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Mary Sue is a constant issue for writers. She frustrates the reader with her flawless appearance, outrages them with her inability to do any wrong, and bores them with how perfect everybody seems to think she is. It's a trap that most amateur writers fall into, but surely, just removing all those possibly offensive traits would make her a regular character, right?
Wrong.
Mary Sue is not always about how she has radiant purple hair, a perfect seven octave singing voice, and can slice Superman with her katana. It's about what she does to the story. There's a fine line between a well developed character and Mary Sue, and it's certainly not defined by her appearance, justification (or lack thereof) for her abilities, or how fantastically improbable her backstory is. It's about how the character is defined exclusively by external traits and her actions to the point of shallowness, and about how all other characters are defined by their attitude to her (or him, as examples will show, this trope applies to both sexes). It's about how, in Fan Fiction, she completely overtakes the canon characters in importance. It's about how people act wildly out of character around her and elevate her to a status well above what she should realistically be able to obtain. In original fiction it's a character who can get away with almost anything, about whom no one can shut up, or a character who is flawed, sure... but seems to live in a topsy-turvy world where flaws function like virtues and are fetishized accordingly. Above all, it is about wish-fulfillment, and wish-fulfillment comes in many forms. There's nothing wrong with a little or even a lot, but when the wish-fulfillment a character embodies starts to warp the narrative and characterization around it, then you may be looking at a Mary Sue, even if she's in disguise.
In the most blatant cases a writer will try to disguise a character's Sue-ness by claiming that she's "not beautiful" before launching into a description of a goddess just without using the word 'beautiful', or by sprinkling her with physical traits such as thinness or a "wide mouth" that have been considered imperfections in the past but are rather more fashionable today. In fantasy or sci-fi examples, an author will sometimes invent a culture where some trait the audience is likely to consider attractive or neutral is regarded as horribly ugly, bad luck, etcetera. The most common of these tend to be a certain eye or hair color, or perhaps something like Pointy Ears indicating partially elven ancestry in a culture prejudiced against elves. But looks aren't the half of it. It is other qualities - abilities, personality (or lack of) and the way that not just the story, but the WORLD revolves around a character, even though it logically wouldn't - that make a character Suetiful All Along.
In addition, he or she never wants for attractive admirers.
Before you spot your favorite character on the list and rush to perform a Justifying Edit, consider that in rare cases even full-blown Purity Sue doesn't necessarily mean a ruined character, and the character who's Suetiful All Along is often more sophisticated than that. Sometimes it's just one eye-rolling event too many that leads you to think back over your hero or heroine's career and wonder "Is she ever wrong about anything that's important?" or "Is there anyone in the story who isn't completely obsessed with him?" Sometimes Sue-ness is occasionally annoying, but livable-with.
Examples
Comic Books
- Wolverine of the X-Men is constantly described and depicted as physically ugly, has a distinct aversion to bathing, and is shorter than most teenage girls. He's also got a personality so abrasive it's a miracle he ever lasted as part of a team in the first place (he drove founding X-Man Archangel off the team and across the country in his first issue). Unfortunately, he speaks 17 languages, his powers make him functionally immortal (he's 112 years old), he has two adoptive daughters, he's been married twice, and he's had more romantic relationships than any other X-Man, in spite of the negative qualities listed above.
- He is, however, written slightly more realistically within his own series, though this varies from writer to writer as more and more Fail Polish has accumulated and he's gradually getten taller. It's often considered to be Mark Millar's fault.
- The fact that the makers of the live-action movies chose to disregard the above description and cast Hugh Jackman as Wolverine probably did not help...
- Amusingly averted in Secret War—though still distinctly Bad Ass, he spent a good bit of the story being a drunken pain in the ass, with realistic reactions from the other heroes.
Film
- Iris of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, despite being one of the stepsisters, is actually rather pretty. It's not true in the book, though, so it may just be Adaptational Attractiveness.
- Similar to the Wolverine example, Riddick's Marty Stu qualities really show themselves as his role expands from Pitch Black to Chronicles of Riddick. In the first film he is an, admittedly cool, dark horse character who presents a dilemma to the other survivors: he's perfectly equipped to help save everyone, but he also might be an untrustworthy and unrepentant sociopath who'd cut your throat for looking at him funny. In the second film he's a legendary figure, talked about constantly. A fearless unstoppable killing machine, soon to be last of his kind and known in advance to be pivotal to saving the universe, circumstances allow little mystery as to which way he is going to jump. In person, if you aren't trying to lock him up or otherwise disturb his loner existence, he's generally urbane, funny, even charming. He's even kind to animals. The closest the film gets to his reputed evil is merely the oft stated disregard he has for the well being of anyone but himself.
Literature
- There are so many heroines who are said to be "not beautiful", but are then described in such a way to make it very clear that they are only not beautiful to the most unsophisticated viewer. Any girl who's said to be "too thin" with eyes that are "too big" and sometimes a "mouth too wide" for true beauty is either already gorgeous or is going to be as soon as she hits adulthood. It was already such a trope by 1911 that it's parodied in Zuleika Dobson: "Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been...She had no waist to speak of." (Zuleika is a hilariously exaggerated Femme Fatale, whose allure drives so many men to suicide that she depopulates an entire town).
- Scarlett O'Hara of Gone With The Wind is introduced as "not beautiful" (but with flashing green eyes and magnolia skin), and she's self-centered, mercenary and amoral. But she's so extraordinarily successful, so resilient, so significant in the lives of everyone around her and so magnetic to men that it's hard not to see her as a wish-fulfillment figure - rather like a female James Bond.
- Some characters start out as genuinely plain or flawed characters, but develop into Mary Sue characters as they age. For example, Frederica Potter in the Virgin in the Garden tetralogy by A.S Byatt. She starts off as a brainy, skinny, red-haired teenager who's not pretty but attractive as an acquired taste. Lots of people don't like her. Fine. But as the series goes on, she acquires an angsty past, her thinness (and her "wide mouth") become ever more aestheticised and harder to explain as she eats a lot of delicious, sophisticated food, she gets through a never-ending stream of attractive men, she becomes famous without having to lift a finger to work for it. When she's occasionally still described as not being pretty it seems ridiculous when she's just been described, at thirty-something, as looking like Alice in Wonderland. Oddly, lots of people STILL don't like her, for no particular reason but that comes to seem as an obvious marker of specialness as if everyone liked her for no particular reason.
- The titular character of Anne of Green Gables is also accused of this. She is introduced as plain, skinny, and red-headed, but is described in such a way that it's hard not to picture an ethereal, soulful-eyed waif. And her initial flaws of a fiery temper, tendency to nurse a grudge and sheer klutziness fade or become irrelevant to the extent that by the end of the first book she's acknowledged as beautiful, and selfless, brilliant, is right about everything that matters and can fix almost anything with The Power Of Love.
- Dagny Taggart from Atlas Shrugged is, at the beginning of the book, described as not being particularly attractive. However, Ayn Rand then proceeds to burn probably at least 20 pages throughout the book about how feminine and sensuous her outfits are. Finally, at a point at which she'd been working 16 hour days for several months and just taken an epic solo plane flight, Rand finally gives in to the trope and openly states that Dagny is now beautiful. Imagine our surprise.
- Anita Blake. According to Laurell K. Hamilton, her Sue is supposedly not attractive because instead of being a tall willowy blonde, she's a short (actually average height) curvy brunette with enormous boobs, collagen lips and a superslim body. Oh, and her *gasps* invisible Hispanicness also obviously detracts from her allure as well.
- Originally this is portrayed more as a self-esteem thing; Anita doesn't say she isn't attractive, the issue being more that she's scarred, muscled and generally not the Hollywood ideal, which has been problematic because of rejection by her ex-fiance's WASP-y family and her stepmother. And (again, originally) outside opinions don't contradict this, one character responding with the fact that she may not be flashy/stunning but still appealing. A little iffy (that someone's saying that at all) but not as bad. Then the author went nuts... and the above applied and more.
- Christopher Pike (the teen horror writer, not Kirk's predecessor as the captain of the Starship Enterprise) invariably describes his heroines as not being especially attractive. The fact that he then goes on, invariably, to elaborate that this unattractiveness takes the form of having breasts far too large for their waifish frames may raise some suspicions about the integrity of the narrator.
- The heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess is convinced that she's unattractive ("I am one of the ugliest children I ever saw") because she doesn't have dimples and golden curls. The narrative voice subverts this trope when it assures us that she is "a slim, supple little creature" with "an intense, attractive little face" and "big, wonderful eyes with long black lashes".
- At the beginning of the first Twilight book, Bella Swan goes on at length on how plain-looking, unremarkable, and clumsy she is. The first sign that Sueness is lurking around the corner is her name, which means "beautiful swan". The second sign is her attracting no less than three male admirers at her new school, despite claiming to be a nobody in her former hometown. The rest of the series consists of Bella being in a Love Triangle with Edward the vampire whose absolute perfection and beauty are constantly described and Jacob the werewolf, and getting her Happily Ever After with Edward by becoming a vampire, which coincidentally makes her stunningly beautiful and graceful in the process. The only flaw remaining for Bella is her boring narrative voice, and that's unfortunately not one that the in-story characters can see. Only that turns out to be what makes her special to Edward — that he can't read her thoughts.
- Lucky him.
- Let us not fail to mention that the werewolf in question is a six-foot plus boy who looks about eight years older than his seventeen years, with "inky" black hair, rippling muscles, superhuman strength, a posse of nearly equally hawt Quiluete beefcake, a motorcycle and an obsessive need to meet all of Bella's emotional and physical needs. God, her life SUCKS.
- Rhapsody from the Symphony of Ages series. Despite being magically transformed into the embodiment of Hello Nurse, she constantly puts herself down, especially when feeling Wangsty), calling herself lowborn and ugly -Which was still an exaggeration from her previous life and wouldn't have been true anyway for centuries)
- Part of this is that at first, after her transformation, people are stunned upon seeing her, and she thinks it's because she is astonishingly ugly, not astonishingly beautiful.
- Robert Langdon from Angels and Demons is described this way at the opening of one of the books. "He was not classically handsome" followed shortly by "tall", "dark hair", "piercing eyes", "voice was like chocolate for the ears" and "swims thirty laps of the pool every day". And he gets the stunningly hot love interest at the end of it.
- If you read through his other books, a lot of Dan Brown's leading men seem to share this trait
- Honor Harrington. She's an awkward half-Asian woman cursed with a six-foot-tall height which, of course, convinces her she's unattractive. Despite this disfigurement, she eventually manages to get into a relationship and is described as 'growing into her looks.' She goes through several cycles more of being stuffed back into her shell by events only to emerge as beautiful again later on, too.
LiveActionTV
- Peter Petrelli from Heroes is constantly made to carry the Idiot Ball, since he's so supremely powerful that if he just acted sensibly, it would be all but impossible for the writers to create any drama for him. However, no one ever seems to hold his plentiful mistakes against him or suggest that the world might not need quite so much rescuing if Peter could just get his act together for once. The worst he's been accused of (and invariably by a villain - any Heel Face Turn seems to be automatically followed by a sudden appreciation of Peter's awesomeness) is being too self-sacrificing and idealistic.
- Mama Petrelli does get in a small What The Hell Hero scene, but it's with a version of Peter from the future (which just goes to show how tightly Peter hugs that Idiot Ball).
- Mercifully, Peter seems to have ditched the ol' Idiot Ball as of late. Well, not so much 'ditched' as 'tossed to his brother', who ran with it.
- Unfortunately, only because he was nerfed in order for that to be possible.
- Max of Dark Angel is not only the only one of the transgenics to have had a mother who loved her, the one Lydecker based off of his dead wife... Was anyone surprised in the second season when it turned out she was the Chosen One destined to save humanity?
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