“Mary Sue” was a big deal back in the 00s. The term was coined in a Star Trek fan ‘zine back in the 70s according to Internet Lore (and while I don’t think anyone’s ever dug up a copy of the original magazine to check, this is recent enough and has a specific enough origin that I’d be surprised if Internet Lore was wrong about this one), but I have no idea how the term was used back then. What I do know is that the term had a heyday during a specific decade and I was an eyewitness to the phenomenon. Everyone reading this is likely vaguely aware of the character archetype, but likely also aware that defining what makes a “Sue” is hard to nail down.
Are they held up as beyond reproach by the narrative? No, the Villain Sue is recognizably cut from the same cloth, and there are characters like Samurai Jack and Superman who are generally portrayed as always doing the right and reasonable thing, and these characters are clearly not what people were talking about when they were discussing Mary Sues.
Are they a critical mass of out-of-place traits in the setting like angel wings, red or purple or otherwise unusually colored eyes, and powers either not present in source material (and not within the reasonable ability of new characters to obtain, i.e. it’s not an X-Men style setting where new people are expected to have never-before-seen powers) or else having a conglomeration of powers that are otherwise mutually exclusive? Not really, while people did start to develop kneejerk reactions to certain eye or hair colors at the height of the phenomenon fifteen to twenty years ago, the fact is that Aang is not a Mary Sue because he can bend all four elements, has not one but two special animal companions, and has distinguishing body tattoos connecting him to an extinguished culture slaughtered by the main villain. Aang isn’t even a little bit of a Mary Sue despite a pileup of so-called “Sue signifiers” that easily push him into at least mild Sue territory if you try to count purely by number of unique and attention-grabbing (or at least, attention-seeking) design elements.
Is it purely a construct of 1) unreasonable standards for fanfic writers to bow to the original IP and canon and 2) rank misogyny? While it is certainly notable that Mary Sue’s name is Mary Sue, and that people even proposed “Gary Stu” as a male alternative and even sometimes tried to define Gary Stu as having different traits, Kim Possible and Buffy Summers were rarely smacked with the Mary Sue label. Indeed, Buffy Summers was frequently held up as the anti-Sue counter to Bella Swan, who did not escape the Mary Sue label despite being an original (legally, at least) character in a book sold at Barnes and Noble. Indeed, precisely because of her prominence in bookstores, Bella Swan was probably the main target of the anti-Sue community throughout the late 00s. There was definitely a general attitude that internet writers were kids playing dress up as real authors or, at the very least, on a lower rung on a career ladder that would hopefully end in becoming a “real author” one day, and a lot of the criticism of Mary Sues was bulwarked by if not rooted in the idea that a character this self-indulgent was unbecoming of prose fiction, which should aspire to publication. But that didn’t stop the consensus from emerging (amongst people who talked about Mary Sue at all, at least – Twilight’s fans were not generally in those communities) that Bella Swan was a Mary Sue, and Twilight unworthy of publication and popularity because of it.
So if Mary Sue isn’t a character without flaws, isn’t (just) a character with a critical mass of attention-seeking traits that people were particularly sick of seeing at the time, and isn’t purely a construct of gatekeeping (even if some amount of gatekeeping caused certain characters and authors to receive unfair scrutiny), then what is it?
I think the inchoate vibe that people were trying to describe with Mary Sue is basically that a Mary Sue narrative feels like it’s the self-perception of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Internetizens were obviously not broadly familiar with the diagnostic criteria for NPD back then (or now) and weren’t actually judging narratives on a rubric of how narcissistic they seemed on a clinical scale, but narcissism isn’t something psychiatrists invented, it’s a real phenomenon that people can pick up on in their environment without having first learned about it from a book. You wouldn’t expect people to be good at identifying a psychiatric phenomenon like this from pure experience, especially when the average age of the community is sixteen, but the clumsy and amateurish efforts of people to describe Mary Sues isn’t exactly impressive in its precision. People’s reaction to Mary Sue is exactly the poorly articulated and yet clearly felt experience you would expect from teenagers in absolutely no condition to accurately describe a psychological disorder encountering it.
Nor for that matter do I think the people who wrote Mary Sues necessarily had NPD themselves – I expect that was very rarely the case. Mary Sue was a phenomenon mainly of either inexperienced writers or hobbyists making no effort to improve, not a handful of prolific serial abusers. When Mary Sue writers did show signs of narcissism, it was usually teenage narcissism which they grew out of. I think the main cause of why Mary Sue feels like a story told by a narcissist is not because it is literally written by someone with NPD, but because writing is something you do alone, and people’s empathy seems to shut off almost completely when someone else is not physically in the room (or at least audible). It’s not controversial to say that people are much more anti-social typing on their screens than when speaking in person, so I don’t find it a huge reach to imagine people writing alone tend to default towards narcissism even if they’re not like that when interacting with other people.
But what do I mean when I say that Mary Sue stories feel like the world through the perspective of a narcissist?
Well, you know those “Sue tests” designed to tell you if a character was a Mary Sue based on a point total calculated from whether they had rainbow eyes and what their BMI was? The diagnostic criteria for NPD are like that, except there’s only nine of them, you need five to qualify, and they’re way better at describing Mary Sue stories (though not necessarily Mary Sue herself – Mary Sue is how a narcissist describes themselves). It should be noted, though, that a story does not automatically improve the fewer of these traits it has, and that my goal with this post is to describe a phenomenon, not provide writing advice.
- Grandiose sense of self-importance. Narcissists are obsessed with and exaggerate or fabricate their accomplishments and abilities. Mary Sue becomes an archmage at the age of fourteen. This is one where the age of the writer often punts a story firmly into satisfying this criteria: A fourteen year old wants to write about a character their own age, but also wants to participate in important events. This necessitates writing a prodigy of absurd capability.
- Frequent fantasies about having or deserving success, wealth, power, beauty, or love. Mary Sue stories often straightforwardly are fantasies about having or deserving these things. One of the most critical signs of a Sue is a character who has these things and complains about being unfortunate and victimized anyway, which is also a thing narcissists do.
- Belief in superiority. Mary Sue is the chosen one, has special powers other people don’t, sometimes including a genius brain that lets them discover things other people couldn’t and with minimal effort. The Tony Stark archetype of being a super genius whose big brain lets them accomplish things other people just can’t even attempt had very little overlap with the era of Mary Sue discourse, and yet it’s not hard to see that BBC’s Sherlock steadily grew into more and more of a Sue over the course of the series and that the first major warning sign was the way his deductive abilities were portrayed as a superpower unique to him, and not (as in the original stories) something he learned to do and constantly tried to pass on to others, with partial success in some cases – Watson was never Holmes’ equal, but he became a noticeably good detective by learning Holmes’ methods, while Scotland Yard remained buffoonishly incompetent by ignoring them. Doyles’ Sherlock’s abilities were a thing he had a knack for but which anyone could learn, while BBC Sherlock’s abilities are a superpower unique to him and a handful of other special gifted people. Sherlock’s use of this trope is pretty glaring since it’s in such contradiction to the less narcissistic source material, but “the story is about Steve because Steve is the one who happened to bond with the Infiniatrix and get super powers” is a perfectly fine premise.
- Need for admiration, reacting poorly to criticism, obsessed with what others think of them, and fishing for compliments. Mary Sue isn’t usually like this herself, but other characters are as obsessed with her as a narcissist would want people to be with the narcissist themselves. People who like Mary Sue are good, people who dislike Mary Sue are bad. People who are indifferent to Mary Sue don’t exist – they secretly have an opinion and are hiding it, so they probably dislike her and are evil. Nobody is ever on Mary Sue’s side despite disliking her as an ally of convenience, nobody ever opposes Mary Sue for understandable reasons. At best, there is some lie or delusion that causes them to oppose Mary Sue and they switch sides as soon as the truth is revealed. A Mary Sue story doesn’t depict Mary Sue exhibiting the attention-seeking behavior of a narcissist because the world and the people in it are already obsessed with her.
- Entitlement. Narcissists believe they deserve more than other people. Mary Sue often gets special treatment from authority figures or allies and then complains anyway because the treatment wasn’t special enough.
- Willingness to exploit others. Narcissists view other people as tools to achieve their own ends, without any goals of their own. Distinct from psychopaths (meaning, people with anti-social personality disorder, because yes psychopathy is a colloquial term with no official diagnostic meaning but it’s also a useful noun describing people of that demographic), narcissists care a lot about what other people think of them, but they don’t care about what those other people want for themselves. This is an important distinction because while Mary Sue often claimed to be a psychopath or used psychopathy as an excuse (this was in vogue back in the 00s), narcissism is distinct. Other people’s thoughts are important to the Mary Sue narrative insofar as they relate to Mary Sue, but they have no goals or desires outside of that. Other characters don’t react the way real people would to this because the story has a narcissistic perspective, which means other people actually do lack any thoughts or feelings not directly relevant to Mary Sue.
- Lack of empathy. You only need five out of the nine to qualify for NPD and this is the one that a Mary Sue story most often misses, although somewhat incidentally: The people portrayed by the Mary Sue story are so lacking in internal lives that there’s barely anything to be empathetic for. Sometimes Mary Sue’s combination of entitlement and victim narrative cause her to demonstrate a lack of empathy for other people’s problems (narcissists often throw temper tantrums when someone else shares experiences of victimization because it diminishes the importance of their own victim narrative, and sometimes Mary Sue’s antagonists will reflect this, but that’s rare – and I suspect those stories are written by actual real narcissists). Mary Sue also sometimes gets to tick this box because she doesn’t notice or almost instantly forgets when people sacrifice themselves for her. Usually, though, Mary Sue gets a pass on this one because the other criteria have created a world where there’s no opportunity to demonstrate empathy one way or another. These criteria are descriptions of the story’s perspective, not of its protagonist, but counting the story as lacking empathy because its need for admiration has eroded any internal lives in its supporting characters feels like double-counting.
- Frequent envy. Mary Sue tends to dodge this one as well, but not always: Sometimes her opponents have hordes of unearned wealth, status, and power which Mary Sue then acquires for herself, which will be portrayed as restoring some natural order of things. Other times Mary Sue always had wealth, power, etc., or acquires them without any comparison to a less deserving antagonist.
- Arrogance. Mary Sue is often rude and contemptuous of other people. This is partly informed by the popularity of acerbic wit in the 00s, which writers of Mary Sue would sometimes try to replicate while failing to get the actual “wit” part. But also being able to insult people and get away with it is semi-frequently part of the fantasy.
This test works really well for identifying characters that feel like Mary Sues for me. I don’t know how broadly applicable it is – I feel like it’s a reasonable guess that this is what people were getting at when they talked about Mary Sues back in the day, but all I can really say for sure is that it accords very well with how I used that term, and people of the time didn’t generaly think I was using it incorrectly.
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