Some thoughts on “Mary Sue”
First: What is a Mary Sue?
- Max Landis: “A Mary Sue is a character who is too good at stuff… And you can say that’s a strong female character, but that’s not what a strong female character is. A strong female character is not a character who is physically strong… Strong means well-drawn.”
- Beyond The Trailer: “The term was actually coined in 1973 by a woman, Paula Smith, when she decided to call out the unrealistic female characters popping up in Star Trek fan fiction.” A Mary Sue is a female character who is never humanized by failure, and is often the only woman in a sea of men (promoting women competing against one another over a single spot).
- WatchMojo: “Characters who, much like Lieutenant Mary Sue, are innately good at things for the sake of narrative convenience, and whose flaws are always endearing.”
So a Mary Sue is a female wunderkind or young genius, whose apparent disabilities of gender and age are not portrayed as disabilities at all, and who lacks the flaws and failures expected of the everyman archetype. Instead, she is more like an underaged version of the paragon archetype, but without the limitations or experiences that normally define a paragon-typed character. She is…
- Female
- Young
- Physically attractive
- Innately and unrealistically skilled at all or most things she tries
- Gently and endearingly flawed, but never really struggles with inability
- Never humanized by failure
- Often (but not always) the only female at the center of a story full of men
- Universally adored
But what if the Mary Sue is a natural result of the cacophony of messages thrown at girls and women regarding what makes a woman valuable? Consider the stereotypical portrayals of leading women in film and television media, and the concurrent expectations placed on women. A modern woman is expected to be…
- Female
- Young
- Physically attractive
- Innately and unrealistically gifted at an eclectic array of tasks and skills
- Gently and endearingly flawed (often so that the male hero can have a built-in reason to save this otherwise perfect woman… or so that she can fallback on using ‘feminine wiles’ to save herself, thus sexualizing her character)
- Smarter, kinder, and more insightful than the men around her (which is used to serve the goal of the male hero)
- The only prominent female in a story full of men
- Likeable in some way to the male characters around her, in order to earn the respect of men
Let’s be real: the woman I just described is the ideal counterpart to the everyman archetype. She is everything good that men value for themselves without being intimidating or threatening to the man’s privileged status, and without suffering from any flaws that could be interpreted as sexist stereotypes.
She also reads very similar to the Mary Sue, but with one very important difference: A true Mary Sue can fulfill this sexist narrative without capitulating to male dominance and privilege.
This isn’t about girls being shallow, or stupid, or bad writers. This is about systematically instilling an impossible standard in girls, and then shaming them for imagining female characters who can actually fulfill those impossible standards without men’s help. This is about wish-fulfillment characters looking different for men and women, due to men and women living under different sets of social expectations and values.
The sexism behind the Mary Sue trope isn’t that the term is disproportionately used against women over men; that’s been built into the definition of a Mary Sue since the trope’s inception. Males cannot be a Mary Sue. Male characters are wunderkinds, or young geniuses, or chosen ones; they are not Mary Sues. Men are not socialized to be flawless the way that women are. Men are socialized to use their brains or brawn to overcome their flaws.
Ironically, this has long been the accepted (and expected) formula for a so-called “well written” protagonist, regardless of that protagonist’s gender identity.
Some may argue that this type of character arc isn’t male or female, but simply human. I agree. It is human to be flawed, and to want to overcome. The problem is, women have systematically been treated as something less than human for so long, that accepting male-created archetypes as the human default can feel a lot like capitulation to systems that still oppress us.
“What, so men can pat themselves on the back for experiencing personal growth, hoard all of the credit for saving the day, and then expect to receive the love of an ideal woman like some kind of a reward for doing the right thing? Well, fine then. I guess I’ll just have to become an unattainable goddess who makes them all look like fools, and who nobody can have at the end. Fuck you, patriarchy.”
- a Mary Sue, probably
There is something to that. I think the reason Mary Sues were so predominant in early fandom is for basically sexist reasons: fanfic writers were mostly female, and there really weren’t any female characters they could identify with in the canon. So they wrote their (idealized) selves into their stories.
(As for why fanfic writers were over 90% female: I think Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers, is correct. Entertainment is skewed to male tastes from a young age. Boys won’t watch “girl” movies, but girls will watch “boy” movies. Guess which movies - and TV shows - tend to be made? So from early childhood, girls learn to mentally re-write mainstream movies and tv shows to suit their tastes. It’s a small step from there to fanfic. Men have much less reason to do this, because they are more content with the product as-is.)
All that said…Mary-Sue is not necessarily female. Wesley Crusher was widely considered a Mary-Sue, back in the days of TNG. (Some tried to create a male version of the name, calling him a “Marty Stu,” but that never really caught on.) Barclay was another character who was frequently called a Mary-Sue. (He is not as blatant a Mary-Sue as Wesley, but he was seen as a sort of fan avatar, and the other characters all loved him.)