Actually, it's not so much the Mary Sue protagonist I wind up disliking, but the author who wrote him/her.
You know who's a real Mary Sue? Ferris Bueller. They didn't even try to hide it in the film. In fact, they seemed to go as over the top as possible to reinforce how awesome and righteous he was and how all that opposed him were doomed to fail miserably. The more I think about it the more I realize that he was never an agent/recipient of conflict/character arc at all. The real journey was Cameron's. He was the one who struggled and had to learn things about himself. And Jean Gray (the sister) to a lesser extent. She had to learn not to hate Ferris and accept his awesomeness before she too was smote beneath his wheels of righteousness. Of course, this scene (probably my favorite) was quite easily handled by a bit of sagacious advice from Charlie Sheen. Great movie. One of my favorites. But even by 80s teen movie standards it was a horrible Mary Sue offender.
He was not a Mary Sue at all. It was very clear that Ferris was peaking at high school. There's no way he's going to a good college like his sister. Also, his parents gave his sister a car and not him. Ferris really only had one skill and it was charm and it did not work on everyone.
Haha, I clicked the link and it confirmed my worst suspicions: Also I decided to take the test for my most favourite, flamboyant character. Apparently she only scored a low-to-moderate chance of Mary Sue-ness Odd. Spoiler: Rant on My Character; Don't Bother Reading It probably only because I make her have consequences. She's a serial monogamist, so she goes through partners pretty quickly (probably one an episode) but often there are repercussions or not healthy matches—some were using her, some she was using them, some she had to convince to give it a go, and her final relationship actually had to actively persue her for half the story. Also, while she definitely is pretty/very attractive (and yes, despite scars), she isn't the most gorgeous or attractive character. Other girls are just as pretty or sometimes prettier. I think she just happens to be more confident/comfortable in her own skin (also arrogant & presumptive). Her character traits can either attract or repulse other characters. She's a mess of cross-breeds, mostly for comedic effect as she has poor control of any of them & it tends to give her negative attributes, and most are a result of her poor judgment skills and consequences for reckless actions. (In her defense she was orphaned at ten and so had no check against her flighty temperament, childish whims, overall immaturity, and never had to take responsibility for herself or her actions—which gradually changes over the course of the story, but basically she just never grew up.) While she more or less brings the main cast together, she isn't universally liked—she actually initially comes across rather obnoxious or a pain. Two characters she forced her company on until they gradually accepted her as inevitable or grew to like her, although not blind to or unannoyed by her vices. One just was drawn to her, and with the other they had snarky exchanges & heated arguments which eventually they both enjoyed, because they both had the same sharp tongue which made them initially dislike the other but then grew to appreciate the shared trait. The friends get exasperated by her frequently, and she is in various ways held accountable for her actions. Late into the story, there actually is a falling out with one of the main characters—one which technically isn't her fault but due to her behaviour & habits is very believably could be. But instead of being the victim of unfair witch hunt (no pun intended), she actually grows up most here where she finally examines herself & her actions, their natural repercussions, and finally holds herself culpable. She re-evaluates her relationships with those around her, and tries to address problems. But that doesn't mean she had a total overhaul of her character—she still tends to speak without a filter and act fairly thoughtlessly, but she isn't so blindly indifferent to how her actions affect those around her and tries to not be perfectly selfish in her actions. She grows & gets better at it over time with various other adventures and misadventures. Also, she isn't the protagonist—technically it shifts among the friend group (who are actually often much more badass than she is) episodic adventure/event by episode. But (especially at the onset) she is often the catalyst to adventures or chaos. But they get their own solo time to shine too, or she might have nothing to do with a particular story or series of events. But anyway, I always suspected she might've been a Mary Sue character. Mostly because I personally loved her so much.
He would if he wanted to. He would change his grades like he changed his absentee records. He'd forge references from the sausage king of Chicago, Sloan's father, or any other dignitary he chose. Or he'd blackmail Rooney with real or manufactured transgressions. That and forgery, computer hacking, manipulation of others against their will and better judgment, impersonations, creating dummies of himself from common household items (complete with sound effects and motion simulations), and parade float hijacking with little consequence. Those that resisted him charms were doomed to ignominy. Even his sister gave in when she realized that resistance was futile. Go Ferris!
But I don't think that makes him a Marry Sue. He's all of those things, but played for laughs. He's a character designed to not be restricted by the world he's in to show a better way, a Jesus type character. Marry sues are a characters who are supposedly restricted, but the author unintentionally fudges the rules for them.
The lying, manipulative, rules don't apply, follow me or die way of Jesus? Kidding I've had enough Mary Sue debate to last a lifetime.
yeah, I get it. You hate Howard Hughes. How about that Kevin kid. I mean, he's seven years old and he still he manages to defeat two adult burglars? What a Mary Sue.
An unlikeable character greatly narrows the room to manoeuvre and the leeway given for a character before they're labelled a Sue. Having a character that is already alot stronger than other chararacters is one thing but when they embarrass and emasculate those characters who are well liked and therefore steal the badassery of others, that makes the usually female lead unlikeable, which makes them more prone to be thought of as a Sue, which makes them seem more unlikeable as the story progresses, therefore more a Sue, therefore more unlikeable, and it builds in a cycle. A cycle which doesn't take much to set off. All it really took was for Rey to fix the Millenium Falcon with Han in the cockpit and that was it. Cycle was begun and the end result is some people writing off her character as a Mary Sue, as the lens through which the character was viewed, was changed and some people looked for things to justify their established conclusion of Sueness rather than enjoying it as a fan. That's simply the risk one has to take though. If you have a female action lead you can't always predict which feat will set some people off.
A Mary Sue is a character who is EXTREMELY PERFECT and well liked by the characters that the plot loves to blow on. These are characters to which God (the writer) favors over anything and anyone. They aren't characters they are just either author inserts (which I have no problem with), or empty. An unlikable character is a dick. To put it simply: Mary Sue = Too many positive attributes Unlikable Character (Dick Character) = Too many negative attributes
Not sure what you're asking. I only count what most would consider "super sues" as Mary Sues. It has to be real bad before I would ever invoke Mary Sue.
Personally, I think that there are a couple of red flags for Mary Suedom. One is when a character always makes the right call when it matters, and is always good at everything. Another is when the story twists itself around a character to reinforce how awesome that character is. Please note - we all need to bear in mind that main characters in stories are going to have the inherent advantage of being major parts of a story. I personally think that doesn't mean they never fall on their faces. A couple of examples - Honor Harrington. She was the best spaceship captain. Okay. But then all of the sudden she was also the best swordfighter. And then the best pistol duelist. And the best fleet commander. And so on, and so on, with no end in sight. I actually cheered when somebody finally beat her. You shouldn't be cheering for the defeat of the main character. With Honor, I think that my issue was that everything was so effortless for her. She was literally always right, and anyone that disagreed with her was always wrong. So this was one of the "overperfect" Mary Sues. Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden is more an example of the second one. Every time he is presented with a challenge, it turns out he's half-demon, or was the seventh son of a seventh son, or something like that. Something out of the blue that lets him overpower his opponents. Or, for the anime/manga minded, Ichigo from Bleach. Oh, you're a high-schooler that is excellent at brawling. Oh, wait, you're a Shinigami. Oh, actually you're the son of a Shinigami Captain. Oh, you're also a Visored. That can turn into a Hollow. And so on and so on. Drizzt, too. Right? Such Mary Sue most of the time. The plot armor was thick on that one. Don't get me wrong, I read the first... eleven, I think? Harringtonverse books. I read seven or eight of the Dresden files, and I watched over 100 episodes of Bleach. But the problem with Mary Sues is that they lack staying power. Main characters are (almost) always going to win. But nobody calls Conan a Mary Sue, even though he pretty much is one. I think that is because Conan had to struggle for what he had. A lot of the Malazan Book of the Fallen characters are raging with power, but almost all of them had foibles to offset that power. Hell, Rand al'Thor was pretty much a god walking, but not a Mary Sue, probably on account of he was INSANE. I think I've talked myself to a point. It's okay for your character to have power, or to be good at something. They can even be IMMENSELY powerful, or really good at a LOT of things. But they need to have flaws in equal(ish) measure to those advantages. I think what it really boils down to is that no reader wants to read a story and be able to say "well, I can tell which character is the author's favorite." Tyrion is not a Mary Sue, despite being Martin's favorite character. Because that guy suffers. Tyrion, that is. Not Martin. I mean, Martin might suffer, but I don't know anything about that. Of course, at the same time, a lot of people in the thread have pointed out that likability has a way of mitigating Mary Suedom, too. Man. This is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Which reminds me. I know somebody linked the wikipedia article above, but this is a pretty good (and humorous!) attempt at explaining Mary Sues. https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Mary_Sue (please note that 1d4 chan is a gaming wiki site, and here there be colorful language)
Actually, it's stunningly easy to create a Mary Sue protagonist without being aware of it. If you love the character you're creating, you will be inclined to give them the kinds of traits that would make you love a real human being. So you might be (inadvertently) creating a character that is 'perfect'—at least in your eyes. (And maybe one whose attributes aren't everybody's cup of tea.) You want your readers to 'care' about your main character, don't you? So it often happens that you create a character whom you care about yourself. For many of us, that takes a moment of realisation followed by a lot of practice to avoid creating a Mary Sue. For me, the dividing line between okay and not okay comes with how you link your overly-loveable Mary Sue with the story's plot. If you allow this character to succeed at everything he or she does, and effortlessly solve all the story's problems because they are so smart/impossibly talented/naturally skilled/favoured by the gods/beautiful/charming/whatever, then I think the Mary Sue-ness doesn't work. If this overly perfect character doesn't win, or needs a lot of outside help to win and emerges as a changed person at the end, then I don't have a problem with the Mary Sue. In other words, it's not so much what the character starts out with that matters. It's what happens during the course of the story that matters—at least to me.
Oh yeah. One thing that I dislike when reading a story is when the main character pulls talents and skills out of thin air just when they are needed. Talents and skills that weren't set up as givens for this character earlier in the story. Just so happens to have won prizes at trigonometry, lucky, eh? Or, while shooting arrows for the first time ever, from 100 paces away, intentionally skewers the eye of a fly that has its back turned. If this character is a trig expert, let us know before the skill is needed. Ditto any supernatural proficiency in archery. And do read Mark Twain's essay: "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Mary Sue-ness is NOT new (nor is a harsh critique of it.) Twain strays from making modern PC word choices at times, but his basic argument still holds water. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/indians/offense.html
I don't think you need to tell the reader all their skills before hand but there should be a limit to how many surprises, especially the very convenient ones.
I haven't read all of the above, so apologies if I repeat things that have already been said: - To my mind, Rey in that new Star Wars film is a classic Mary Sue. She is very likeable (mainly due to the performance rather than the character), but she has no flaws and overcomes obstacles so easily they may as well not exist. By contrast, Luke had to struggle, fail repeatedly, and overcome obstacles before he could achieve his goals. Jack Reacher is a classic Mary-Sue, and unlikable. He is especially unlikable because he comes over as some masturbatory author surrogate. That little twat out of Star Trek The Next Generation, the doctor's son, was a Mary-Sue, also smug and unlikable. That ginger prat out of CSI:Miami is a Mary-sue and ditto smug and unlikable. People often mistake James Bond for a Mary-Sue, but he is an emotionally stunted, alcoholic psychopath- they are some quite large character flaws. I don't think a Mary-Sue is automatically unlikable, they just lack flaws and they never fail. They are also rarely likeable by virtue of the fact they never fail. But I also think there is a cultural difference with these characters. Just take the difference between UK and US sitcoms. In the UK the MC is the fall guy and the butt of the jokes. In the US the MC is the wise guy and cracking the jokes (pre Alan Partridge and The Office et al influence, and even then the MCs are far, far less pathetic than their British counterparts). Some cultures will more readily accept effortless success than others.
You can afford a fluke or two maybe. Let's say you have a character who's never shot a pistol, but she grabs a Glock off the floor, points it at the foe who's nearby, and kills him. That would be a fluke, but it wouldn't be a problem to me because it's still believable because 1) the target was fairly close 2) most people know which way to point the gun and what the trigger does 3) Glock has a passive safety system 4) if the gun was dropped by someone who was fighting the enemy, the chances are it's loaded with a round in the chamber and ready to fire just by the pull of the trigger. But let's say this same character decides to take down an enemy 30-40 meters away, and this particular enemy is a facehugger (I just decided this is Alien fan-fiction), and she's only got one round left. I would expect her to miss, but if she doesn't, I might still buy what happened if there weren't too many lucky breaks like that in the story, but I'd frown and huff a little. But then... Maybe she has to escape now and she's twisted her ankle, so running is extremely laborious and painful, but luckily she's in an Alien meets Westworld fan-fiction, so there's an unsaddled horse outside, so she decides to ride to safety--except she doesn't know how to ride or handle horses, so if she at that point did leap on the horse and gallop out of harm's way without falling down and breaking her neck, I'd call bulllshit and be done with the story. My willing suspension of disbelief is broken. Now imagine the opposite where she suddenly has those skills... we have this character who's, I don't know, a spoilt brat whose life has consisted of dancing in the clubs and sniffing cocaine so far, and it has not been established her favorite hobbies are pistol shooting and horseback riding, and she ends up in this pickle with facehuggers and hostile androids or whatever, and shoots and rides her way out of it without the author ever mentioning those skills, I'd feel cheated because these skills seem tacked on as an aftertought, even if these were the only flukes in the story. When the next challenge appears, I can't go back to thinking what the author has taught me (foreshadowed) about the character to figure out how she's gonna tackle it because I can't trust the author to not conjure up another magical skill to solve the problem.
But where's the line? Do they have tell you all their skills in the first scene? Do they have to mention each once verbally at some point before use so you aren't surprised when they are used?
When you write, you'll notice there are plenty of natural opportunities where to foreshadow something, so it's not like you need a list or an expositional dialogue every time something needs to be foreshadowed. Let's say you have a female soldier and you mention in one sentence she was the best sharpshooter in boot or that was her favorite part of her training or she's dreamed of going to sniper school but hasn't gotten her chance yet. Then later in the story, her skills are needed to solve a problem or save a life. Or I make a big deal out of a character being really into boxing. The reader expects she'll punch her way out of a situation later in the story, but then I actually use that skill to get her to infiltrate a crime organization whose ring leader is also really into boxing. Or I establish in one piece of dialogue she knows German, and later this skill is needed for something. But then there are skills you don't need to list, I think, if the expectation is they are part and parcel of a profession or lifestyle. Like if a person lives in a cottage in the woods, she'll probably have survival skills and you don't need to make her talk about them in advance. Or if she's a soldier, she'll be taught all kinds of skills you can use in your story but don't need to list every single one 'cause they come with the profession.
A well written Mary Sue or a Mary Sue that works is an oxymoron. Poor writing is a necessary pre-requisite to Mary Sue.
