 Mary Sue is a term that gets thrown around quite often as a criticism of characters in fiction. I've seen it used more than once as a bludgeon against pretty much any character in an SCP article or a tale that people don't like. So much of what we understand about the term, though, is just wrong. And I'm going to explain why. So first of all, there's a very basic issue with it. It's supposed to pertain only to characters from fan fiction. Already, you could probably begin to see the problem with its use as a criticism of primary media. When someone calls a Rey from Star Wars or Arya Stark from Game of Thrones or Mary Sue, they're already on slippery ground. But even if we ignore the part of it that is wrong inherently, the purpose of it is to generally obliquely criticize female characters for doing things that a particular reader or viewer doesn't think that character would be capable of doing. So you show a man straining and struggling to lift a car, and that's badass, but you show a woman doing the same thing, and it's a Mary Sue. The term, actually, originates as a criticism of Star Trek fan fiction from the 1970s, believe it or not. A Mary Sue was a character in a parody story written to examine the problems with how fan fiction of the time was generally written. It wasn't, by the way, only a term used to describe female characters. The original Mary Sue happened to be a female because the author who created the criticism was a female and she was examining wish fulfillment and author insertion into a story. But that same story could have been written with the same message about a male character as well, but we do differentiate between Mary Sue's and Gary Stu's, or whatever alternative name you want to come up with. Regardless, the male equivalent criticism is so rarely invoked in the modern day that it's almost not worth talking about. Now the biggest target of Mary Sue criticism I've seen on the Wiki is 2721, even though it really, really doesn't fit the bill at all on either a authorial insert level, or a wish fulfillment level, or a flawless character, or being fan fiction, unless we consider all of the SCP Wiki to be fan fiction. It involves a dangerous, sentient AI that is a satellite that becomes a fan of homestuck and doesn't feel right in its body. And on the surface, this is sort of an interesting concept because examining an AI that is a satellite that doesn't feel like being a satellite is correct for it, is sort of a brilliant usage of writing to explore a very realistic theme that is relevant to many of the writers who are on the site right now. But that's really only true if you think that is a realistic theme, obviously. They are realistic themes, by the way, but that's a digression. If you think it's not a realistic theme to explore, the whole premise will miss you hard and will feel, obviously, unrealistic. Now this goes double for any female characters and roles that are traditionally understood to be male-dominated. You may have noticed earlier that Mary Sue is not a term that is leveled against male characters very often, and there's a reason for this. Male characters are inherently understood to be more capable, almost invariably. That's not a good thing, by the way, but it is how the greater culture tends to view things. To bring things back around to a recent example, if you train for years with assassins and killers and become capable of great feats of stealth and combat, you're either Arya Stark and get called to Mary Sue, or you're Batman. I don't know that this is a deliberate problem, either. I don't think people are deliberately trying to be misogynistic. I mean, if you think that way, you're still wrong, and you're still being misogynistic, but it's entirely possible that you just never heard else-wise, which is sort of the point of these videos. Mary Sue long ago stopped being a valid piece of criticism, and frankly it never was all that useful even when it wasn't being overused. We throw all sorts of easy, critique at things we don't like so we can safely dismiss them. Like, oh, that's a Mary Sue, or oh, that's a cliche story element, or oh, that's a thing that does a thing, but none of these are useful. And while your opinion is just as valid as anyone else's, if you decide to call a character a Mary Sue, you need to be ready to back up that with facts about how the character is unrealistic. Or how it lacks flaws and weaknesses, and also understand that what you consider realistic and what other folk consider realistic are not the same. Which, by the way, is why Mary Sue is a dumb f***ing criticism, because there's no universality to it. The only thing it really tells a person is what you personally don't consider realistic, and if that's a strong female character with flaws who f***s up from time to time and has a long history of character development, then the only thing out of that description I can assume you're taking issue with when you call the Mary Sue is strong female. Anyway, that's it. If you liked it, be sure to hit the subscribe button. And if you want to see more content like this, head on over to Patreon at patreon.com. A link will be in the description and at the end of the video. And as always, thanks for watching.