The Mary Sue: A Case Study

I previously posted this to Facebook.


If you are watching Teen Wolf because I talked about it, don't read this because spoilers. Not awful ones, but I know it wrecks stuff if I'm anticipating something happening. Knocks me out of the story.

Anyhow, I want to talk about the character, Kira. At first she works. And then, in my opinion, she stops working. And she stops working because she's a Mary Sue. Sort of a fake, artificial, logical Mary Sue but the effect ends up being the same. Which I find interesting and possibly important from a writing point of view.

If you've watched, staring in season 3, the character of Kira is introduced. Kira is a kitsune or she's possessed by a kitsune. As it gains power she loses control of it. But in the mean time it confers to her the ability to be a bad-ass sword fighter. She can control electricity as well, but doesn't do anything with it.

Compared to Allyson who's back story is that starting as a very young girl she practiced with a bow and arrow and was proficient enough to be on the National Junior team. Her family also taught her other weapons. Even if they never told her the Big Family Secret, she was trained.

Kira wasn't. And while at first she does a few things that could be instinct or accident, as events progress she simply allows the spirit in her to do all the work. They continue this logically and eventually she has to leave and spend indefinite decades or centuries learning not to be subservient to it. So ultimately it was a recognized thing, that she hadn't earned or learned any of her skills, and in the story it all flows logically and purposefully.

But something else happened, too. She lost agency. Losing agency is not interesting. Fighting to regain and assert agency would be interesting but she doesn't do that. And not being compulsively inquisitive toward her own *self* was not interesting.

It doesn't need to be one of those sequences where the new superhero kid tests to see what his superpowers are, how fast he can run or how high he can jump, but if you could turn on a light bulb, wouldn't you try to see what else you could do?

But the lessons for *story* are still there.

There's a reason that a Mary Sue character doesn't work. And it doesn't work even when it makes sense because the same problems exist. People don't complain when they *expect* a Mary Sue because they don't like a super powered girl character. They complain because they know that this particular failure will ruin a story