Gary/Marty Stu Necessary Terms?

I hope I'm not the only one who thinks having to come up with a masculinized term for male Mary Sue characters is ridiculous.

"Mary Sue" is a writing term of art. It refers to a specific type of character. Variations like Gary/Marty Stu are pointless and I wonder why people have a hang-up against applying a writing term derived from a female character to all characters, male or female.

I've heard female stock-comedy characters called Scaramouches before, even though that term derives from an originally male character. What's the big deal?

 

Hard to say. For me, I think it's expected for a masculinized term for a male Mary Sue to happen. Think of it as a reaction to a previous reaction.

True, "Mary Sue" is a term in writing, but a rather broad one. As said, it's pretty much a given that the term is masculinized. Humans have an innate need to categorized topics in a specific way. I mean, would you really call a perfect male who can do nothing wrong and the universe bends to a "Mary Sue"? Sounds a bit off to me.

Never heard the term before, but it seems like a reverse reaction compared to the Mary/Gary Sue/Stu. It should also be said terms change over time. Languages are always evolving.

In my opinion, the term simply changed to be up-to-date with modern standards. True, the Mary Sue term started with fanfiction OCs being too, well, Mary Sue-ish - and still continue to be. However, as we continued to critique media and its various tropes, cliches, and characters, the term simply had to cater to both male and female characters. Whether or not the term is correctly used, well, the jury's out on that one. A good conversation starter, OP!

 

I don't know but I am fine with them using two different but similar names to denote the gender. Its no different than using john doe and jane doe to identify unknown persons when the police are not sure of their identity.

 

Maybe. Except in that case sex is a material fact relevant to identification or a patient or a deceased. Unless sex is a characteristic of a Mary Sue character (and I don't think it is--the fact of being either male or female doesn't enter into it) I don't think it's relevant. There's nothing gained by not simply using "Mary Sue."

 

@awkwarddragon yeah, I'd still call the male character a "Mary Sue." That sounds normal to me, where Gary Stu or something like that sounds silly.

You don't hear Scaramouche applied as much these days. It's an old stock-comedic character. But back when that use was more common it was applied to both sexes, so I thought it was a good analogy.

To me, "Mary Sue" as a writing concept is gender-neutral even though it is derived from a female character name.

 

It doesn't matter what you call it as long as it's not referring to any of my characters.

 

Fair enough. I don't expect everyone to follow the mainstream idea - if one would call it that - of rebranding the Mary Sue concept by masculinizing it to Gary Stu to better fit male characters.

 

I've found 'Mary Sue' as a very useful description of certain protagonists. Oddly enough, as a reader of military/action/historical/alt-history stories, I see 'Mary Sues' as the protagonists in a lot of those stories. Some writer have idealized (insert ancient warrior group/leader) and so badly want the reader to see just how perfect this group/leader was.
Funny, as all of these stories involved male characters, I've never had an issue with using 'Mary Sue' for the male gender.

 

I feel like the way the "extra-specialness" of the character is expressed may be gendered, though? Like, the strange-coloured eyes - is that a Marty-Stu thing? I see it as a female iteration. Or the "pretty but doesn't know she is" thing - is that part of being a Marty-Stu?

I agree that the general idea is the same for both Marty-Stus and Mary-Sues... they're both unrealistically idealized character types. But because the human "ideal" varies depending on gender, I think the idealization also varies. Which doesn't mean a gendered term is necessary - but I can see why it might make sense.

 

I was thinking there's probably some gendered distinction, as well. Honestly I find that the term is so watered down in the common usage that it's kind of useless, so I usually kind of zone out when people start talking about Mary Sues, but that seems like it could be a thing.

TV Tropes sees fit to give the two their own pages, anyway, and on the Marty page it suggests the difference is this:

All the same rules apply, but a couple variations do tend to show up, expressing different ideas of what constitutes male and female "perfection".

In the past, Mary Sue didn't really do very much, because a woman who took an active role in dramatic events was unwomanly and, by definition, not perfect. So Mary Sue mostly radiated a soft glow of purity and beauty into the narrative around her, was inexplicably popular, and had people fall in love with her a lot. And this side of her lineage still shows, even as changes in society have allowed women to get their katanas out and fly and so forth.

Marty Stu, however, is usually restricted to being a creature of action since men who do not take an active role in dramatic events are unmanly and, by definition, not perfect (Non-Action Guy tends to be looked upon with disdain). So Marty Stu is the personification of action, action and more action. Or, if he is of an intellectual bent, he thinks his way through problems, inventing whole new branches of science and technology in the process, and in some cases, the character is often portrayed as personification of both, completing missions as both the brains and the brawn taking up the roles usually shared among the main character and a team or a partner.

In contrast to Mary Sue who has been freed to play an active and/or passive role, Marty Stu is almost never seen taking on his sister's old school Purity Sue role: passive motivator of others through his purity, beauty and helplessness unless it's in addition to the action and intellectual roles they already have.
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I don't refer to Mary Sues as any gendered differences. They're all "Mary Sue" to me if they meet certain levels of criteria. I know some people try to separate them on gender but I don't think that's very accurate, as most of the time a "gruff action manly man" Mary Sue will express all the same traits a female "pretty radiant loved by everyone but never does anything" Mary Sue does, and if you examine any given Mary Sue you'll find they're all the same even if they're slightly different.

Take any shitty Mary Sue MC from action/war/espionage novels. They might be rugged manly men of action who can kill you with one quick strike (of course) but they're also handsome and everyone loves them even if they don't do anything worth that affection. Female love interests (normally Mary Sues themselves) will inexplicably want the MC to fuck them even if the romantic chemistry between the two was nonexistent at best.

I'll agree there's a clear difference between what I would refer to as "Active" and "Passive" Mary Sues, but it's not really a strict gender thing.

Strange/different colored eyes are a huge cornerstone of any gender of Mary Sue, yeah. Some of the most infamous male Mary Sues have the classic two-different-colored-eyes thing.

Sort of. A male Mary Sue might be "good at something but he doesn't know it" or may even be "handsome but he doesn't know it". I'll agree that typically 'beautiful but she doesn't know it' is primarily the female version of Mary Suedom but males have their own close versions of it, too.

Edit: quoting error

 

Are you criticising people involved in a creative craft for being creative? I think there's quite a lot of fun value in trying to come up with a male variation of Mary Sue. It's harmless. There are a lot more annoying things in the online writing community, like all those creative terms that writing gurus try to come up with, and then nobody else knows what they mean, and people start to bandy all sorts of wrong ideas and crap advice. But Gary/Marty Stu is pure fun, and there's no way one can mistake the meaning of it. So, why not.

 

What in the world is Mary Sue?

 

Having returned from a long foray into the realms of fic, the following observation:

In certain slices of the writing community, I'm not sure if it's founder's effect or if it's sampling error that's in play or maybe a little of both. In fanfiction communities, the term Marty Stu is almost universally shunned as a derailment of the gendered way in which Mary Sue is very much engaged, and it's a strange phenomenon because the characters, the phenomenon, and the kvetch about the phenomenon are being had and deployed by mainly individuals who identify as female.

Fic (fanfiction) is a predominantly female space. In these realms, OC's (original characters) have some unexpected modes of engagement. When fic fans talk about OC's, they are picturing a female character, by and large. The idea of the OC undergoes a massive conflation program wherein the character is usually engaged as a "self-insert or hard-line Mary Sue until proven otherwise". I'm not saying they always are Mary Sues, but the general consensus of those who dig fic is that OC = Self Insert = Mary Sue.

And this is where I get lost as regards how to engage the situation. Female writers writing female OC's, which, when those writers turn around and become readers, they then engage as problematicly Mary Sueish, and the problematic part is both the Mary Sueishness and the fact that this is constantly happening to specifically female characters... written by female writers.

The whole thing is an Ouroboros.

And don't try to enter the conversation using the term Marty Stu instead of Mary Sue. No matter how many times or different ways you display your character's penis-owning-and-happy-about-owning-that-penis status, any attempt on your part to stick to that will get shoved over back into the deeply gendered Ouroboros conversation about female Mary Sues.

The best engagement I ever got on the topic was to the tune of, "Dude, I get what you're saying. I do. Look around you. No one is trying to have the conversation you're trying to have because their OC's are all women. Your little dude-OC is just a negligible aberration to them in the grand scheme of things."

And that from a woman.

In short, this group of read/writers agrees with the OP, but for wildly different reasons.

I don't think there's a way to untangle the issue regarding the term. There are too many items zipped into the term that different groups of people jealousy hold to their respective bosoms. It doesn't matter which way you go with it. Whatever choice you decide on, the unchosen choices are there waiting to judge you ten ways from Sunday.

 

For one thing many feminists who are active in gender-related issues (not all feminists) like to insult males by calling them female names or somehow implying femininity and then watch them squirm or get mad. This of course goes back way before feminism was a thing, it's as old as the human race. To impute femininity to a male is an insult, though the opposite is not (depending on how it's done). This requires a little explaining.

Males, in order to become men, must develop masculinity. Females are under no such onus. This is why you so frequently hear insults like "He's not a real man, he's just a boy!" but nobody ever says "She's not a real woman". It's because, in order to earn your place among the men, you must learn to deal with pain, frustration, rejection etc and not go all emotional about it. This is why boys and girls are raised differently. Imagine a boy and girl both coming home with skinned knees and crying. The boy gets "Stop crying, learn to deal with it like a man" while the girl gets pampered and coddled and encouraged to cry it out.

How else can you produce a generation of men who will fight to defend the society, enmasse or individually? Masculinity and femininity are complementary, as represented by the opposite sides of the yin/yang symbol. We need both for wholeness, but it's been separated and distributed unevenly, as most things in nature.

 

Even if one agrees with the premise here, it is irrelevant to the discussion. Using the term "Mary Sue" for a male character isn't calling the character female or implying that the character has female characteristics. It's just shorthand for (potential) problems that can be associated with characters of any gender.

 

Perhaps time is also in play? The term pollyanna has been in use for so long that it's not even capitalized anymore to denote its provenance as an actual name of an actual character whose attributes are being invoked when that word is used. I've yet to see anyone raise a flag in any camp at all for that word. Perhaps the term Mary Sue feels too neologistic to the zeitgeist to separate it from the gender it invokes.

 

Feminism is not a bad thing in any way. And there's nothing wrong with raising boys and girls the same way. In fact I believe it's important to raise all children with love and understanding. Instilling the notion of equality and equal rights is important regardless of the gender.

In fiction, the story a writer is trying to tell may challenge these things. But, really, we are all after creating characters with depth. When done correctly none of these terms matter. We don't want paper-thin characters. We want characters that you can almost hear breathing next to you.

 

But Crusher wasn't a Mary Sue, unless he was written by a 14 year old boy. A Mary Sue isn't a feminine character, it's a character who is a projection of the author, at least how the author would like to be seen.

 

Well, that rules out Wesley Crusher.

 

He absolutely was. Roddenberry created him as a self-insert character. It's why he was named Wesley, after all. You know, Gene Wesley Roddenberry?

 

Not at all. He was annoying, but he was a Deus Ex Machina character throughout.