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The Mary Sue Fallacy; Misconceptions About Overpowered Characters

The Mary Sue Fallacy; Misconceptions About Overpowered Characters, Conflict, and Relatability.

Even if you've been in the online fiction community for only a little bit of time, I guarantee that you've heard people throw around the term "Mary-Sue" to describe a particular kind of OC. When people talk about Mary-Sues, they're usually referring to a character that is too perfect, overpowered, and blatantly a self-insert.

To put it simply, a Mary-Sue is a wish fulfillment device that the author uses to fantasize about an idealized version of the author's persona. As you probably know, a true Mary-Sue is very, very bad. However, many people seem to equate an overpowered character with being a Mary-Sue, which I think is completely not true.

To put it simply, the amount of power a character has is just a stat like any other. It's a part of a character that can be anything from cringeworthy to cumworthy, depending on the quality of the writing. Like there are both well written and poorly written intelligent characters, the same goes for overpowered characters.

Many people argue that if a character is too powerful it becomes more difficult for the audience to "relate" to them. But, how important is relatability anyways?

The way that I define relatability is the readers looking at a character and going, "bro I felt that." Relatability is often achieved through the emotions that a character feels, the way they think about the world, and the conflicts they struggle to overcome. Supposedly, if a character is too powerful, many people lose their ability to empathize with them because "no one is that strong/magical/intelligent/whatever". I say fuck that.

For this section I'll be discussing the character Mob from the anime Mob Psycho 100. If you haven't seen the show yet, don't worry, because I'll be avoiding spoilers as much as possible.

The show's protagonist, Mob, is pretty much as overpowered as one can get. He's shown time and time again to be a more powerful psychic than all the show's other characters combined. Whether Mob "can" or "cannot" defeat the bad guys isn't even a question. Sounds pretty Mary-Sueish, right? So, what is it that makes Mob a well-written character?

Well for starters, the entire THEME of the show itself is that even immense power can't help with some everyday issues; throughout the show we see Mob struggle with talking to girls, building muscles, and making good grades. The writing shows us that despite being most powerful psychic in the world, Mob is still just an awkward middle school kid like anyone else; something deeply relatable that the audience can connect to.

This relates to one of the reasons that I think overpowered characters can be so incredibly interesting. Many shows, books, or movies, find conflict in the question; "will the characters be powerful enough to defeat the big bad?" This is prevalent in shounen anime especially; most of the show comes from the protagonist working and training to become more and more powerful. There's nothing inherently wrong with this conflict; everybody loves an underdog, and there's something exciting about seeing an underestimated character defeat his foes. However, when the character inevitably reaches the peak of their power, where will the conflict come from? Villains can only get so threatening, and heroes can only pull out a certain number of "ultimate moves".

This is why overpowered characters are so interesting to me; when you take away the conflict of "are they powerful enough?" That forces the writing to substitute the shounen-escalation kind of storytelling with something different. The tensions come from totally different places than what is considered the norm, and if they're well done, they will likely resonate with the audience long after the story comes to an end.

For this next part I'll be talking about The Chimera Ant Arc (Which I honestly consider to be one of, if not THE best works of fiction I have ever had the honor of witnessing) from the anime HunterxHunter. Unfortunately, spoilers will be unavoidable, so if you are planning on watching this incredible, mind blowing show, please read no further.

In The Chimera Ant Arc, the hype for the antagonist, Meruem, was absolutely unreal. The way that his powers were displayed was terrifying; his strength made even the second most powerful person in the universe look like an ant under his heel. However, over the course of the narrative, we as the audience grow attached to Meruem after witnessing his compassion and love for the human girl Komugi, and his changes in philosophy were very satisfying to see from a villain who was previously so evil. So when he was challenged to a fight with Netero, the all-powerful chairman of the hunter association, we didn't want either side to come to any harm. Both sides of the fight were right in their reasoning; we as the audience feel conflicted. This builds into a mind-blowing fight, with an ending so tragic that it left me crying for literal hours afterwards. In my opinion, The Chimera Ant Arc, possibly the best anime storyline of all time, would not have been the same had Meruem not been so overpowered.

Ok now that I'm done jacking off to HunterxHunter, let's talk about stuff I DON"T like. What makes some overpowered characters so shitty? The answer is actually pretty simple; they're perfect.

Yeah, now we're really getting down to business. It's time to shit on some Sues! I won't get into details about the super obvious things like rainbow hair, a harem of boyfriends, yada yada. Imma talk about the sneakier kind of Sues, the ones that TRICK you into thinking that they have flaws, when in actuality, they really don't.

A kind of Sue I see a lot on Wattpad is the girl that's smart, sassy, perfect grades, beautiful, da bad boy luvs her but he don't kno whyy, basically she's perfect. Yeah, definitely perfect. Ohhhh but she's cLuMsY!!! And she also has tRaAuMa from bAd cHiLdHoOd!! Oh, cry me a river. Sorry, but just giving character's a little stumble in their step and a tragic backstory won't be enough to garner my sympathy. So Miss Sassy Pants is an orphan? Big deal. So is every other girl on Wattpad. 

On that note, this is getting long, so the next chapter will be about writing good character flaws so stay tuned for that. Please continue to leave requests about what topics you would like to see covered, I'll see ya soon.