You Are a Mary-Sue (And So Is Cthulhu) · 1:20pm Oct 17th, 2015
I am part of a riff group. F/F/T3k is a dedicated but small group of people who go around sporking pony stories and continuing an eternal blood feud with kudzuhaiku and Dakari King Mykan, two authors who really shouldn’t be dignified with an undue amount of attention but whose works are wonderfully mockable and so I shall let it slide. I’ve made friends and possible enemies and frenemies with several members of the group, and I’ve noticed that we all tend to gravitate to different forms of humor in our riffs. I make far more obscure references than the riff guide tells me I should, occasionally just rant about story flaws, and engage in a bit of dark comedy. SC276 tends to methodically point out flaws in the story while alternating between that and making quips about the prose. Topher tends to take on the persona of an absolute sociopath with few, if any, social restrictions, who the rest of us (mostly) play straight man to. One of my favorite people to read riffs by, NaturalGlitch, is different though. Glitch just straight up hates the brony community. Like, really hates it. He doesn’t necessarily hate it for bad reasons, but there’s a thinly-veiled animosity that just leaks through every line of some of his riffs, and somehow this ends up resulting in hilarious stuff. He’s easily the star of the “Baron Silver” riff, and the last riff he participated in, "Cupcakes: Creepypasta Edition" was a treat even if near the end a couple of his jokes ended up getting scrubbed for going "too far".
Anyway, I bring this up because something he brought up in that riff actually got me thinking. Specifically, he referred to H.P. Lovecraft’s characters as “villain sues”.
Huh…?
“Villain Sue” is a term that, like “Mary-Sue”, is primarily a buzzword that allows you to say that you think something is wrong about a character without articulating what, in particular, is wrong with them. I’ve started to try to wipe the words “Mary Sue” out of my critical vocabulary entirely because it just doesn’t describe much about the characters it’s applied to. Are they perfect in the sense of having no character flaws to speak of? Captain Carrot from Men at Arms and various other Discworld novels fits that description, but he’s not usually considered a Mary Sue. Exceptionally talented hero who has the potential to save the world and powers nobody else can use? Aang. Chosen one who gets a bunch of magic stuff through no immediate merit of her own? Sailor Moon. You can’t really define a Mary Sue in concrete terms beyond “I’ll know it when I see it”, which leads to internet combat on exactly which characters count.
The closest definition I’ve seen to a working one for “Mary Sue” actually comes from the Pokemon fandom. Farla is one of my favorite fan-authors of anything ever, and her story “Lucki” is possibly my favorite prank ever pulled. See, it’s a parody of OT Journeyfic that-
-right, not everyone knows that fandom. Pokemon fanworks tend to have a much higher tolerance level for original characters than MLP fics do, primarily because there are like three different conflicting sources of canon people tend to draw from and one of them is the games, where the player character is silent and just one of hundreds of trainers in the region. As a result there are a ton of “original trainer” stories floating around. “Journeyfic” was (and presumably still is) a sorta-popular genre where original trainers just sort of puttered around through a region, got their badges, and basically re-enacted the anime. They weren’t, by and large, all that great and tended to get abandoned by the author.
Anyway. “Lucki” was originally posted by Farla on Serebii.net’s forums, which is about as large a gathering of pokemon fans as you can find on the internet. She used an alternate account for it (which basically got her banned once the deceit was revealed), posted the chapters over a pretty rapid period, and got a pretty high level of praise for the story. Nobody reading found much objectionable about it. Lucki, the titular character, gets her first pokemon, goes on a journey, fights Team Magma, and then she catches an Absol, and, well…
Things just break down. In the last chapter or two of the story Lucki alienates everyone she knows, her pokemon either abandon her or become emotionally shut off because she’s abused them, and the story ends with her making the impetuous decision to help Team Aqua accomplish their goal purely because she thinks Team Magma is smelly, and well, yeah. The world drowns. And the thing is, all of that’s been set up since the first chapter. The only mystery is why it didn’t happen sooner, really.
That was when Farla took off her mask and revealed the whole deception to her readers. Lucki was a Mary Sue the whole time- what Farla called a “Middling Sue”. She wasn’t smarter or more talented than everyone around her and her rare pokemon lost battles (even if her common ones won almost every fight) and she sped through a vast area in less than two weeks and kidnapped pokemon who had other obligations than to stay with her but the readers couldn’t tell what was wrong. The people who realized something was off about the character didn’t know how to describe the problem, and didn’t push. The people who didn’t realize anything was wrong loved the story because Lucki was a reader surrogate. The audience had illustrated her point for her. It was the most brutal writing lesson I’ve ever seen delivered.
And at the same time, years after reading it and still thinking it’s the most brilliant treatise on The Mary Sue as a concept I’ve ever encountered, I think Farla did something she didn’t intend to: she broke the concept of the Mary Sue.
Farla’s assertion after writing was that “Middling Sue” characters were Mary Sues who weren’t blatantly obvious as such- Sues who were defined by the universe just being super-convenient for them in very specific ways that aren't as obvious as more blatant Sues. Lucki gets a shiny pokemon because in this universe, they’re conveniently easy to get. Every cool pokemon Lucki meets is willing to drop everything they’re doing- even if it’s protecting their family from poachers or being a little kid who clearly isn’t ready to battle- to hang with her. She doesn’t win every battle with a super cool dragonite, but her squirtle- who is stated in literally the first chapter to be weaker, on average, than most pokemon of her species- seems to win just about every major battle she’s sent out into. Even though said squirtle is a delicate snowflake who’d much prefer to be a pet or a contest pokemon instead of being thrown into the realm of pitched gym combat. The entire universe bends itself to be a nice place for Lucki, even though Lucki does absolutely nothing to deserve it.
In other words, Farla's assertion is that if the universe is stacked in favor of the character to the point of breaking or bending its own rules, that character is a Sue.
So is that the most cohesive definition of “Mary Sue”? Probably, yeah. Is it useful?
Yes and no.
It’s hard to say how well a universe is stacked in favor of a character, for one thing. If we treat H.P. Lovecraft’s gods as characters instead of indescribable others or forces of nature the way he clearly intended for them to be treated (rant for another time), then everything is stacked in their favor. But if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be a story. Everything in Star Wars: A New Hope is stacked in the favor of Luke Skywalker being awesome and saving the day- he just happens to receive droids meant to go to someone entirely different, the Death Star just happens to have a weakness that a fighter pilot can exploit, the fighter craft used by the rebels just happens to be something he can pilot pretty damn well without needing intensive training, and the obstacles to hitting the weak point just happen to be ones that it’s easier to overcome with the Force than with complex targeting apparatus. The deck was stacked for him to do that. It was always stacked.
So is he a Mary Sue?
Well… no. Bland, maybe. Archetypical, maybe. But if Luke is a Mary Sue than you have to go through every iterative character based on that Archetypical Hero template ever written and say that all of them are Mary Sues because they were destined to save the day because the universe is bent around making sure they achieve that task. Beowulf is a Mary Sue. Superman is a Mary Sue. Spider-Man? Mary Sue. David Xanatos? Hoo boy.
And the thing is, if they’re all Sues, if every exceptional character and every character who has convenient things happen to them is a Sue of some kind…
...Then no one is.
The Middling Sue didn’t really define a new Mary Sue- it just pulled back a tarp and showed what was going wrong with characters whose flaws were invisible before. The problem with Lucki isn’t just that the universe is magically convenient for her, it’s that she’s a terrible person who makes terrible decisions and we’re supposed to root for her and be happy when she succeeds, even though she's done nothing to deserve it. The problem isn’t that she’s like Luke Skywalker. The problem is that she’s like Rayford Steele, the airline pilot from the Left Behind novels who gets mad at his co-pilot for hitching a ride back to the terminal when they land after the rapture takes place but doesn't actually lift a finger to assist a single dying or injured person in a terminal full of wrecks and crashes.
All of which is to say it drives me crazy when someone calls Yog-Sothoth a villain sue instead of saying “I think Lovecraftian gods are bullshit because being indestructible and invincible means there’s no sense of tension.”
(And by the way, you're wrong about that last one too if you think that. I'm sorry.)
To me, a Sue is a character who's power-level is off for the story being written about them.
Like you said, stories have to present tension in their world. Yes, Carrot is Sue-like, but he's limited in terms of the stories he's in. Same with Batman or Superman. The Elder gods are all powerful, so Lovecraft never wrote a story where they show up and lay waste to reality-- there wouldn't have been much conflict there. They work perfectly well in the stories Lovecraft wrote.
You can write an aliorn OC who has ALL THE MAGICS, but then make him a Dr. Manhattan character who refuses to interact with the world. That creates a conflict if a reason he should interact with the world shows up. You can make a character who everyone falls in love with and then have her go fight a big bad, as long as the big bad is actually a challenge. I mean, that's pretty much the first episode of MLP:FIM. But you can't send your all powerful alicorn OC to fight the big bad. Then he becomes a Mary Sue.
It might make more sense to think of Mary Sue as an adjective instead of a noun. You literally can't make a character who is, inherently, a Mary Sue. But you can write a story with Mary Sue Celestia, or Mary Sue Soul Killer the alicorn OC, or Mary Sue Mary Sue.
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I'm definitely inclined to agree with this, because it comes closer to addressing the actual flaws of "Sueishness", which are that the character neatly destroys any chance of a story really being at all interesting. I think the reason Captain Carrot succeeds in the Discworld novels is mostly because while he has this supernatural ability to get everyone to like him, he's usually not the one who gets tossed into the most dangerous situations, and even in Men At Arms his major role is solving the problem by taking advantage of his ability to rally the entire city watch behind him and use their talents appropriately.
The flip side is, of course, that still means you can't define sue-ish-ness in the terms most people tend to use it. Sue-as-adjective starts to stand in as shorthand for characters who don't work in the story because they don't fit its boundaries. As much as I have issues with some of the writing in Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, I think Less Wrong's quote about "If you make Frodo a Jedi, you have to give Sauron the Death Star" pretty well gives you the actual equation you need to write a story. If you unbalance the heroes and the forces they're dealing with, you have to either give the villains a skillset and resources that make it difficult for the heroes to go off and deal with them, or you have to scroll back and look for other sources of conflict.
Either way, I just about loathe discussions where people use "Mary Sue" as their end all description of characters without explaining the qualifiers. The word on its own is basically meaningless, and usually you get your point across better and with less pushback if you just say exactly what about a character or story doesn't work for you with a bare minimum of buzzword.
Maybe it would be more useful to not find a single all encompassing definition for a Mary Sue, but instead more something like a checklist.
You would have a few check marks that definitely define a character as a Mary Sue and a few secundair traits that can add up to how much of a Mary Sue a character is on a scale.
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The internet is full of those.
I hate them because generally they're even worse than having a consistent definition. For one thing, several real life individuals actually fail on Mary Sue checklists (Bono from U2 is a famous example). For another, they tend to be focused on defining surface attributes of characters rather than how those characters interact with a larger framework of a story. Batman is a traditional Gary Stu, but not all stories about Batman are terrible. David Xanatos is a villain who always wins, but his always-winning is the most entertaining thing of all time and usually compelling.
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Well, of course most check lists made on the internet aren't any good, that doesn't discredit the idea, however.
An all encompassing vision will exclude certain characters that are Mary Sues, and include some that aren't. Maybe even some real life people. That doesn't mean they don't have their use, The same goes for the check list.
Also, maybe it is best to get rid of the notion that a Mary Sue is always bad. You mentioned Xanatos and Batman, and honestly, they are very blatant Mary Sues. But they are well written ones. They are entertaining and enjoyable because the writer and setting are good. But they are still Mary Sues.
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If at some point "Mary Sue" just refers to "exceptionally skilled or gifted character" it is so broad a label as to be without purpose. If any checklist can only identify whether a character is or is not a "Mary Sue" without revealing whether they are a negative factor or a positive factor in regards to the quality and/or entertainment value of a story, then there was no point in using the label to begin with.
As an adjective, I can maybe see a purpose as shorthand for Farla's definition- "things are obscenely convenient for this character in ways that undermine the integrity of the story". As a noun- as in, Character X "Is a Mary-Sue"- I think it's functionally useless and we may as well toss it from our collective vocabularies so we can start talking about the real reason things don't work.
If at any point your definition of a critical term can encompass both David Xanatos and Wesley Crusher without identifying the significant differences which come from experiencing stories focused on those two characters, your buzzword probably ain't worth it.
I think the real problem with the "Mary Sue" idea is that, ultimately, Mary Sue isn't a character attribute, it is a story attribute. This is why the idea of adding flaws or whatever to a "Mary Sue" character doesn't fix them, and why a flawed character can still be a Mary Sue.