Tuesday, 10-Oct-00

    I'm going to rant about a very rare type of Mary Sue, who I've committed myself, and who seems to her creators to be totally unlike a Mary Sue, because she is A Villain and Villains are supposed to be hot stuff. Right?
    The characteristics of Mary Sue DeVille are as follows:
   

• She can beat the main characters in a fight without trouble. Often she commits "Beat-On-Worf" syndrome, named for the tendency Trek:TNG writers had to make sure we all knew new characters were badasses by having them beat up Worf...thus severely weakening Worf's badass status. In X-Men fandom, Mary Sue DeVille can beat Gambit, Wolverine, Cyclops, Bishop and sometimes all four at once. Or, her telepathic powers overpower the combined force of Charles Xavier and Jean Grey. Or, her superior control of magnetism brings Magneto to his knees even though he's three times her age and knows a lot more dirty tricks.
  

• Mary Sue DeVille always had a tormented past. This excuses everything she does. Welll, this isn't 100% true. My own Mary Sue DeVille, Alatan Katse, had what should have been an idyllic upbringing, were it not for the alien influencing her throughout her childhood. But generally, Mary Sue DeVille has experienced rape, child abuse, torture, genocide, and any number of terrible things.
  

• Mary Sue DeVille is not old or does not act old. This is an important distinction between Mary Sue DeVille and, say, Mystique. Either Mary Sue DeVille is a contemporary of the X-Men, or, if she is old enough to explain her extraordinary abilities, she acts young and hip, rather than a mature adult like Mystique or a severely weird adult like Sinister. In such circumstances, she is generally immortal or has a healing factor.
  

• When Mary Sue DeVille picks on the X-Men, you get the distinct impression that the author prefers her to the X-Men. She is not treated as a villain; she is treated as a protagonist who has every right to set Wolverine on fire for daring to challenge her. Generally she is used to point out how lame the X-Men are.
  

If you think you have written about Mary Sue DeVille, how can you save her?

Mary Sue DeVille is easier to rescue than your typical Mary Sue. She is not loved by all the X-Men because she's not supposed to be; she's a badass. She's probably not a naive, innocent teen (an evil teen, maybe). She may be a twink, but a twink can be okay for a villain. But what you have to do is humanize her. No villain is so damn good they can consistently beat the X-Men without trouble, and if you're writing from the point of view of Mary Sue DeVille, probably no one will enjoy your work because she's both original and an antagonist; it works much better to write from the X-Men's point of view.
    My character in the Gatchaman universe, Alatan Katse, started as Mary Sue DeVille. A supergenius, the 14-year-old daughter of the first series' villain, martial arts expert, shapeshifter with a healing factor, and she had a fantastic strategic ability-- she was able to work out in advance how to beat the Science Ninja Team, who were all much older and more experienced than she was, three times. Yawn. So what I started doing was the following:
   

• improved the role of the heroes (in this case, the Science Ninja Team.) I had them almost kill her once, figure out her clever plan and work around it once, beat her up a few times, and from then on things were a bit more even between them. Alatan got harder and tougher, and the Ninja Team learned to compensate for her advantages, like her healing factor.
  

• humanized Alatan. I wrote about her troubles with discovering sex, her desire to connect to her second-in-command as a mother figure, her insane resentment of her own mother for never being there during her childhood, her extreme hero worship of her father. I had her suffer humiliation. I had the Science Ninja Team bust in and try to kill her while she was in bed with a subordinate, leading her to run for her life down the street half-dressed in skimpy lingerie. (Alatan appears to her subordinates to be an adult, because of her shapeshifting ability. No one knows she's 14.)
  
  

You can rehabilitate your Mary Sue DeVille and make her a good villain if you let the heroes beat her (preferably because they were smart, ir they used teamwork, not because of dumb luck or because she fell madly in love with Gambit and couldn't go through with killing them all) a few times. Don't have her beat Wolverine in hand-to-hand with ease; he is the best at what he does, after all. If she's a telepath, she's awfully unlikely to be Xavier-class and have Xavier's training; have her beat on Emma Frost or Jean Grey to prove what a badass teep she is, unless she comes from the future, an alternate dimension, was trained in TP combat by the dead Shadow King, or there's some other very good reason why Charles would not be aware of such a badass teep.

And humanize her. Most importantly, give her faults. Not villain-useful faults, like swearing too much or having a hairtrigger temper, but faults like dropping her villainous plans to see her boyfriend, or not being able to do math, or living in the sewer and desperately wishing she could have a real house.
    All of the above goes for male villains, too; it's just that male villains are less likely to be Mary Sue DeVille.

-- Alara Rogers



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