So (Mary) Sue Me

Assorted fairly random thoughts about the latest metafandom imbroglio/kerfuffle/wank/wtf term you prefer.

As various people have pointed out, there are several incompatible definitions of 'Mary Sue' about. I've always read it as pretty much the original "femgenficathon definition (qv), which is pretty much the standard definition -- i.e. an OC or supercharged CC who warps the story around herself to a ludicrous extent. And 'Gary Stu' the same but male. It's always struck me as being a clear enough term to describe one of those concepts that are fuzzy in definition but usually immediately recognisable when encountered, and it's familiar to many people even outside fandom -- especially outside the frequently inward-looking sub-sub-sub-section of fandom on LJ/DW. It doesn't mean that an Authorially Declared Awesome character can't be entertaining and likeable if written with enough storytelling mojo (we've all seen such, yes?), but the usual trouble is that there isn't nearly enough of it, because the character was lovingly crafted before such minor details as a plot were thought of.

So anyway, the common argument is, roughly: "we should ban the term Mary Sue because people have begun to overuse it to bash any half-decent female character, especially in bullying anti-MS comms, and this discourages awesome female characters". Several responses spring to mind.

OK, suppose we do manage to ban it, and then ... we expect said people to not bash and bully merely because they don't have a term for it? Or will they not just latch on to whatever substitute is found and use it in precisely the same way? Or for that matter just state outright that Character X is being Too Awesome For Her Own Good, which doesn't exactly sound like an advance? I agree that from what I've seen (not too much) these comms can often be over the top and cruel, but ... this is out of the ordinary in a milieu that contains Fandom Wank, and hatememes, and indeed a wide variety of international-standard flamewars?

It reminds me a bit like those shopping arcades that ban people wearing any hooded garment, simply because the hoodie is the uniform du jour of the young and thuggish. Yes, such garments make people uncomfortable, but the problem is the young thugs, not their fashion choices. The fire, it is misdirected -- at the symptoms, not the cause. (I'd like to say something fancy like 'the signifier not the signified', but unfortunately semiotic analyses usually make me run screaming and so I'm probably Doin It Rong.) But banning hoodies (garments) will do pretty much bugger all to get rid of hoodies (thugs). Likewise, banning the term Mary Sue isn't going to stop anyone attacking female characters for being Too Damn Awesome, if they're the sort of people who do that. Meanwhile, in both cases you're getting rid of something that was useful.

As far as can gather, this kicked off when people suddenly read the slightly changed rules for the sixth femgenficathon, noticed a reference to Mary Sues that had been there ever since the first one, and objected on the grounds that it was insulting and misogynist. (Yeah, I know there's a lot more to it than that one-line summary -- but there always is in metafandom discussions that diffuse over a wide area, and gehayi zapped the original thread before I even knew anything had happened, so this will have to do for the moment. If you want a fuller picture, you can easily find it.)

The definition originally read:

Since you are going to be writing about women and girls, I urge you to make them believable. Do not turn them into Mary Sues.

For the purposes of this ficathon, I am defining "Mary Sue" as "authorial stand-in who possesses many, if not all, characteristics that the writer wants to possess--good looks, intelligence, "attitude," "coolness," wealth, noble or royal blood, special toys that no one else has, the love of all canon characters, the love and desire of the author's lust object(s), special powers that may or may not be canonically possible, a Destiny--and a remarkable talent to send all canon characters OOC and to kill the plot.

A Mary Sue can be either an original character or a canon character. Believe me, I have seen Hermione and Ginny Sued many, many, many, many times.

Sounds about right to me. The entire, explicitly stated aim of the femgenficathon is to get more stories about awesome female characters, or at any rate ones that aren't defined by their ships (which is why the accusations that the comm is denigrating awesome female characters seem to me to be spectacularly missing the point). The basic trouble with Mary Sues is that they're ersatz awesome, not actually awesome.

Incidentally, the revised, decaffeinated version now reads:

Since you are going to be writing about women and girls, I urge you to make them believable. Do not write them out of character. For the purposes of this ficathon, please note that the parameters of acceptability being consistent with canonical behavior, canonical abilities and the reality of the character's world. I do believe that female characters can be awesome without being inconsistent with their canons.

Is it just me, or is that not at all the same thing? Quite apart from the fact that a lot of people seem to like writing their characters out of (canon) character, there are many many ways for a character to be OOC without turning into a Sue (e.g. Muggle-loving!Bellatrix, Meek!Donna Noble, or Sceptical!Luna).

Another suggestion that seems to be made a lot is that the term Mary Sue has become particularly corrupted over the last couple of years by concept drift, in which some people throw it at any female character they don't much like. Again, maybe it's just me, but my reaction was basically, "um, you only just noticed that?" I've been in fandom as such since about 2003-4 (not nearly as long as some, I know, but hardly a newbie), and I'm pretty sure this was common even back in the day, at least on the FictionAlley discussion boards. Anyone who didn't like Ginny or Hermione or whoever wheeled out the Suecannon and started firing. Meanwhile, half the threads in the "In Character" forum seemed to be basically asking "is my character a Mary Sue?", and a very high proportion of the time the answer was clearly "hell yes", posing the awkward problem of how to say so without being cruel. The forum archive goes back to February 2002: here's the first such thread and I think we can agree it's a paradigm case.

Incidentally, Gary Stus may be less often seen in the wild, but that's probably simply because male writers are rarer. The tendency seems to be just as prevalent, although it usually takes a different form -- an OC, or in HP quite commonly Harry himself, who gets powered-up with all sorts of cool abilities until he can basically take out an army of Death Eaters single-handed, and starts arbitrarily laying down the law and becoming judge, jury, and executioner. Same wish-fulfillment, different expression, and just as annoying. (Actually, this is considerably more likely to make me drop a fic in disgust than a Sue is. Incidentally, I noticed a couple of prime Stu-candidates here and here among the most recent "In Character" threads, both of them ill-advised.)

So, in short, my point. Do I have a point? Oh yeah. 'Mary Sue/Gary Stu' strike me as being terms that concisely express a useful concept -- a particular type of badly-constructed and generally naff character -- and are widely used and understood, both in fandom and beyond. Getting rid of them loses that, and I haven't yet seen an alternative term which quite captures the same meaning, nor am I convinced that the shifted usages are a new or an insuperable problem. So I'm going to keep right on using the terms where relevant, and eh, I expect the meaning will be clear enough if and when I do. So (Mary) Sue Me.