The other day, trying to find a control to use for The Mary Sue Litmus Test (for the sake of a blog post, you see), I asked my friend Rebekah if I could use her, thinking that she, a real person, couldn't possibly test positive for Mary Sue. I started asking questions, and Rebekah and I ended up turning it into something of a game, then into a livetweet session, which we lovingly entitled #SueQuest.
But the more questions we answered, the more it seemed like my friend truly was a Mary Sue--something straight out of a bad high school drama, almost. Even with a metric fuckload of desuifers, she ended up scoring a forty-five--five points away from "BURN IT AND RUN!" territory!
It seemed hilarious, of course, but it really got me thinking. Thus, I tested myself--and I also came out a Mary Sue, with 43 points of Sueness! And this is without answering any of the "Is this character named after you?" type questions. In fact, the only person I tested who didn't end up a Mary Sue was my dog, Amy--and she still had 27 points, placing her in the "be very careful" range.
She is little more than a very tiny bug.
I'm not about to say that this means anything--certainly not anything concerning Syera Miktayee, whose website I enjoy and frequent quite...um....frequent...ly. Shut up. It's not like it's just this one test--Rebekah and I came up a Mary Sue on every test I could find.
But it does remind me of a few posts by the women down at Rewriting Mary Sue, and some points that have been made--how the term Mary Sue began as a term for bad fanfiction author inserts who bent the entire fabric of the universe to their whim so that things would turn out well for them; for whom there was never any question of winning, for whom the best always occurred, the worst flitting through only briefly, trivially, and with great contrivance; but how it has now come to mean any character who happens to have too much power or be too good at too many things--and the fact that the term is disproportionately leveled against females.
As Jenn Lyons pointed out in one of the above links, male characters have to be so Mary Sue that they're freaking SUPERMAN before anyone will call them a Mary Sue--or Gary Stu, if you prefer the more masculine term. When a man is Batman, he's Batman; when a woman is Batman, she tends to get slapped with a citation.
One of our goals as writers is to create realistic, three dimensional characters that still manage to be out-of-this-world fantastic--most of us don't read superhero stories to see how regular "normal" people are processing the events. We read superhero stories to watch people with amazing abilities overcome impossible odds using their incredible talents!
But how can we ever expect to see realistic, three-dimensional characters if two American teenagers from the real world (without superpowers, I might add) register as Mary Sue right off the bat? I definitely agree that characters who bend the world to their whims are a problem, as are overpowered, unflawed characters (though the term for this, I was originally taught, is God-Modded), but I think this is something definitely worth considering the next time you decide to trash a Mary Sue. Do you have a problem with this character because she doesn't have realistic flaws, because she makes things stop making sense? Or do you dislike her because you think she's too smart and too beautiful and too talented all at the same time? There's an expectation in society that women are to be only one or two of these, never three, and never, ever any more than that.
If you're ever in doubt, play the sex-swap game; if you make this character a man, do you have the same reaction? If you compared her to a male superhero, how does she rank? Is she really as bad as Superman? Or are you just upset that this portrayal of a woman is going against the grain of the stereotypes you've been taught to separate them into?
I encourage you all to play the #SueQuest game; test yourself, your friends, your family--just don't forget to tag it if you do, so I can see what your outcomes are! What are your thoughts on Mary Sues? Feel free to discuss your Sue Views or deconstruct some characters in the comments section!
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