Mary Sue Who?

Image Property of Marvel Studios

Do you remember that lovely Buddy Holly song about a girl who inexplicably loves a man who stutters her own name? Or what about that little girl who somehow starts to sound like Faith Hill halfway through her song about Christmas? Or Dule Hill’s donkey in the movie/book Holes?

I’m not talking about any of them today.

Instead, I’m choosing to do something really stupid and wade into the semi-controversial waters of the ever-bemoaned Mary Sue.

If you’re not always trolling Twitter or other popular internet fan sites, then you may not have a clue what I’m talking about. That’s fine, because it gives me a chance to do something every teacher I ever had told me not to do: reference Wikipedia!

The concept of a Mary Sue is essentially a perfect female character. She is the nicest, prettiest, most talented character you’ve ever met, and gosh darn it she’s just so cute. Or sassy. Or whatever your definition of perfect is.

In our superhero-movie culture, the term is often used for any female character who is just too strong or too powerful. Never mind the fact that any superhero is literally “too powerful,” which is what makes them superheroes. The female ones are called Mary Sues.

In the last few years, we’ve unfortunately seen fanbases largely divided over the inclusion of more female characters in media. You have some people who clamor that anything without a perfect female lead is sexist, and then you have some people who clamor that anything with a female lead is evil.

And that dichotomy has largely created the problems we’re facing now.

See, the two most commonly lambasted characters right now are Rey from the new Star Wars trilogy and Captain Marvel, or Carol Danvers, from the MCU. If you really feel like wading into this battle online, have at it. I would argue against doing so, but I guess I’m about to step in it knee deep, so who am I to stop you?

I am really interested in the discussion about Rey. She’s a talented, capable sorta-Jedi who is the current protagonist in my favorite long-running narrative. So let’s start with Captain Marvel.

The problem with people calling Captain Marvel a Mary Sue is that, in one very specific way and for a very specific couple of moments, they’re kinda right. Now she isn’t the typical definition of a Mary Sue by any stretch, if you read the Wikipedia link above. She isn’t the charming, sweet, brilliant and too-talented wunderkind. She is, however, extremely powerful. Even by comic book movie standards.

She isn’t always too powerful, though. In her debut movie, obviously titled Captain Marvel, she spends about a third of the movie in flashbacks as a regular, non-powered human being. She spends another third or so as a semi-powerful but also somewhat amnesiac individual. These are the most interesting parts of her character.

When Danvers is limited in some aspect, she has to actually work at solving her problems. However, in the grand finale of the movie, she “wakes up” and realizes the true potential of her powers. It’s a great character moment, of course, and she does some awesome things that provide no shortage of spectacle.

I really enjoyed Captain Marvel, and I even enjoyed her “awakening” where she realizes that she’s more powerful than anyone was letting on. However, the moment she really showed off what she was capable of, I got more than a little nervous.

She’s so powerful that she really could present a narrative problem for the MCU moving forward.

I’m going to engage in some pretty hefty Avengers: Endgame spoilers now, so I apologize. In the first and second fight with Thanos, the man we’ve been told for the better part of a decade is the biggest, baddest dude in the universe, she is able to single-handedly subdue him. You could argue some technicalities in the first fight, and that’s fair, but she still needs no help to pin him down.

Let’s be real. This is who the Avengers should have called on to help.

The second time around, Thanos does get the better of her, but only after he sucker punches her with an Infinity Stone, which was admittedly a really clever move. Before that, she brushes off a headbutt from Thanos like it’s WCW and she’s Goldberg.

This can very well be a narrative problem. It wasn’t in Endgame, mind you, because they found a pretty clever way to deal with her. First, they gave her a problem she couldn’t punch her way out of. No amount of muscle or brawn was going to undo the damage from Infinity War. For all of her powers, she was actually pretty ineffective against the main problem.

And that’s the hallmark to good writing with powered individuals. You have to find a way to level the playing field between them and their enemies. Think about Superman and Lex Luthor. Superman is the strongest man on Earth and his enemy is an evil genius. Besides being a trope of comic book fiction, the OG EG Lex Luthor is a direct foil to Superman. He’s a problem that can’t be easily solved by all of Superman’s might.

Second, they just took her off the board. Captain Marvel spent very little time on screen in Endgame, which makes sense for a lot of reasons. Her movie was the last one out before Endgame, so logistically she’s the least involved character in this fictional universe. Long-time fans are more interested in seeing what the original Avengers cast can do in this situation, so that’s who needed to be highlighted. Even Spider-Man got the axe, so to speak, in favor of characters like Thor and Iron Man. Prior to 2008, Spider-Man was easily Marvel’s most popular character outside of the X-Men.

Unfortunately, you can’t just keep removing Captain Marvel from the scene. She is so powerful, and now popular, that you have to do something with her. And in the inevitable Captain Marvel sequel, she has to be the star. Obviously. She will also likely play a major role in the upcoming plans for Marvel’s Phase 4, which means they have to have a plan for her and fast.

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Speaking of Superman, audiences have slowly stopped responding to the blue-and-red boy scout. People often say that his character is boring. While I think that has more to do with the way movies have handled him than anything else, he’s a good analogue for Captain Marvel. Both are extremely powerful and nigh impervious.

The only thing keeping Superman from being a Mary Sue is the fact that he’s a dude. (Technically he’s a Kryptonian, but let’s not nitpick.)

Characters who are so unbelievably powerful need careful writing to remain interesting. The best example of this concept is in video games. When Superman 64 came out for the Nintendo 64, and when every video game out there had the number 64 in its name, they had a unique mechanism for Superman’s health bar.

After all, he couldn’t be killed. You can’t have a video game where Superman dies, but you also can’t have a video game with an invincible protagonist. So the video game designers came up with a system where Superman’s health was the health of Metropolis. You had to constantly be fighting crime on the streets and taking down enemies to maintain your health.

It’s clever, I’ll give them that, but it also highlights just how difficult it is to deal with an impervious character.

There are a few other characters in comic book fiction you could claim are overpowered. Deadpool, for instance, is insanely overpowered. But his weakness is laziness. He’s also funny. We don’t need Deadpool to have a dramatic foible, necessarily, because he’s hilarious. And his laziness keeps him from just becoming too much to deal with. There’s a reason one of his catchphrases is “Maximum effort!” It’s because he usually employs no effort.

So to argue that Captain Marvel is a bad character or a Mary Sue just because she’s overpowered is a bit silly. She is certainly a challenging character and one who will be difficult to deal with moving forward, but she isn’t a bad character.

However, you can be right to say that Captain Marvel is a Mary Sue in the sense that she is the epitome of wish fulfillment. With Marvel fans and comic book fans arguing for more female inclusion over the years, and the weaknesses of many of the included female characters being quibbled over by those same people, a character like Captain Marvel was a bit inevitable.

She is the fulfilled wish of a generation of female comic book fans. They wanted to see a powerful female character who could stand with and above the male counterparts. Unfortunately, in order to fulfill that wish, the creators may have gone just a tad too far.

You can’t blame them. In an era where “the squeaky wheel gets greased,” a fringe minority of fans have always been annoyed by whatever flaw or foible a female character showed. In order to combat those squeaky wheels, Marvel creators took an existing character and probably juiced her up a little bit too much.

The wish fulfillment aspect isn’t just in her power, though. In Captain Marvel, Danvers has so many moments that are intended to make female fans say, “You go girl!” that have nothing to do with fighting bad guys. She calls out a jerk for hitting on her and asking her to smile. She tells off another jerk by saying she has nothing to prove. These aren’t bad moments. But they are wish fulfillment. And as long as her character is treated that way, she is going to run the risk of falling too far into Mary Sue territory.

“Here she is riding her bike for the first time. Oh, and there’s our little girl murdering her first Skrull. Isn’t she precious?” (Photo by Caroline Hernandez on Unsplash)

That being said, we need to give her time to grow and develop. Since her movie was the last one to come out, she’s had so much less time to develop as a character. We really have no idea what she is going to be like. She has to grow and we, as an audience, need to give her room to do that.

Also, it should be said that every comic book character has an element of wish fulfillment. I wish I could fly like Iron Man. I wish I were rich like Iron Man. I wish I were brilliant like Iron Man.

Okay, so I basically just wish I were Iron Man. (Minus the alcoholism and the, uh…yeah.)

While it’s true that Captain Marvel is essentially female wish fulfillment, that makes her no different from the male characters.

As for Rey, I want to compare her to two other Star Wars characters. First is Luke Skywalker. I saw a thread on Twitter recently where people were complaining about characters being labeled as Mary Sues and someone said that Luke was a male Mary Sue.

That’s just patently false. If Force Awakens is to Rey what A New Hope is to Luke, then let’s look at how each of those characters grows in their initial appearances. The greatest complaint against Rey is that she is too good at using the Force too quickly. She does so with no training at all.

Admittedly, this is a fair complaint. She is able to trick a storm trooper (Trooper…Storm Trooper) and is able to resist Kylo Ren’s…mind meld? Is he a Vulcan? This is all with zero formal training.

Compare that to what Luke does in his first movie. He uses the Force to do…almost nothing. His big hero moment, blowing up the Death Star, is using a skill we are already told that he has. He can fly and shoot things, and we’ve seen that in action. And he also vouched for himself by saying he can shoot womp rats in a crummy T-16.

The only thing Luke uses the Force for is to listen to Obi-Wan. That’s it. There’s no great stretch there to believe that this character we’ve already seen fly is a capable pilot, and it’s not until the follow-up sequels that we see him growing as a character in the Force.

However, we also now have two movies with Rey in them, and that does her a great service. If a Mary Sue is a “too perfect” character or “wish fulfillment,” then perhaps the best thing that Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi was to have her make some crucial mistakes.

I mean, Rey does some really dumb stuff in that movie. By sending herself to Kylo Ren, and by falling for his lies, she puts herself and others in a truly terrible situation. And that’s a good thing. If a character is going to be overly strong, then they can’t also be overly smart. And if they are smart, it has to come from experience.

But we see Rey make some mistakes in Force Awakens, as well. She’s only brought face-to-face with Kylo Ren because she tries to run away from her destiny. And, like with Luke, we get to see her use some of the skills we already know she has. The great introduction scene where Rey is climbing around in a fallen Imperial Star Destroyer comes into play later when we see her climbing the constructs of Starkiller Base. That’s good writing. The movie gives us something about this character, and then that something comes back into importance later. Character building!

You could still say that Rey is the same kind of wish-fulfillment character that Captain Marvel is, and there’s some truth to that. As I’ve already admitted, she does come across as a little too good at the Force for someone who has no training or experience (that we know of, and that’s crucial).

Compare that with Jyn Erso in Rogue One. Jyn’s journey in Rogue One is a great example of how to do a proper introduction and arc for a character. She is an interesting, flawed character who has to grow and adapt in order to accomplish something of note. What we miss with Rey in her first outing is that earned growth in the aspect of being a Force user.

The difference, of course, is that Rey has all the time in the world to grow. She’s got three movies. Jyn had one. Her story arc had to be told by the end of Rogue One because, well…she dead. And we have not yet seen the completion of Rey’s arc, just like we haven’t seen the completion of Carol Danvers’ arc. We don’t know what is in store for these characters, and there is every possibility that their completed story arc and story progression will justify everything we’ve seen of them so far.

Ultimately, though, fans need to see growth and progress in their protagonists. Captain Marvel works in Endgame because she’s a side character. You can be more static if you’re a side character. But when she’s again asked to carry her own film, she will need to grow and change somehow. She’ll need to face some kind of obstacle that she can’t just punch her way through.

But seriously. How can you not be excited about this movie?

And with Rey, we’ve seen her grow a little. She’s changing with time and I am firmly convinced that her arc will end satisfactorily. After all, she’s at least earned something by this point, so we can now focus on her conclusion rather than just her beginning.

I’ve said an overwhelming amount of nonsense to just come to this point: Be careful. You may be right, but you also need to understand the connotations behind what you’re saying. Even though there are legitimate narrative problems with these two most recent examples of female protagonists, they aren’t necessarily bad characters. And they’re not bad just because you don’t like them or care about them.

And to those who don’t read my words carefully enough to understand what I’m saying, just because someone points out a problem with a character, it doesn’t mean they’re sexist. The odds that you’re right might be increasingly strong, but they aren’t 100 percent.

After all, nobody’s perfect. Especially if they’re written that way.

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If you enjoyed this post, feel free to peruse some other pieces I’ve written on Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.