Reforming Mary Sue

[truepenny]

The Virtu, Chapter 5: 50 ms pgs., 11,205 wds
Running total: 239 ms pgs., 54,563 wds

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sosostris2012 made a post the other day about Mary Sues and the process by which a Mary Sue can become a real character--or at least a lens to examine the phenomenon of Mary Sues through. I commented with a link to this post of mine about Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice and the great Mary Sue-ness of its protagonist, and rereading that post of mine (and nattering at the ever-patient matociquala) prompted me to start thinking about Mary Sues, and Byron, and just what's at work there.


I use the term "Mary Sue" rather broadly, to indicate any protagonist¹ who is clearly wish-fulfillment, whether she² is the author thinly disguised and inserted into a daydream or whether she's a conglomeration of characteristics that the author, and the author's intended audience, are predisposed to consider "romantic." (And I use, as Cordelia says, sarcastic quote marks.) This is where Byron comes into the picture, because a lot of Mary Sues, especially in genre fantasy, are really Georgie Sues, in exactly the mode that Georgette Heyer pokes fun at in Venetia via the juxtaposition of Damerel with Oswald Denny.

The distinguishing features of this type of character, whether an uncomplicated Mary Sue or a Byronic one, go something like this (and feel free to add to my list--I don't pretend to completeness):

1. She's either extremely tall or extremely short. Height extremes are always a dead giveaway.

2. She is always thin, and usually stronger than she looks.

3. If she is in fact a she, she is very likely a tomboy. Or at least impatient with the normal lot of a girl trapped in a cod-medieval world.

4. If a he, he may be rather girly (e.g., Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel), though I don't know that this always holds true.

5. Long beautiful hair. Usually red or blonde. Or raven-wing black.

6. Tragic, guilt-ridden past. With scars. The degree of trauma depends on the inclination of the author and genre.

7. Unappreciated orphan child.

8. SPECIAL. Magic powers are good, or being especially empathic (Talia, also Lackey), or musically talented (Anne McCaffrey's Menolly). Or, you know, the long-lost heir to some kingdom or other, or the possessor of a miraculous birthright. It's not the specifics that matter; it's the Specialness.

9. Everyone who meets her either adores her or hates her. If they hate her, it's out of envy. People frequently adore her despite her acting like a spoiled bitch, because they can see the pain that causes her to lash out (see #6).

10. Drop-dead gorgeous. Often with peculiarly colored eyes.

11. A handicap or physical defect that nevertheless never impedes her in doing anything she wants. Myopia is a good one here, or some interesting illness, especially if you can finagle it to where the character coughs up blood on a more or less regular basis. (E.g. Raistlin Majere in Dragonlance, and hell YES Raistlin is a Mary Sue. And dripping Byronism all over the place with it.)

12. The more Byronic of the sisterhood frequently have borderline-psychotic tempers. Those who did not get the Curse of Georgie Sue are unfailingly gentle and sweet-natured and make friends with no provocation.

Now, it's easy to see why characters like this are appealing, especially if you're a teenager. (I loved Menolly and Raistlin in my time, so I'm not pretending to any moral high ground here.) They pander to the part of us that knows we are Special and misunderstood, and hold out hope that we will eventually, after suitable perils and suffering (which we endure bravely and from which we emerge possibly bloody but definitely unbowed), find a community or a person who will understand us and love us for what we are. Which is what we all hope for, and actually I don't have any problem with that as a plot arc.³ The problem is back there with the Special.

The message I wish The Incredibles had offered is that everyone is special, regardless of whether they have super-powers or not. Sadly, the movie only went with the inverse formation, and put it in the mouth of its villain, who wants to be sure no one is special, leaving the movie to assert that if you're special, you should be proud of it, and sure, using it to cheat is just fine, as long as you don't go overboard. Which is not a message I like very much. Being Special is a chimera, a mirage; even if you are special in some way or another, it doesn't make you a better human being or entitle you to anything more than the kid next to you. And being special in one way does not bring with it the attendant cluster of characteristics that make up a Mary Sue. That's the real problem with Mary Sues: they heap perfection upon perfection, or Byronism upon Byronism, until there's no room left for anything real.

Mary Sues also, as a species, have no sense of humor, and especially not about themselves.

As a writer, you start with Mary Sues because you have this nagging certainty that you have to make your character interesting, but you don't quite know how to do it. So you give her a shiny shiny surface and let her float through life without her feet ever quite touching the dirt. Byronism is actually a step up from that, because it grasps, however dimly, that making a character interesting has something to do with their interior life. So you go overboard, because you're still not quite sure what you're doing, and heap on the trauma in the hopes of generating sympathy.

And then one day you wake up and realize you've overloaded your poor suffering protagonist with attributes and traumas to the point that neither he nor you can keep the story moving for all the weight bearing it down, and you realize, blushing hotly, just what a little idiot you've been.

And you start over.

Which brings us to the idea of reforming Mary Sue. Because Mary Sues frequently do have an interesting character trapped somewhere inside them; it's just a matter of getting rid of the baggage. Or of letting the baggage be identified for what it is. Admit that your charismatic and beautiful character is an asshole. Admit that a Byronic past more often leads to PTSD than to romance. Like I said in my earlier post today, think things through. Let the consequences play out. Let go of the idea that Special equals worthy. Let Mary Sue get dirty; let Georgie Sue be laughed at. They won't thank you, but, you know, you're not in this business to make your characters happy.

Letting characters be real means letting them not be perfect. It means opening the carapace of Mary Sue and letting them come out. It means letting yourself breathe.

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¹Let's stick to protagonists for this post, although secondary characters can certainly also be Mary Sues.

²I also refuse the masculine back-formations such as Gary Stu or Marty Stu. A Mary Sue is a Mary Sue, regardless of the character's sexual equipment.

³Actually, I think that's one of the best plot arcs there is.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

You have, incidentally, just nailed the reason why the Fae children in the Promethean Age books have muddy gray-green eyes. *g* And also the reason why Jenny likes to point out that she's not special--she's a statistic. And a large part of the rationale behind Jewels, as you will see.

It's anti-Sueing.

Surviving abuse doesn't make you special. It may make you tough, or broken, or both. But special, not so much.

Actually, Elaine is in many ways a very intentional Mary Sue undermine. It's one of the reasons she's so damned unlikable, I think.

Nobody likes a Sue.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I suddenly realized yesterday that there's a particular way of doing Mary Sue alternate history, where everything goes right instead of wrong and the reader wants to cheer but somehow it's hollow. This is what's wrong with Scott's Alexander book. I noticed it when reading Harry Turtledove's novella about Socrates going to Athens, which does that for a while (Yay, we burned Sparta!) and then subverts it very cleverly.

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

_1632_?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The height thing wouldn't annoy me so much if it actually got used: if really short or really tall Mary Sues had to deal with the drawbacks of their height. Go house-hunting with a guy who's 6'2", which is not even really tall in my social circles, and you will write more about ducking and less about loftiness. And not in a cute way, either.

Oh, that's a Sueism: all flaws or potential drawbacks are cute, sweet, or otherwise endearing.

I know a few people who appear to have cast themselves as Mary Sues in their own lives past their teen years. "Oh, that's just how I am!" they'll say, blithely listing a dozen reasons you should want to smash their faces in. "I'm just like that!" Not. Charming. At. All.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

all flaws or potential drawbacks are cute, sweet, or otherwise endearing

I'd be happy with even a few logical downsides of otherwise normal Sue traits. The Sue's wild flame-red curls never seem to tangle if you look at them wrong, or try to strangle Sue and her True Love in the night. The Sue's ample creamy bosom never causes her back pain, or leaves her with nasty bra gouges.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Clearly "ample bosom" means something other than us.

[loup_noir]

For my sins (and because I volunteered), I spent three years as a mod at a fan fiction site. You have done a beautiful job at nailing the Sue. The Sue is also incredibly sexy, even if she doesn't realize it. Some Sues, if written very well, are wonderful. You can really enjoy their slight imperfections and weird magical specialness, but only if they have a few flaws to play off of. The true Sue has so few flaws that she's almost perfect. Yuck. Gimme flaws! Gimme someone to root for (not against)!

I've seen some wonderful transitions from Sues to characters with depth, so there is always hope. Of course, I've also seen the opposite. *cough* Anita Blake *cough*

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

I've got a lovely mary sue characteristic:

Really long hair.

I have a character who informed me that she has hair down to her calves.

I've been haivng lots of fun insterting the miles and miles of work one has to do without thinking twice in order to have Really Long Hair.

and people ask her Stupid Questions about it. it's lovely.

M'ris made me think of that when she was talking about height - there are a ot of mary-sueish characteristics (like indeterminate light eyes) that don't have to be, as long as the writer thinks about them for a bit. and I dig that.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

You know the sad part? I, too, have a character with Really Long Hair. And as a former possessor of Really Long Hair, you would think I would mention my character's more often, and the difficulties of dealing with it.

Except...it was never a difficulty for me. Braid it, ta-da, no problem. I even fenced with it (the braid was like a gorget; many a time it saved my neck). And throughout history, thousands of imperial Chinese guards never had a problem, either.

I'm on the fence about the long hair. It seems like it should be a problem, but empiricism suggests otherwise.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Which brings us to the idea of reforming Mary Sue. Because Mary Sues frequently do have an interesting character trapped somewhere inside them; it's just a matter of getting rid of the baggage. Or of letting the baggage be identified for what it is. Admit that your charismatic and beautiful character is an asshole. Admit that a Byronic past more often leads to PTSD than to romance. Like I said in my earlier post today, think things through. Let the consequences play out. Let go of the idea that Special equals worthy. Let Mary Sue get dirty; let Georgie Sue be laughed at. They won't thank you, but, you know, you're not in this business to make your characters happy.

-->Oh thank Crom you said that, because as I went through your list, it was horrifying. And I was thinking, "But--she's not! Dammit, she's seriously broken! S'Perry called her 'evil'!" And whew, I get to the last paragraph and I'm all, "Oh, okay then, she's a reformed Mary Sue. Which I can definitely see."

Though you're making me rethink where the book has to end. Now I think it has to end with the Big Evil Moment. Argh.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Hee.

Hence my new icon, courtesy of matociquala.

Because Felix is all about the Mary Sue. Except that he's a selfish, manipulative bitch and is openly acknowledged as such by everyone in the novel, including me and himself.

[seajules]

I think there's one more significant trait of a Mary Sue you failed to mention, and it's less to do with the character than with the setup of the world. Number nine touched on it, but...things work out for Mary Sues. They're not forced to face the consequences of their own stupidity or bad decisions. Even if they're wrong about something, they're not really wrong, because it will turn out, through often impressively implausible twistings of plot, that they were really right.

Something I've learned, in reforming my MSes, is that you can change the character around all you want, but if you the author still have the same attitude toward him/her, the character will inevitably twist back around again to MS territory. It's another level of meaning to "murder your darlings." Step back and let your characters fail. Let them be unlikeable. Let them be occasionally stupid. And let other characters call them on it. Let the consequences of their mistakes drop right on top of their perfectly-coiffed heads. Let other characters chew them out and be right, and let them react to such chewing out with ill grace. Make yourself write a scene employing some part of the character's personality that you personally don't like very much. And if subsequent edits mean you have to get rid of that scene, write another one.

None of us like each other all the time, and none of us like every single thing about any of the rest of us. I find that's a really useful fact to keep in mind when writing.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes. Thank you! I hadn't thought about it quite that way round, but you're absolutely right.

[iagor.livejournal.com]

Heh, my heroine only got number 5. She is an orphan, kinda, but the tragic past isn't stressed. And I don't remember her eyes color.

"I use the term "Mary Sue" rather broadly, to indicate any protagonist1 who is clearly wish-fulfillment, whether she2 is the author thinly disguised and inserted into a daydream or whether she's a conglomeration of characteristics that the author, and the author's intended audience, are predisposed to consider "romantic." " Love this comment. At the same time kiddies "like" wish fulfillment. That's why you get requests from editors and marketing like "please make sure character wears a spiffy leather outfit in one of the scenes".

I do think you hit the nail on the head with permitting the character to be seen in unflattering light. Just for the curiosity sake - this chunk has gotten me more positive comments than perhaps the rest of the narrative.

"She sat in the client's chair in a whisper of fabric and crossed one lean leg over the other. Her gaze drifted to my tear-soaked shoulder and remained there. I glanced at it and saw a thin streak of clear snot deposited by Julie. I took the rag, still damp with Julie's tears, wiped the snot off, and stared back at my visitor.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?""

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Hee. Yes.

Bakhtin has a thing about the classical vs. the grotesque body in art (meaning visual as well as verbal creations). The classical body, like a statue (Michelangelo's David is a good exemplar), has no orifices and doesn't even sweat, much less produce the more vulgar substances. Grotesque bodies have mouths and anuses; they produce sweat and urine and feces, semen and blood and tears and, yes, snot.

A lot of fiction is more comfortable with the classical body than the grotesque (Stephen King is one of the few authors I can think of who consistently describes the grotesque body), and of course the more idealized the character, the more likely they are to be a classical body. So no Mary Sue is ever going to excrete anything except beautiful tears.

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

if you're special, you should be proud of it, and sure, using it to cheat is just fine, as long as you don't go overboard.

This, incidentally, is also the message inherent in the Harry Potter series and one of the reasons I gave up on the series halfway through the second book.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Yeah. The idea, which is mostly but not entirely subtext, that Muggles deserve what they get because they're stupid, and the even more pervasive idea that Harry can get away with murder because he's Special (I can never help sympathizing with the Slytherins at the end of the first book, because dammit they did win the House Cup, and there's all sorts of other problems there with the overidentification of individuals and institutions, but that's a digression), and everyone else should just accept it. Bleah.

[parallactic.livejournal.com]

I'm a lurker on matociquala's lj, and followed a link here.

I think a good rule of thumb is that for every virtue you give the person, think of a vice. So take super-beautiful looks. Make the character vain, have nasty people hit on them and think they're available, or make people assume they're an idiot and talk down to the character. Or make them bear an unfortunate resemblance to someone else, and have everyone project all these expectations on them. Alternate between having people falling over themselves to help the character, and the character being stuck in a situation where their looks don't have currency and now they have to rely on their rusty wits and wishing they'd paid attention instead of getting other people to do stuff for them. Be aware that while beauty opens doors, it also closes them. For example, have the character really want to be a plumber, but everyone is pushing him/her as model or trophy wife/husband. Or you could always play against expectations. "S/he's so sweet looking, you wouldn't expect s/he'd have a nasty temper."

Then again, I suspect I have the opposite problem, and go overboard with the Byronic character. I assume their virtues are already established, so I can play with their vices and flaws. In real life, I like nice and sane people. In fiction, I like them unhinged and screwed up, and that sort of thing tends not to produce nice, likeable people.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. Those of us still hammering out the ideas that will hopefully end up as a book really need to hear these things.

Frankly I think I have a bigger problem keeping secondary characters from turning into Sues, so I look forward to any further thoughts you have on this subject. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The thing I had to learn to do was not to allow all the secondary characters to be helpful. Because, you know, you put them in the story to help advance the plot, and if you don't watch yourself, it's very easy to make them all Disney bunny rabbits, bright-eyed and cute and ever so eager to help the hero.

Remembering that your secondary characters have no intrinsic reason either to like or to help your protagonist can make a huge difference. If you give them an agenda of their own, ever so slightly at cross-purposes to the protagonist (not just turning them into blocking figures, because that's just the negative of the Disney bunny and still not much of a character), they tend to develop in less simplistic directions.

At least, that was a major breakthrough for me. Of course, as matociquala has commented, I now tend to go to the opposite extreme, and all my secondary characters are assholes. *g*

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I'm beginning to wonder if being clinically depressed for an awful lot of my teen years led to being a better writer. Even my earliest Mary-Sues had Tragic Flaws, Dark Secrets, and serious Byronic tendencies.

I'm beginning to think that The Fonz may be the best example of a reformed Mary Sue. He's still a total Mary Sue, but he's got flaws, and a little tragedy, and most of his flaws are comic. His Mary-Sue-ness is exaggerated for comedy, but it works.

The Mary-Sue tendency I hate most: for the Mary Sue to be a "loner" who "no one understands", whilst surrounded by helpful spear-carrying secondary characters. This may be particularly because I rather identified with the poor spear-carrying hopeless-crush girlfriend, and rather hoped that she, or I, would one day find the moxie to bitch-slap Byron Sue into noticing all those spear-carriers and stomp off, win the adoration of some boy with proper social skills, and refuse to let Byron Sue come crawling back.

So there.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The Fonz as reformed Mary Sue is a charming idea. And, yeah, he's too cool to be real--but the show knows that and plays with it.

Of course, I'll forgive almost anything if it's meta.

... And I hadn't thought about this before, but are the rules different in comedy? I don't write comedy, so I hadn't thought about Mary Sues in that context.

The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis, in The Great Race) is the Mary Sue to end all Mary Sues--everyone adores him, except for Professor Fate, who hates him because he's so perfect, and has a temper tantrum about it, to boot--and the movie lets him be that and makes fun of it at the same time. And I like Leslie, and root for him in a way that I wouldn't if I had to take him seriously. So that set of ground rules may make a big difference.