Hello and welcome to Fanfic Subgenres, where I take a look at subgenres of fan fiction, and then find examples of those subgenres in professionally-produced works.
This time, I’ll be taking a look at Self Insertion Fics and the character type known as the Mary Sue.
Self Insertion is pretty much what you expect. It’s where the author puts himself/herself into the story. They somehow find their way to the setting of a movie, video game, TV show, anime, or whatever, and interact with the characters.
In a Self Insertion Fic, the author character usually is familiar with all the characters and their conflicts from having seen the show in his/her own universe, and tries to meddle with them. They try to be the matchmaker and pair their preferred Shipping couple together, or try to get characters who are quarrelling to put aside their feud, or even try teaming up with the hero to defeat the villains.
Of course, when such things go too far, many people tend to dislike Self Insertion Fics because they’re basically run by the author’s ego. The author basically steals the spotlight from the characters to such a degree that readers tend to be annoyed. This of course has led to several parodies of Self Insertion Fics where the Self-Insertion gets embarassed, easily trounced in battle with antagonists, and/or has all sorts of humiliating things happen to him/her (in manners which may or may not be in character for those dishing those punishments out).
A variant of the self-insertion is the Mary Sue, an original character that is basically a thinly-veiled substitute for the author. This character is usually (though not always) native to the setting — in other words, she didn’t travel to the 24th century, she actually lives in the same time period as Jean-Luc Picard and the rest. Her male counterpart is referred to sometimes as a Marty Stu or a Gary Stu.
The Mary Sue, like the Self Insertion author-character, is often despised because she steals the spotlight away from the canonical characters. Often at times, the Mary Sue is ridiculously competent at whatever the characters are good at, whether it’s steering starships, performing martial arts, using the Force, or playing videogames. All too often, a Mary Sue will get many of the principle characters to fall for her. Generally, in all the worst examples of Mary Sue, the world will revolve around her.
Some Mary Sues are not quite as extreme as that. There are a few characters who are obviously based on the authors but are only minor characters who pop in as bit players. But mostly, Mary Sue has come to mean ‘That ridiculously attractive ridiculously competent thinly-veiled insert character who steals the spotlight and makes the main characters fall for her’.
Are there Mary Sues in professionally-produced work? Of course there are.
A number of Agatha Christie books have a recurring mystery novelist character named Ariadne Oliver. She’s clearly based on Agatha Christie herself. However, she does not intrude upon the story too much, serving mostly as comic relief. One of her main weaknesses is that being a mystery writer, she comes up with way too many ideas as to whodunnit and why. So of course she’s not going to be the one to solve the case.
However, this is not to say that the more negative examples of Mary Sue can’t find their way into mainstream fiction. There are a few examples, but first, let’s make a few things clear.
A lot of characters in movies of the past few decades have been accused of being ‘Mary Sues’, whether they are or not. The term ‘Mary Sue’ has, in recent years, been abused by questionable “fans” to bash characters (especially female characters) they don’t like. These people have basically forgotten the actual meaning of the term. I’ve already gone into it above, but here’s a quote from Curiosity Inc’s review of Prey to back me up.
Back in my day, a Mary Sue was a character hotter than Kirk, smarter than Spock, more empathetic than Bones, and sleeps with all three. A Mary Sue has no development arc because she is impossibly perfect from the outset. A Mary Sue never has to face any kind of adversity because she’s instantly and immediately capable of solving any problem she faces. She has no agency of any kind because everything is practically done for her. This is why a Mary Sue is a boring character in a useless masturbatory tale.
(For a classic textbook example, I maintain that with The Nutcracker and the Four Realms as with the ballet it’s adapted from, the protagonist is indubitably a Mary Sue. Everything is simply handed to her, she has no development or agency whatsoever, the story is basically nonexistent, and nobody really cares about anything except the music anyway.)
While Rey of the Star Wars sequel trilogy might be called one by some who (unlike me or Curiosity Inc) DO use the term too lightly, she is not treated too substantially different than how Luke, Leia, or Han were treated in the original trilogy. She does have development and agency, and very little is just handed to her. The Force is already an established part of the Star Wars universe, so if she’s a Mary Sue, than so is Luke, Anakin, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka, and every other Jedi/Force strong protagonist in all of Star Wars. I wouldn’t call her a Mary Sue.
However, the more negative examples of Mary Sue DO exist in professionally produced material. As an example, I’d give the live-action Resident Evil movies of the 2000s-2010s.
One of the harshest criticisms of the Resident Evil movies is directed at the character of Alice. Alice is an original character not from the games. In the first movie, she’s a tolerable Badass Normal (not too much different from the games’ protagonists – more on that later), but in the second (Resident Evil: Apocalypse, adapting the last days of Raccoon City scenario from the games), she starts gaining super-powers due to the experiments the Umbrella Corporation has performed on her. She is able to move with speed and strength beyond regular human capability, and take down the Nemesis creature in a fight.
Worst of all, she blatantly upstages characters who were the protagonists of the games in, at times, a truly obnoxious manner. Jill Valentine attempts to do something ‘cool’, only for Alice to step in, interrupt, and finish what Jill Valentine was trying to do. This is particularly egregious in the scene where Jill Valentine is lighting a match to blow up monsters in a kitchen pursuing them, only for the match to go out and Alice to toss a lit cigarette to finish the job. It’s as if she’s trying to say “I’m the star, bitch! You don’t upstage me! You’re the sidekick!”
Oh, and the aforementioned Nemesis? In the original video game series, it was Jill Valentine who fought this aforementioned boss. But here, Alice once again takes over and is the one to defeat the antagonists. Jill Valentine therefore is demoted to side character in a movie that adapted elements from a video game where she was a protagonist.
Alice is also played by Milla Jovovich, who was dating the films’ writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson at the time, and married not long after. Put all that together, and one could make a case for Alice being a Mary Sue in the negative sense of the term. If Alice isn’t a Mary Sue, she comes dangerously close to being one.
(Some might also call Alice a movie variation of ‘Dungeonmaster’s Girlfriend‘, a tabletop role playing game phenomenon where someone’s player characters are given preferential treatment because of a relationship between the player and the Dungeon Master/Game Master).
Oh, and while I’m not all that familiar with the Resident Evil video game series myself, I am acquainted with them enough to know that all of their protagonists – Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Claire Redfield (who turns up in the third movie and is demoted to side character, though not as obnoxiously as Jill Valentine in Resident Evil: Apocalypse) are normal human beings fighting monsters without the assistance of super-strength, telekinesis, healing factors, or other superpowers. They fit the ‘Badass Normal’ trope, and were capable (with the player’s assistance) of winning battles without those abilities. In the first movie Alice wasn’t as out of place because she didn’t have the aforementioned superpowers yet and was mostly a Badass Normal like the other Resident Evil protagonists.
I really wanted to like the character (as I tend to like strong female characters), but after the second movie, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, I found myself thinking they’d taken the character in a direction I didn’t care for. And I was wondering why Jill Valentine was even in the movie if she wasn’t allowed to do anything really heroic or ‘badass’.
(And I’m not the only one. A lot of people who were fans of the original games thought Sienna Guillory was great in the role of Jill Valentine, but were frustrated at her being upstaged at nearly every turn by Alice, a character – I must repeat – who is not a canonical part of the original video game series).
Not that I’m defending the Resident Evil movies. They’re poorly-written films that play like Anderson and the rest of the creators were basically making the story up as they went along. A lot of the actions and motivations (especially those of the villains) make no sense. But all these problems are not helped by Alice’s becoming a superhuman, and the fact that characters from the games such as Jill Valentine are only in the movies so that Alice can upstage them and/or keep them from upstaging her.
In any case, Mary Sues, whether you like them or not, are present in professionally-produced fiction too.
(Oh, and as of this writing, I’ve only seen the first three Resident Evil movies. Alice is a bit more tolerable in the third film, but still there’s a few questionable moments. I have the fourth on DVD, but I haven’t been in any hurry to pop it into the DVD player. I have, however, heard that the games’ protagonists still end up having to – at best – be reduced to side characters in favor of Alice).
(This is an updated and revised version of an article I originally posted on Jul 27, 2014).
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