Quotes / Mary Sue

"It was love at first sight
Inside Hogwarts school that night
When she walked up to the common room and he was waiting there for her.
He said, "Malfoy thinks you're hot."
"And Ron really thinks you're really hot."
"And for reasons unexplained to the readers I think you're hot too."
And she smiled as their lips met.
A scene we won't forget,
'Cause it was close to nineteen paragraphs long."

—Rachel Robichaud, The Life of a Mary Sue

Cody answered again "I brought you here because I'm your biggest fan! I've always wanted to meet you in person, so I used my high intelligence to make a time machine to warp you in the future. Maybe we could have some butt kicking adventures or something."
Donatello pondered on what Cody said. "biggest fan...high intelligence...adventures...OH MY GOD! WE ARE IN A MARY SUE FANFIC!"
Everyone screamed.

—Fast Rewind, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Crack Fic.

I am everything you want, I am everything you need,
I am everything inside of you that you wish you could be.
I say all the right things, at exactly the right time,
But I mean nothing to you, and I don't know why...

—Vertical Horizon, "Everything You Want"

"Twelve Times A Day Man"? You can't just start makin' up terrible new characters!

—Strong Bad

"My attempt to define the difference between a character who is a sue, and one who is merely a protagonist, in the simplest way possible:

"A protagonist is someone the story revolves around. A mary sue is someone the world revolves around."

—Idler 2.0

"Others still carry this meaning out to extremes, and use the term to describe anyone who isn't a homeless junkie or a brooding sociopath with an alignment of chaotic neutral."

—1d4chan.org

Ron: Did you see that new student on the train? I think she's another one.
Harry: Yeah, I saw her.
Hermione: Another what?
[they see the new student, who has a radiant halo of light about her face]
Hermione: ...Oh.

—House Sparklypoo

"It's easy to justify a lot of things about Kirito because he has no defined personality at all. But when you add to those traits the fact that he's got the scripting skills to not just hack the game from inside it, but to custom write code in the space of a few seconds to store data as an in-game object, I gotta call bullshit. Hacking games require time and at least some knowledge of the source code. There's no way Kirito has that. Even if the thousand or so carefully selected beta testers for SAO were data-mining the shit out of the game, they only had it for a little over a month over summer vacation, and they only had a fraction of the content. It would be hard to get a full picture of how the game works in that timeframe under normal circumstances, but SAO is also the first game of its kind built from the ground up for incredibly complicated brand-new proprietary hardware. So already, Kirito is doing something that nobody outside the company should know how to do. But even if we assume that there's a command already in place to store a script as an in-game object, think about what he's storing. Yui is a fucking A.I, the most complicated kind of program conceivable. Her code needs to be immense to account for the broad amount of situations she might need to deal with. And it also needs to be capable of re-writing itself on the fly in real time! Kirito is taking that huge complex code, saving its current state of operation, and converting that information into a custom item, in a game whose script he must be figuring out in real time, all in the space of a few seconds! NO! Not! Fucking! Possible! In this moment, Kirito ceases to be a real human being, and I lose all suspension of disbelief for this entire show. It's just not believable that any person could be capable of pulling off the shit that we've seen him do up to this point. Maybe some of it. But not all of it. And especially not a fourteen year old fucking child!"

—Mother's Basement What's in a Scene? - How SAO Became the Worst Anime Ever

"The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress–that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty."

—George Eliot, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

"Bob is so cool, other Mary Sue's weep at the mere mention of his name, for they know there's no way they could possibly be as cool as... well, you get the idea."

—Commentary on Bob and George

"Are you frightened, by perfection?
Is this who you are, not who you want to be?"

—Plushgun, Just Impolite

"So, after all the Twilight movies, all the bullshit, two movies, divided up, actually telling us, 'The moral of the story, the moral of the story... is if you sacrifice NOTHING, do nothing, play these boy toys like... BOY TOYS, you can live happily ever after as the blood-sucking demon that you are.' FUCK YOU, STEPHANIE MEYERS!!!"

— The Nostalgia Critic, on the ending of Twilight Breaking Dawn: Part 2 and the series in general during his review of the film at Shadocon 2012

Perfect people are boring. Perfect people are obnoxious because they're better than us. Perfect people are, above all, too good to be true.

—How NOT to Write a Novel, "Too Good To Be True"

"Since it's important to write what you know, the main character will be you! But while you are a depressed, socially retarded dullard who no one will ever obviously admit to liking, your author insertion character is a fantasy, so they will be a charismatic eccentric who is unconditionally loved by everyone while he's setting their dog on fire!"

—Yahtzee, on a guide to Webcomics

"First Zod falls in love with Lana, now Bizarro? Is Brainiac next? Hey, I have an awesome idea, Al and Miles. Let's introduce Doomsday, but instead of being evil, he falls in love with Lana! I'm a fucking genius! I just wrote Season 8!"

— Television Without Pity recap of Smallville, "Persona"

"The reason the fans liked Rose was because the script liked Rose."

—Mr TARDIS Reviews on Rose in his video "Is Doctor Who too sexy? Discuss!"

Woolie: ...He transforms into robot mode and now—!
Matt: Nobody told me Transformers could do that—!
Woolie: —And now no-one can tell that he's actually a kaiju in disguise! And he joins the recruits, sneaks up—
Matt: Wait, what?!
Woolie: ...And he infiltrates, and he's the new jaegar, he's like; "Hey guys, what's going, hey, what are we doing about the kaijus???" And they's like "Hey Megatron, you the coolest new robot, we all want to be your buddy and it's gonna be amazing!" And then, and then, Kevin Nash is like "Oh my God, this guy's so hot, I can't wait to get my hands on him!" And then he totally falls in love with a kaiju—!
Matt: This is bullshit!
Woolie: He falls in love with him, I swear to God! One day, when they're lying in bed together, he whispers in his ears all the little secrets about how to defeat the jaegars, and how to slowly infiltrate and conquer all of American Society! And then—
Matt: This is just the worst dude.

—Best Friends Get Hyped For Pacific Rim

Onward, Sueish soldiers, with our violet eyes,
Grammar is our en'my, fans' reviews our prize.
Satan is our homeboy, logic is our foe,
Give us stupid powers, wind us up and watch us go!

Curves in the right places, powers that make no sense,
Onward, Sueish soldiers, here to cause offence!

Hark! The English teachers, weeping in despair!
Murd'rers soften when they see our haunch-length hair.
Mark our tragic childhoods, watch us try to spell,
When we reign in Heaven you'll be glad you're bound for Hell.

Curves in the right places, powers that make no sense,
Onward, Sueish soldiers, here to cause offence!

Like a gestalt entity, Sues are much the same,
Myrmidons of evil, each with twenty names.
Like the Hydra, Sues can never be erased;
FF.net deletes one, three spring up to take her place.

Curves in the right places, powers that make no sense,
Onward, Sueish soldiers, here to cause offence!

Fandoms come and fandoms go, fads and fashions pass,
Mary Sues alone will be etern'lly crass.
Overcome we never shall be by taste and wit;
As Einstein will tell you, we’re the one thing infinite.

Curves in the right places, powers that make no sense,
Onward, Sueish soldiers, here to cause offence!

So, do not resist us! Join our hackneyed fight!
Why write proper fiction when you could write tripe?
Proofreaders won't stop us; mods can do their worst.
We will rule you all if we don't kill each other first.

Curves in the right places, powers that make no sense,
Onward, Sueish soldiers, here to cause offence!

—Onward, Sueish Soldiers, by Cherylbites of Das Sporking^note Sung to the tune of "Onward, Christian Soldiers"

"Y'know, I think I understand the Mary Sue a little better now. What makes a Sue isn't that they have limitless powers and quirks and "special" qualities... it's need. Mary Sues are generally "chosen ones," destined to save others. The world revolves around them as a perfect crystal star. But it's all window dressing... there's no room in the story for anyone else to truly help them better themselves, denying them the potential for growth and increased empathy. They love people, but they don't need them. But Kirk, the Doctor, Wolverine... they DO need people. They have flaws which require the presence of others to counteract. Kirk is headstrong and cocksure, the Doctor can get lost in his god-complex and lose perspective, Wolverine just goes nuts sometimes. While they're certainly brilliantly capable, to be at their very best they must connect with those around them. Even Superman needs to be brought down to Earth by Batman now and then. But each Sue is an island. This may be the key to their downfall, because this is why no one loves them like they seem to think they should. They don't NEED to connect with others for support, their empathy is purely cosmetic. They're each designed so that they can handle any situation with nothing but their own perfect attributes."

—Found in the comments of the webcomic Ensign Sue Must Die

Purple Beetle: With my powers, I can easily crush God-Man! Than I will be able to rob banks unimpeded!
Narrator: From his God-Hideout atop Mt. Zevuluss on the planet Xeq, the omniscient God-Man lifts an eyebrow and the Purple Beetle is no more!

—God-Man◊

"Just like The Idiot's Lantern, there's this feeling that Rose comes first and the rest of the human race have to make do with second best."

—John Belsalhia in his review of "Army of Ghosts"

"Having a relatable character is key to writing a story, and who's more relatable than You? You know You better than anyone, and if there's one thing You know about You, it's that You are great. The easiest way to make a main character likable is to make every character in-universe love them unconditionally. Character flaws are bad, so make sure your character doesn't have any! Also, make sure to give them a cool power, like an evil dark side or omnipotence."

—Welcome to Fanfiction.net! (and Wattpad)

"Mary Sue: A character whose unreasonable ease or difficulty in overcoming obstacles, forming relationships, and/or gaining accolades runs contrary to the intent of the writer and makes it difficult for the reader to get invested in the story or character arc. Also, apparently, a term used to refer to any female character you don’t like."

—nphofrph's Sing-Along Glossary of Roleplay Terms

Jamie: It's a terrible story. William Dewey is totally unbelievable!
Steven: Cause he grows fifty feet?
Jamie: No, he's got no character.
Steven: But the script kept saying he was very good.
Jamie: Exactly! How can a guy has no faults? To be human is to be flawed, a real hero must struggle!
Steven: That's so beautiful, and also totally not represented in Mayor Dewey's script.

— Steven Universe, "Historical Friction"

Protagonist: Center of the story

Mary sue: center of the universe

—Hypersonix Gamer in the comments of This Video

"While normal characters are stuck obeying the laws of their own universe, in the case of a Mary Sue, the universe bends to obey the character."

— Literature Devil