Captain Jack "Mary Sue" Sparrow?

[dwgm]

The Mary Sue question is an interesting one. jenthegypsy, new to fanfic (what an adventure lies ahead!!), was asking me what a Mary Sue is, and, coincidentally, a member of little_details asked about the origin of the term. The term apparently dates back to a fanfic story in the Star Trek: The Original Series fandom, which actually had an OFC named Mary Sue. However, this site referenced in a comment in the little_details post has this to say...

She (or he) is created to serve one purpose: wish fulfilment. When a writer invents someone through whom he/she can have fantastic adventures and meet famous people (fictional or real), this character is a Mary Sue. (We don't have a name for the male version -- suggestions?

and that...

storytellers have been rehashing Mary Sue since the dawn of time....

By this definition, most any major canon character would be a Mary Sue, not just original characters. Think about it. Harry Potter? Frodo or Aragorn? And, most especially Jack Sparrow, and all the main characters of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Another referenced article in the little_details post has this to say about Mary Sue's characteristics...

She has better hair, better clothes, better weapons, better brains, better sex, and better karma than anyone else. Even next to the strong and interesting heroines of twentieth-century media and fiction, she stands out. She is singular; she is impossible to ignore.

Now replace "she" with "he", and you've got Jack Sparrow all over.

You could make a case that any main character in any story is a Mary Sue, unless he or she is a true antihero, with characteristics and adventures that serve as dire warnings rather than desirable examples. And who wants to read that, at least most of the time?

It doesn't seem to me that it's possible to write any character and fail to project one's experiences and philosophies through that character, canon or otherwise. And I don't think I am alone in wanting to read stories that are uplifting, and about people who are extraordinary, in one way or another. So it seems to me we're destined to be inundated with Mary Sues, as we have been since people started telling stories.

Comments

[porridgebird.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm..... my understanding has always been that a Mary Sue -- by definition -- is not a canon character. But (in fanfic) she becomes the Star of the Show. She's not always perfect or even "better" -- a lot of the time she's got big fat angsty problems that the canon characters are compelled to fix (usually with their genitalia). She's an author insert and the story is about her. The canon folk just co-star or play supporting roles

See what I think has happened is that, over the decades, the definition of MS has expanded so far beyond the original that there are some who say ANY OC is a Mary Sue. But I'm remembering back when it pretty much started, in the Trek fandom ("Yeoman Mary Sue"), after the first series ended & before the first movie was even in the works. That's where I first heard the term, and it was much more specific than it is now. It's way overused these days, imo.