Comics Are Great! 03 – Mary Sue

This time we take a trip to the murky waters of definitions in writing and storytelling. To complicate matters we take on a term first coined in fanfiction: the Mary Sue character. Though opinions differ on which characters stand as good examples of a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu, read the Wikipedia article), most agree on what a Mary Sue character’s traits are. They are generally held to be characters who act as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author, possessing unbelievable skills, unparalleled physical beauty, and solving a story’s crisis with relative ease. But these days it seems this term gets thrown as a criticism at virtually any kind of character in fiction, and if we extend the logic of wish-fulfillment out, can we even think of the act of writing itself a form of Mary Sue creation? How does one draw the line and make some distinctions so as not to go mad second-guessing everything they create?

I’m grateful to be joined by Dave Roman, Brandon Dayton, and Kasey Van Hise in an attempt to answer these questions.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• TV Tropes
• Brandon Dayton’s excellent essay An Appeal for the Epic Character
• Wikipedia’s article on the Mary Sue character
• A Mary Sue Litmus Test
• A forum thread on the Comic Book Resources site on the subject
• Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends
• A quote on writing by Jim Jarmusch

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