Mary Sue, Gary Stu, and the crime of wanting to be great

The term has an exact birthplace. In 1973, Paula Smith... co-editor of the Star Trek fanzine Menagerie... published a parody called "A Trekkie's Tale" in issue #2. It opens with its heroine stepping onto the bridge: "Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky," thinks Lieutenant Mary Sue, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet at fifteen and a half. She is brilliant, beloved by the entire crew, and dies tragically while everyone weeps.

Smith wasn't inventing a character; she was naming a pattern in the submission pile: story after story where an original young woman boards the Enterprise, and as Smith put it, everyone falls all over her because she's so sweet and good and beautiful. Her own later summary of what she did is the most level-headed sentence in this whole discourse: "I simply named a bug, I found a new fern." A pattern, observed, named. That part was fair.

What the name became was something else.

The term escaped the editors' room and hardened into fandom's most efficient dismissal: Mary Sue stopped describing a story problem (a character who warps the plot's reality so nothing has stakes) and started describing a PERSON problem... namely, a girl who dared to write herself awesome.

The damage was measurable and immediate, inside the very community that coined it. At a 1987 Star Trek convention, Smith herself interviewed a panel of female fan authors who said they had stopped including female characters in their stories AT ALL... the safest way to never be accused. Sit with that: a term born to improve fiction taught a generation of women that the only unimpeachable female character is an absent one.

Then the internet gave it infinite range. The label jumped from fanfic to canon, and the targets kept a theme: Rey was derided as a Mary Sue within days of The Force Awakens... for a skill set noticeably thinner than the one Luke Skywalker (farm boy, one afternoon of training, blows up the Death Star) carried out of 1977 to nobody's objection.

The male term exists... Gary Stu, Marty Stu... and the most interesting fact about it is that it never stuck to anyone.

Run the checklist against the canon. James Bond: irresistible to every woman, expert in everything, unkillable, adored or feared by all. Batman: peak human in every discipline, richest man alive, always right, wins against gods with prep time. John Wick. Jack Reacher. The entire competence-porn genre IS the Mary Sue checklist with a Y chromosome, and it's marketed as... awesome. Which it is! Nobody walks out of a Bond film complaining he's implausibly good at things. Implausible greatness is the PRODUCT.

And the second target of the weapon was never characters at all: it was YOUNG WRITERS. "Your OC is a Mary Sue" has been the standard first review handed to every fourteen-year-old girl who posts a story, a rite of hazing dressed as craft advice. The equivalent boy, writing himself as the chosen one with a dragon and two girlfriends, is just... writing. He'll be told to vary his sentence structure.

Here's the series thesis applied at last: wish-fulfillment was never the crime.

Every character is somebody's wish. The self-insert is not a failure mode of fiction... it's the ENGINE of it, the whole reason a species tells stories: to be, for an hour, someone braver, luckier, more loved. Adolescents write Mary Sues for the same reason adolescents look in mirrors: to try on a self and see. Paula Smith named a real craft problem... a character the story refuses to challenge is a story with no pulse... and that critique deserves to survive. But it's a critique of STAKES, not of wanting. The fix for a Mary Sue was never "want less." It's "let the world push back."

So: keep the craft note, melt down the bullet. A girl who is the youngest lieutenant in the fleet is not an embarrassment. She is a draft of a self... and the correct response to a draft is the one Smith's own parody modeled before the internet weaponized it: affection, and a little editing.

Roleplay knows all this in its bones, by the way. Every character card ever written is a wish with stats. Play yours without apology... the youngest lieutenant, the chosen one, the one everybody loves. In a story you're telling on purpose, being great was always allowed. Just let the world push back... that's not humility, it's what makes the greatness feel like anything at all.