Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: People always put extra conditions on what Mary Sue means

[quote name="Vested Id"][quote name="blackwater"]The term came from the fan-fiction world. A Mary Sue is a character that someone drops into an existing universe. If the character was there all along, they're not a Mary Sue. The distinction matters. When a character is there from the beginning, the story tends to be balanced around that character's abilities and powers. So Superman and Batman are powerful, but they also have powerful enemies. You could say the same for Picard and Kirk, or Luke Skywalker and Leia. But when some author adds a Mary Sue to the universe, it unbalances things. For example, in the recent Star Wars movies, Rey was a huge Mary Sue because she could effortlessly do things that it took Luke Skywalker years of training and effort to do. This cheapens the original trilogy. Why should anyone care about Luke's struggle if Rey can do all that stuff on day one? She can even beat the main bad guy right out of the gate. Why should anyone care about the Skywalker saga if Rey (whose parents were originally "nobodys") is just as powerful? Authors who aren't good enough to come up with their own shit want to drop these kind of characters into an existing universe to fulfill some kind of fantasy. Maybe it's a power fantasy, or maybe it's a fantasy of showing how awesome their preferred race or group is ("grrl power"). Whatever. They don't see that by creating this kind of character, they're cheapening everything else in the story. And these authors always, always feel the need to rub their Mary Sue shit all over the existing storyline. If it's a Harry Potter fanfic, the Mary Sue will show up all the time to show how he's smarter than Harry, prettier than Hermionie, whatever. If anything was impressive in the original work, the Mary Sue will have to make a point of showing how they're even more impressive.[/quote] This is fine analysis, but I think you're talking about a manifestation of the Mary Sue type. Other people insist it's a "self-insert" because the original example was, which is a desperate feminist manuever to control the meaning. Any primay character, <em>namely women</em>, who have no flaws can be recognized as a Mary Sue. It's just a fact about human psychology — a feeling that women ought to embody virtue.[/quote]