Polyamorous Vulpine

The thing about Mary Sue culture is that it isn't the fact that these women are beautiful or intelligent or skilled or charismatic that fandom so hates; it's that those facts are celebrated, appreciated, taken and/or presented without a denigrating and derisive filter of sexism. You'll notice that if they're put down, abused or painfully self-conscious there's much less of a negative response to simple admirable qualities (unless they're accused of whining or sneered at for having a low self-esteem, but that's merely a part of the fandom practice of belittling and dismissing the suffering of female characters and even castigating said characters) as long as they're, you know, kept in their place. (Sometimes almost - or exactly - verbatim.)

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From improper: If You Need To Make A Tiny Cry To Feel Superior
You Are The Problem
In Defense Of Mary Sue: She's Not The Enemy

Mary Sue is the character that only her author can love; she's beautiful, intelligent, powerful, influential, and she gets the guy (usually- Mary Sue stories tend to follow fairly heteronormative patterns). Sometimes she gets multiple guys, and they fight over her! She's unique - she's special - and she'll probably save the day with a little-known fact (or made up fact) that her aforementioned unique history has been uniquely tailored just so that she'll know just the right thing at just the right moment.

She's unrealistic in every way. Here's my question: so what?

Methodical debunking of all the very thin "reasons" used for by bully culture of aggressive Mary-Sue shaming.

From the comments:

I was honestly this close to just posting a sparkling, blinking marquee of IF YOUR SUPERIORITY IS BASED ON BULLYING CHILDREN, THE QUALITY OF THEIR WRITING IS NOT WHAT THAT REFLECTS UPON.

Mary Sue, what are you? or why the concept of Sue is sexist

Wish fulfillment characters have been around since the beginning of time. The good guys tend to win, get the girl and have everything fall into place for them. It’s only when women started doing it that it became a problem.

First person to call 'but I insult men with an explicitly gendered term in the same way! That makes it ~gender-neutral~!' gets laughed out of the room.

To be perfectly frank, considering that huge swathes, if not the vast majority, of all genres of fiction worldwide deride and denigrate or in some way deprioritize and minimize female characters on the basis of their sex, why shouldn't girls create fiction that glorifies and makes them not only necessary but vital due to some intrinsic fact of their female existence?

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I was thinking about female characters I've seen called Mary Sues.

There are so many stories where the male characters are powerful, and dangerous, and mysterious, and the characters around them male or female are drawn to them, or hate them, or love them, but overall respect them. Women, apparently, can't have that magnetism without being unrealistic. Sometimes exceptions are made when the character is a) older b) meaner and/or c) not in an emotional relationship.

Or maybe it's just that in those theoretically Mary Sue-ish stories I like, the heroine is rarely condescended to, belittled or shown contempt by characters that are supposed to be positive and ambiguous.

I'm not saying female characters can't be shown those emotions. I'm just saying it's such a constant barrage of it in both narrative and characters, and I'm really tired of the double standards.

Apparently that's too much to hope for.

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A Very Long Entry About Mary Sues by teyla

I think that someone writing a Mary Sue doesn't want to look at the "darker" aspects of their own personality. They create their characters entirely from aspects of their own personality that they like, or that they would like to think they had, and, most importantly, that they imagine would appeal to others. This is why usually, Mary Sues show up in "badfic"--a piece of writing that seems to have no depth, no thought, whose ambiguity seems to rely entirely on contrived conflict that offers very clear-cut choices: the "good" choice, and the "bad" choice. A Mary Sue's character goal is to endear themselves to the audience, and a Mary Sue's choices are made not based on what is most appropriate to the situation, but on what the writer thinks would charm the reader most. A Mary Sue is constantly asking for validation, not their fellow characters, but the reader--which is what makes them so annoying.

[...]

Mary Sues are, however, characters who were shaped not from within, but from the outside--carefully molded to appeal to everybody. One size fits all; you're going to love this character because they don't do anything. They don't act, they only react--to society's expectations, to their antagonist's/love interest's expectations, to the reader's presumed expectations. Which is also why I think that female Mary Sues are anything but feminist--we're trying for active female characters, aren't we? Not for characters who were carefully shaped to charm and endear themselves to the readership.

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Storming the Battlements or: Why the Culture of Mary Sue Shaming is Bully Culture.

This is an excellent, well written, intelligent article and really illustrates to me why I feel so uncomfortable using the word now.

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I wasn't expecting anybody to like the Mary Sue idea! Before I posted about it I had just this paragraph written, so I'm sharing it, and mentally puttering around.

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