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The 7 Biggest Mary Sues in Pop Culture

7 Biggest Mary Sues
© Mania/Robert Trate

 What’s a Mary Sue? The exact definition has never quite been clear. The term first arose in a piece of Star Trek fan-fiction parody, used to describe a newly introduced character who eclipsed the regulars with her extraordinary skills, contrived background and nauseating specialness. In some circles, a Mary Sue is a piece of author wish-fulfillment: inserted into an established canon as a way of living vicariously amongst favored characters.  Others believe that Mary Sues are merely too-perfect heroes, for whom no problem is too big to overcome. More than a few people use the term to describe any character they don’t like, and some wildly popular protagonists have been wrongly branded Mary Sues (including James Bond, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and Batman).

We here at Mania use a succinct definition. A Mary Sue is any figure whom the creator dotes on unnecessarily, and who – through such dotage – severely weakens the overall story. That often entails excessively colorful backgrounds, willfully anti-social behavior, flawless skills in a number of arenas, and an utter inability to make any kind of mistake ever. (We’ve also borrowed liberally from the Mary Sue Litmus Test, which you can find here http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm.) Mary Sues can be of either gender (males are sometimes referred to as “Gary Stus”), and indeed most of the characters on our list are men. Some characters start out as Mary Sues and others devolve into them through overuse. And as much as we may wish otherwise, their status is not relegated to amateur fan fiction. Here are the seven most egregious Mary Sues in pop culture: the ones that make us want to hunt down their creators and slap the taste right out of their mouths.

7. Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs, etc.)

Thomas Harris’s renowned psychopath has gone through numerous incarnations, and before I begin, I’m going to excise the movies Manhunter, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs from the discussion. His presentation in those efforts was remarkable: a terrifying, implacable force that pushed protagonists Will Graham and Clarice Starling to the limits of their abilities. (It also earned Anthony Hopkins one of the best-deserved Oscars in history). All three of those films (and most of the books they were based on) focused on the good guys, making Lecter a very scary foil rather than the focus of all the attention.

That changes for the worse in later efforts, when Harris completely lost his shit and transformed Lecter into some kind of ridiculous anti-hero. He turns Starling into a cannibal! He commands the will of man-eating pigs! He performs plastic surgery on himself! The risible overkill came full circle with Hannibal Rising, complete with a background that bears disturbing similarities to this:

Lecter also touched on time-honored Mary Sue tropes of orphans, traumatic childhoods and mad skillz in a ridiculous array of subjects. Oh, and did we mention he has six fingers on each hand? Yeah, that’ll make him hard to find.

6. The Vampire Lestat (Interview With the Vampire)

Lestat follows a similar arc to Lecter’s, in that he starts out as an antagonist and only gradually finds his way to Mary Sue land. In the early books, Anne Rice played him as a charming fiend: far more devil than diva and forced to share the spotlight with a wide array of characters. But somewhere in the middle of the Queen of the Damned, everyone else got pushed to the sidelines so that Rice could indulge her beloved favorite. He went from sinister tempter to godlike superbeing complete with the ability to fly, ignite fires with his mind, and walk in the sunlight unharmed. Also, count the number of Very Special Women who fall madly in love with him at the drop of a hat. I know he’s a vampire and that’s what they do, but Rice writes such scenes as masturbation-by-keyboard rather than dark seduction. The final nail came with Rice’s renunciation of the finale of Interview, where Louis met Lestat as a sad, pathetic figure in modern-day New Orleans. We can’t have a moment like that mar Mommy’s precious little bloodsucking angel, now can we? Lestat deserved better and his early incarnations were truly great. Pity we had to suffer through so many Mary Sue-isms in penance.

5. Sylar (Heroes)

A lot of people like Sylar, which gives him more cover than some of the other folks on this list. But a close examination of the character reveals a series of Mary Sue traits that cannot be denied. For starters, he’s impossibly powerful to the point where he literally cannot die. (Yeah, yeah, the writers took all that away from him for a while… before giving it back without the drawback of eating human brains to boot). He also has a way of diminishing every other figure with his pointless angst, shattered romances, and half-hearted attempts to become a good guy. The Heroes writers clearly felt the need to shower him with attention, both by their discomfort in his villainous status and in the way the repeatedly sprang him from the corners he was painted into. That came on top of multiple Mary Sue tropes such as a striking appearance, a tragic past, a lack of human empathy, and an ability to recover from a staggering array of infirmities none the worse for wear. By any reasonable standards, HRG would have capped his ass at the end of Season One and been done with it. But he didn’t – for reasons that have never been fully explained – and thus was the Sylar’s supreme asshattedness reinforced for the entirety of the series.

4. Eragon (Eragon)

Eragon could easily be a stand-in for every cut-rate fantasy hero or heroine ever slapped on a cheap paperback. Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series has been described by one critic as “the most expensive fan fiction I’ve ever read,” and that’s being generous. Paolini began writing the series at the age of fifteen after becoming “frustrated” with the poor quality of most fantasy novels… unaware that fifteen-year-olds aren’t exactly paragons of writing experience.

The result? A ridiculously overrated fantasy epic centered around a wet dream of an author stand-in. Eragon begins life as a orphaned peasant boy, until the Forces of Evil slay his beloved uncle and send him off on yet another Quest of Supreme Vengeance. He becomes an unstoppable swordsman in about a month or two, bonds with a baby dragon instantly (and becomes the first person capable of riding one in millennia), and eventually develops into a super-strong magic-wielding half-elven godling capable of vanquishing any foe with a single blow from his mighty phallus. And yet everyone loves him; if they don’t, then they clearly belong to the forces of evil and will have their butts righteously kicked before the series concludes. Congratulations Chris: you’ve officially turned The Hero with a Thousand Faces into every douchebag football captain who ever ruined high school for the rest of us.

3. Lisabeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

The hard-core crime novel of the decade – one of a trilogy which spawned a trio of well-regarded Swedish films and the inevitable America remake – actually features a pair of egregious Mary Sues. The hero, middle-aged journalist Mikael Blomkvist, is a thinly veiled stand-in for author Stieg Larsson (himself a lifelong journalist). This may explain Blomkvist’s unwavering integrity, devastating attractiveness to the opposite sex and possession of an extremely enviable lifestyle despite being, you know, a hired scribbler.  He also saves his country from catastrophic financial meltdown because he’s just that good at his job, dammit.

But Mikael is nothing compared to the titular character who, stripped of her punk ethos, is almost a textbook case of Mary Sue: weirdly exotic hair, cool-sounding nickname, tragic past as an orphan, unparalleled hacker skills, and photographic memory that basically makes her infallible. Oh yeah, and she’s madly in love with Blomkvist – a man twenty years her senior – despite being a sociopathic rape victim who hates everyone else in the world. Larsson apparently wrote the book after witnessing the actual rape of a 15-year-old girl. He did nothing to stop it, and the lingering guilt stayed with him for the remainder of his days. I understand the need to vicariously heal such pain, but that doesn’t let him drag the reading public along with him.

2. Wesley Crusher (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

Until recently, Crusher stood as the god-king of Mary Sues, such that even Wil Wheaton called the character out on it. He’s also a not-so-subtle stand-in for series creator Gene Roddenberry, whose middle name is Wesley. Apparently not satisfied with being a decorated war veteran, distinguished police officer, award-winning screenwriter and the creator of the single most influential sci-fi television show in history, Roddenberry inserted his own little universe-saving avatar into the Trek mythos to more accurately articulate his awesomeness to the public. Hence, Young Wesley shows up – more or less uninvited – on the bridge every episode and demonstrates that he doesn’t need any training, experience or relevant skills to fix any problem imaginable. The first season of TNG played like a fanzine brought to life, until someone finally came to their senses and ordered the Boy Wonder to take a back seat. The show recovered, but all of us breathed a quiet sigh of relief when he finally departed in a flash of Sparkly Destiny.

1. Bella Swan (Twilight)

Speaking of sparkly destiny…

“Hi, I’m Bella Swan. Isn’t my name cute? I live in a small town in Washington that serves as a hub of supernatural activity… if by ‘supernatural’ you mean hunky male models who periodically strip down to their waist and turn into living disco balls in the sunlight. They all love me, of course: after living for hundreds of years and traveling throughout the world, they find my moods and problems endlessly fascinating and waste scads of time trying to make me happy. My extraspecialonetruelove Edward says I’m like his own personal brand of heroin, which is totally romantic and not psychotic at all. Of course everyone in high school loves me too, though they’re not so cool as my hot supernatural boy-harem and I sometimes humiliate them in public. I’m such a klutz! And even though I exist as the center of my universe and everyone around me basically devotes their every moment to my bliss, I’ve never really fit in! I’m a quirky outsider and no one understands me, which is really cool because I don’t have to confront any of the alienation and loneliness of that equation. And then there’s Edward! Oh Edward, sweet emasculated sparkle-pire of my heart! He makes me feel so alive even as I long for the cold embrace of death to bring us together for all eternity. But only after we’re married… because we wouldn’t want to do anything creepy.