A Place for Published Mary Sues (or Why Vanyel Works)

Having recently reworked one of my oldest original fiction characters after realizing she was a borderline mary sue, I called a friend of mine to converse about characterization. She and I are both fantasy writers of the unpublished sort, and we both started writing fairly young. Like most writers who started young, we began with writing irredeemable mary sues who we have long since scraped before moving on to real characters.

It struck me as we spoke that some of the characters we read about in our preteens and early teens were mary sues/gary lous themselves. Fuerthermore, we loved these characters and empathized with them for all their ridiculous perfection. She brought up probably the worst published gary lou in recent fantasy, and one we both adored, Vanyel Ashkevron in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books. He is extraordinarily hansom, extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily angsty, and dies in an extraordinarily romantic way. He scores well over 100 on the Mary Sue Litmus test and anything over 70 is “irredeemable”. Yet, at eleven, when I read The Last Herald Mage trilogy, I just adored him. He was for a long time my favorite fictional character, and I still have a soft spot for him.

For those of you reading this who are likewise fond of Vanyel, I hope to explain why so many of us who discovered him and characters like him young are fond of him, and why mary sues and gary lous are important in modern fiction.

While mary sues and gary lous are often characterized as author inserts gone wrong, most published mary sues that I have run across, including Vanyel are not. Lackey actually did make an author insert later on in the Valdemar books, a Herald named Misty, who isn’t really a classic mary sue. I think the perfection and angst associated with mary sues and gary lous say much more about the preteen and early teenage brain. We don’t just like to write mary sues at that age, we like to read them as well. We fall in love with them, write them ourselves, grow out of them, and put them away.

Vanyel actually does exactly what he’s supposed to. He’s very good at convincing preteen and early teen readers that homophobia is bad. He is so good, and so perfect and so angsty that readers that age can’t help but fall in love with him, in spite of his homosexuality. Other mary sues and gary lous from books for that age group include Daine from Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books, Alanna from the same, Vesper Holly from Lloyd Alexander’s Vesper Holly books, and others.

These are popular books. They are often very good books, in spite (or because) of their mary sues. If old children and young teens like to read about mary sues and eventually grow out of them, then what is the harm?

This is not meant to be a glowing pean to mary sues. I have long since grown out of them and have found myself desperately disappointed when I went back to read childhood favorites and found that the main characters were mary sues. However, I do think that as preteens and young teens, we like to read these characters as much as write them, and so mary sues should not be vilified, but instead regarded as toys for older children.