Mary Sue

[abigailnus]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "alice_loves_cats" <hypercolor99 at h...> 
wrote:
> Anne U:
> 
> >(poor plots, bad 
> > grammar and punctuation, MarySues, etc.) 
> 
> Alice:
> 
> MarySues??? (see above)

Ah, Mary Sue.  I take you haven't read much fanfic, have you, Alice?  Mary Sue was the 
name of a half-Vulcan, half-Human character in an early Star Trek fanfic (this was 
back when fanfics were being distributed in printed magazines).  She was so perfect, 
apparently, that she had Spock, Kirk and McCoy madly in love with her.  The author of 
that fanfic was named Mary Sue.  Since then Mary Sue has become a byname for a 
character who is a blatant insertion of the author (or rather an idealised version of the 
author) into a story.  Mary Sue is perfect.  She's beautiful, she's smart, she's funny, 
and most importantly, everybody loves her.  The men all want her, the women all 
adore her.  She can do anything - fight, cook, sing, perform magic, fix warp engines - 
and often has special powers such as telepathy or prescience.  She has a preternatural 
insight into the main characters of the world the fanfic is set in, and often sets about 
fixing their lives.  She frequently dies, and is lamented by all who knew her, at which 
point she comes back to life.

There are some hilarious, and several serious, discussions of Mary Sue online, as well 
as tests to discover if your original character is indeed a Mary Sue.  Specifically, I 
remember a website called Fanfic University, or some such thing, which had some 
very interesting articles on the Mary Sue phenomenon.  The paragraph above is more 
or less paraphrased from my memory of one of those articles, but there's also some 
discussion of the origin of the phenomenon, and the reasons for its resilience.

Abigail
No idea what a BNF is, though.