Thoughts on Good Ol’ Mary Sue

Thoughts on Good Ol’ Mary Sue

I was cleaning through some files when I found this rumination I started a while back. It’s not half-bad…

The question of Mary Sue is always an interesting one. What defines Mary Sue is subjective and somewhat arbitrary in the minds of the readers, but here’s the clincher:

When we read fiction, generally what pulls us into a story is our ability to identify with the protagonist. We look at her (or him) and see some aspect(s) of ourselves. We understand to some degree, at least, how they are approaching a situation, why they think what they think, why they do what they do.

The Mary Sue “factor” is a barricade between the author’s protagonist and the reader. These are qualities of the character that repel that identification and prevent a reader from responding.

Mary Sue is about self-insertion, but it’s also about writing ourselves not as we are, but as we wish we were. We write ourselves with all of the qualities we’ve coveted and lacked, that would have saved the day for us at various times in our lives. It can be as simple as having our character walk into a party and (unlike us) nobody else is wearing the same dress she is… and looking better in it than she does. (We’ve all been there, right?) Or perhaps rewriting the incident in which the guy who humiliated us in the high school hallway one horrible afternoon is instead flayed alive by our wit. (Don’t we all have a collection of things we wish we’d said to some jerk, but didn’t even think of until after the fight is over?)

But while we can all probably identify with being the one who looks like the “pathetic twin” in the fashion contest, or who was tongue-tied and devastated in a verbal match, and we all did wish we hadn’t been… it’s very hard to identify with a character who wins those things effortlessly. Because the truth about the human condition is that everybody – even the person we envy most of all – constantly struggles with something.

There are many professional writers who “get away” with writing Mary Sues. Anne McCaffrey comes to mind, as much as I love her writing. Many of her characters are a little too perfect, too glamorous, or too sweet and pure and innocent, and their battles are traditionally with someone who is a little too evil… and the result is that we’re forced into sympathizing with a character we have trouble relating to, anyway, because her opponent has been rendered as a cartoon villain and we can hardly root for him/her. This was particularly noticeable for me when I was reading the “Crystal Singer” series (Carigana, Killashandra’s antagonist who we were adamantly not to sympathize with, had many of the same personality traits that Killashandra herself had, and that we were to sympathize with) and in “DragonQuest” (Supervillains Kylara and Meron were so nasty and wicked to everybody, especially the poor, sweet heroine).

And a certain degree of self-insertion is inevitable – after all, the cardinal rule of writing a good story is “write what you know.”

But that’s often what does not happen with a Mary Sue. The author writes not about the things she understands, but about the things she’s imagined and dreamed of but has no concrete experience with.

Her character is the wittiest girl ever, something she’s always longed to be, but because her wit is what the character has to draw from, it falls flat for readers, because most of the material is still simplistic or recycled.

Her character is super-fashionable, owning all the clothes she’s always longed after… and this gives her story a very short shelf-life because as fashions change, the clothes she dressed her character in go from being fashionable …to “five minutes ago” …to out-of-style …to laughable.

Her character has the body she’s always dreamed of having… with none of the drawbacks. She has the little abdominal six-pack, but somehow never has to take time out of her busy world-saving schedule to get her butt into the gym… or she has 36DD breasts but strangely, no grooves in her shoulders from where her bra-straps bite in, and no back-aches. (In fact, she can go braless!)

Her character is a superintelligent scientist, but both the character and the writer mess up some basic science facts in the very first chapter. (And as an aside, this is the plague of science fiction, and part of why the genre as a whole doesn’t get the credibility it deserves… just last night I watched a movie in which the ship’s captain referred to not a “conversion table,” but a “conversation table.” And watching actors attempt to use slide-rules in 1950s z-movies is always good for a laugh.)

And above all, her character’s flaws are unrealistic – the quick temper that somehow never makes people decide they’re done with her is a perfect example – and somehow get redeemed by the story because they are turned to her advantage in some way.

It’s more interesting to feel – and empathize with – a character’s deep insecurity, her sense that she’s just been shown up by someone else, her awareness that a situation is totally out of her control and is probably going to stay that way… than to feel and empathize with a character who always knows exactly how to solve every crisis. And it’s much more meaningful to us to hear the hero whisper “you’re beautiful” to his lover, reassuring her insecurities, when we know that her insecurities are as valid as our own, and she doesn’t look like the latest airbrushed Playmate Of The Month.

Mary Sue draws writers to her because she’s the woman we all secretly wish we could be. But she also repels readers from her because she’s also the woman we all secretly wish would drop dead.

August 22, 2003