male or female? They are over the top and unfit for their job. And the story treats their behaviour as right and hilarious.
It's a Sue/Stu, because in this fandom US Marshall's take their job seriously and so do other federal agents. The US Marshall would have been arrested for their threats; not giving a sparing session in the gym with friend A.
Yesterday someone suggested to me I should write my own badfic (?) and I think I might just try substituting any of my recents female Sues with a male Sue. Although I would much rather write good fic with a female OC that is not an OC.
I've seen a lot of male OCs in action-oriented video game fandoms (Halo, Gears of War, Left 4 Dead.) They are typically a bunch of ultra-tough kickass dudes, laying waste to their enemies without breaking a sweat. It's much closer to a 50-50 male-female representation in RPG-type games, like Mass Effect or Fallout.
I've seen some, but they're mostly sidekicks, brothers and teachers of the fic's main character, and treated as abusive arseholes, punchbags or comic relief. I've seen some characters I'd classify as male Sues (distinct from Stus - I personally classify a very distinct archetype as a Stu), but they're usually in bad slash. On the whole, though, I totally agree that female OCs, especially objectionable ones, are far more common, which makes comparison difficult...
I'm afraid I haven't had time to read the whole discussion so far, but I think we agree about what makes a Sue or Stu. It's not what they are or what they do, but whether the people around them react in ways that make canonical sense. Coincidentally, I just re-read "Suedom," too. ^_^
Regarding Tamora Pierce, let me point out that just as we don't believe being a bad writer makes you a bad person, so being a good writer does not make you a nice person. I take serious issue with being considered not worth talking to because I choose to use a certain term, and I did go to college and graduate with a BA in English--the studies in which which included literary history, feminist literary criticism, and many other things. Please to not blindly place me in a category without ever speaking to me, thank you very much.
I stand by what I've been saying for a while: changing what you call a thing doesn't change how people feel about it. It's far easier to change a definition than to change people's hearts.
(Also, hi, I'm back!)
~Neshomeh
Hey back! Welcome to the PPC. Around here, we have... oh wait. It's you! Yay! We can finally get our mission beta'd and such. We only finished writing it what, two months ago? :p
Thanks. ^^
Ah yes, the mission and stuff! I think I want to look over that myself first, actually. Some things have been niggling at me; I'm not entirely sure Ilraen is in-character in places, so I may want to re-write bits. *ducks thrown things* Hey, it's waited this long, it can wait a bit more, eh? ^^;
~Neshomeh
One more thing... wish I could edit posts, but here we go.
I see this problem lots in all kinds of minority groups: Rather than declaring equality, once they realize they're not inferior, they tend to go overboard and declare superiority--usually embarrassing the mainstream parts of the movement. There are women who call themselves feminists and claim that women are superior to men. There are groups who say blacks are better than whites. I've even met other autistic people who are autistic supremacists, claiming that autistic people are the "next step in human evolution" (biology fail, anyone?).
The feminist Mary Sue is a reflection of that. Rather than claim equality, she claims superiority. She makes herself better than everybody else--nothing truly challenges her. If the story goes against her, she changes the story. Rather than being a realistic person who is on a level playing field with everybody else, she puts herself at the top of the hierarchy and turns everybody else into playthings.
Real-life minority groups are dealing with this sort of inverted prejudice. It can be difficult because when you tell people, "No, actually, women are just as good as men; not better," you can get accused of supporting male superiority. I've been accused of being a "traitor" to autistic people because I agree that autism is a disability. It's like they can't get it through their heads that a person can be an equal to another person; and so they've got to create these unrealistic ideas that puts them at the top, undisputably. And then they fly off the handle when you correct them.
The Mary Sue is this problem personified--the person who decides that rather than creating a character who fits into the canon as an equal, they will create a character who will make canon their toy and be superior to everyone there, whether by overpowering them, seducing them, or just turning the canon into their personal playground.
I know people say Mary Sue when an OC is powerful; but that's not the big thing, at least not to me. The question is: Is the character realistic?
The power differential is also significant. If you have a very powerful character, who has very powerful opponents, then there's not a big power differential and there's no problem. For example: Harry Dresden. He's very powerful; but his enemies are just as powerful and often more so. Despite his high power level, he's not a Stu. (He's also got flaws which come back to bite him on the butt with regularity.)
Whereas, if you had someone with Harry Dresden's power level fighting opponents whom he could easily wipe the floor with, that would be a Stu, because the character would be a big old power fantasy.
The same applies for females. Check out Mariel, from the Redwall series. She's a good fighter and she can take on multiple opponents at once. She's tough, strong, and quick-thinking. But her opponents match her power level; they're a real threat to her, and she's not just standing there being awesome and grinding everyone into the dirt. Therefore, she's not a Sue.
WARNING - the following contains lots and lots of opinion.
Mary Sue, Marty Stu - the name is irrelevant. It would be nice to have some alternative gender-neutral phrase that snaps off the tongue, but we have to make do with the language we've been given. Unfortunately, said language opens us up to accusations of sexism and the like. Yes, it's true that male characters in both fanfiction and original fiction are given more leeway when it comes to being shallow self-inserts. Yes, female characters are more frequently bashed. Yes, it's a crying shame. But until we all become professional book critics (and how the world will shudder on that day, oh yes!), there is little we can personally do besides shout in the wilderness of the internet.
But anyway, what makes a Sue/Stu a Sue/Stu? Whenever I peruse a potential Suefic/Stufic, I have a mental checklist - a basic litmus test, if you will. If the story hits most or all of the points, then it's mission material.
Does the character have depth? If so, is that depth believable?
Flat, one-dimensional characters are not good for propelling a story. Neither are characters with personalities or backgrounds that make no sense. Here's an example from a DMS mission I'm working on wrapping up: the main character (a young woman) owns twelve nightclubs AND was a former top SAS sniper. While you're all counting the contradictions in that very short sentence, I'll be on the next point.
Is the character likable?
Note: I don't mean 'likable' as in 'morally good.' A well-crafted villain protagonist can be just as interesting a character as the Boy-Scoutiest of heroes. Let me be more blunt: is the character a douche and, if so, does her/his behavior go on uncalled? The tenth Fellowship member verbally castrates Boromir and Sam every chance she/he gets while everyone else watches and laughs. The fifth Survivor opens fire on a crowd of uninfected people without provocation and everyone else pays it no mind. That sort of thing.
Is the character substituting herself/himself for a canonical character?
What's that? Sam's dead? Don't worry Frodo, I, [insert name here], will help you take the Ring to Mount Doom! Along the way, we can explore how deeply in wuv with each other we are.
Is the character violating the rules of the canon without a proper and believable explanation?
'Proper and believable' are key words here. Anyone can make excuses for why their extra Organization XIII member can feel genuine emotions, or why their intelligent Special Infected OC has fully-functioning wings. If said excuses don't fit the rules of the world, then something is wrong.
Anyway, that's what I feel about this issue. I hope that all made sense and wasn't just me babbling.
"Mary Sue, Marty Stu - the name is irrelevant. It would be nice to have some alternative gender-neutral phrase that snaps off the tongue, but we have to make do with the language we've been given. "
Why do we have to make do with it? Language is fluid. Why do we continue to use a set of language that is nebulous, decentralized and gender biased? The PPC is pretty introverted anyway, with a large internal vocabulary. What's wrong with coming up with new, more accurate terms? It may even spread outward into the larger community.
English is the only language I know well enough to comfortably use (I know bits and pieces of some other languages, but not nearly enough to have an actual conversation with anyone), but I've heard that English is a very gender-unbiased language compared to most of the other major world languages (e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Polish, etc... I'd include Russian, but I'm not sure how gender-biased that language actually is.) Seriously, English is (again, only as far as I know - I could easily be wrong) one of the few major languages that doesn't slap gendered pronouns, prefixes, suffixes, or what-have-you on just about everything.
You seem to be talking about grammatical gender, which doesn't have anything to do with gender bias. Grammatical gender is basically just another way that words have to agree, like with number agreement--it wouldn't be correct to say la niño or el niña in Spanish any more than it would be correct to say "they was" or "it were" in English. In languages with grammatical gender, there doesn't have to be any relation between the gender of a word and the gender of a subject. For instance, in Spanish, persona and víctima are always feminine, even when they refer to a male. I understand there's a word for the male anatomy that is feminine, but I don't know it. (I'm sure there are masculine words that can refer to female subjects, too, but I don't know them, either. I've forgotten most of my Spanish classes, and I got the aforementioned examples from Wikipedia. >.> )
That isn't to say that Spanish-speaking countries or other countries with grammatically-gendered languages don't have gender bias problems, though. Pretty much the whole world has gender bias problems.
~Neshomeh
[jokingly argumentative]Well, why haven't you come up with anything instead of just complaining at me?[/jokingly argumentative]
There are a few reasons I could think of to stick with the current language. If we become too insular with our words, outsiders may not know what we are talking about. The flow of new writers (and thus new ideas) may dry up to a trickle. Similarly, it's going to be very confusing for anyone skimming through our old missions when Sues and Stus are called as such in one mission and than something completely different in the next.
It may even spread outward into the larger community.
AHAHAHAHA your hopefulness amuses me.
Still, finding a new word or phrase could be an interesting experiment for the PPC community. Perhaps we could all pitch in ideas regarding what new all-encompassing name we should call Sues and Stus, followed by a collective vote for the favorite. If the phrase catches on, we keep it. If not, we stick with the old familiar terms until a proper substitute can be found.
I like this idea. And even if we end up having multiple names for something, how is that really different from the various names we have for spirit possessions? We've already got Sue/Stu-Wraith, Author-Wraith, Author-Phantom, and slash dwimmerlaiks. We've had people randomly using Marty/Gary Stu and Marty Sam for the male characters.
I know it would have to be pretty catchy and easy to remember for me to be able to really replace Mary Sue, but I bet with this group of creative people someone can do it.
... would still be a usually-female character with an annoying tendency to get its way with little to no justification, and people would still accuse us of being anti-feminist for not liking them, IMO. Plus, as PC pointed out, it would be really confusing when anyone tried reading older missions, and we'd have to rename the DMS and the DMSE&R, and the whole nine yards.
That said, I have considered that a play on "ta'veren" from the Wheel of Time series might work. As Phobos will explain if you ask, the ta'veren characters in the books are not Sues due to the negative effects of being ta'veren, but if you ignore the negative side it is pretty darn similar, what with the universe bending itself around them and all. Na'veren . . . ?
~Neshomeh
The DMS is already inaccurately named since it doesn't exclude Gary Stus (or whatever moniker the author chooses to use).
...would be to remove the 'usually-female' qualifier.
Not until we start sporking as many male OCs as female, anyway, and that's not likely until we start running into them with the same frequency. At least in the fandoms I follow regularly, there are vastly more female OCs than male, and therefore more poorly written female OCs. Whatever term we use, it will be primarily associated with female OCs because that's primarily what we see, and we'll still be accused of being anti-feminists and Canon Nazis and everything else, regardless of what words we use, as long as the numbers remain the same.
Hmm, I sense an opportunity for another Board-wide challenge: go forth and get ye a Gary Stu, and spork ye him well, and tip the scales of thy count!
~Neshomeh, currently at 6:3 Sues to Stus, thanks to three Sues in one mission and two Stus from fandoms I don't usually follow.
Now that you mention it, I once read a horrible Labyrinth/HP crossover, with a blantant replacement-Stu-Harry. If it's still up, I could take a swing at it. ^^
[steps up on soap-box]
That said, while I think we should watch ourselves, so we don't sound like we automatically assume that every badly written, overpowered character is a female, written by another female, we also have to ignore those who calls us anti-feminist. We are here to protect canons and if the most threats against canons are female characters by female authors, then by golly, that is what we're going after.
Anyway, as it is very nicely pointed out on the wiki, writing overpowered, divinely beautiful, female characters who wrap everyone around their littlefingers, have very little to do with feminism, so calling us anti-feminist for slapping such characters down, is kind of silly.
[/steps off soap-box]
I admit, I'm fairly recent to the concept of "Mary Sue/Marty Stu" myself - so much so that when I first came across the term almost two years ago, in horror, I put my fanfic writing on hold to sort out a few imagined chinks in the armour, so to speak.
In any case, after reading a number of articles about this sub-class of characterisation (or lack thereof), this is my take on it - regardless of gender, a "Daemon Interferus" (my personal, fictional term to replace the Mary/Marty identifier) is, at the heart, an author's construct which is generally over-idealised, conforms to steryotyped behavior and/or disrupts any established canon merely on its whim for its whim.
One of the biggest issues with the "Interferus" is that the Sue/Stue label has been thrown about so much that its original meaning seems to have lost signifigance. Should it merely apply to over-idealised, canon-breaking female characters? Of course not! But all such characters, regardless of gender, should none the less be held accountable.
Forgive me for seeming to be the fool in this rant, but, IMO, Neshomeh says it best - they, no matter what they are, have an annoying tendancy to get their way with little to no justification.
+CRUSH THE STERYOTYPE. KILL THE CANON-DESTROYER. BURN THE PLOT HOLE CREATOR+ (Joking)
This isn't really a response to anything you said, Church; you just jogged my memory. {= )
Someone asked why we can't use "Mary Sue" as a gender-neutral blanket term. The reason is that it's a girl's name, and we already have a bad habit of using feminine terms to insult men by feminizing them. For instance, calling them girly. It's terribly anti-girl, since it implies heavily that girls are somehow lesser than boys. We don't want to do that, so if there is going to be Mary Sue, there must also be Gary Stu (or Marty Sam, or whatever).
It also occurs to me that we have an opportunity to improve our usage on this front. I've just looked over the Mary Sue page on the wiki, and it does tend to make reference to Gary Stu as "the male version of a Sue." I suspect that we could clean up those references, there and elsewhere, and go with language more along the lines of "the author's darling male OC," or some such. (As usual, I'm all for taking this on if it's the will of the Board.)
~Neshomeh
Mary Sue was once just ONE example, a real parody Sue named 'Mary Sue.' To me, calling something a Mary Sue is like calling a character 'a Judas': it's not necessarily talking about their gender or what they are (because those can vary) but what they DO in the story. And even if Sues may take different actions, they all do the same thing... mess up the canon.
So when talking about Sues in GENERAL, I will use the term. But when referring to a specific male Sue I find, I will use 'Gary Stu' because male examples follow a slightly different common pattern, and shouldn't be feminized... not just because it's insulting, but also because it's just not as accurate to call them the archetype 'Mary Sue.'
All squares are rectangles, yet I describe squares as squares because it's more precise.
All Stus are Sues, yet I describe Stus as Stus because it's more precise.
And on and on.
I fear the original Mary Sue character is often forgotten--I just forgot about her in that post--but the part where it's an archetype is something we could use when giving our definition of Sue or Stu, too. That might be effective, and with less of a hassle.
One way or another, tweaking the Sue and Stu pages after this winds down probably wouldn't hurt. I'm basically with EileenAlphabet: I'm not out to please people who are already set to dislike us for reasons I believe to be silly, but the clearer we can be for our own sakes, the better. With each time this conversation about what makes a Sue comes up, I think we've come closer and closer to a standard definition, and the pages can reflect that better. Plus, the Sue article is just really messy at the moment.
~Neshomeh
I propose that in the fair, equal world we'd all love to see, it wouldn't matter one whit whether we used a male or female name for a given archetype, because no one would instantly assume we were being sexist over it. Is it, perhaps, more sexist to assume that because an archetype has a female name, it is more negative than it would be if it had a male or neutral name?
Food for thought, I think.
~Neshomeh
And I don't believe that an archetype with a female name is more negative because of it, it's the fact that a negative archetype gets a female name.
Okay-- sorry. I started off on an essay there that I truly cannot finish. I've got to go figure out if I can still salvage this semester, and walk the dog, and so on and so forth. But I'll come back, after work, and finish this, because I do think it's important to recognize the difference here, and the fact that, whether we want it to or not, male privilege does exist, both IRL and in the fantasy-writing community, and the last thing we want to do is unintentionally undercut equality. (Not superiority, equality. I'm not a crazy "Men Are Scum" feminist, I'm someone who wants, very badly, a world in which Jim Butcher could write Harry Dresden as Harriet Dresden and he'd get exactly the same number of Sue/Stu remarks.)
I don't, either; I doubt any of us do. However, suppose the original archetype character had been Ralph. My question is, why should calling a negative archetype Ralph be less offensive than calling it Mary Sue? I get why it is--you mentioned male privilege--but why should it be? Is it fair and equal if we aren't allowed to give a negative thing a female name, ever, even when it's accurate? My argument is that some underlying assumptions are at fault here, not the terminology we use; operating under a different paradigm is what we really want, and the only way to get it is to start behaving as though it exists.
I realize I may be undercutting what I said about needing a Gary Stu to go with Mary Sue, but the truth is I'm sort of on the fence about all this. I'm debating with you all to convince myself as much as anything else. I want what's best for women and the PPC, and if I thought changing the words would help, I'd be all for it, but I have yet to be convinced that it would be worth the effort. (I note here that no one has seized on either of the two gender-neutral suggestions proposed so far, or even commented about them.) People are still racist regardless of what "politically correct" words we use for black people, and yet, homosexual people proudly identify as gay and gain acceptance despite the idiots who fling the word around as an insult. At the moment my position is that I'd rather the term "Mary Sue" be more like "gay," and we should defend its correct definition rather than retreat from it. But, at the same time, if the evidence mounts up that changing it would make a difference to how people feel and act toward us (women and/or the PPC), then I'm willing to change.
So, I'm sorry to cut in again before you have the chance to write your essay, but my hope is that I've made myself a little clearer.
~Neshomeh
I sort of wrote this post knowing that at some point I would have no idea how to articulate what I meant, and I seem to have hit that barrier here. I'll try-- bear with me.
I came to verbal blows with an ex-friend of my sister's, recently, over a handful of things. He once told her to, and I quote, "Get back in the kitchen!" And used to go on about girls, what they were good for, and so on. I was not sad when they had a falling out (his chauvinism pushed him to a point where none of his female friends were comfortable with him, and he eventually chose casual sex with almost-strangers over friendships), because going home had become either grinding my teeth silently over sexist remarks, or a continual hashing over Feminism 101. And both of those are exhausting things to do on a regular basis.
But here's why I bring it up-- every time I tried to explain to him why his 'jokes' weren't funny, I got the "But women are equal to men, so why does it matter? It's just a joke, it's not like I'm actually going to slap her," or whatever flimsy response. Or "But I'm only joking. Am I not even allowed to do that anymore?"
Jokes matter. Using a joke that reinforces harmful behavior is a problem. Using language and terms that reinforce harmful stereotypes is a problem. Intent is not magic. All those other things that are well on their way to becoming clichés.
Basically, my point is this. I... okay, I can't say I don't care what the critics think of the PPC. The most iconic critic on this debate around here, Boosette, is someone I look up to and respect; we have a mutual friend who I love dearly. Who also truly despises the word 'Mary Sue,' and with good reason. Both of them have good reason. Tamora Pierce has good reason. ...That wasn't the point. Let me try again.
Basically, my point is this. Critics aside, I'm thinking about the fangirls, the Suethors, the fourteen-year-olds who haven't seen this discussion or the many essays on both sides of the argument that sprang up around the last debate, dubbed (to my eternal chagrin) "The Boosette Incident." Imagine you've posted strong (in the strictest sense of the word-- I mean, literally. Strong with power, strong with beauty, etc. Not 'strong' in the literary sense.) female characters three times, and each time you've gotten a flood of reviews going "SUUUE ALERT OMG SOMEONE CALL THE PPC!" And then you post a fanfic with a Dunedan (I know there's an accent somewhere there) who does much the same thing, and no one says a thing. What conclusions could you draw from this? Female powerful characters = Bad. Male powerful characters = Good.
Now, we know that's not the truth, or the whole story. But from an outside perspective? I'm oversimplifying it, and not doing the argument justice at all. But do you get what I'm saying?
It's also, for the record, a big part of why I push for strong concrit instead of just sporking. I've never understood why mocking someone should take precedent over trying to help them improve. Yes, some authors don't know how to take criticism. But what about the ones who do? Why is our automatic reaction not to post a review going "Your story, to be honest, needs a lot of work. Your character doesn't seem realistic, s/he is undermining canon..." etc, but to come running back here and go "OH MY GOD GUYS LOOK AT HOW HORRIBLE AND STUPID THIS IS" every time?
I don't know. I think I've officially lost my train of thought (four paragraphs ago, possibly?) and am rambling.
TL;DR:
If we are not careful with how we use the term 'Mary Sue,' we are, if not intentionally, undermining female fantasy characters and reinforcing harmful gender roles. I know that we don't want to do that. I know there's no perfect solution. But I think we could stand to be a lot more careful with our words. We're writers; let's try to remember that, when... well, writing-- stories and reviews both.
--VM, who will now climb off her soapbox and go hide in a cave somewhere
I did read this, and started a reply, but then realized I wasn't making sense and resolved to come back later.
Long story short, I do get where you're coming from, but I guess I see the whole thing differently. I suppose our respective views have a lot to do with our life experiences--I don't have a Scumbag Steve in mine, for instance; I can honestly say I've never been aware of anyone judging me simply for being female, and if they did I think I would just write them off as an idiot and get on with achieving my goals, thanks. It's really hard to wrap my head around the idea that not everyone has the same resources I do.
So, bearing my own personal privilege in mind, I do agree that we need to be careful, but I'm with Araeph--I'm not willing to let anyone's opinion push me around just because other people aren't as careful as I am. I think the best course of action is to keep on more or less as we've been going and not to let actual Mary Sues off the hook, but rather to crack down harder on Stus, and not make excuses for them. All those superheroes with their cliched angsty pasts and ridiculously unrealistic everything? Yeah, that noise, for starters. We're not sending our boys very good messages, either.
Incidentally, this thread did get me off the fence about reviewing one of a pair of fics I'm aiming to spork (this one, if you're curious). It's not a terribly positive review, but given that my issue with the fic is that 90% is lifted straight from the books, there's very little I could offer in the way of writing pointers beyond "I'm here to read original writing, please do some." {= P I actually liked the OC in question from the other fic of the pair--my plan is to let her go free in some Generic Fantasyland in the end.
Anyway, if you want to keep talking about this stuff, please e-mail me. There's loads more to say, and it is important to talk about it.
~Neshomeh
What about a Division of False Mary Sue Accusations? It could function quite like the Intelligence Department, going into fics and explaining just why the OCs there avoid Suedom, or enumerate redeeming qualities in the story that override the Sue's presence.
I'm actually planning something much like what you describe in a mission I'm working on. Intel doesn't always get it right, after all. A character that looks like a Sue in the beginning can get better in the end. {= )
~Neshomeh
To me, calling something a Mary Sue is like calling a character 'a Judas': it's not necessarily talking about their gender or what they are (because those can vary) but what they DO in the story.
Which means it should be a gender-neutral term-- Mary Sue is a girl's name. The association is with a feminine archetype. This is a problem. Because as long as we're using a girl's name-- which is associated with femininity and a feminine archetype-- we are basically leaving ourselves wide open for accusations of being anti-feminist. And what's more, in that context those who jump to that conclusion have reasonable cause to do so.
(As a general aside: for what it's worth, I think Tamora Pierce was more referring to people who slap the label on any strong female character. I doubt she actually knows this group exists, specifically.)
(DISCLAIMER: THIS IS ONLY ONE PERSON'S OPINION. IT MAY NOT BE UTTERLY CORRECT, BUT SHE'S TRYING TO PUT IT OUT THERE IN ORDER TO FIND THE 'MOST CORRECT' THING,SO SHE CAN THEN FOLLOW THAT.)
The PPC doesn't go after authors, but what makes a Sue a Sue is very much an author's fault... whether the author knows it or not, the hallmark of a Suefic is that it somehow achieves a secret goal, one that doesn't exist to fit into the canon at all... but one that takes over and tramples it into the ground.
For example. I know this was true for me when I wrote suefics... I was 13 years old, and I was lonely, and I had no friends, and I felt my parents thought I was a useless shlub who couldn't do anything. And so what did I write? A 18 year old, sexy, popular, sassy girl who canons were friends with (despite the story!), who had amazing abilities (that didn't fit into canon at all) and saved the day (undermining the efforts of the canon characters).
I didn't realize it at the time, but I exorcised all of my desperate wants and insecurities as a character that ruined a story for her own gain. That character wanted so much. She was like a demon, that just wanted everything to satisfy her, and when she sucked the canon dry of everything she wanted in life, she didn't even care about finishing the story. It scares me today that I wrote such a horrid, shallow character. I didn't even realize I was doing it at the time... but my ulterior motives were there.
I'm not a stupid person for it. I just wasn't aware of what I was doing, and was possessed by the need to negatively channel my frustrations into writing (Write a story where NO ONE GIVES HER TROUBLE! NO ONE! NOT LIKE REAL LIFE!) rather than positively (Write a story where the hero overcomes problems and becomes a stronger person!). So that's why we don't get mad at Suethors... it's temporary.
But the Sue. How many times have you read a story and been like, 'Why does everything end up as a sex dream for this character? It's like a hand of God keeps handing her sex scenes for no reason,' or 'Why is this story continually trying to convince me that this character is cool? Can't he speak for himself?' Yeah, those are Sue/Stu stories. They break your suspension of disbelief because the person making them ignores the storytelling in favor of their own emotional wants. Even ones they aren't aware they have, sometimes...
(And it IS perfectly possible to want something but not be aware of it. Look at so many people who are overweight who would outwardly claim that they are fine with how they look, or fine with exercising to stay in shape, but also feel unwelcome in society... wishing they were accepted. I know when I was younger and felt that way, I suddenly had a lot of effortlessly 'skinny' characters... and I didn't realize why...)
As for Tamora Pierce, I suspect she's been very jaded by people defining Sues simply as 'female character with special traits.' I would be too, if a thousand people without organization insulted me and said my characters were shallow every day. But I don't think say... Alanna was a Mary Sue. She was confronted by very big problems and mostly overcame them on her own merits, no matter what special traits she had. One scene comes back to me vividly: when she discovers her training lance has been weighted to make her fail. And yet, she doesn't solve it by being special. She solves it by practicing and practicing and practicing until she succeeds with the rigged heavy lance and it makes her a stronger person.
She doesn't do anything she does because OUTSIDE THE STORY the person writing her 'secretly wants attention' or because 'she has insecurity issues' and is living vicariously through her. Her motivations exist within the story, INSIDE the story, and if she's insecure at times, it's because SHE IS. Not because being insecure gets her something.
It makes me mad, too, that so many people (mostly not PPC people) have this definition of Sue that means 'female character with special traits within the setting' because that means that if nearly every classical hero was female, they'd be a Sue. This isn't true.
No matter how much 'stuff' a character has, I usually hold this rule for Sues:
If a character exists to tell a story, and could have gone on living in the world even if there was no story to tell, they are not a Sue.
If a character exists to simply display traits or simply be desirable in some way (whether in power of beauty! It doesn't matter, only that they REALLY WANT YOU to like them because of what they are!) without fitting in to the world itself, then they are a Sue.
Whether they are a Sue/Stu worth killing remains to be seen. My definiton of a CanonStu is a little less stringent than many. To me, characters like Drizzt or Eragon are CanonSues/Stus: concessions are handed to them in their worlds to them that aren't found anywhere else. I actually know very few CanonSues written by female writers. Most of them are actually rather recent, actually. Bella from Twilight for example.
This is because I think many female writers (at least in the past) came from an adult feminist rather than a youngminded-romantic viewpoint. Many of them were there to write about the struggles and effort of this female character, how they earn their place in the world by the sweat of their brow and their own merits. Even if they have Teh Awesome in them. I know for a fact that was Tamora Pierce's point. In fact, you quoted her ranting about her characters' feminist history...
I'm afraid that last time this point came out on the Board, I didn't know that much about groups that oppose Sues other than the PPC. Nor have I bothered to remember what I already knew. Otherwise, my posts there would have been very different from the ones I put forth. Now, I think I've learned a few things about how the "Sue-Opposing" community really functions.
There are two types of criticism directed at Suefic. One is constructive criticism, in which one tries to tell an Author what they are doing wrong without trying to sound unnecessarily combative, and flaming, in which insults are hurled at the Author as well as the fic, sometimes verging on death threats. I had only been focusing on the former.
My perception was that most sporkers were like Neshomeh, Araeph, and July, who tried to help Authors but got flamed in response because their reviews weren't 100% percent praise. Araeph even gave an example in which a 30-year old Author gave her a flame out of proportion to the criticism. Fanficrants also has many examples in which relatively benign crit is met with shouting and insults.
Then, I began checking the review pages for Suefic on FF.N. While its true that there were people trying their best to help, pointing out the qualities and flaws of the story, there are also people who go "Mary Sue, Die!" or "I want to destroy everything you love, including your cellphone". Also, for every good Sue Parody fic, there are a bunch of bad ones that focus only on superficial symptoms.
Not merely that, but on other sporking sites (I won't name names), outrage at how the canon characters are OOC shells of their former selves are often derailed into personal attacks on the Author him/herself. Ironically, those sites also call themselves feminist for tackling issues like heteronromativity, rape culture, and so on. However, they have not tackled the questions you posted, at least to my knowledge.
So, where am I going with this? Let's just say that I can't disagree with you entirely, not anymore. I still belive that the PPC isn't wrong in what it does, but that doesn't mean there isn't a double standard, or that the term "Mary Sue" isn't used too often. I think that we do need a united defnition of a Sue, and that we should speak out against those who misuse the term.
I hope I don't come as calling for a crusade, or being aggressive again. Its just that there are two sides to every picture, and to me, the PPC was just focusing on one.
She is a PG for it after all. She's just calling for some critical analysis about the term Mary Sue.
The problem with the term Mary Sue is that it is too nebulous. It never had a standard definition, and with how large and decentralized the fanfic community has gotten I doubt it ever will. There also seems to be an insistence that Mary Sue only applies to female characters (which I have always disagreed with - there's no reason the term can't be gender neutral. Making a 'gary stu' counterpart is just unnecessary) which means that the term is going to be loaded with gender bias for as long as it is used.
I think that if we want to start making more clean language we'll have to start inventing new terms. A term for a character that has talents, innate powers, extreme beauty, etc above and beyond his/her peers (which would function only as a Trope, not necessarily as an automatic negative component. Not All Tropes are Bad), and another term for a character that seems to draw attention to his/herself in a story inexplicably, and drives the plots in ways that can only be explained with Fridge Logic.
The former would serve as the traditional superficial Mary Sue traits (and would not be negative by default) while the latter would cover the deeper Mary Sue traits (which would almost always be negative).
For me, what makes a Sue/Stu, is not as much how the character is and what it can do, as how it affects people around it. If people instantly trusts the character and let it do things it shouldn't be getting away with, it is probably a Sue/Stu.
Take for example the beautiful, second daugther of Elrond, who falls in love with Legolas as soon as she lays eyes on him and who sneaks into the council and then jumps out and demands to go with the Fellowship. Definite - one might even say, classic - Sue, right? Except that after jumping out and making demands, she is sternly but kindly told off by Elrond and sent to her room, and the Felloweship leaves without her at dusk (or dawn, depending on 'verse). In that case she is still uncanonical, but I would say that she is not a Sue, since everyone around her acts sensibly and in character.
In fanfiction, Sues and Stues are mostly easy to spot, since we know how the canon characters are supposed to act and can spot it when they are being warped. A stranger walking in and instantly becomming friends with everyone would be a Sue in most canon, (but not, for example, My Little Pony).
CanonStues (telescope-word, yay!) are harder to spot, because we don't know whether their surroundings are acting as they usually would, we can only look at whether we think they are reasonable, based on what we know of the setting. Also, while it is easy to see when someone is stealing the spotlight, it is much harder to see when the person who belongs in the spotlight is hogging it. Most main-characters has some degree of main-characterness (which TV-Tropes has an excellent word for, which I can't remeber nor find), which means that f.ex. people in high places at least listen to them, even if the don't comply with them, so the line gets fuzzy.
While I will agree with those who say that fanfiction-Stues are mostly females and written by females, I think it is annoying if someone tries to argue that the same goes for canon-Stues. My experience are that they are 50-50, when it comes to original characters.
You are rigth that male characters get away with a lot more than women, without being called Stues. I think that has something to do with more people having heard of Sues than of Stus, but also with the general tendency to look at male characters as ... characters, while female characters get scrutinized and usually found either too weak or to strong, too feminist or not feminist enough, not a good rolemodel for girls or a two-dimensional, boring character who always do the right things.
Mikael Blomkvist from 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' is not just a Stu, he is a blatant self-insert by the author, but most people don't think about that. In fact most people don't think about him at all; meanwhile Lisbeth Salander gets poked and prodded and discussed, in a way that would never have happend if she had been a male sidekick.
female characters get scrutinized and usually found either too weak or to strong, too feminist or not feminist enough, not a good rolemodel for girls or a two-dimensional, boring character who always do the right things.
Come to think of it, you're right that this is a big thing: I see far more female characters being judged based on their fitness as role models for girls than I've seen for male characters and boys. I'm prepared to believe that that's part of why female characters get analysed so much more, and as such are accused of being Sues far more than male characters are accused of being Stus.
Heck, I know I do it when I'm not watching myself. I was annoyed in Harry Potter that Hermione got married and had kids rather than becoming a professor at Hogwarts or such like... and then I realised that if she was a single professor I'd have grumped about how, yeah, what sort of message does that send? That boys don't like nerdy girls and if you're clever and academically accomplished then you'll end up alone (and anyway, I have no idea what her job was. Maybe she was now an author or something).
In my defence over that bitterness, at this time I'd spent some time putting up with "Oh, you're the one that's not engaged" being the way people distinguished between me and my little sister.
... People actually say that, to your face and all?
IFRC Hermione got a high position in the Ministry of Magic.
But yeah, that is the perfect example. No-one complained that Ron married and had children and noone would have complained if he hadn't married and gotten children, because he is a male character, and as such his story and the choices he makes, is read and enjoyed but not scrutinized.
We ofter hear that such and such female character's only motivation is a man. Meanwhile nobody complains that Aragon's motivation for becomming king, in a large part was his love for Arwen. But Arwen get plenty of ... Oh, well, you get my point.
The list of double-standards is just endless and it wont stop until female characters get the freedom to be just characters in a story and not be treated as if they should be spokespersons for (diverging) feminist agendas.
And now she's married I've also had a couple of rounds of "Ah, yes, the one that didn't get married."
I have to resist the urge to respond, "That's right. I'm the one that just got her degree from a world-class university."
To be honest, I have to try to be interested in Arwen, but having put in the effort I do think she's a genuinely interesting character, and strong in a way that the film missed entirely. It is true that her main motivation for staying in Middle-Earth is love for Aragorn and she doesn't do more than offer moral support, but I'm actually prepared to let a high fantasy princess who is not a major character do that. I can see that she's strong in her own way, and I can see that the support she offers is important to the plot, and that's enough. I'd not accept her as the heroine of the story, but that's because the action is happening with Aragorn.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a male character with that sort of role in order to make the comparison, or, indeed, a male character of whom we can fairly say that his only motivation is a woman. I have seen people criticise statements that Aragorn's sole motivation (as opposed to a major motivation) was Arwen, though, on the grounds that it makes him a terrible hero if the only reason he saved the world and defeated the dark lord and reclaimed his kingdom was so that he could hop into the sack with a pretty woman. So maybe there's hope?
This contains a more-than-healthy dose of subjectivity, so be warned :)
For me, a Sue in fanfiction becomes a Sue when the canon characters start to pay undue attention to her. My favourite example is a fic I read years ago which caused me to add 'anti-Sue' to my list of Sue classifications. The author had gone to great lengths to remove all Sueish traits from the character and, in the attempt, had removed most of her interesting traits as well. I literally do not remember anything about this character apart from thinking she was rather dull and didn't seem to have much to contribute, and having the niggling feeling that something was off about the way the canon characters were treating this utterly unremarkable person. I realised what it was when Erestor and Glorfindel took time out during the couple of days around the Council of Elrond to take her for a picnic: for some reason, all the canon characters she met became fascinated by her, despite the fact that there was nothing to draw real attention. In some ways, it would have been less noticable and irritating had she been a classic Sue with ethereal beauty and five different kinds of elemental magic, because there would have been a reason for the canon characters to notice her.
That same qualification can apply to original stories, though I've not seen the problem there as much. An example that comes to mind is actually for a male character who does actually have striking good looks, a reputation and a powerful organisation backing him, so the comparison is imperfect. The book in question is Clive Cussler's Lost City and (trying not to spoil it) I felt that the villains dedicated a level of energy to eliminating Kurt Austin, the hero, that seemed quite out of proportion to the actual threat he posed, setting elaborate and dangerous traps in order to gain the satisfaction of personally killing him. James Bond villains are much the same.
In both the Kurt Austin and James Bond cases, the villains have had a chance to get to know the hero and resent him. Far more telling is the way smaller characters interact with Austin (I've read that book more recently than anything Bond, so I'll stick with that example, though I'm aware it's more obscure). In many cases they take one look at him and know he's an honest badass with a plan. I call this instatrust and count it as part of the world revolving around a Sue (or Stu, in this case, since most action heroes are pretty blatent Stus).
Although, as I say, the comparison between Kurt Austin, head of the NUMA Special Assignments team, and a random teenaged girl is imperfect, Austin's influence is correspondingly wider in scope as he can persuade people to do things like lend him expensive equipment and potentially get themselves fired from their jobs without even having to show ID. I feel that the comparison therefore stands and undue attention (including instatrust and everything that happens being connected to him/her) is a reasonable Sue trait for both fanfic and canon purposes and, as we can see from this example, applies to both male and female characters.
(Others include having objective knowledge of in-story reality and never suffering from bad consequences, but this post is already far too long. I can go into them more if anyone cares to hear about it :) )
I'm a little sorry you posted that quote from Tamora Pierce, though. I never had a problem with her - read some of her books when I was a teenager and enjoyed them, and never considered Alanna a Sue. Still don't, looking back, if only because it seemed that she earned what she got. That quote, though... I can't read it without hearing "Oh yeah? Well... you're stupid!" and it's kind of given my opinion of her a knock.
Have you a link to that litmus test? I'm always interested in tests that don't go 'Is she pretty? Is she an elf? Is she related to a canon character? She's a Sue, then.'
The discussion on which she was posting was basically someone telling her about various characters who they'd seen labeled Sues for no apparent reason other than they were strong female characters-- which, obviously, would bother her a lot. I went looking for the original topic last night, and couldn't find the exact quote, so I'll see if I can dredge it up later.
The litmus test is on Tangodown! in a pdf format-- here.
I'll check back later-- can't respond to most of these at the moment, work calls. Thank you all, though.
I'm prepared to believe it sounds less petulant in context.
Thanks for the test! It does look more accurate than the ones I've seen in other places, but I can see why this format is less popular - requires an honest assessment of the character and plot, and by the time you can do that you're out of the woods anyway...
The essence of the problem is always the lack of character - the ridiculous names, beauty, and skills tend to just be side effects of that problem, albeit far more overt.
...this issue came up on the Board (not the IRC). So I'm a bit nervous posting my views now. However, here are my arguments:
For me, what makes a Sue or Stu is the lack of real flaws and limits, with the latter more important than the former. Most of the characters sporked by the PPC have nothing going for them except a cliched corncoupia of awesome traits and powers, with a dash of tragic backstory that is soon forgotten after some moments of angst.
True, we do encounter "Not-Sues or Not-Stus" that are physically unattractive, can't do stuff considered cool, or are devoid of 'awesome' traits to the point of flatness. But on closer inspection, they still get everything for free most of the time, and when they don't, it's meant to be treated as a moment of utter unfairness from an unfair world and everyone is supposed to sympathise with them unless they're monsters in human shape.
Here's an example: Benjamin Perry* is 18, a nerd with conspicuous pimples and oily hair and a penchant for clumsiness. But then he falls in Middle-Earth, where he is accepted instantly into Rivendell, belived right away when he says that their story is published as fiction in the far-off future, and allowed to go with the Fellowship despite his aforementioned clumsiness.
There, he keeps tripping on tree roots every so often, and his unattractive features are described once every chapter. But, everyone loves him except Boromir (who, even when he raises practical objections to Ben's coming, is still protrayed as a one-dimensional jerk with nor redeeming qualities). Then, he saves Gandalf at Moria, and at Lorien, Galadriel makes much of his 'wisdom' and 'purity', even though those aren't shown beyond a few token mentions.
Then, he prevents the Fellowship from breaking by exposing Boromir as a coveteous liar just by showing Aragorn a passage from the book. Boromir is then given a humiliating exit, and then dies soon after without doing anything to redeem himself unlike in the book. This makes him best friends forever with the rest of the Fellowship, who take him to Mordor, where despite his clumsiness, he doesn't alert the orcs and other sentries.
Once they reach Mount Doom, he then destroys the Ring by ripping it off from Frodo and throwing it into the lava himself. He also has Sam kill Gollum by informing him that he'll be trying to attack Frodo on the Mountain. Once the mountain explodes, he then reassures the Fellowship that the Eagles are going to rescue them - despite the changes already made to the story. He is then given the highest honors when they get back to Minas Tirith, with everyone including Faramir suddnly forgetting about his part in Boromir's death.
On the Obverse, we have people who are Awesome and Tragic, unrealistically so. But they have some subtle flaw, some subtle limit, that makes them not a Sue/Stu. In fact, they can even be said to be Deconstructions of Sueish traits. Sorry to remind you of one of your debates in the IRC, but for me, most powerful-but-friendless characters fall into the Subtly Flawed/Subtly Limited camp.
For example, Paul Muad'dib from Dune has a lot of Sueish charactheristcs. Noble lineage, special powers and training, and a great and tragic injustice early in his life. But what makes him not a Stu is that even when he reaches a position of power, the Universe is not willing to let him walk all over it. Not merely that, but the series does not cover up his morally dubious deeds or pass them off as unambigiously correct.
If he was a Stu, then those who plot his overthrow (and suceed) woudn't be portrayed as having points. If he was a Stu, then he would have been portrayed as the victim of an uncaring, unfair world and everyone would have been expected to overlook his dark deeds. Nor would his fall have been portrayed as self-inflicted, at least in part.
There are also characters with Sueish traits but limited spotlight. For example, Faramir of LotR is everything Boromir isn't: He is scholarly, yet a good figther nonetheless, is able to see the larger picture, and is able to resist the power of the Ring. However, he only appears for a few chapters, where he is generally helpful to the protagonists and allows them their space in the story.
In fact, there are a lot of awesome, tragic, and otherwise Sueish characthers that avoid Suedom because they show respect to the protagonists and don't try to usurp their place. You may disagree with this view (and the others that I put forth), but for me, several characters you see as Sues and Stus aren't, and some characters you see as Not Sues, but just flat characters are, as they don't do anything to earn the good things they get.
As for my views on Tamora Price's statement and the "Sue-Opposing" movement at large, I'll make another post as this one has become too big.
*A character made up just now, but based on certain archetypes spoken about on other sites.
If she's got a name like Chiannariel Moonswaternight, but she's believable, her story works, she's got depth and personality and character, I don't bloody care, she's not a Sue in my book. If an OC has the unremarkable name John Doe, he doesn't have any special powers or overshining beauty, but he's flat and floppy and clearly the self-insert of an unimaginative high-schooler... he's a Stu!
I just realized that we weren't really disagreeing on this, and that my long and elaborate post was just an extension of this paragraph. Sorry about that. I assumed from our IRC debate that you had a different view of Sues from what you stated here.
I hope that I don't make such a big mistake in my next post.
I didn't take it personally, and I think that happens fair often, on the IRC. A lot of us have similar opinions, but different ways of expressing them and very different perspectives, so we wind up talking past each other.
I have seen a lot of people use the label Mary Sue on a canon female character they didn't like. The only one that comes to mind now is in the Avatar (Last Airbender, the cartoon AKA good one. I ship TophxSokka, and a lot of people just labeled the opposing love interest, Suki, a Mary Sue. It does get grating, and almost made me stop reading the stories. Feeling shame for my Ship-mates isn't fun.
As for what makes a Mary Sue...Well, I can agree with your definition a lot, actually. In an Avatar story, Sokka gets powerful with non-canon powers, and it adds a lot of Cthulhu-esque themes and a complete non-canon race! But...I read it again, and while it pings my non-canon radar, I can't dislike it. Sokka is still Sokka, and everyone still treats him like usual (still the Butt Monkey).
To be honest, Eva didn't make me angry, with her elemental powers, because I have no objection with making powers up, or being different. Even the spells heather made up, with the exclusion of the Resurrection spell, didn;t make me angry. Heather herself made me angry. She, herself, was a horrible person and got away with it all, not being called out.
If we could use/make another word instead of Mary Sue, I'd be all for it. Making one would be an interesting time, I'm sure.
Looking back on the aspects of being a Mary Sue, having super powers, being powerful, being better, then wouldn't a lot of old FPS characters be? I remember in Medal of Honor: Frontline (Remember the begining of the PS2...I feel old now..) you are a person who is named only, but never talks, or communicates, and you kill swathes of enemies, and generally win the war yourself. I guess it could be more complicated then that, but it struck me just now. Just something to ponder.