mrv3000 | Mary Sue?

manticoran just posted about someone getting irked over the overuse of the Mary Sue term, and I realized I'd typed up a tl;dr "Mary Sue" rant back when I'd seen it thrown around one too many times in the Doctor Who fandom. Since I've, you know, seen this aaaall before in the SG-1 fandom.

And since the brain has broken today, I'm gonna post it now. MWAH.

Oh, Mary Sue.

The problem is, is that just about every fictional TV character will have elements and degrees of Mary Sue. But if a character has some so-called Sue-ish qualities, are they automatically a Mary Sue? Most times TV/movie/comic writing gives us caricatures of real life. We're shown the extraordinary so as to make it entertaining. Characters will be completely awesome or be the bestest at what they do, or will be loved by all, or will sometimes be able to get away with things with no consequences. Some shows are starting to buck that trend - a good example is BSG. But even BSG still gives us larger-than-life characters with Sue-ish tendencies. However, I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. We want to see extraordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances. If people wanted to watch someone knitting a scarf, there'd be a scarf knitting channel.

Now, I have seen "Mary Sue" thrown around as a sort of fannish trump card plenty of times. It starts out with a person or a group of people disliking a character for whatever reason - rubs the wrong way, takes away screen time from their own favorite character, gets in the way of a OTP, or any number of other reasons. And so there's this character hate. But when this person sees other people actually liking this character or extolling his/her virtues, that grates.

So it's so easy to take these larger-than-life characteristics and spin them negatively by calling "Mary Sue" on that character. The kicker is, the pro-character people can't really debate the Mary Sue claim without attacking the things that made them like the character in the first place. So then the people who didn't like the character are perfectly content, since "Mary Sue" has been called and therefore the character, and anyone who likes that character, can be written off.

For years there's been this Saint!Daniel or Saint!Sam going around SG-1 fandom. People have called Mary Sue on both Sam and Daniel so many times, you couldn't even count. Have they both Sue-ish qualities? Absolutely. Daniel can instantly translate no less than 5,000 languages, has the uncanny ability to pick up alien tail, and doesn't die no matter what pile of radioactive rocks you throw at him. Sam can field-strip a MALP and turn it into a toaster in 5 seconds, while getting a promotion every other season, as well as having her own little collection of aliens that have fallen madly in love with her. Plus each of them have often become the protagonist of episodes when everyone knows it should be Jack, dammit!

But are they then Mary Sues? They have unnatural abilities, yes. And they're Sue-ish, yes. They're also given completely unrealistic scenarios that can only happen in fiction. But I'm not ready to call them Mary Sues.

One character that has a ton of Sue-ish qualities is the Doctor from Doctor Who. He is supposedly awesome beyond all awesomeness, has magical powers that seem to suddenly appear whenever the story calls for it, immortal, knows everything, practically never has to deal with fallout from his actions but yet we must love him, is often very quickly given control of the situation by perfect strangers with only a simple, "hello," and I could go on. Now, of course, the Doctor is not a Mary Sue. Just as neither Sam nor Daniel are Mary Sues. At least in my mind. They're simply extraordinary characters. And we might not like all the characteristics they've been given, just because they *are* a bit too unrealistic or too much of a stereotype, but simply slapping a "Mary Sue" label on for that is a bit...lazy.

"Mary Sue" is a very easy blanket term to write off a character, and too often I think it's being used as that, instead of there being an actual Mary Sue. Not to say that canon Mary Sues don't exist. They do. But I watch a lot of TV and I think the only canon character I'd truly describe as a full-on "Mary Sue" is Wesley from ST:TNG. A 16-year-old who was a super genius. He was always right and was loved for it. Even when he'd go against his mother or Picard or anyone else, he was still right. And loved for it. The boy had pretty much no flaws - others were flawed if they didn't immediately get his awesomeness. You thought any minute Picard would adopt him, and he walked around with a golden glow emanating from his unitard.

And so while people will cry "Mary Sue!!" about various canon characters, I'll smile, pat them on the head and think, "dear God, I'm pretty sure Wesley achieved a higher plane of existence."