It often seems to me that the truly worrying thing about Mary Sues isn't character rape or bad prose or even wish-fulfilment. The worrying bit is the peek we get into a total stranger's personal psychology - and it's seldom a pretty sight.

Yes, I'm ranting again, though this particular rant isn't so much my usual vitriolic screed as it is a collection of random thoughts-in-progress, based on nothing more substantial than quite a lot of observation. Even I'm not totally sure how well this is going to work, but I'm going to give it a go all the same because anything else would be sensible and logical and since when have I allowed that to hold me back?

First off, I am well aware that I am probably not the first person to do this, but that never exactly stopped me before either.

Secondly, I am not (of course) by any stretch of the imagination an actual psychologist or even vaguely qualified to be anything very much. I have A-levels. Any idiot can get A-levels. That being so, some of the conclusions I come to in this rant-thing may be a bit wonky or inaccurate or just plain silly, or even blindingly bloody obvious. I'm still very much thinking this one through, so please forgive me if this doesn't sound quite right in some way. Once again, it's just one girl's opinion, though she's getting a little long in the tooth for that particular descriptor.

So. The psychology of Mary Sues.

As my luckless reader may well be aware, I created a fair few Mary Sues myself in my earlier days and have had at least a passing acquaintance with many, many more, and most of them are pretty worrying for what they imply about the psyche of their creators. My search for a representative of the breed took me, of course, to Gaia Online, which seems as good a place as any to find a Sue in her natural habitat.

After a bit of a search, during which I found both Akira and Shiki from Togainu no Chi being turned into all-American Gary Stus - I needed wangst past and contradictory personality and flange powers, and though many Sues have one or two, finding one with all three is sometimes a little harder - I found this 'OC' in the Kochi•Academy•[Accepting•News Update] RP thread. Kochi•Academy•[Accepting•News Update] is a fairly typical 'Academy for Speshully Speshul Super-Sues' roleplay, a natural breeding ground for beautifully angsty OCs who are tormented for being 'different'. (One of them, I shit ye not, is a hot zombie with no weaknesses whatsoever who can regenerate any part of her body including her head and angsts about being an overpowered unfeeling undead monster.) I've edited the really extraneous stuff out of our Mary Sue's character profile simply to stop your eyes crossing with the sheer tedium of it all. Her full profile can be found here.





So, here's a character whose past is angsty and dramatic and makes no real sense; who is nice yet rude and shy yet talkative and untrusting but gives strangers the benefit of the doubt and basically has no clear personality at all unless 'whatever her creator feels like at the time' counts and it's called a DECISION, Suethor, and you need to make one; and who has clearly wandered off with Orihime Inoue's powers never mind that she's still using them. Yumei Mitsuki here even has a bad Japanese name - and one which clearly owes its origin to her creator's own choice of screennname - despite the fact she's living in Generic America. Yeah, I think she's a fairly representative sample of the breed.

So, you may be wondering - or probably aren't but hey! Rhetoric is fun! - what, exactly, does this have to do with Suethor psychology?

( Thankfully that's the end of the preamble. Now read on. )

In short, the average Mary Sue isn't so much a fictional character as she is a study in teenage psychology. They're full to overflowing with adolescent psychodrama.

It's no real wonder that as young authors get older, most of them stop creating these kinds of characters. Creating Mary Sues is a stage most young authors go through and they aren't necessarily damaging to a writer's development in and of themselves. Once young writers have gotten over (or learned to deal with) their teenage insecurities and personal problems, and they've started actually interacting with the opposite sex instead of giggling over them from a distance, there's far less of an actual psychological need to create flimsily-drawn wish-fulfilment characters like these and consequently less of them get written.

Most people get over their Sues and look back on what they've created with the mild embarrassment of adults everywhere reflecting on adolescent folly; Mary Sues are as much a part of growing up, for a writer, as really bad haircuts and ridiculous clothes are for pretty much everyone else. It's probably worth mentioning, though, that the most horribly memorable Sues are almost invariably the ones that were created by adult authors. The Suethors who don't grow out of it are the ones you really have to look out for, and who really deserve our scorn.