The Other Mary Sue

When we the audience ‘dive into’ a tale, who are we when we do so?

The term ‘Mary Sue’ derives from Paula Smith’s ‘A Trekkie’s Tale,’ which appeared in the Star Trek fanzine Menagerie 2 in 1974. The lead of this tale was one Mary Sue, ‘the youngest lieutenant in star fleet at 15-1/2’ gifted with impossible talents, who is beloved by the main Trek characters, and saves the day. (I report this on fragmentary descriptions I found at the Wikipedia entry for ‘Mary Sue’ at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue.)

Smith is said to have been satirizing the tendency of (teenaged) fans of Star Trek whose fan fictions employed idealized (impossibly idealized) versions of their authors, as a wish-fulfillment, a way the writers could imagine themselves joining the crew on the starship Enterprise and getting Spock bewildered and Kirk impassioned, saving the day, and even dying glorious, noble, self-sacrificing deaths in doing so. Somewhere along the way this concept was taken up, so that it is quite popular in the fanfiction world. It is even applied to ‘canon’ characters and characters in original tales, to mean any character that is a flat, idealized proxy of the author.

Now it is no stretch to see our very definition of Romance and Earthereal tales as requiring the lead character be a Mary Sue, for ‘the Other Self’ is a representative of the author or audience with the bad parts stricken, and the good parts enhanced, with special talents, knowledge, skills, who all too naturally wins his goal and saves the day.

In original tales, or ‘canon’ characters for tales drawn from a common well (Lancelot du Lac, for example), the ‘Mary Sue-ness’ of these author proxies is harder to prove. Many modern fantasies have taken ‘representative’ modern men and women (more likely boys and girls) and swept them into Eartherea to serve some vital, cosmos-saving feat (for example, Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Tapestry of Fionavar in which five students from the University of Toronto are swept by an arch-mage into Fionavar, the archetype of all worlds, to serve a vital destiny. Kay was a Canadian who was pursuing a law degree at the University of Toronto when he conceived the basis of the tale.)

These tales, with their ‘modern every-boy and -girls’ swept up into Eartherea, are often written by talesmen who are decidedly not like the characters, but are instead middle-aged men and women who base the characters on children they know — perhaps the very children for whom they weave the tale. Alice in Wonderland comes to mind, as does the Narnia tales of C.S. Lewis.

So we can look at two types of ‘Mary Sue-ism’ — one in which the author casts himself into Eartherea to battle dragons and win fair lady, the other in which the author casts his specific and immediate audience into Eartherea. In the latter kind, the ‘every-boy’ tends not to be the prophesied King, but rather a helper and witness serving a vital but perhaps small role. So we see the children who go into Narnia only help and assist, and Alice is but a tourist in Wonderland. Tolkien’s hobbits may be seen as something of the sort, as Bilbo only helps settle the fate of five kingdoms, and is not the heir to any; at tale’s end he goes back home, enriched, wiser, but still just a hobbit who lives in a hole at Bag End.

We can also note that there is something broken, deficient, or awry in any tale that strikes any of its readers as including a Mary Sue (except for the very first, ‘A Trekkie’s Tale,’ where the effect was said to be deliberate, and is a parody). For just as soon as we say, ‘That’s the author putting himself into the tale!’ we have lost the illusion of the tale, we draw back out of Eartherea, shatter the spell, and look at ‘the man behind the curtain.’

Any false note will break the spell, if it be false and shrill enough. Alas, the knowledge that there is such a thing as a ‘Mary Sue’ encourages jaded readers to squint at many a tale’s lead and wonder, ‘Mary Sue? Or no?’ — whereas those as yet innocent of what a Mary Sue is, would not ask the question, and would be so much less likely to even consider it. They might well, on the other hand, note the cliché of the ‘youngest lieutenant in Star Fleet,’ a bewitchingly-fetching 15-1/2 year-old, who sweeps Kirk off his feet, out-logics Spock, and saves the day. But it is less the ‘Mary Sue-ness’ that does it, than the cliché.

Sometimes, the Other that strikes our fancy has no character traits in common with us — or even any that we admire. Sometimes we enjoy becoming bad, evil, willful, rebellious, in ways that we never allow ourselves to be in our real lives. Though this kind of lead may be no less a cliché, it is not generally considered an author’s proxy, though there is the rebel!MarySue who acts out on all the author’s willful rebelliousness, throws tantrums, breaks things, and is ultimately revealed to be hiding a dark tragedy in his past, having been traumatized (or at least unappreciated) at a younger age.

But Reader, be not over-harsh on Mary Sue and all her authors. We all dream on Eartherea with the hope to pass beyond the Fields We Know someday, and every hero in the immersive ‘fictive dream’ is but our own representative, through whose deeds we touch and taste the berries of immortality.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, July 19, 2008)