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On the concept of "Mary Sue"
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:CreationDate: 2014-03-19 12:05:08
:Id: mary-sue
:tags: - rant
There's about as many different definitions of "Mary Sue" as there are
people who talk about it, so I'm going to write my own:
A Mary Sue is a wish-fulfilment character, who is absurdly competent
at anything they do, and/or loved by everyone else, and/or
repeatedly saves the day, and/or steals the show from what should
theoretically be the protagonist, all with no good (or none at all)
in-story explanation.
The name comes from a parody story published in 1973 in a Star Trek
fanzine (see page 25 of `this history of ST fanzines
<http://www.ftlpublications.com/bwebook.pdf>`_ for the full text), but
soon spread to many other fandoms. One of the most problematic aspects
of the term is that it's a woman's name, and many people can't seem to
conceive of a badly-written, over-powerful wish-fulfilment character
that also happens to be a man: consider that, after all, `Batman has
most of the traits of a Mary Sue
<http://adventuresofcomicbookgirl.tumblr.com/post/13913540194/mary-sue-what-are-you-or-why-the-concept-of-sue-is>`_,
but very few people seem to notice.
For a very in-depth, but not exactly balanced, analysis of the idea,
`TVTropes is always a good starting point
<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue>`_, and `the
Wikipedia article has useful references
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue>`_.
