Are We Too Paranoid About Mary Sue?

In 1973, fan fiction author Paula Smith became tired of reading stories with unrealistic characters.

She was part of the Star Trek fandom, which was responsible for much of the popularity of fan fiction in the 20th century. The character that she so despised was clearly a proxy for immature authors.

Laden with cruel humor, Paula set out to parody these proxies. The result was a ten paragraph story, published in the fanzine Menagerie. It was entitled A Trekkie's Tale.

The protagonist was a fifteen year old girl, who had somehow managed to become a lieutenant in the Star Fleet. Her name was Mary Sue.

During the course of the short story, it became clear that she was brilliant at all that she did.  Everyone loved her. Captain Kirk fell in love with her; but he had to wait in line, as every other member of the crew craved her affections too.

Her intelligence and initiative managed to save the day, before she tragically died. All major characters (and minor ones) mourned her passing.

While clearly satirizing an existing tendency for idealized characterization, Paula Smith may have kick-started an even more insidious problem.  The only way to avoid the accusation of inserting a Mary Sue was to ensure that your female characters were very dull.

The classic Mary Sue will achieve much at an unrealistically young age.

It doesn't matter that everyone else will have had to study for a decade to reach her rank, she will hold it anyway. The reason will never fully be explained, beyond vague hints regarding her prodigious intelligence, wit and hard work.

This genius will come to the fore time and time again, during the narrative. She will upstage all older, wiser and more experienced characters by having the solution to every problem at hand. She will be skilled in all things.

If an explanation is forthcoming, then it will be some kind of exotic, unique or preternatural power. It sets her naturally above her peers.

Mary Sue is undoubtedly beautiful, with a personality to match. Her utter perfection causes every major character to fall in love with her.  If said person is gay, then she will be the exception to his whole sexuality.

Her flawless persona has emerged despite (or perhaps because of) a tragic past. She may, in the story's finale, reach an equally tear-jerking end.  She would be mourned by all canon characters; and it's expected that the readership will weep for her too.

However, the Mary Sue accusation is a fast-moving phenomenon. It evolves to take in anything which makes a character special. It's become increasingly difficult to write any interesting female, which isn't open to being labelled a Mary Sue.

The response was focus instead on the men. Despite the fact that the majority of fan fiction writers are female, it's like Women's Lib never happened in their stories.

All female characters tend to fade into the background as cameos; or else emerge so dull and unremarkable, as to disappear behind the shining, glorious men.

Instead, there has been a massive rise in homo-erotic pairings, known as 'slash' in the fandom worlds. It's much safer to write about liaisons between two male canon characters (one of whom will undoubtedly have attributes that are perceived as feminine), than it is to introduce a female love interest.

This has been the fear-driven effect of Mary Sue.

I've written a lot of fan fiction in my time. I do it for enjoyment and the cathartic release of simply writing for pleasure.

I do like writing.

As an older woman, I thought I was immune to all of the psychological imperatives for writing a Mary Sue. 

I'm more interested in human beings, with all their foibles intact, than in the perfect models propagated by fashion magazines. I wasn't that taken with romance when I was fifteen, let alone now.

Wish fulfillment can happen at any age, but I've had plenty of real life opportunity to explore the depths of my actual emotion.  I wanted to look at polar opposites and challenge myself to write from another point of view.

In my realism, I included a whole cast of players to populate my world. I was careful not to let the original characters over-take the canon ones. After all, this was fan fiction, not original fiction.

All was well until an accusation of Mary Sue suddenly appeared in my comments box. It really threw me.

The female character involved was not a self-insertion. In fact, she couldn't have been further away from the real me. She had as many faults as she did things to commend her. She hadn't saved the day, taken over the world nor started a romantic liaison with a major canon figure.

For a couple of days, the whole thing snowballed. My accuser brought back up to support her labeling.  With my confidence teetering on the brink, I accepted that I must have committed that foul crime.

It was only when I became upset about it, that a friend learned what had happened. She reassured me, in disbelief and fury, that my character was not a Mary Sue. She also pointed out that my story, immediately prior to the accusation, had received a much publicized 10,000 hits.

It wasn't reality, but jealousy that had led to the emergence of a troll.

Was that the end of it?  No way.  The damage had been done in my own head. Writing fan fiction stopped being such a pleasure, and I momentarily lost self-belief in my ability to create it.  It took three months for a collection of friends and readers to talk me back into putting fingertips to keyboard again.

We can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible.  And I do wonder how many other authors are silenced more permanently because of Mary Sue.