Is "Mary Sue" Still a Valid Criticism? (pt. 4)
pt. 1 | pt. 2 | pt. 3 | pt. 5 | pt. 6 | pt. 7
The backlash against calling characters "Mary Sue" is valid — the term is often sexist, racist, and simply unfounded. However. I do think that there's a baby in that bathwater, and that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can still be a meaningful criticism.
Argument 4: "Mary Sue" is still a valid criticism to the extent the "Mary Sue" character tends to start out good at everything... which can end up giving them nowhere to grow. And character growth is awesome. It makes for some of our all-time favorite heroes: Spike, Anya, Castiel, Zuko. Edmund Pevensie. Taylor Hebert. T-800. So on. Watching a character become talented or ethical or powerful makes for a great story. But if a character starts out talented/ethical/powerful, then the story often ends up in a trap of throwing ever-bigger Godzillas at a character we've already seen defeat Godzilla several times.
Effort and struggle tend to be what make a character interesting or relatable. It's the all-important difference between fearlessness (boring) and courage (relatable).
One example of how doing something badly often looks more impressive than doing it well: Captain America. He got widely derided as "useless" in Avengers (2012), so for Winter Solider (2014) the writers didn't make him more powerful... they added visible effort.
The moment of hesitation before Steve jumps, and the moment after he lands where he has to stop and go "ow" for a few seconds, do so much to sell this moment, vs. the unreal-looking way Steve does almost everything without effort in Avengers movies:
Example of this problem*: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Protagonist Ender has so many abilities so ridiculously beyond what real six-year-olds can do I can't list them all, but the point is that as of his first day of school, he's already curb-stomping kids twice his size and scoring better at training games than any other person ever measured. What problems Ender does have tend to come from being too good at things — hence John Sclazi among others deriding him as insufferably perfect.
Counter-example: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Protagonist Jean Valjean is smart enough to invent a new type of fastener, strong enough to lift a carriage unassisted, moral enough that he's literally meant to be a Catholic saint... and the book gets away with it because when we meet him, he has none of that. He'll become the world's greatest dad, but in his first scene he gets in a shouting match with a small child over a single coin and only realizes too late what an ass he's being. He'll end up running an entire town and its wealthiest business, but first we get a long sequence of him unable to get even a chance to earn enough food to survive because of his criminal record. He can go a long, long way (1500 pages!) and the story can still feel coherent, because he starts out with so little.
Tl;dr: Mary Sue ≠ ultra-talented. BUT if a story has a character start out ultra-talented without showing us how they got there, the character tends to stagnate and the reader may lose interest.
*I constrain my examples to white male protagonists that someone else has called "Mary Sue" first, as part of my argument that it's not all sexism.
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
janainaart
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
izzy806
