Beware subjective morality.

Online media criticism has some peculiarities. Among these is the term ‘Mary Sue,’ derived from a Star Trek fanzine story. The term is widely used and therefore, by the same virtue as other powerful pejoratives (‘fascist,’ ‘racist,’ etc. (admittedly more serious accusations)), it has nearly as many definitions as uses, and possibly more. I’ve taken a stab at defining the term for my use which still holds up. But today I’d like to have another go at providing a diagnostic: when can we identify a character as a ‘Mary Sue’?

We can start by discarding the gender requirement. While I’ll be treating the character as feminine for ease of reading, gender is not a useful part of the term.

My definition revolved around the character as a fantasy-fulfilment which overwhelms the narrative’s coherence and verisimilitude. We must recognize, however, that a character always being right doesn’t actually constitute Mary Sue-dom. A character can be consistently right and still be a realistic character; that doesn’t mean ‘always right’ isn’t dangerous for a character. He may become an Author’s Pet, a related problem, or a mere mouthpiece. If you have a character who does what is right in every instance, consider whether he faces real challenges or real distress, if he pays in real terms for his choice (more than cosmetic consequences), and if he avoid the Mary Sue trap described below.

Here’s what happens with a Mary Sue: the character becomes not merely right but the standard of rightness.

• A Mary Sue never does wrong- and if she does do wrong, the narrative provides what it judges to be a complete justification. Or she does wrong, and the narrative treats the wrongdoing as ‘cool’ or ‘admirable’ (a gritty Mary Sue rather than a pretty one).
• A Mary Sue has cosmetic flaws- but they never really hurt her. They never really cost her, except….
• Anybody who fights against the Mary Sue is (1) utterly evil (2) deceived as to the MS’s nature (3) evil but being set up for a redemption through….
• If the Mary Sue ‘likes’ a character, he is redeemable; if she hates him, he is irredeemable. In fact, redemption’s substance is being liked by the MS.
• Counterpoint, if the MS dislikes an apparent good guy, he is evil, in the story’s estimation.
• One result of this standard focused on the MS’s perspective as the standard for morality is that Lust Objects (i.e. the character, original or borrowed from somebody else, that the author/ the MS lusts after, sexually or on another path of desire) will never be truly evil, though he may be alluringly, transgressively ‘evil’.
• All these MS standards are unmoored from reality. Evil and good, in the story’s perspective, have to do with how much the MS (the author-insert) likes the character or the action. Whether the reader is revolted by this clash depends on whether they adopt the MS’s perspective and agree with making her the moral standard.

If you’ll note, one give-away for a Mary Sue and the basis of much of their repulsiveness is that they rely on a fundamentally subjective morality. This should be repulsive because morality is objective, based on the unchanging God (Gen. 18:25). For some, it is attractive because they enter into and sympathize with the perspective which defines the subjective morality. For too many, this is repulsive because it clashes with their own false morality. But in the end it is fundamentally discordant with reality, a flaw which dooms the enterprise from the beginning.