The Mary Sue Problem And Giving The People What They Want

Lance Cpl. Kayla Hickingbottom, Training Regiment team 1 team member, throws a dodge ball at Headquarters and Service Battalion team 2 team members Jan. 24 during the Women’s Dodge Ball Tournament aboard Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. Julica Evans, RTR 1 team member, followed Hickingbottomes lead aiming and throwing her ball at H&Q 2. RTR 1 showed no mercy taking home MCRD’s first Women’s Dodge Ball Tournament against H&S Bn. 2. Photo by English: Lance Cpl. Crystal Druery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The concept of a Mary Sue is not one that I take particular issue with. As a writer myself, and this includes fiction, a Mary Sue only becomes a problem with bad writing. The biggest cardinal sin of writing is doing it badly. Plot holes, conveniences, etc. But bad writing is only truly bad if it doesn’t fit the context of the world it inhabits. A character who crushes it always only becomes boring if there is no challenge in that success. As a lover of action movies and action anime and superhero movies, a Mary Sue is not an overpowered or OP character. Superman and Batman, both OP in their own right, fit the context of the world they exist in. A Mary Sue is a character who succeeds without any significant struggle. The issue becomes one of established franchises.

The one example most people mention is Rey. I was one of those The Force Awakens defenders because we just didn’t know her background from only that movie. It was the first in a planned trilogy. I didn’t expect Rian Johnson to crap the bed so hard, nor for Kathleen Kennedy to greenlight a new Star Wars trilogy without demanding on a trilogy plan before filming the first movie in it. (Or for them to completely say no to George Lucas’ ideas for a sequel trilogy. That one broke Jeremy Jahns.) Bad decisions abound, but I’m glad Favreau and Filoni have brought the fans back somewhat. Give fans what they want but do it well. Fan service is only bad if it’s not done right.

Back to Rey; my theory after seeing TFA was that she was the sole survivor of the Jedi temple massacre Kylo and the Knights of Ren clearly committed (via a flashback) at some point in the past. Kylo being particularly intrigued when he found out a girl had given his Stormtroopers trouble made me think he knew who she was. In short, she had training, but Luke wiped her memories and hid her where it was unlikely anyone would come looking for her. And that was probably Abrams’ idea, but he absolutely sucks at follow through. Leaving the sequel without a script and letting Rian Johnson do his own thing was the worst decision in the franchise since Mace Windu went down like a chump. (He apparently is returning for the Obi-Wan Kenobi show.) JJ can build a great world, but he can’t finish it in a satisfying way.

But Rey in TFA isn’t explicitly a Mary Sue. She became one later when it turns out she did all that TFA stuff with zero prior Jedi or Force training. Which is insane. Also, she never really lost a fight in the entire trilogy. And that says nothing about wasting both Finn and Poe, Finn especially egregiously likely to keep China happy (the Chinese government is incredibly racist, especially towards black people.)

I bring all this up to get to the core problem. The Mary Sue Problem is largely due to the Galbrush Paradox. In short, a female protagonist is not allowed to suffer but a male protagonist, especially a white dude with brown hair in his late thirties, can have all manner of horribleness done to him. But it goes further than that. A male protagonist is also allowed to show weakness in a way a female one is not. As an analogy, author Jack Fisher elucidated that Guybrush Threepwood, the protagonist of the classic point-and-click adventure video game series Monkey Island, is a weakling and terrible at being a protagonist, something consistently pointed out by basically everyone in the games. The woman he is on task to save in the first game ends up saving herself once he catches up with her. The joke is that she’s an anti-damsel in distress and he’s an ineffective protagonist. The key to this is the absolute crapstorm that would result if you swapped their genders. A female protagonist goes to save a prince, and the prince saves himself by the time she finds him, making her an ineffective and weak heroine. Imagine it.

Certain people just don’t let those stories happen without a five-alarm fire of Internet hate discourse. So, Hollywood knows there’s a demand for strong female protagonists, but they just know those heroines can’t suffer and must succeed, usually without much challenge. This is what made Captain Marvel such a boring movie. She is never meaningfully challenged throughout the movie for long and defeats all foes rather easily. Brie Larson played the character with a wooden arrogance that just didn’t sit well with me. Respect is earned and Carol Danvers had yet to earn that. She earns it in Endgame but is also yeeted out of the fight by one Power Stone-powered punch from Thanos, so there is that.

And this brings us to another subject: Critics and the stories they like. If you could even believe it, only one MCU movie has any Oscars at all, even the technical ones. And that movie? Black Panther. It won a technical award over Infinity War, nominated in the same year. Absolute insanity. The Academy has a bias against good special effects in popcorn flicks. Like idiots.

Critics tend to love one-off stories more than continual narratives, as far as movies are concerned. Self-contained narratives. Why? Because one-off stories allow the protagonist to lose and stay in that state. Critics love their poignant failures, even if the failure is unearned, as it were. The original ending of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story has the Average Joes lose. The director said he preferred that ending as a true underdog story is one where the underdog inevitably fails, like the Jamaican Bobsled Team or Eddie the Eagle (oddly, the same Olympic games.) But that ending sucks and just goes to the end credits. The new ending is funnier and gave us fat suit Ben Stiller lip-syncing to that milkshake song with big floppy man boobs. Horrendously funny.

One-off stories where the protagonist doesn’t really win or even loses are adored by critics and largely hated by general audiences and promptly forgotten by both. No staying power. Critics ain’t rewatching a three-hour movie that ends in failure again. A movie with zero rewatchability is a bad movie. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If the movie isn’t poignant in the end or satisfying in the failure, it’s just a cheap gut punch. Humanity likes seeing humans succeed against all odds. You pull that carpet out from under your audience, they will hate you for it.

The best comedies or action flicks, in my mind, will beat a tragic drama any day, even though I do love that genre as well. My top ten favorite films of all time, in order, are: Dirty Harry, Animal House, The Princess Bride, Napoleon Dynamite, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Dark Knight (and maybe The Dark Knight Rises if I’m being overly positive,) Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Kill Bill: Volume 1, the Back to the Future trilogy (I can’t pick just one,) and, finally, John Wick (and the first sequel if I’m being generous.) Not a single drama in the lot. Nor a single failure storyline. The protagonists all succeed in whatever task was set before them (if we exclude The Bride not finishing her quest as the sequel is my least favorite Tarantino movie.)

Give the people what they want. And what they want is for the villains to lose and the heroes to succeed against them. And that limitation isn’t really bad. There are so many stories; just give them a happy ending. People desire victory for the main character, whom the audience is meant to empathize with and see themselves as him or her. You have that character lose; the audience feels that they themselves lost. And who wants that? I don’t want to be preached at for current political discourse talking point #5. And few other people do. Except the critics. And you know my feelings about them.

To bring it back to the Mary Sue Problem. We know and expect the protagonist to win in the end for most mega franchises. If they lose, they don’t stay down long. That essentially makes all entertainment of this stripe nihilistic, as nothing really changes. This isn’t inherently bad. It’s escapism. Rick and Morty and One-Punch Man are both a parody of this idea. It doesn’t mean you can’t fill your world with excellent characters, world building, set pieces, and insanely sharp and biting dialogue. But this is also why media with overt modern political themes with total and complete lack of subtlety are hated so much by general audiences and adored by the usual suspects. No one likes being lectured to unless you already agree with the underlying message. Christian targeted movies are in the same box. They make a great ROI, but most are lazy pander jobs with little more to say that the audience wasn’t already aware of.

But this brings us somewhere else. Toxic fandom is a misnomer. From GamerGate to The Last Jedi discourse, the fans are rarely the problem. A franchise is not owed money from prior fans. You must keep them happy if you expect them to keep showing up. You piss off enough of the established fanbase, you kill your brand. It can reanimate with the right touches, but Disney learned the hard way when Solo bombed after The Last Jedi delivered well below fan expectations.

Subverting expectations is not inherently a bad thing, but just don’t do it to a franchise like Star Wars. Do it to a slasher franchise like Halloween or an action horror franchise like Alien because even the committed fans will agree most of the movies in these franchises suck. You have more to play with since fan goodwill isn’t as high. Experimentation with the core ideas is encouraged. But not with franchises with decades of goodwill like Star Wars. It is very easy to have all that goodwill squandered with one to three disappointing films (TLJ, Solo, and TRoS all disappointed.) It took a shot in the dark series like The Mandalorian to even begin to recoup some of that lost goodwill. And the fans are not all back yet. The Book of Boba Fett squandered some goodwill on many fans’ favorite character. Idiots. They repeated the Solo problem. Whether the movie was good or not doesn’t mean it was a good Han Solo movie, which it definitely wasn’t. TBoBF was not a good Boba Fett show. It was The Mandalorian season 2.5, as the best episode of it has no Boba Fett. In a show named after him!

The Mary Sue Problem is not that a character is powerful, but that strength and success are unearned in the eyes of the audience. Who wants to root for a character who wins without even having to try? What’s the bloody point of watching that?