Alright, let's start this whole blog exercise with a theoretical discussion of literary terminology. If this blog persists long, this is the sort of thing you'll be most frequently getting out of me. I want to try, as many before me have, to define that most elusive concepts: the Mary Sue, and her counterpart, Marty Stu (sometimes called Gary Stu).If you've hung around the internet much, you've heard a million definitions of the Sue. In fact, it you're hung around the internet much, you've come across the phrase 'If you've hung around the internet much' a million times. The best definition I've seen so far is that the Sue is an overly idealized author stand-in, and I think that sums up the concept in a nutshell. But I'm not going for nutshell wisdom. I'm looking for a more rambling kind of insight. This may take a while.
If you follow me much on YouTube, you're probably reasonably familiar with my dramatic readings of the legendary Zelda fanfic, My Inner Life, which contains one of the most Suish characters ever devised. Her name is Jenna, and she's unbearable. She's always better at everything than Link, always fawned over by the other characters, always rewriting Hyrule's history, and always winning every fight without much trouble.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
The Difference Between the Hero and The Marty Stu
Of course, that applies to %90 of heroes in other works of fiction, as well. Gilgamesh is the best fighter in ancient Sumeria, all his subjects love him, and the world basically revolves around him. Beowulf is an unambiguously cool guy (eh kills mosnters and doesn't afraid of anything).
So why is it that Batman isn't a Marty Stu? He's unambiguously fantastic and idealized. He always wins. What's the difference?
I don't think that a Sue or Stu is just a poorly-written protagonist. There is a fundamental difference beyond mere quality. Look at Prince of Space. He is, ultimately, heroic. He's always right, and he's also VERY poorly-written, but he isn't a Stu. Not really.
Another definition that is often used is that a Stu or Sue bends the entire plot around him- or herself. And while this is true of every Sue out there, it's also true of plenty of non-Sue heroes. Look at Harry Potter. He's clearly not a Stu, and yet the world revolves around him. Kinda. There are prophecies a-plenty surrounding him, only he can defeat Voldemort, and he's a pretty great guy. But he isn't a Stu.
What Batman and Harry are is heroes. And a hero is generally pretty tolerable, while a Stu or Sue is not. And here is my belief on the inherent difference. Ready, guys?
A hero (or heroine, for that matter) is an improbably idealized character who serves as the story's protagonist, accomplishes great deeds, and is intended to be unambiguously liked by the reader. The entire plot and setting can be focused specifically around this character, but that doesn't necessarily make them a Stu or Sue. The hero is a character who is valourized.
A Sue or Stu is a hero that is designed, whether consciously or otherwise, to flatter and valourize the opinions and identities of a specific, often very small, group. This group could be limited to the author, and with fan fiction, it usually is. The Sue is a charater who stands in for something else, which is being valourized.
Jenna is a Sue for the fan fiction writer (whose name just happens to be Jen), because she is – and not even Jen has illusions about this – an idealized version of the author. Jenna is constantly being told how pretty she is because Jen wants to feel pretty. She is constantly the centre of the plot because Jen wants to feel important.
Harry isn't a Stu because he doesn't pander to any specific group. Partly, this is because he, like most protagonists, has very little personality. He's basically a nice guy, even if he has the occasional emo fit in Order of the Phoenix. He likes sports, and he wants a girlfriend, and then he gets one and he's happy, and he wants to stop the bad guy and all that. He's a bit of a geek, but if he were some type of Geek Stu (it's happened) we'd constantly be told why geeks are inherently better than everyone else. He is a geek and he is valourized, but geekiness itself is not valourized. Harry's blandness is probably his greatest strength: we can all see ourselves in his shoes, and we can all care about him.
The movie Scanners very cleverly takes this concept of the bland hero and runs with it: the hero of the piece, Cameron Vale, is the most emotionless, personality-free motherfucker you'll ever see in a movie. While Harry is invitingly blank, Vale is alienatingly blank. That's why his name is Vale. Because he's hidden from our view. And let's just say that it's no wonder the most memorable thing in the movie is Michael Ironside as the head-exploding villain.
There's a Goethe novel called The Sorrows of Young Werther (read this comic right here: http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=228) that became very popular among German Romantic poets because it's about a poet who isn't appreciated and kills himself. It might be well-written, but you can already see the masturbation in their reading. As they read it, every one of them was comforted by the myth that one day, they too might be appreciated, that they really were worth something, that their suicide could be beautiful. All of this is nonsense, of course, but what's aesthetically appealing to us is often based on how personally flattering we find it.
This sort of thing still happens today. If a Stu is a character who stands in for a concept that is being valourized, then Jake from Avatar is a Stu for white guilt and primitivistic fantasies. 300's portrayal of King Leonidas is a Sue for Frank Miller's own neofascistic views on masculinity, violence, and race. Because these are the themes that are being valourized in these awful, awful movies. All of Byron's protagonists are transparently Stus for the affair he had with his half-sister – Manfred is “Pity me!”, Don Juan is “She wanted me so it wasn't my fault!” and Childe Harold is “I'm an outcast. That makes me cool!” John Galt is Ayn Rand's Stu for being a self-justifying jerk, which is almost meta, in a way.
It's quite possible to pull this off completely by accident: a hero is supposed to be somewhat idealized, and many of the more egomaniacal writers out there will take this to mean that a hero(ine) is supposed to be The Ideal (Wo)Man, and then they broadcast their own egomaniacal, and often problematic views. We've already gone over 300's valourization of the fascist state through Leonidas. So let's go back to Jenna, for a minute. Yes, she's a Sue for Jen's plea for attention, but she's also a Sue for Jen's attitude about women's place in society; because she's so idealized a character, when she obsesses over childbirth and spends all her free time in the kitchen (probably barefoot), we're basically being told that that's how all women should do it. Sues and Stus aren't just annoying; they're socially irresponsible.
Perhaps this is why there are more Mary Sues than Marty Stus (or Gary Stus; hell, we can't even agree on a name for the male variant). For whatever stupid reason, "Feminism" has become a bad word, connoting bra-burning Second Wave misandrists who don't shave their armpits. But luckily, the actual principles of Feminism have, more or less, gotten through; Feminism is a sort of sacrificial lamb for its own cause. So a generation of girls grow up thinking that being powerful is revolutionary, and they write Sues based on this principle. Characters who won't shut up about the fact that they're powerful and female (gasp!); Characters who are, from the earliest stages of their design, valourizations of girl power. And although you'd have to be mad to deny the validity of girl power, this isn't about that for which the characters stand. It's about the way they stand for it: annoyingly.
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