Is "Mary Sue" a label we are more inclined to slap on female characters?

[Vegosiux]

I don't really. The thing is, sometimes there are Mary Sues in fiction that, well, aren't that bad.

This is the gist of it. Mary Sue is a trope, and as such, a tool, not necessarily good or bad - just like Damsel in Distress, Professor Guinea Pig, or Contrived Coincidence.

The problem with fanfiction Mary Sue is that they're usually an author wish fulfillment with no regard for the setting they're in, they're a completely new character who steals the show and also breaks up the official couple in order to go have sex with whichever of that couple the author would prefer to have sex with.

 

[Gatx]

Not really. I mean maybe it's just an aspect of what things you're a fan of. I'm pretty big into anime, and there are plenty of examples of "Mary Sue" type male characters in anime.

In recent memory there's...

Kirito from Sword Art Online for instance - total loner but he tries to be nice to everyone and every girl he meets falls in love with him. Then he gets to be the only in the entire setting to be able to dual wield, and wears a black trench coat all the time.

Haru from Accel World - at first you might think no since he's actually a chubby kid who's only good at videogames and lives in the shadow of his better looking best friend, but of course his being good at videogames turns out to be super important to the plot and he gets a unique, one of a kind power in a virtual reality game. Also all the girls that show up fall in love with him.

I think that Mary Sue is a more popular term than Gary/Marty Stu, yes. People have no problem labeling Mary Sues, even some women that don't deserve it (I read a completely bonkers article on how Maria from Silent Hill 2 was a Mary Sue). Meanwhile, Batman has a horde of fans desperately arguing that his parents dying TOTALLY precludes him from being a Gary Stu (for srs, guise!). He's a somewhat interesting Gary Stu, but a Gary Stu nonetheless.

Of course, this could be because Batman has been around for a while and acquired a fanbase before "Mary Sue" became a thing, but a spade is a spade.

I don't think that Batman is quite a Mary Sue because despite seemingly having everything going for him (despite his parents dying) he's kind of bat shit crazy. He's obsessive and paranoid in how he fights crime and he basically does go overboard with it in a lot of the comics that show a possible DC future.

 

[CrazyGirl17]

I guess it can apply to male characters, albiet under the label Marty Stu. And admittedly, a character can have some Mary Sue/Marty Stu trait and still be likable - at least when well-written. In fan fiction, a Mary Sue/Marty Stu tends to be a wish-fulfillment character, though the idea can be played with and made interesting. Again, it all depnds on how well they're written.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

I've always thought one of the best examples of a male 'Mary Sue' (or a 'Marty Stu') is Giorno Giovanna from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Such a disappointing waste of character.

 

[Thaluikhain]

IIRC, there was a big argument on TVtropes a while back about whether or not a male character could even be one of those.

The term is waaaaaay too widely used for female characters. Presumably this is, in part, due to in most fiction, female characters tend towards being useless. Once you've gotten comfortable with that, a halfway competent woman gets jarring.

(Having said that, many Mary Sues are still useless, but the plot lets them get away with it)

...

As an aside, possibly it's a genre thing. You tend (I think) to seem this term used in female dominated genres like urban fantasy more than serious manly stuff.

For example, 40k's Lelith Hesperax...she'd fit the many of the criteria of being a Mary Sue, but I wouldn't expect that label to be applied to her.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Well yeah I only call OP female characters Mary Sues and I call OP male characters Gary Stus. So yes I do, it doesn't make sense to call a male character a Mary Sue. I don't see the problem with it when many words have different genitive cases(Steward/Stewardess, Duke/Duchess, etc). Also Batman isn't really a Gary Stu he is Deus Ex Machina incarnate. Marcus is also not an example and neither is Lara a Mary Sue.

If you want to see a really Gary Stu just look at people like Kirito from SAO.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MartyStu

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Where I find Mary Sue's the most evident is when there's a huge discrepancy between the what the character does and how they act and how the rest of the world treats them. Something like everyone loving them for no good reason. A big example is Ana Steele from 50 Shades of Grey. There is such a big difference in way she acts, and how everyone treats her. She is such a massive dick to her best friend, but the book expects you to think she's great and her friend's just annoying, she isn't funny at all, but Christian considers her very witty for inexplicable reasons (note that I haven't read the book, just read this [http://jenniferarmintrout.blogspot.com.au/p/jen-reads-50-shades-of-grey.html?zx=67317b32c1f8ef73] review, which happens to be full of excerpts, more than enough examples to judge this on).

Another one that you mentioned that does this is Katniss, at the very least in the second movie (read the first book, but that was a while ago). Everyone makes her out to be incredibly important, and such a badass, but...the second the action starts she's just so useless. She takes care of mooks, but any time they're in real danger she's either being saved, or sitting by and watching someone else save them. There's one moment that she does something to resolve a problem, the rest of the movie she's pretty useless, and constantly in need of saving.

It's discrepancies like that where it really bugs me. And it really feels like an author insert. The author's trying to make the character act like them, but is having the entire world make a really big deal about that.

Male Mary Stues tend to act a little different, they will still have the world make a massive deal about them, but it's less common for other characters to praise them for doing nothing. More often you'll see their actions painting them as absolutely infallible.

At the very least this is what I've noticed in my experience. There's always a group that tends likes these characters though, and the fact that male directed media stretches across genders more than female directed media means that fewer people are going to be part of the group that loves the Mary Sues. Being on the outside of a fandom makes it a lot easier to criticize it. So, maybe part of it comes from that?

I'd also bet on a suggestion I saw someone make earlier in this thread, that most fanfiction writers are female. Considering that that's where the trope started, and I can't think of many Mary Sue characters in actual professionally made stories, I wouldn't be surprised if there just existed more female Mary Sues in the plethora of poorly made fan fictions

 

[Torque2100]

I tend to use both terms (Mary Sue/Gary Stu) equally.

I've really noticed a massive surge in the number of characters fitting the "Mary Sue" archetype. That is, a character who is so totally idealized that it's difficult to take them seriously. I think a lot of this has to do with the influence that Anime and Manga on Western pop culture. Weather you like it or not, I have found that the main characters of most of the popular series, particularly shows like Naruto or Code Geass, or those shows falling into the "Moe" subgenre, have very Mary Sue-esque attributes.

I also think that it has a lot to do with the phenomenon of "Ascended Fanboys." That is people who grew up watching/reading/playing a certain property who are able to work themselves into positions where they can influence the development of those properties. Often, their influence is not a positive force. These "ascended fanboys" often devote a great deal of energy to forcing their own fan theories and interpretations into the property, or changing the property so it resembles their own fan fiction.