I sort of agree and sort of don't. The problem isn't when one of these Mary Sue traits appear (as you pointed out with Elrond), but when many of them appear they can be symptoms of a deeper problem: an author tossing out any semblance of reality and instead fulfilling wishes with the character. A lot of popular characters are Mary Sues, that certainly isn't a good thing.

The focus should be on making a character realistic or plausible, not a way for the author to feel good about themselves.

I have to agree with you on most of this essay, and applaud you as well for making me look at "mary-sues" in a different light.

I would be lying to say that I've never called a character a Mary Sue in a review--in fact, I've done it more than once, but trust me--if you had read said stories, I can all but promise that you would agree.

In one particular story on , a girl used a ridiculously lengthy paragraph to describe her literally perfect character. She compared the character's voice to a songbird, described her full, pouty lips, and compared her eyes to a firefly flitting infront of the moon.

Predictably, the canon character from a certain anime fell head over heels for the girl at first glance, and they were deeply in love and having sex by chapter 2. To top it all off, all the canon characters were painfully out of character as well.

I promptly left the author a kind-as-possible review pointing out the problems with her story, and did my best to offer advice on fixing it, although I doubt the story had even a little hope of improvement.

On the other hand, I've encountered several stories in which authors clearly were trying to make good, believable characters, but inadvertently made them sue-ish. In cases such as this, I try to leave constructive criticism, and one girl even thanked me for my help and cleaned up her act in the next chapter.

So, in conclusion, there is a big difference between a poorly-developed character, which is often written on accident, and a Mary Sue, which is always written on purpose by an author who just doesn't give a **. The easy way to tell is by whether the author tries to correct their mistake or just keeps on trucking with their horrendous original character.

But like I said, I see your point entirely. Just one more thing--the Litmus Test has several questions with modifiers (such as with the clone example) that actually subtract from a character's Sue-ness. For example, if your character has purple eyes (often an immediate sign of Sue-dom) but purple eyes are common in your universe, then the character's eyes don't make him/her a Sue. (Hopefully that made sense.)

I don't entirely agree with you here. True, Mary-Sues are often characters that are simply cliched, not bad, but I still believe that you can have a character with NO flaws that is TOO perfect, which is exactly what a Sue is. They're not romanticisied/cliched characters, but unreal ones. Good essay though, I'm tempted to agree with you on all your points but your complete denial of the Sue. I tihnk that the term is overused, that's all.

And as the BIGGEST Shoerlock Holmes fan on earth, I must correct you. He is NOT a Sue. He has been beaten "four times before; three times by a man and once by a woman", he's really vain at times, egotistic and even he makes mistakes, like in the Norbury case and the case of the Dancing Men. True he's good at almost everything he does, but he has faults and is therefore not a Sue. A Sue is a character that has no faults ... maybe your essay should talk about how the term Mary-Sue is misused and overused.

Great essay though. You might want to check out my rants? I think you might like them.

Sakura

I agree with most of this but I don't see how Harry Potter could be considered a Sue. Harry is far from perfect: he's very short, scrawny, has untameable hair, not very smart and short sighted. Not to mention he can be quite self-centered at times. (He always thinks everything is HIS fault.)

Besides that though, I agree with this. Nice job on the essay.

Although I happen to agree with your conclusions I dislike the declarative tone of this piece. And saying that "Mary Sue is a fallacy" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Perhaps, "Saying that a piece fails because it uses a 'Mary Sue' is a fallacy" would be true, but your current phrasing is without meaning. You claim that "What was once thought a devastating rot has truly only yielded a few bad apples." Yielded to who? Who "once thought" this? Who are the "few bad apples"? How many is a "few"? Also, many of your arguments are weaker than they could be. While this is a nice start, you really could do a lot more with this piece than what you have so far. Right now it's not much more than a few unsupported statements and a criticism of some bogus "litmus test" that no one worth their salt took seriously anyway.

The main problem with Sues is that they are usually underdeveloped wish-fulfillment characters in fanfiction. I wouldn't consider characters like Kirk or Sherlock Holmes to be Stus or Sues- in my experience this isn't even a problem in canon or original fiction unless you count heroines of bodice-ripper-type romance novels. IMO, a likeable, memorable character can never be a Mary Sue, no matter how 'perfect' s/he is.

It's interesting that you brought up the famous Litmus tests. In my experience, no character would score nothing on one of those unless the author was intentionally trying to create an anti-Sue - yuck.

A badly developed character isn't about the number of flowery nicknames or magical abilities the writer has endowed him with. But when a character is a one-dimensional author surrogate created soley for the author to indulge his/her fantasies of boneing canon characters, that's a problem.

Hey, PM me back- I'd like to see more of your opinions on this.

Omg thank you for writing this. I am ashamed to say that I have been putting much thought into not making a character a 'Mary Sue' as I got a particularly scathing review on one of my stories, on that one of my characters was a Mary Sue when I had gone to great lengths to make her interesting, unique, and have a well developed plot and back story as well as real and valid emotions. It saddened me to hear that someone did not like my character, or my story because of my character, and it almost put me off of writing all together. Which was horrid since I dream of one day becoming a writer renowned the world over, a dream that will some day come to pass.
Granted, I now no longer pay heed to my reviewers that have nothing nice to say, at all, or constructive, and are merely spiting hateful flames upon me, but even still. We writers, I fear that I am included in this, are sensitive creatures and cannot be jeered so without consequence. We have feelings too, and sadly our muses are very fickle things and are even more emotive than we and when we are hurting they hurt worse. I didn't write for a good three months after that particular review but then decided that if all they had to do in their free time was to hunt down Mary Sue's and kill the author's self esteem that they have little life and are of no concern to someone such as me. Who are they to judge? Let me read a story of theirs and see how their characters stack up.
I suppose that it all comes down to tastes and preferences in this case. But I agree, there are no such things as Mary Sue's, and it has taken me quite a few years to figure this out. It all depends on the writers skill and the characters inspiration as well as ability to carry out the writers wishes of pathos if the story is to be good or not. Stories are nothing without characters, and characters are nothing without conflict and history. *shrug*
Either way. Thanks for writing this. You helped cement my own opinion of this travesty of literature critiquing. Imagine how many other writers such as I have gotten such reviews and given up their loves? I just pray that some of them too can come to the realization that those that say such things have almost no right to do so. Right intention or not.

I commend you on a well written essay. However, I do not agree with you.

"There are no Mary Sues. There are good characters, so-so characters, and bad characters."

A Mary-Sue is basically another word for a bad character. That would make sense, wouldn't it? So whether someone reviews a story and says, "I think you've got a bad character." Or they say. "I think you've got a Mary-Sue." It doesn't make much of a difference.

Mary-Sues are mostly written among young writers. It is because of lack of experience, and lack of understanding other people.

Yes, there are some published writer's that write Mary-Sues. For some, I would have to say that it's just bad writing; but for others, such as J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, she screwed up her MC, but kept the story going with a dynamic plot, sub-plots, and amazing secondary characters. She made one mistake that she couldn't fix, but she covered it up as best she could.

I see no problem with calling a writer's character a Mary-Sue. It is just another way of suggesting that they either fix up their character, or fix up the rest of their story. If the writer can successfully do that, they are just as good a writer as if they had never written the Mary-Sue in the first place.

For the essay overall, I agree. "Mary Sue" isn't a very accurate term. There's a few things that I have a problem with in this essay, however, but take it in stride. I'm playing devil's advocate here. A few notes:

- "As silly as it seems that the entire idea behind immortality is to always have vigor and beauty, it would seem sillier, if a man or woman appeared and moved like they were four thousand years old, or four million years old."

Just because immortal characters 'typically' appear younger than their actual age doesn't mean that *every* immortal character has to be that way. Personally, I'd like to see an immortal character be aged because honestly, that's why living forever might not be such a fun thing. You age and decay and yet you can't pass on... well, that's just a personal side note.

As for the sentence itself, be careful. It doesn't really seem clear, mostly because you got so happy with the commas. Comma ninjas strike again!

- "Plenty of published authors commit this apparently heinous sin, such as Robert Jordan when he bestows several nicknames on, not just Rand, but a number of his characters."

Look, just because something is published doesn't make it a paradigm, Robert Jordan especially. I don't care what supporters of Paolini's Eragon say. It might be entertaining but it's riddled with lame crap that makes me want to scream. Publishers are in it for the money, not good writing.

Again with the effing commas!

- "This question is obviously a part of determining self-insertions, but it is entirely irrelevant; how likely is it the reader will know the writer loves to play the violin?"

I get what you mean, that a reader might never know that the author is inserting themselves. However, I don't see it as entirely irrelevant, and I think you might be missing the point of that section of the litmus tests. They're meant to make the *writers* aware of how attached they might be getting to their character. The more like the character the author is, the more likely they are to take offense. A writer might start to treat a character less like fiction and more like themselves. Get what I mean?

And forget about the semicolon between those sentences. A period and a capital H works just fine, or you can start the next sentence with something like "For instance, how likely...".

- The end started to get a little random, like you were thinking of things to say. Where you missing a section? Another good thing that you could have touched on would be characters that are completely un-Sue and yet are still badly written characters. Afterall, 'originality' doesn't guarantee awesomeness.

- Despite all that wonderful bashing of the Sue litmus tests, you forgot to mention the most important thing: Originality and the notion of good and bad works comes down to the *way* something is written! You can have the most 'Sue-ified' character, but if *written* in a fresh and new way, it's just as original as anything.

To go along with the above, who do people hate characters with Sue traits? Again, it's when the author writes about them and *only* them. If the author spends an entire paragraph dedicated to the beautiful and astounding features of their heroine and her apparently tragic past but doesn't give ** about the other 'less important' characters, then there's something wrong and a reader has the right to complain.

Anyhow, overall, I think you proved your point and I am in agreement (for the most part). Sorry if this all sounds a little random or jumbled; I get distracted easily. Go over the essay at least once more to get all the editing errors and all will be well. Keep on writing! ( :: )

Very good, I agree with you and I think you've pretty much summed it all up. Impressive.

This is a great response to the Mary Sue mania that seems to be taking over online fiction these days. I agree with you-I'm an avid supporter of freedom of character development. Good job!

It is well written, and well thought out. I thouroughly enjoyed it. However, some sentences were confusing, there were a few misspelled words, and it seemed as though a section was missing. You might wish to go over this again.