Fiction, Fandom, and Using the Term “Mary Sue” as a Criticism
An interesting online discussion has popped up in the wake of The Force Awakens, concerning the (young, female) protagonist, Rey, whether or not she is a “Mary Sue,” and whether or not she would be perceived in this light if she were male.
On one side of this debate, we have individuals who believe the term Mary Sue to be a meaningful descriptor of a character who is flawless/unrealistically skilled, for whom things come too easily, and who, in serving as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author/audience, is cheated out of actual character development and growth.
On the other side of the debate, we have the argument that Mary Sue is itself a gendered term, that female characters are overwhelmingly more likely to be criticized under this label, and that much of the out-cry over Rey’s role in the Star Wars universe arises from a gut-level assumption that males should be at the center of stories and that hyper-competent female protagonists must justify both their competence and their centrality to their own story specifically because they depart from this perceived default.
As a young adult author, I see the term Mary Sue flung around a lot. As a cognitive scientist who studies the psychology of fiction, I have many thoughts about the psychology of extra-textual engagement, the centrality of acts of imagination in fandom, and the role that gender might play in both of the above. Today, I’ll be hitting on three points that I think could advance the discussion of the way the term “Mary Sue” is used.
First, we’ll look at the context in which the term arose and some of the academic views on the function of Mary Sue fanfiction. Then, we’ll move on to discussing the role that the audience’s imagination plays in bringing characters to life. And finally, we’ll examine the assumption—held by many who have slapped the Mary Sue label onto Rey—that if gender were playing a role in their assessment of her character, they would definitely know it.
The term Mary Sue traces its roots back to fanfiction and, specifically, a type of fanficiton in which an original character is inserted into the story and becomes the center of that fictional world. Prototypically, a Mary Sue is powerful, special, and loved and quickly earns the admiration and affection of the core characters. The reason that there is a term for this is that this type of fanfiction—which can often be seen as self-insertion, with the Mary Sue standing as a proxy for the writer—is that it is quite common. Many people enjoy writing fanfiction stories of this type; many other people enjoy reading them. Nonetheless, within the wide world of fandom, there is a pervasively derisive view of Mary Sue characters and the authors who write them.
In some ways, this derision is puzzling. Fanfiction as a whole is a way of expanding, subverting, exploring, and playing with the original text. This raises the question of why there is such a strong ethos that one can play with the characters and story in the wrong way. It makes sense that a fanfiction reader might not want to go along on someone else’s wish fulfillment ride. But there are, presumably, lots of sub-genres of fanfiction that any particular reader may find are not to their taste, yet few of them command absolute value judgments in the way that Mary Sue stories do. Rather than being seen as a sub-genre defined by certain tropes, Mary Sue stories are often seen as bad writing, simply by virtue of containing a Mary Sue, no matter how well written they may be on other fronts.
From a scientific perspective, this raises a couple of questions. First, why are Mary Sue fanfics so prevalent to begin with? And second, why are they viewed with such derision? There are a couple of different theories that address the first question. For example, there is an argument to be made that fanfiction is a form of imaginary play, with some stories—particularly the first stories written by many fanfiction authors—resembling externalized daydreams. And why wouldn’t a person play a starring role in their own daydream? Why wouldn’t they dream about being powerful and special and loved?
Fanfiction can also be seen as a way of taking control of the one-sided parasocial relationships that we form with fictional characters. The idea here is that our brains aren’t wired to fully distinguish between real people and fictional characters, and so we can develop relationships with people we know are not real. In the normal course of things, this relationship is one-sided—you know the character; the character does not know you—but self-insertion into fanfiction can allow the reader to break down that wall and imagine rich and fulfilling two-way interactions.
From this perspective, the existence of self-insertion stories and the appeal of writing Mary Sue characters is not surprising in the least. But the pervasive view that these stories (and characters) are bad or should not be written is puzzling. It is easy enough to avoid such stories if you do not want to read them. What harm is there in someone else taking pleasure from writing them? Why is Mary Sue so often an insult, rather than merely a descriptor? If someone wants to write or read an overly idealized original character, beloved by the canon characters, what is the harm?
One question that seems relevant to ask here is who writes Mary Sue stories? Fanfiction, on the whole, is written predominantly by woman. What little data there is tends to suggest that Mary Sue stories are frequently written by young woman—often teenagers. Given the degree to which our society tags anything associated predominantly with teenage girls with similar derision, I think it makes sense to ask how much of the derision held toward Mary Sue fanfics stems from the same place as derision for, say, boy bands whose fan-base consists largely of teenage girls.
It is worth noting that fanfiction, as a whole, is often viewed with similar derision in the wider culture. What Mary Sue stories are within fandom communities, all fanfiction is to the general public—and likely for similar reasons. Plenty of academics have argued that the act of writing fanfiction reflects a largely female form of meaning-making, which relies more heavily on emotion and personal investment than more traditionally male forms of textual analysis. Fanfiction is also often viewed as a feminization of the source text, inserting themes—and, yes, characters—into texts that may have originally catered more toward male audiences. This is, in fact, one theory about the prevalence of Mary Sue stories that I did not address above—that they represent the female audience writing themselves into stories from which they have been largely excluded.
In other words, this particular theory says that part of the reason you get so many Mary Sue fanfics in the first place is that so many popular media properties—now and historically—have focused disproportionately on male characters. For women to see themselves in the story, let alone to see themselves as the hero, they often have to write themselves in. From this perspective, it might not be surprising that some viewers thought The Force Awakens resembles a fanfiction story and that Rey resembles a Mary Sue—for decades, women have been writing themselves into the Star Wars universe in positions of power, and those stories have been frequently derided as lesser within fandom itself.
While there are male-equivalents of the term Mary Sue (Gary-Stu or Marty Stu or what-have-you), those terms are much more rarely used, even within a fanfiction context, in part because stories featuring male self-insertion characters are themselves less common. Given the demographics of fanfiction writers and the gaps in the source material being filled, this makes perfect sense. But it also, I think, makes the transition from using the term within a fanfiction context to using it to analyze characters in mainstream media extremely problematic.
In the world of fanfiction, female self-insertion/wish-fulfillment characters out-number their male counterparts in large part because the opposite is true of traditional media. One could easily theorize that the term Mary Sue is then coded as predominantly female and applied disproportionately to female characters in traditional media as well. And this is hugely problematic, because within a fanfiction context, Mary Sue characters are defined in large part by the way they become important and central to the story, and the application of the term Mary Sue to female characters in traditional media can be seen as subtly reinforcing the idea that a female character has to have a reason to be at the center of her own story. (See also: this awesome blog entry by Holly Black)
Based on all of the above, I do not think it is possible to have a discussion of whether or not a character is a Mary Sue without discussing gender. Gender is always, always the big giant elephant in the Mary Sue room. The term was invented in a predominantly female subculture and applied specifically to the type of story that arguably represents the extreme version of many of the hallmarks of that subculture (e.g. emotional investment, personal relationships with the characters, subverting largely male source material). The term is most associated with a particular demographic (teenage girls), who are often the subject of cultural derision, and within the context of traditional media, the term Mary Sue is, by any reckoning, far more likely to be used as a label for characters who fit that demographic as well.
To argue that one’s perception of Rey as a Mary Sue has nothing to do with her being a teenage girl ignores the fact that the prototypical Mary Sue is a teenage girl, and unless you want to double-down on the idea that we make judgments about Mary Sue category membership in a way that fundamentally differs from all other categorical judgments, this will have an effect on our perceptions of who is and is not a Mary Sue more broadly.
We’ve talked quite a bit about what it means to be a Mary Sue character within the bounds of fanfiction. Within the context of traditional media, however, the term Mary Sue is most frequently used to denote an over-idealized character who is inexplicably good at everything, universally beloved, and has few or no flaws. While it’s worth noting that the term has become so fuzzy that it can be (and is) applied to pretty much every female character (particularly those of the teenage variety), for the purposes of this section, I want to concentrate solely on the “inexplicably good at everything, flawless, and beloved” definition.
To me, the most striking word in this definition is inexplicably. It suggests that a character must have a reason for being good at something, which in turn raises the question of whether we have been trained to believe, subconsciously, that some people require more explanation for their skills than others. This, I think, is an area that has been addressed several times in the Mary Sue discussion—do people default to seeing hyper-competent female characters as less realistic than their male counterparts?
I want to gloss over that question for the moment and address a related one: what is the process through which we, as the audience, deduce how a character came to be a certain way? One way in which we can do this is through a narrative that provides an explicit, in-text explanation. Luke developed his Jedi powers because he was strong with the force and trained with Yoda. We know this because we were told, repeatedly, that he was strong with the force, and we saw him training with Yoda. This is what, I have gathered, many critics of Rey’s character development feel was missing in The Force Awakens. But explicit, in-text explanations are not the only—or even the most important—way that we come to understand characters in context.
Within the psychology and philosophy of fiction, there is a general consensus that the words on the page or the scenes that appear on screen are not the be-all and end-all of our understanding of a given story. The audience always does an incredible amount of imaginative work alongside the creator, filling in gaps, puzzling out characters’ motivations, projecting large swaths of our understanding of the real world onto the story, and reading the entire text through our own life histories and emotions, as well as our narrative hopes and preferences.
All of which goes to say that when two people are debating whether or not a character “is a Mary Sue,” they are operating under a misapprehension that they are talking about the exact same character in the first place. No two readers will experience a text—or a character—in the exact same way. Narratives are powerful in part because of the gaps they leave for our imaginations to fill. The perception of whether or not a given narrative leaves too many gaps and shoves too much of the work of character-building onto the audience will vary from person to person. Many times, the “is this character a Mary Sue?” debate often boils down to “did this narrative fail to inspire me to imagine the rich inner life and history of this person?”
The answer for you, personally, might be yes. And that it is okay. It is okay to find the story and the character unsatisfying as a result. But calling a character a Mary Sue assumes that your experience of that character is the only valid experience of that character. What is inexplicable to you may make perfect sense to someone else. What seems two-dimensional to you may be richly three-dimensional to someone who was more imaginatively engaged—or whose life experiences facilitate a different understanding of the character. It all comes down to what gaps you are filling in, what questions you are asking, what emotions and experiences you bring to the table, and how richly you are imagining the inner life of the character. When different people have vastly different reactions to the same character, it is helpful to realize that this is a good indicator that some people are filling those gaps and other people did not find the narrative engaging enough to do so.
Are there things that narratives can do to masterfully encourage question-asking, gap-filling, and in-depth readings of their characters? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, this tendency is also going to vary based on the properties of the character and the properties of the reader/viewer. It is not a stretch, for instance to suggest that people are more likely to richly interpret characters they identify with than characters they do not identify with. It seems fair, therefore, to ask if gender—both the viewer’s and the character’s—might play a role in how predisposed we are to richly imagine a character’s inner life. Similarly, there is reason to believe that we come to fictional stories with a rich body of prior fictional experiences and that these experiences affect the ease with which we see certain characters as three-dimensional. From this perspective, too, we would expect an effect of gender. To the extent that we use prior experience with fictional characters to scaffold our understanding of new ones, we would expect that a male character in Rey’s place might subjectively seem more “developed” or “realistic,” due to the prior experiences most viewers have with male “Chosen One” protagonists in big budget epics.
For these reasons, it is worth examining the effect that a character’s gender has on the level of imaginative work you, as a viewer, are ready and willing to put into constructing that character’s inner life and history. Making a claim that a character “is a Mary Sue”—and arguing with vast numbers of people who experienced that same character in a richer way—not only prioritizes your experience over theirs, it also completely ignores the psychological reality that people do experience stories differently and that our own identities, life experiences, emotions, perspectives, and prior media exposure are all likely to play a huge role in this.
For example, I looked at Rey and saw an individual experiencing the lingering effects of being forced to fight for survival from a young age and having to imagine that there are people out there who care for you, because you have no actual social support and need to believe that to push on. I saw someone who made some questionable decisions out of a need to preserve that illusion, an impulsive hero who refused the call in a visceral way that made me wonder if she had a history of trauma that had been repressed. I took each of Rey’s triumphs as a clue to be used to reconstruct possible versions of her past, asking “what does the fact that she can do X, Y, or Z tell us about the life she’s most likely led up until now?” rather than assuming that X, Y, and Z were inexplicable.
My reading of Rey’s character is not, in any way, objective. It’s personal—but so is yours, no matter what that reading might be. I’ve seen people suggesting that the only thing that counts in the Mary Sue calculation is the text itself—not the subtext, the questions the text raises, or the emotional weight that individual viewers bring to the screen. But given the fact that no one experiences a text directly, that we all perceive and understand stories through the lens of our life experiences and prior exposure to media, that seems like a pretty convoluted argument to make. The absolute prioritizing of “explicitly defined in narrative” over “left up to the audience to flesh out or puzzle over” is even more bizarre if you’re interested in discussing the degree to which characters are realistic, complex, or three-dimensional. Real life rarely spoon-feeds people to us, after all, and understanding other people—and how they came to be who they are—requires a lot of imagination, trial and error, and puzzling things out.
Fandom itself is largely defined by the way it interprets and reinterprets the subtext—the theories it constructs about characters’ pasts, or what so-and-so was feeling when he/she said or did a certain thing, or how two characters fit with each other, or the underlying logic of the world. Fandom is in the business of filling in gaps. From this perspective, it seems to me that the term Mary Sue, when applied to traditional media, often serves the function of licensing the person using that label to deny the Mary Sue character any further consideration. After all, the term Mary Sue suggests that you shouldn’t think too hard about that character, because there is objectively nothing to think about.
But, of course, as discussed above, this view isn’t objective, any more than any reading of a text is objective. There’s a difference between saying “this character felt really two-dimensional to me and I just didn’t buy her skill levels and wish we had gotten to see some development there” and declaring “this character is a Mary Sue.” The latter makes an implied claim to objectivity that the former does not. It dismisses not only the character, but also the people who do see more there than you do. And all too frequently that translates to directly dismissing people who have different perspectives—and experiences and identities—than you do.
If Bias Were Playing a Role in My Judgments, I Would Know
We’ve now considered two distinct ways in which character gender might affect the degree to which a protagonist is likely to be seen as a Mary Sue. The first is inexorably tied to the origin and meaning of the term and the implicit associations it carries. The second involves the role that gender might play in the degree to which our understanding of a character extends past that which we are explicitly told or shown in the text itself. A third consideration, which we have not yet addressed, is that there is a wealth of experimental evidence that men and women are evaluated differently in the real world. The exact same behavior can be perceived very differently depending on the gender of the actor.
Given this, it seems entirely reasonable to raise the question of whether our perceptions of fictional characters also depend on gender. In many ways, it would be far more surprising if they did not. And yet, when the question is raised with respect to the use of the term Mary Sue, one frequent response is for the person using that label to insist that it has nothing to do with gender, that they would feel the same way if the character were male. The general underlying assumption here is that if your perception of a situation were in any way affected by the gender of the person you’re evaluating, you would know it. And that simply isn’t true—not for gender, not for race, not for a whole host of factors that affect our judgments in major ways. Bias is often unconscious. We feel as though we are evaluating something solely based on the merits, we feel as though our perceptions are undistorted reflections of reality—but there is an overwhelming amount empirical evidence that this is not the case.
So even if you feel as though gender is playing no role in your Mary Sue judgments, decades of psychological research suggest that you wouldn’t necessarily know if it was. This holds true even if you can think of examples of male characters who you do consider Mary Sues, because none of those characters are the same character you’re evaluating now, and human beings simply do not have conscious access to all of the factors that influence any given judgment we make.
Allow me to give you one striking example that has nothing to do with gender. Imagine that you’re being asked to evaluate another individual. Do they strike you as a warm person? Generous? Caring? When asked to make this judgment, you probably rely on a variety of factors—but would you ever guess that one of those factors is what you’re holding in your hand when you make the judgment? Researchers at Yale University found that targets were more likely to be judged as having warm personalities if the person making the judgment was holding a warm coffee in their hand than if they were holding an iced coffee. When you are physically warmer, you feel warmer towards others and interpret them as having warmer personalities. But you have no conscious awareness that this is what’s going on and feel like you’re making your judgments entirely based on the other person’s demeanor.
There are literally thousands of examples just like this one showing that we often have no idea that our judgments are being influenced by a factor that is nonetheless influencing our judgments. We may explicitly believe that our judgments are objective and have nothing to do with gender, while nonetheless being influenced by the gender of the person we are judging. Factors like gender and race can affect what we pay attention to, how we encode that data, how we interpret that data, and our ultimate judgments—all without any conscious awareness that they have entered the equation at all.
So what can we do about these unconscious biases?
Well, one thing you can do is be aware that they exist. You can choose to stop operating under the assumption that if bias were playing a role in your judgments, you would definitely know it. You can stop using the argument that because your judgment doesn’t feel biased, it for sure wasn’t biased. And you can choose to react to people saying, “there is a long list of reasons to think gender might be playing a role here” by really considering those reasons, rather than dismissing them because you “know” that gender has no effect on your judgments.
So where does this obscenely long blog entry leave us? I don’t think it provides a definitive answer about whether Rey is “over-powered” or “under-explored” or whether the movie would have benefited from showing more of her journey up front, but I do think it calls into question the way that people use the term Mary Sue, why so-called Mary Sues are seen with derision in the first place (both within the context of fanfiction and in traditional media), and the vast underestimation of the role that one’s life history, perspective, and identity play in our experiences of narrative.
Given that the term Mary Sue will always carry gendered connotations and that it is highly likely to be disproportionately applied to female protagonists—who, in big budget epics, are already vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts—I see very little benefit to its continued use. Your mileage may vary, but before you slap that label on any character in traditional media, you would be well-served by reminding yourself that everyone’s experience of a narrative—including your own—is subjective and that no one has conscious access to all the biases that play a role in our judgments.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy:
Imaginary Friends and Real-World Consequences: Parasocial Relationships (TedX talk)
Fandom, Parasocial Relationships, and What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know
Author Gender, Null Results, and Examining Privilege
Suggested Academic Reading:
Barnes, J. L. (2015). Fanfiction as imaginary play: What fan-written stories can tell us about the cognitive science of fiction. Poetics, 48, 69-82.
McGee, J., 2005. ‘‘In the end, it’s all made up’’: the ethics of fanfiction and real person fiction. Commun. Eth. Media Pop. Cult. 9, 161.
Scodari, C., 2003. Resistance re-examined: gender, fan practices, and science fiction television. Pop. Commun. 1 (2), 111–130.
Bacon-Smith, C., 1992. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Gerrig, R.J., 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Jenkins, Henry, 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, New York.
Rosenblatt, L., 1978. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL.
Walton, K., 1990. Mimesis and Make-Believe. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Zubernis, L., Larsen, K., 2012. Fandom at the Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationship. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK.
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