The Story of Star Wars (2004)

My original debut piece entailed dusting off a dying trope, so no one was more surprised than me when the popular YouTube channel “The Take” beat me to the punch. As a lifelong roleplayer who’s experienced plenty of cross-over with fanfic writers and lovers, I figured that the “Mary Sue” was an archaic archetype: a silly milestone.

You see, somewhere down the line, “Mary Sue,” often a cringe-worthy chapter in the creative history of young writers, made an epic trek from the campy corners of fanfic to an interview with a chart-topping celebrity in 2016. This was certainly a shocking and sensational trajectory, but why, in 2021, is a major presence still examining a matter that's over five years old? A quick browse of YouTube’s filtered results as of this writing would suggest that the “Mary Sue” is not a hot new trend in the cinema circuit, nor has it been applied recently to any character other than Rey.

On September 23rd, when I set out to layer a critique of the Mary Sue on top of the surge in female superheroes in the MCU, I pitched an idea to my team through the lens of a roleplayer. I asked: “What informs anti-Mary Sue sentiment, and will female superheroes face a similar critiquing process? If so, will lovable flaws somehow protect them?” Perhaps there was something to that, because, lo and behold, The Take claimed, a week later, that one can create the “non-Mary Sue” by plugging in flaws. But is it really that easy? And should we be bashing Mary Sues in the first place? I invite you to follow me down the rabbit hole of YouTube comment threads, Discord channels, fanfic nostalgia, and a man that really just wants his pig back.