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

[radiumx.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, but it's no Mary Sue (or Gary Stu) if an author creates a self-insert to star in an original piece of work.

I've always believed the same - A Mary/Gary is only such if they're trying to make it un-obvious but fail miserably.

A group of friends who did not go to the same high school as I used to write a serial web piece called "Self-Extraction". This chronicled the adventures of a squad of assassins hired by literary aficionados to 'extract' particularly persistent or annoying 'self-inserted' Mary/Garys from their favorite TV shows, comics, and books.

[geekmama.livejournal.com]

a serial web piece called "Self-Extraction".

LOL--the premise sounds very cool. I presume Wesley Crusher was a target? (Although I liked Wesley, which just goes to show you that Mary Sues can be appealing (if he does indeed qualify))

[cymbeline.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of something a friend and I did in High school. We got extra credit in our English class for writing short stories using the week's vocab words. Well the last week he proceeded to kill off the characters from my story as well as a few others in his...it was hilariously funny!