Mary Sue

The 'original' Mary Sue is actually well worth reading. It's a parody, and apparently identification of, the character type; evidently rather common even then. At a mere ten paragraphs, it comes to only about a third of a page -- I found it on page #15/real page 25 of http://www.ftlpublications.com/bwebook.pdf (via the wikipedia article on Mary Sue).

Comments

[Bradel]

I had not known about that. 1973, and in the Star Trek fandom.

It kind of defeats the purpose of writing Mary Sue parody stories, though – knowing that the name itself derives from a parody. Is anyone really going to parody the trope better, and more efficiently, than the trope namer originally did?

[toafan]

1024746 Hard to say. More efficiently, probably not -- the 'original' packs like seventeen major 'indicators' into maybe about twenty lines of print. On the other hand, what constitutes a Mary Sue spreads and varies from fandom to fandom, and that can be parodied, so what constitutes a 'better' parody probably varies too. For example: there are fics on this site about a red-and-black alicorn named Mary Sue. For example: picture a fic where Twilight slowly realizes that she is a mary-sue, and nopony else notices. For example: the Star Trek webcomic where Mary Sue herself is played completely straight, and everyone else on the ship knows it.