In Defence of the Mary Sue: Why Cringe Is Part of Becoming a Writer
Somewhere on an old hard drive, in a forgotten notebook, or buried in a fan fiction archive under a username nobody should ever reconnect with their adult life, there is a character who was impossibly talented, mysteriously beautiful, emotionally wounded, loved by everyone important, feared by everyone evil, and probably had violet eyes for reasons that were never medically explored.
This character may have been a princess, warrior, assassin, chosen one, vampire, Jedi, witch, mutant, lost sibling, secret heir, or misunderstood girl with a tragic past and a suspiciously large number of love interests. She may have saved the world before breakfast. She may have made canon characters behave like adoring furniture. She may have had a name involving moons, ravens, roses, storms, or apostrophes used with confidence but no linguistic justification.
In other words, she may have been a Mary Sue.
The Mary Sue is one of the most mocked figures in storytelling. She is usually defined as an overly idealised character who feels like authorial wish fulfilment: too perfect, too powerful, too loved, too central, too obviously special. In fan fiction, the label has often been used for self-insert characters who enter an existing fictional world and immediately become its emotional and narrative centre.
The criticism is not always wrong. Mary Sues can make stories flat. They can drain tension, distort other characters, and turn plot into a coronation ceremony with occasional dialogue.
But the mockery is often too easy.
The Mary Sue is not just a bad character type. She is also a record of desire before craft has learned how to disguise it. She is what happens when a writer wants too much, too visibly, too early, and without yet knowing how to turn longing into structure. That can be clumsy, but it is also deeply human.
Cringe is not the opposite of creativity.
Often, it is where creativity starts.
Where the Mary Sue came from
The term “Mary Sue” comes from Paula Smith’s 1973 parody story, “A Trekkie’s Tale,” which mocked a certain kind of self-insert fan fiction in Star Trek fandom. Lieutenant Mary Sue was absurdly young, brilliant, adored, competent, beautiful, and important. She was the joke version of a character who enters an established world and immediately becomes its most special person.
The phrase stuck because it named something readers recognised. Many fan communities had seen versions of this character: the newcomer who outshines the heroes, wins the love of a major character, solves the central conflict, and bends the fictional universe around herself.
Over time, “Mary Sue” became a general insult for any character seen as too perfect or too obviously wish-fulfilling. The male version, sometimes called “Gary Stu” or “Marty Stu,” exists in theory, though it has never had quite the same cultural force. That imbalance is not accidental.
The term has often been aimed at young women, fan writers, and characters associated with feminine desire. It has been used to criticise weak writing, yes, but also to police who is allowed to be powerful, desired, exceptional, central, or self-indulgent in fiction.
That is where the Mary Sue becomes interesting. She is not only a storytelling problem. She is also a cultural accusation.
What makes a Mary Sue?
A Mary Sue is usually marked by a cluster of traits.
She is unusually beautiful, often in a way that is heavily described. She has extraordinary skills, sometimes with little training or consequence. She may be kind, brave, brilliant, tragic, sarcastic, wounded, mysterious, and morally superior all at once, because moderation is for side characters. Other characters admire her instantly, including characters who are usually suspicious, aloof, emotionally unavailable, or dead inside for plot reasons. The world treats her as important, and the story often protects her from meaningful failure.
The deeper issue is not that she is powerful or gifted. Many good characters are powerful and gifted. The issue is that the story stops resisting her.
A strong character can be extraordinary and still face limits. They can be loved and still misunderstood. They can be talented and still make mistakes. They can be central without turning everyone else into supporting staff. The problem with a Mary Sue is not that she is special. It is that the story often agrees with her specialness too completely.
Conflict becomes decoration. Relationships become worship. Failure becomes temporary theatre. Other characters lose their own motives because their main narrative function is to notice how remarkable she is.
That is bad writing, but it is also revealing writing. The Mary Sue tells us what the writer wants: power, recognition, beauty, safety, admiration, belonging, revenge, transformation, escape. She is not subtle about it, but subtlety is not always available to a fourteen-year-old with a notebook, a favourite character, and several unresolved feelings.
The psychology of wish fulfilment
Wish fulfilment gets a bad reputation because it is associated with indulgence. But almost all fiction contains some kind of wish.
Adventure fiction wishes for danger with purpose. Romance wishes for desire that is returned. Crime fiction wishes for mystery to become order. Superhero stories wish that trauma could become power and that punching might, under the right lighting conditions, solve structural problems. Literary fiction sometimes wishes to be recognised as too serious to have wishes, which is perhaps the most suspicious wish of all.
The Mary Sue is simply less elegant about hers.
She often appears when a writer is using fiction to rehearse identity. What would it feel like to be powerful? Desired? Chosen? Brilliant? Unrejectable? What would it feel like to enter a world you love and matter inside it? What would it feel like if the people who ignored you, mocked you, or underestimated you were forced to see your worth?
These are not trivial questions. They are especially intense for young writers, marginalised writers, lonely writers, and fan writers who use existing fictional worlds as emotional playgrounds. A Mary Sue may be a fantasy of competence, recognition, repair, or control. She may represent the writer’s ideal self, protected self, avenging self, lovable self, or self finally allowed to take up space.
That does not automatically make her good fiction. Therapy and storytelling are not the same job, however much the internet keeps trying to make every notebook into a treatment plan. But psychologically, she makes sense.
A Mary Sue is often a first attempt at answering: what if I mattered?
It is not surprising that the answer sometimes arrives wearing a cloak and being fluent in eleven languages.
Why the cringe feels so painful
Cringe is what happens when we encounter a version of ourselves that wanted something too openly.
This is why old writing can be so hard to read. The spelling mistakes are survivable. The plot holes can be forgiven. The real horror is the nakedness of the desire. The old story reveals what we wanted before we learned to hide it: to be adored, to be exceptional, to be rescued, to be powerful, to be understood, to be the person everyone finally regrets underestimating.
That kind of wanting feels embarrassing because adulthood teaches us to launder desire through irony, taste, restraint, and plausible deniability. We learn to want things in socially acceptable packaging. We call it ambition, aesthetics, craft, brand, discipline, or research. The younger writer simply gave herself wings, a tragic backstory, a forbidden romance, and a sword.
Cringe is not proof that the younger self was stupid. It is proof that she had not yet been trained to disguise longing.
There is something almost admirable about that. Not polished, no. Not necessarily publishable. Sometimes not even readable without needing to stand up and walk around the room. But alive.
A Mary Sue is embarrassing because she wants without apology.
That may be bad craft, but it is not a moral failure.
The gendered double standard
The Mary Sue label has always carried a gendered edge.
Male wish-fulfilment characters are everywhere. The impossibly competent action hero. The genius detective who insults everyone but is always right. The brooding man with a tragic past and unlimited combat ability. The ordinary male protagonist inexplicably desired by multiple women. The chosen one who discovers he is uniquely powerful, uniquely important, and uniquely burdened, which is convenient because he was already the main character.
These characters are not always called Gary Stus. Often, they are called icons.
This does not mean female wish-fulfilment characters should be immune from criticism. Weak writing is weak writing. A character who bends the world around herself without cost or complexity can make a story collapse, regardless of gender. But the intensity of the Mary Sue accusation often reveals discomfort with certain kinds of feminine fantasy.
Young women writing themselves into beloved worlds have been mocked for self-indulgence in a culture that has rarely objected to male self-insertion when it comes with guns, prophecy, emotional repression, or a sports car.
The question should not be whether a character is powerful, desired, or important. The question should be whether the story gives that power weight, consequence, resistance, and meaning.
Power fantasy is not the problem.
Unexamined power fantasy is.
And even then, it is worth asking why some fantasies are treated as embarrassing while others become franchises.
Why Mary Sues can weaken stories
Defending the Mary Sue does not mean pretending she is always good writing.
She often is not.
The craft problem begins when a character is too protected by the story. If she cannot fail meaningfully, there is no tension. If everyone loves her, relationships become dull. If her flaws are decorative, they do not create conflict. If the world exists only to validate her, the setting feels artificial. If canon characters are rewritten to admire her, readers can sense the manipulation.
Stories need friction. Characters need limits. Desire needs obstacles. A protagonist becomes interesting not because she is important, but because importance costs something.
A good character can be talented, beautiful, powerful, beloved, and still compelling if the story makes those traits complicated. Beauty can invite objectification. Power can create fear. Talent can isolate. Being chosen can become a burden. Love can be partial, difficult, or undeserved. Strength can fail. Confidence can crack.
The Mary Sue fails when the story gives her everything without asking what any of it means.
This is why “make her flawed” is not enough. Many Mary Sues technically have flaws, but the flaws are fake. She is too caring. Too brave. Too selfless. Too haunted by her incredible destiny. These are not flaws; they are compliments wearing a small false moustache.
Real flaws cause problems. They damage relationships, distort judgement, create consequences, and force change. If a character’s “flaw” only makes her more attractive to the reader, it is not a flaw. It is lighting.
Fan fiction as a training ground
The Mary Sue often appears in fan fiction because fan fiction is one of the safest places to be excessive.
That is a strength, not a weakness.
Fan fiction lets writers practise inside worlds they already love. The setting, characters, conflicts, and emotional stakes are already charged with meaning. A new writer can enter that space and experiment with desire, identity, dialogue, intimacy, power, humour, angst, and style. Sometimes the result is elegant. Sometimes the result is a seventeen-chapter emotional hostage situation involving a self-insert with heterochromia and a destiny no one asked for.
Fine.
That is part of learning.
Early writing is often imitative, indulgent, and overstuffed because the writer is still discovering what stories can hold. Fan fiction gives people a place to try things before they know how to control them. It allows exaggeration. It allows repair. It allows private emotional experiments in public or semi-public form.
This is why mockery can be so damaging. It is easy to laugh at beginner writing. It is also lazy. Everyone starts somewhere, and many writers begin by producing work that is too obvious, too intense, too derivative, too dramatic, or too close to the bone. If people are shamed too early, they may never reach the stage where they learn control.
Craft develops by surviving cringe.
A writer who never writes anything embarrassing probably has not written enough.
The Mary Sue as scaffolding
A Mary Sue can be understood as scaffolding.
She may not belong in the final building, at least not unchanged, but she helps the writer reach something. Through her, the writer experiments with agency, beauty, danger, love, status, anger, competence, grief, and belonging. She holds the writer’s early attempts at selfhood, story, and emotional control.
Later, the writer may revise her into someone more complex. The impossible talent becomes hard-won skill. The tragic backstory becomes a source of conflict rather than decoration. The universal admiration becomes a few meaningful relationships. The perfect beauty becomes embodied experience. The chosen destiny becomes a burden. The self-insert becomes a character.
Or perhaps the writer moves on entirely, leaving the Mary Sue behind like an old costume from a play they are glad no one filmed.
Either way, the Mary Sue may have done her job.
Not every early character needs to be defended as secretly brilliant. Some are simply part of the process. The problem is that online culture often preserves and ridicules developmental work as if a young writer’s first attempt should already meet adult standards of craft, irony, and restraint.
That is a grim expectation. We do not judge a child’s first drawing by gallery standards. We should be equally cautious about treating early writing as evidence of permanent creative failure.
The Mary Sue is often not the destination.
She is the messy bridge.
Embracing the cringe without worshipping it
There is a difference between embracing cringe and refusing to improve.
“Let people enjoy things” is a useful corrective to cruelty, but it can become a hiding place if it means no one is allowed to discuss craft. The goal is not to declare every Mary Sue above criticism. Some stories are self-indulgent in ways that make them boring. Some characters flatten the world around them. Some fantasies are worth examining, not because desire is bad, but because desire can be lazy, repetitive, or politically odd when left unchallenged.
Embracing the cringe means refusing shame as the main response to early creative desire. It means recognising that awkward, excessive, self-revealing writing is part of becoming a writer. It means allowing people to have developmental stages without turning them into internet exhibits.
But it also means learning. Eventually, a writer has to ask harder questions. What does this character want beyond being admired? What are the costs of her power? Who disagrees with her? What does she misunderstand? What does the world refuse to give her? Who exists in the story for reasons other than reacting to her?
Those questions do not kill the fantasy. They make it better.
The point is not to destroy the Mary Sue. It is to let her grow up.
Preferably without losing all her weirdness in the process.
Why we should be kinder to our old writing
Most writers have old work they would happily fire into the sea.
That is normal. It is also a sign of growth. If your old writing embarrasses you, it means your judgement has developed. The cringe is not evidence that you should never have written. It is evidence that you kept going long enough to become harder to impress.
This matters because shame is a terrible teacher when it arrives too early. It makes people cautious before they have learned anything worth protecting. It encourages cleverness over sincerity, irony over risk, and polish over life. A young writer who is terrified of being cringe may produce work that is technically safer but emotionally dead, which is a high price to pay for avoiding a few dramatic adjectives.
The Mary Sue, for all her flaws, is rarely emotionally dead. She is too much. Too bright. Too wanted. Too central. Too obviously loved by the person who made her. That excess can be shaped later. What cannot always be recovered is the willingness to care.
So perhaps the correct response to an old Mary Sue is not worship and not disgust, but recognition.
There she is. The embarrassing little engine of wanting. The character who did not understand restraint, but did understand that stories were places where a person could become more powerful, more visible, more loved, and more alive.
That is not nothing.
It may even be where the writer began.
Simply Put
The Mary Sue is often bad storytelling, but she is not meaningless.
She is what happens when wish fulfilment reaches the page before craft has learned how to manage it. She is too perfect, too admired, too powerful, too central, and often far too obviously loved by the person who created her. That can make a story weak, flat, and unintentionally funny.
But the Mary Sue also tells us something about identity, desire, shame, and creative development. She often appears when writers, especially young writers, are experimenting with who they want to be and what they want stories to give them. Power. Beauty. love. Recognition. Escape. Revenge. Belonging. A dramatic cloak, perhaps, because adolescence is not known for under-accessorising.
The answer is not to pretend Mary Sues are always good. They are not. The answer is to stop treating them as creative crimes.
Cringe is part of becoming a writer. Early work is allowed to be excessive. Desire is allowed to be visible before it becomes elegant. The Mary Sue may not be the character who survives revision, but she may be the character who gets the writer to the page in the first place.
And honestly, that deserves a little more mercy.
References
Erikson, E. H. (1959). Identity and the life cycle. International Universities Press.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge.
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100
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