Mary Sue
Mary Sue is a nickname given to a certain type of character within fan fiction, and, by extension, to the type of fiction that contains a Mary Sue. The name comes from Paula Smith's story, "A Trekkie's Tale", which appeared in 1974 in the fanzine Menagerie #2.
The term is highly pejorative. Its usage has spread widely over the Internet, in conjunction with the accessibility in self-publishing the medium affords to new and ever more numerous fan fiction writers.
Male Mary Sues often require an inflected term for clarity, and have been referred to as "Gary Stu" or "Marty Stu".
Descriptive Definition
Perhaps the most common definition of the "Mary Sue" character is that it is a character who represents the fan-fiction author. A Mary Sue may be a "wish-fulfillment" version of the author: extra-bright, extra-cute, extra-special. Or, a Mary Sue may play some role the author, perhaps, would wish to play: the injured and tragic victim; the keen investigator who solves the crime; the best friend and confidante.
The use of the term as a negative and its rapid gain in popularity have contributed to a dilution of its meaning. Some fans apply it to characters indigenous to canon, and/or to any badly-written character.
The qualities attributed to Mary Sues are numerous. Online fans have created several Mary Sue Litmus Tests designed to detect the Mary Sueness of a character or story within a certain fandom. Bad writing, self-insertion, and blatant wish-fulfilment cover the main categories of a Mary Sue's characteristics.
Political Analysis
Bad writing, self-insertion, and wish-fulfilment are overlapping characteristics and striking ones found in Mary Sue fanfics, but they are insufficiently restrictive to define the phenomenon itself or discern its origin.
The defining characteristic of a Mary Sue is illegitimacy. This is the link between its other characteristics, and it is at the heart of the backlash again the phenomenon.
Fandom, as a community, is the product of the common interests among members of an audience who share a relationship to a certain performance. This relationship entails loyalty.
What attributes the character may have are variable; what causes annoyance is the introduction of a cuckoo into the canon's nest, some bigger, brighter, louder character who steals the limelight from the characters the reader chose to read about, the intrusion that distorts the text.
The Mary Sue arrives as a wedge between a group's loyalty to a certain performance, and an individual's relationship to that performance as expressed in fiction, when the interests of the group and of the individual enter into conflict. The infinite number of ways in which loyalties can clash accounts for the nebulousness of Mary Sue's profile.
However, sexism does play a central role in the phenomenon, because the performances towards which fans show loyalty are products of a sexist culture. The typical Mary Sue is female, because of the marginalisation of women in the texts and performances from which most fandom derives. The laws of canon are largely patriarchal, and female fen therefore find their position at odds with their loyalty to the fandom in a way that male fen do not.
The backlash against Mary Sues only exacerbates this underlying sexism, because the hatred felt against intruding female characters intersects with and reinforces, to a degree, the misogynist tropes that provoke it. Infighting and seeking conformity to the source texts cannot change this political condition: only the production of new canon and a shift in loyalties may lessen the stigma of illegitimacy by transforming the law. The stigma of the "Mary Sue" label has been held up as an insult and a threat to new writers.
External Links
- Mary Sue: An Explanation at The Mary Sue Society
- Mary Sue Dialectics, a LiveJournal entry by a FSF wiki contributor
- The Mary Sue Project, by Lelac Almagor