There’s a character you should all know and dread: “Lieutenant Mary Sue Je’nerik, the youngest cadet ever to make commissioned rank in Star Fleet.”
At least, such is the lore. I first encountered Mary Sue in a piece of Star Trek fanfic that was being passed around amongst my writer friends that was so badly written, I had to believe it was intentional parody. Since then, though, I have encountered Mary Sue many, many, many more times.
Oh, her name routinely changes, as does her description and her backstory. But Mary Sue is always a character who is meant to be taken quite seriously, by the poor benighted soul who has been selected by a sadistic caprice of the Muses to write her latest adventure. Mary Sue is typically young, attractive, smart, healthy and athletic, and impossibly over-competent at anything she tries. She is always the most intelligent and best-informed person in the room, and never wrong about anything—or at least, not about anything important. If she does have a physical flaw, it’s always something so obvious as to serve more as a constant reminder of her innate virtue than as a meaningful impediment to her success, and it’s also something that can be overcome or brushed aside in the final scene. She never faces any truly serious challenges; her greatest character flaw is frustration, that the people around her fail to recognize her innate superiority and defer to her obviously brilliant leadership. At the climax of the plot, when all seems lost, she is the one who invariably saves the day (ship|world|whatever), by coming up with a remarkable insight or noticing a tiny detail that all the far more experienced people around her who have been dealing with this sort of thing all their lives have inexplicably overlooked.
Okay, let’s be honest. Odds are you knew a real-life Mary Sue in high school. And you hated her with a passion hotter than the flames of Hell.
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Despite the name, Mary Sue is not always female. I’ve seen plenty of male-presenting Y-chromosome-having masculine Mary Sues in the slush pile over the years, and come to think of it, quite a few Transgender Sues lately. In all cases, though, the core defining characteristics remain the same. Mary Sue is always the most intelligent and best-informed person in the room; healthy and athletic (unless an obvious physical flaw is part of the virtue veneer, like Cinderella’s tattered dress); and in the end, always right, no matter how much the authority figures in the story have disbelieved them up to this point.
Sorry, folks. I guess this means that in a lot of regenerations, Doctor Who is pretty much a total Mary Sue.
I once made the mistake of sending an encouraging personal rejection to an author who’d submitted a paranormal thriller that was pretty good, except that the protagonist, despite being a middle-aged man, was a Mary Sue. The author punished me for my error in judgment by sending me even more stories featuring the same protagonist, walking through a series of formulaic paint-by-numbers paranormal encounters while surrounded by a constantly changing cast of disposable secondary characters who may as well have been wearing red shirts. After awhile, I actually found myself rooting for the monsters in the author’s stories, as the recurring protagonist was such an insufferable conceited ass.
One begins to wonder: what compels an author to write such a character? Or worse, to write such a character over and over again, all the while believing this character to be good and interesting to anyone else?
The most charitable answer I can come up with is that the writer is projecting their idealized self-image into the story, or perhaps, an idealized image of themselves and their handful of closest friends. This, admittedly, is something most of us start out doing, when we first begin to write fiction in our childhood or early teenage years, but it’s a practice you should leave behind when you graduate from high school.
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Mary Sue is on my mind this morning because of my recent work on this book.
As I was developing the cover and testing it out on my focus group, the Stupefying Stories Secret Inner Circle, one of the members had this to say:
“One of my big pet peeves is when people in survival situations in science fiction books have impossibly small backpacks that could not possibly carry enough supplies to last more than a short day hike. I think he’d be loaded down and I think there might be stuff attached to the baby carriage, too. I mean, his backpack isn’t even full.”
This comment turned into a lengthy conversation that went on… and on… and on some more…
Eventually, though, we got down to the crux of the matter, which was that his real objection was to the way that David Bruce Banner was portrayed in the 1970s TV series, The Incredible Hulk.
“What really annoyed me about The Incredible Hulk was how David Banner had a little daypack that was about a third full and he knew he was gonna be traveling for months or years. Not to mention he knew he’d need frequent changes of clothes. I bet he couldn’t even fit a pair of jeans in that backpack of his.”
BRB: “Which would have been a real problem, considering how often he ripped his pants to shreds.”
“I mean, look at him! Not even a damned jacket!”
Ignoring for the moment the inherent silliness of expecting rationality in a TV series—one may as well ask how it was that no matter where they went in the galaxy, the Enterprise always arrived there in the daytime. You never saw a moment like this:BRB: “Well, it is California.”
KIRK: “Uhura! Contact the Leptonian High Council!”
UHURA: “I’m trying to, sir, but all I get is a recorded message telling me they’re closed for the weekend and to please call back again on Grabtharsday during normal business hours.”
—I can assure you that no one ever plans to get into a survival situation. Survival situations come about because someone failed to plan, or did something stupid, or something that could never possibly fail, failed. As with “Hold my beer and watch this,” survival situations are usually preceded by statements like:
“The weather’s nice. We won’t need our raincoats.”
“Those little clouds? We’ll be across the bay before the storm hits.”
“There’s a gas station in Furnace Creek. We don’t need to stop to fill up now.”
“Ignore that. The engine always makes that noise.”
“The Russians are pushovers. We won’t need our winter uniforms.”
Or else by no words at all, but merely by being secure in the knowledge that that crucial bronze casting in the heart of the ship’s steering gear has never, ever, failed, not once, not on any boat, ever.
People don’t plan to get into survival situations. Survival situations come about because something has happened that is outside the range of reasonable human planning. If you could plan for going into a survival situation, you could make a better plan and plan to be somewhere else, and not in that situation in the first place.
So, as regards The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds: Joe didn’t plan to be in this situation. The BART system broke down. He had to bail out and continue on-foot with just his daughter, her stroller, and what he had in the passenger car with him for what he’d expected to be a short trip. He’d never planned to end up on foot in Oakland, in the middle of a riot.
Of such elements is good dramatic tension made…
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Uh-oh. I’m out of time and still have not yet finished what I set out to do this morning, which was to connect the Mary Sue character trope to prepper and survivalist science fiction. I guess this column will continue into a Part 2, tomorrow.
~brb
1 comments:
I think Jack Reacher is an interesting character/series to consider in any conversation about Mary Sues. He's the biggest Mary Sue (literally) I've ever seen... he's never wrong, he almost never even faces an "all is lost" moment, he's the strongest, smartest, cleverest, most morally clear character in any book he's in; yet Lee Child (and his brother, now) has spit one out like clockwork every year for the last thirty years, and people still love them (to the tune of two movies and a massively successful Amazon series). Funnily enough, he connects to the backpack discussion as well, since he carries nothing with him but a toothbrush and the clothes he wears (I don't know how he finds his size at Goodwill no matter where he goes, but that's a minor plot hole compared to everything else in those books).
As you hypothesized, Reacher is in fact an author stand-in, in the sense of (IIRC) Child had just been laid off and was feeling powerless, so he wanted to write the most powerful character he could, someone who could walk into literally any situation and still come out on top.
I don't mean this to say we should all be writing Mary Sues/Gary Stus, but rather sometimes *any* trope can be massively successful if the conditions are right.
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