"Hi, everyone. My name's Jane, and I write Mary Sue novels."

"I knew what I was doing. I mean, I knew when I made my protagonist a virgin at twenty-six that I was heading down the wrong road. She's not a Christian fundamentalist, or unmarried and living in Iran. But I just couldn't bring myself to give her a fumbling backseat high school experience or a token bad marriage to an older man with regular erectile dysfunction. It's stupid, but . . . I really thought I could handle it."
"I kept writing, and made her beautiful and built and brilliant . . ."  Jane stopped and covered her face with a trembling hand.
The redhead sighed.  "The three killer B's."
Jane dropped her hand and bravely pushed on. "From there, I admit, it snowballed. I gave her a bottle-green Jag, and a job curating an art museum, and a Victorian mansion she bought for a song and renovated single-handedly. The next thing I knew she was gardening, raising hybrid roses and tossing together gourmet dinners for one."
A lanky teenager in a black leather jacket slowly clapped his hands three times. "So what did you name her? Elizabeth? Angelique?"
"Jennifer. Jennifer Jane Fairchild." Jane avoided his eyes. "I knew it was wrong. I knew it spelled the end of my sobriety, but you know . . . God, it felt so good to write it."

"My pet theory for why girls are more likely to write Mary Sue fanfic? A) they are more likely to write fanfic and B) They need it more because fewer of the female characters out there fulfill the same function for girls and women that Rocky, Eragon, Batman, Luke Skywalker, James Bond etc. fulfill for boys and men.
So, yeah, any female equivalent of Rocky is going to have aspects of Mary Sue-ness - because Rocky has aspects of Mary Sue-ness.
But we only call River a Mary Sue, not James Bond. And seriously, which is more deserving of the title of Mary Sue - James Bond or River?"

"There's a book I have called Fearless Girls, and in the introduction the writer talks about going to a school and reading a picture book to a kindergarten class. At the end of the story, she asked the kids who they'd 'been'. Who had they identified with in the story. And one of the little girls flipped through the pages to a crowd scene, and pointed out a girl in the background -- the only female character in the story. That's how I feel sometimes. It's why I end up fixated on hobbits who show up for two scenes at the end of a three-book trilogy."

Comments

[Alix]

"any female equivalent of Rocky is going to have aspects of Mary Sue-ness - because Rocky has aspects of Mary Sue-ness."

Oh, God, no kidding. And then when you try to write strong female characters - y'know, ones who aren't really all that different than the strong MALE characters that show up in all OTHER fiction - you get all paranoid and hypercritical.

"Is this too much? If I give my female character TWO powers, is that one too many? If my female lead develops four or five different fantastical abilities, is she a Mary Sue, even though that kind of thing is NORMAL for male lead characters in fantasy like this?"

(I write fantasy, needless to say.)

I had a major crisis with a story I was working on a while ago, because the strongest person in the fantasy world of that story was a woman - a female equivalent of Superman, no less, if Superman could copy others' powers. I almost scrapped the damn thing, even though I rather liked it, because that female character seemed so Mary-Sueish, and was called such by many reviewers.

When I asked them why they thought she was a Mary Sue, the ONLY response I ever received was "because she's so powerful!"

I guess superheroes and power fantasies are only for the boys... (she says sarcastically.)

Excellent post. Sorry for randomly dropping in...