Mary Sues make terrible protagonists and indeed destroy any story they are in. But that doesn’t mean they still don’t have a fanbase. And Lauren Chen found a Twitter thread with some interesting responses that reveal why the Mary Sue isn’t going away any time soon.
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In a video published to her Mediaholic YouTube channel on Dec. 8, Chen highlighted a Twitter thread by user @JoshuaLisec that provided an explanation of why Mary Sue characters don’t work. The thread also identified characters such as Galadriel from The Rings of Power, Rey from the Star Wars franchise, and Captain Marvel from her eponymous movie as Mary Sues.
Lisec’s explanation is rather innocuous. He clearly explains (as others have done) why protagonists who have no character flaws or challenges to overcome don’t work, and why they cause a story to fail from the start. (Hence why the aforementioned stories with their female leads failed.) Yet despite the tameness of it all, the thread (unsurprisingly) received some harsh responses.
https://youtu.be/0BBp2x_JAxc
“But what I thought was just as interesting as his post were the posts responding to it in a shockingly negative way,” Chen said in her video. “‘Cause honestly, whether you agree with Joshua or not that characters like Rey are poorly written, I feel like it be a pretty big stretch to call him sexist for his opinion. And yet that’s exactly what happened on the internet-dot-com.”
She then cited the series of responses to Lisec’s tweet where the users apparently took exception to what he wrote. Indeed, at times those replying resorted to calling him names such as “fragile” and so forth. All in all, they were quite typical of the types of comments regularly seen on Twitter. For her part, Chen went into detail on why there was nothing wrong with Lisec’s thread.
“It’s not misogynist or anti-woman to look at a character—a fictional character—and say, ‘Okay, it doesn’t seem like you have any flaws or weaknesses. Therefore, I don’t see how you can grow in a story,’” she said.
“It’s not bigoted hateful or a rejection of women as people to look at Rey from Star Wars and say, ‘Hey the fact that she was so strong at the start of it it kind of feels like her main purpose was really just wish fulfillment or self-insertion,’” she added. “And it’s funny because as upset as feminists were with Joshua’s thread, some of them were also simultaneously confirming it.”
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Chen later cited a tweet by user @tommy_stella who said, “I don’t want to actually jump into the Mary Sue discourse . . . but I do want to say that I don’t care if she’s a Mary Sue, I don’t care if a grown man thinks she’s a well-written character, I care about this:”
He then attached a montage of photographs of little girls, some dressed up as Rey, meeting with adults (one or more who may be original Rey actress Daisy Ridley) who are also dressed as Rey. Chen found that quite telling.
“And again this goes back to the idea that the main purpose of storytelling nowadays is just self-representation. It’s only a good story if you can see yourself in it. That’s why we have to have all of these different diversity quotas. What these people don’t get is that you don’t need to share characteristics with the character in order to see yourself as them,” she said.
“I guess it’s cute that little girls like Rey and they’re dressing up as her,” Chen added. “But let’s face it, they’re also many other characters who aren’t women who are actually well written that little girls also dress up as.”
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She continued, “And, personally, as someone who does have a daughter and was once a little girl, I would way rather look up to a character like Aragorn who is a man even though I’m not, just because he actually displays a lot of virtue.”
She expanded on the difference between The Lord of the Rings character and the Star Wars character. “He has trials that he overcomes. He doesn’t want to be king but he has to grow into that role. Instead of just siding with Rey because, ‘Oh, she woman, me woman too.’”
Ultimately, Chen’s Mediaholic video shows that while Mary Sue characters are terrible, there are still plenty of people who actually like them. More importantly, as Hollywood has demonstrated, Mary Sues have the support of the people who count the most: those who are in charge of making stories that reach the widest audience.
So Star Wars will continue to feature Mary Sues. The MCU will continue to feature Mary Sues. Reboots of franchises that people love and don’t originally have Mary Sues will continue to feature Mary Sues in their new incarnations. And every other story in every other medium from the legacy entertainment system will continue to feature Mary Sues.
Every now and then news appears that seems to indicate that Hollywood has had enough of people disliking its woke entertainment, and that it will do things differently going forward. But that simply will not happen. The people running Tinseltown, and the nation at large, are committed to their beliefs and will not change. And Lauren Chen’s Mediaholic video is a good reminder of that.