#history of terms
Before you use the term Mary Sue, ask yourself, do you really understand what it means and where it originates? PROBABLY NOT.
A writer named Paula Smith coined the term in the 70s to refer to an author SELF-INSERT character. She wrote a satire of a popular trend in Star Trek fan-fiction of the time where writers would introduce a random character who came into an established universe and immediately jived with everyone and everything. A little ridiculous? Sure. But only because these young writers were forced to insert into material that already existed. Actual canon stories are RIFE with self-insert characters.
In reality, the “Mary Sue” character archetype actually helped young women and other people of underrepresented identities find a way to see themselves in popular stories which literally never featured MCs that weren’t white men. Sure, Paula Smith thought these self-inserts were a little ridiculous (internalized misogyny hello there), but most of them were written by teenagers just trying to connect with popular material.
IN FACT, male characters in “canon” stories are actually WAY MORE LIKELY to be “Mary Sues” (or Gary Stus if you wanna get gendered about it) because male writers didn’t have to write fan-fiction to self-insert, they could just do it in their own original material (which they were allowed to create because of their privilege).
JUST BECAUSE A CHARACTER YOU DONT LIKE SEEMS OP DOESNT MEAN THEYRE A MARY SUE. The Force Awakens was written by a MAN, Rey is not a Mary Sue! She is not a self-insert character! You know who definitely is? LUKE. That TEENAGER destroyed the DEATH STAR after like a week of makeshift training with one guy on a rickety old smuggler ship.
Paula Smith really grew to regret the evolution of her coined term, as it has become a tool for men to put down competent female characters and something of a specter that haunts many people trying to write non-white, non-male protagonists today. Since the 70s, Smith has pointed out that characters like Captain Kirk, Superman, and James Bond are just as much “Mary Sues”as anyone else. In 2012 she said -
“"[W]hat gets focused on in the culture is defined by boys and young men. Psychologically, there’s a turning point in men’s lives. There’s a point where they need to break away from women in their youth, and then later they come back to women as grown men, but many men never make it, never quite come back to a world that includes women as human beings.“
The next time someone tells you that your favorite female or POC character is a Mary-Sue, you give them this list:
Luke Skywalker, James Bond, James T. Kirk, Superman, Batman, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Captain America (which is honestly PEAK self-insert), Sherlock Holmes, Ender from Ender’s Game, Peter from the Chronicles of Narnia, Ethan Hunt, Malcolm Reynolds, Marty McFly, Nathan Drake, John Carter… ETC.
Note: I actually love many of these characters, and I don’t think that any protagonist that matches the gender of the writer is a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu. My point is that these are all protagonists who, for a lot of their canon, at least, face basically no obstacles they can’t overtake just by being their OP awesome selves. Certainly many of these characters have evolved past their original “do no wrong” status, but only because they were given room to do so. They weren’t immediately written off by trolls.
STOP CALLING CAPABLE FEMALE AND POC CHARACTERS MARY SUES AND JUST ADMIT YOU DON’T LIKE IT WHEN YOU CAN’T AUTOMATICALLY RELATE TO THE PROTAGONIST ON THE BASIS OF YOUR GENDER AND SKIN COLOR.
