Is calling a character a "Mary Sue" a legitimate criticism?

[Christopher]

Again, I see it differently. I felt Lana's return was the best thing that had happened to her in years, because it gave better closure to her arc on the series and because it portrayed her in a more impressive light, as someone who'd become an independent, successful woman in her own right and had outgrown being merely some male hero's love interest.

And again, I don't see how anyone can blame Clark for favoring Lana over Chloe, because Lana Lang being the younger Clark Kent's love interest has been a fundamental part of the mythos for 60 years. It's like blaming Romeo for killing himself over Juliet. What else is he supposed to do? That's the story!

 

[Hermiod]

^Well, for starters, this clearly isn't the "younger" Clark anymore - Welling's refusal to put on the suit aside.

She shouldn't be portrayed in a more impressive light. She was portrayed in a ridiculously over impressive light since day one.

 

[Scout101]

Honestly, Chloe has had more damage done to her character as "mary-sue-like" over the years than anyone else. Or maybe her super-power is just neutralizing plot black holes? Granted, she's been on the show since the beginning, but she's the one that wasn't part of the mythos, came out of nowhere, and usually solves the problems that makes the superheroes look like chumps, even though their powers should take care of it no problem.

Cute, perky blonde reporter for the high school paper? Sure, all well and good. Then again, she's also a super-hacker beyond any level of encryption or earthbound technology, crushing military firewalls using her ipod (maybe there IS an app for everything?). Need her to have super powers of her own, and bring people back from the dead? No problem, done and done. She's shown more abilities than Superman at this point. And everyone (on the show or here) fawns over her, even when she's a super-bitch.

She was better when she was the fun, normal one on the show, but they've stretched her well past anything believable on just about every occasion in order to fit the plot. Can't figure out why any of the characters even like her anymore, and Clark hasn't told her to just eff off at this point...

 

[LaxScrutiny]

That Clark is supposed to be in love with Lana is what pushes her towards being a Mary Sue. The difference between Lana and a character like Billie from Charmed is, Lana was "inserted" 30 years or so after Clark Kent/Superman was created, but it happened to be in the 50's, so there is some supposed history there. But she is still a retcon, and without showing a meaningful chemistry she comes across as something forced into the story.

The character wasn't developed enough to show her has being such a major love interest (in the eyes of fans who disdain her), we were just told that she had to be. The idea of being "universally adored by other characters despite having no evident qualities worthy of adoration". Apart from being half-asian, and we are all supposed to do cartwheels over girls that look remotely asian.

I saw the Lana arc last year the same way as Hermiod, and it did anything but give the character closure. Clark never grew up and grew out of his adolescent fantasy love for her. If she was detoxified he would dump Lois in a second and spend the rest of his life with Lana. That's not closure. Closure would have been showing their characters maturing to the point where they realized that they had a childhood crush and they are beyond that now. Closure would have been Clark saying "Excuse me a moment" to Lois at Chloe and Jimmy's reception, walking over to Lana, shaking her hand, giving her a kiss on the cheek, and then walking back to Lois, finishing the dance and commiting to an adult relationship.

 

[Christopher]

She shouldn't be portrayed in a more impressive light. She was portrayed in a ridiculously over impressive light since day one.

Well, I don't agree. I think the Lana who guest starred in the eighth season was a far better-written, more mature, more likeable character than the Lana of the previous two or three seasons, and the closure she was given here was better-written than the closure she was given at the end of her tenure as a regular. Of course, that's largely because the writing on those previous seasons sucked and the show overall has become much better-written since Gough and Millar left the showrunner posts.

I saw the Lana arc last year the same way as Hermiod, and it did anything but give the character closure. Clark never grew up and grew out of his adolescent fantasy love for her. If she was detoxified he would dump Lois in a second and spend the rest of his life with Lana. That's not closure.

If you're looking at it solely from the male character's perspective, perhaps. But when it comes to female characters in fiction, I prefer seeing their arcs defined on their own terms rather than treating them merely as subordinate facets of a male character's arc. From Lana's own perspective, the storyline gave her empowerment, independence, and a new heroic destiny. She wasn't just some man's love interest who got away; the end of the story for Clark was the beginning of the story of the rest of Lana's life, a story that would define her for her own actions and abilities, not merely as some man's object of desire.

This is one thing the current showrunners have done very well -- portraying their female characters as empowered individuals with their own journeys rather than merely appendages to the male hero. They're doing the same thing now with Lois, where her role in the Clark/Lois/superhero triangle isn't simply about being infatuated with one male or the other, but with being driven to find her own greater purpose and make a difference in the world. What's great about this version of the Clark/Lois dynamic is that Lois sees herself as the hero, the one with a higher calling and a need to keep secrets to protect Clark.

And I think the eighth-season Lana arc did show Clark maturing out of his adolescent infatuation, because this Lana had herself matured into a true equal of his, someone who actually deserved to be loved on that level. It wasn't a childish infatuation anymore, but a partnership of peers. Remember, a Mary Sue isn't just someone who's loved and worshipped by other characters, it's someone who doesn't deserve the admiration. That implies that it's possible for a character who was a Mary Sue to grow out of it.

 

[Hermiod]

^She doesn't deserve the admiration. Ironically, the only way you can suggest that she deserves any admiration at all is to admit that she's a Mary Sue - she was written as perfect at everything she does since the first episode.

I'm brought back to what I said in my first post in this thread - she's written like Homer's plans for Poochie - especially the "when Poochie's not around everyone should be asking 'where's Poochie ?'" part.

 

[LaxScrutiny]

If you're looking at it solely from the male character's perspective, perhaps. But when it comes to female characters in fiction, I prefer seeing their arcs defined on their own terms rather than treating them merely as subordinate facets of a male character's arc. From Lana's own perspective, the storyline gave her empowerment, independence, and a new heroic destiny. She wasn't just some man's love interest who got away; the end of the story for Clark was the beginning of the story of the rest of Lana's life, a story that would define her for her own actions and abilities, not merely as some man's object of desire.

Lana became "empowered" in a far too literal sense for it to be taken as actual character growth. The only way she was able to rise above being little more than a love interest was to become the second most powerful humanoid on the planet? This doesn't strengthen her character, it weakens it into an eggshell.

Earlier in the story, Lex desired her as a precious object, not as a human. He didn't treat her with any human respect, but coerced her love with manipulation and utilized huge resources to fake a pregnancy. At this stage, and through the first seasons with other boyfriends, Lana showed a very adolescent personality typical of a teenage girl: She saw her self-worth as measured by the worth of her boyfriend.

When Lana finally clued in to Lex's manipulations, she realized how powerless she was, not just from her economic status or physical strength, but her personality. She went dark, kidnapped Lionel, etc. "Dark Lana" was by far her most interesting hour, and it should have been the catalyst for Clark realizing she wasn't a fairy-tale princess.

I believe that Lana's video-taped goodbye to Clark was forced by Miller and Gough having to leave the series and to write in a short space what they would have preferred to drag out for another season. That said, this was Lana's moment of true growth. She could see herself as an individual, realized she had to discover the world and her worth as an individual, and not just be the arm candy of the best boyfriend she could hook up with. Personally I see this as Lana's empowerment and independance.

We shouldn't see Lana's empowerment and independance as suddenly aquiring superpowers. We should see it as the day she realized she could go out into the world on her own. That was the day she grew up. This was the end of the teenage Lana and the beginning of her adult life.

But with the Lana-return arc, we see again that Lana herself is defining who Lana Lang is in terms of how she fits into her boyfriend's (super powered Clark) life. In order to be with him, she needs superpowers. She is not enough by herself. She needs body modification to be worth of being at his side. This is little more than a metaphor for a boob-job. Her arc was the equivalent of some other woman getting some silicone implants to be worthy of getting married to a successful boyfriend. That doesn't speak empowerment to me, it speaks of a personality that is broken.

In order to fit into the show, Lana has to be perfect. She has to be the perfect desirable cheerleader. She has to be the perfect lover who will always be there for Clark, even after years of forced separation. She has to be faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive. She has to be all of these things, supposedly, according to the writers. Personally I think she didn't have to be, I think she was a better character when she showed believable weakness, when she lost it and sought dark revenge the way many of us would if we'd been manipulated like the Luthors did to her. But the way the writers ended up needing to turn her into a perfect machine, this was her Mary Sue destiny, because she couldn't do it with any realistic character growth.

 

[Christopher]

^She doesn't deserve the admiration. Ironically, the only way you can suggest that she deserves any admiration at all is to admit that she's a Mary Sue - she was written as perfect at everything she does since the first episode.

I don't care to argue whether that's true of the character before, but you are misrepresenting my position. You seem to be treating this as a fight of some sort, as if it's about you vs. me with one of us having to "win." That's not a constructive way to engage in discussion. I'm simply saying that I see the character differently than you did. That doesn't mean I think I have to prove you wrong, it just means that my personal reaction to the character is not identical to yours.

My opinion is that Lana Lang was a reasonably worthwhile character at first, as far as I could judge, but that as the writing on Smallville got progressively worse in the last few Millar-Gough seasons, her character suffered along with every other character and storyline. But when better writers took over the show starting in season 8 and brought her back for a return visit, their interpretation of her character was, to me, more successful. I'm really not interested in whether a fan-vernacular label like "Mary Sue" is a "correct" designation for her character; labels are the most superficial level of analysis and tend to obscure more truths than they reveal. My point is simply that I think the character was better-handled in that storyline than she had been previously.

You apparently feel it necessary to treat the character as monolithic, unchanging; that whatever you held against her in earlier seasons must be held against her in perpetuity. But I don't see her -- or Smallville -- that way. In my opinion, the post-Millar/Gough Smallville is a very different creation than the Smallville of the previous three or four seasons. That Smallville was so bad that the only reason I'd bothered to continue watching it was because I loved watching Kristin Kreuk, and in S7 it became so supremely awful that even Kreuk couldn't keep me watching, and I gave up on the show altogether late in the season. But the post-M/G series is a radically different entity, created by writers who have interpreted the characters in very different and better ways. So I don't see the S8/9 characters as identical to the characters of the M/G era, and I don't assume that their drawbacks in earlier seasons must be held against them in the current seasons. So I'm not "admitting" anything about Lana being a Mary Sue, nor am I denying it, because it's not really important to me to have an opinion on that matter. My position is simply that the S8 Lana character is a distinct entity from the earlier Lana character rather than an unchanged continuation.

If you feel differently, that's fine. You're entitled to your opinion. I'm not trying to fight with you or shoot you down. I'm simply participating in a conversation and offering an alternative perspective to the discussion of the Smallville Lana Lang character. There are more people on this BBS than you and me, so it's not about us. Other people might appreciate getting to read and consider multiple points of view on a given subject. That's what a BBS is supposed to be for. So there's no reason our different perspectives on the character can't coexist.

 

[Lapis Exilis]

I'm not really qualified to get into a discussion of Smallville's Lana Lang's character development since I only watched the first season or two, but it seems to me the issue of Lana comes down to the actress and always has. Those who find her supernaturally gorgeous can suspend disbelief and buy what the writers are selling. Those who don't... well, let's just say that Kristen Kreuk never struck me as having any dramatic weight. She's pretty, sure, but she's fluff, so any writing that tells me she's brilliant, talented and powerful - I can't buy it because she does not portray brilliant, talented and powerful. She just presents the pretty. It works the other way too - I bought Welling as Clark Kent even though he really only presents the pretty. But it was pretty enough to forgive the lack of any dramatic weight to his performance - for a little while anyway.

Superheroes in general are difficult to judge on the Mary Sue scale because they are such extreme wish fulfillment fantasies. By a general definition of Mary Sues as too-talented/ too-angsty/ too-much-attention paid in the narrative pretty much all superhero writing of the last 20 or 30 years has been a bunch of Mary Sues out saving the world since the writers of this material have long since been nothing but superhero fans who grew up wishing they could be insert-favorite-superhero-here-man. But since the audience is entirely made of readers who want exactly this sort of wish fullfillment material - the genre finds a small but perfectly suited group of authors and audience. A show like Smallville is not strictly Mary Sue-ville because the authors are not inserting themselves into the narrative, but they are pandering to a kind of self-insertion wish fullfillment in their audience. But many genres operate on this - romance, a lot of action-adventure fiction, which is where things wrap back around on a definition of a Mary Sue - that it is inextricably tied to fanfiction, because the only thing that really distinguishes a Sue from any fantasy wish fullfillment hero (from Indiana Jones to Bella Swan) is the insertion of the character into a pre-existing canon. Lacking that, you simply have characters that are too talented to be believeable, but that you want to believe in because it's a satisfying escapist fantasy.

 

[Christopher]

No question, Tom Welling is a mediocre performer -- at least, too mediocre to make Clark interesting when he was written as blandly as he was before. (He has shown some ability to be interesting when playing a mind-altered bad-boy Clark or a more complex and nuanced version of Clark, and he's definitely been better lately as a nascent superhero embracing his responsibility than he was as the self-absorbed, petulant farmboy who spent seven years refusing to climb out of his rut.) But here we have to beware the tendency to slap the label "Mary Sue" on any character we don't care for. It's not a label that one should seek out excuses to stick on as many characters as possible. It's best to err in the other direction and wield it conservatively, to counter the tendency in fandom to toss it around too casually. Lots of characters have traits that are part of the definition of a Mary Sue, but that doesn't mean any character with one or two Sue-like traits is a Sue, any more than every animal with four legs and two horns is a giraffe.

Again, I think labels get in the way more often than they illuminate. I think it's more useful to discuss the specific traits that are problematical with each given character, rather than trying to reduce all criticism to whether or not a certain generalized label can apply.

 

[Hermiod]

There are more people on this BBS than you and me, so it's not about us. Other people might appreciate getting to read and consider multiple points of view on a given subject. That's what a BBS is supposed to be for. So there's no reason our different perspectives on the character can't coexist.

We seem to keep ending up like this. I'm not picking a fight with you. I'm quite happy to agree to disagree with you or discuss the subject further.

 

[coolghoul]

If I may bring the thread back to the topic of most interest to me...

What did Christopher think of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li?



Seriously, I have wondered from time to time whether I should get it from Netflix. For the record, I have watched StreetFighter (with Raul Julia as Bison) - which is a weird combination of pathetic and awesome at the same time. Overall - a plus.

It reminds me of a discussion about Mortal Kombat - the first of which I had liked inspite of all it's flaws. People had decried the next version but I still went for it. It's special effects were at the same level as the Mortal Kombat TV series and I ended up hating it... Hence the interest...

 

[hyzmarca]

Lana Lang is merely a symptom of the giant circle-jerk that is Smallville, as the desire to continue the show removes all hope of meaningful character development.

I'd say that Clark and Lana both fall into the category of Designated Heroes. If the show was honest, they'd be the bad guys. In the beginning this was intentional. Clark wasn't supposed to be morally perfect. He was supposed to be a flawed person gradually developing his morality. But then they through that out the window because they could never let him actually become Superman and decided to present him as being morally perfect without actually changing his personality.

Lana was supposed to be better than him, someone who would inspire him to be a better person but remain out of his league. But they screwed that up intentionally to satisfy the shippers (when really they should have shipped Clark and Lex, Welling had much better romantic chemistry with Rosenbaum than he ever had with Kreuk).

 

[Hermiod]

^Well, it has always been my assertion that the heroes in Smallville were always Jonathan and Martha.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Is the idea of a Mary Sue vague and just used to criticize characters we just don't like, or is it a valid criticism?

I'm posting this in the SF&F forum because Mary Sue comments only seems to be used for SF&F (the phrase originating with Trek). I also got called out for calling Amy (on Doctor Who) a bit of a Mary Sue.

It's immature, in-group laziness.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

Somebody just needs to include a character named Mary Sue in some work of fiction who is the opposite of the "Mary Sue" stereotype.

If they haven't already.

 

[payndz201]

^Well, I didn't get to know the Billie character at all well, because I simply couldn't stand the actress. I skipped most of that season of the show. It was pretty much skippable anyway, from what I saw.

You didn't miss much. Apart from the last ten minutes of the penultimate episode, the finale, and maybe 'Run, Piper, Run' and 'Repo Manor' if you're being very generous, season 8 was dreadful. Even by Charmed's standards!

Admittedly, other factors like a huge budget cut, Leo being written out for half the season, Darryl disappearing entirely, Phoebe's 'six episodes then they're gone' romances and Rose McGowan only being there because her contract forced her to and making her displeasure clear every second she was on screen didn't help. But Billie was a major contributor to the sinkhole of suck.

 

[Christopher]

Lana Lang is merely a symptom of the giant circle-jerk that is Smallville, as the desire to continue the show removes all hope of meaningful character development.

"Is?" Lana isn't a member of the cast anymore. She left two years ago, and returned for an arc of several weeks last season. And under the new showrunners of the last two seasons, the characters have developed and changed far more than they did in the previous seven years. (Well, those that are left. There have also been a lot of cast changes.)

I'd say that Clark and Lana both fall into the category of Designated Heroes. If the show was honest, they'd be the bad guys. In the beginning this was intentional. Clark wasn't supposed to be morally perfect. He was supposed to be a flawed person gradually developing his morality. But then they through that out the window because they could never let him actually become Superman and decided to present him as being morally perfect without actually changing his personality.

Again, that was under the old guard. It's a completely new show these days.

 

[Vestboy]

True, the show has changed in recent years, and is a more interesting show now. Once I accepted reading it through the filter of a DC-Universe Elseworlds, my enjoyment of it increased immensely.

That said, I thought the Lana-arc last season was a weak spot. This is in part because I really feel that the romantic elements are the weakest parts of Smallville, and often feel like they are network-imposed instead of organic. So when Lana returned last year it felt like the show stopped for four episodes, and then started back up once she left. But: mileage, variable.

 

[Hermiod]

Is the idea of a Mary Sue vague and just used to criticize characters we just don't like, or is it a valid criticism?

I'm posting this in the SF&F forum because Mary Sue comments only seems to be used for SF&F (the phrase originating with Trek). I also got called out for calling Amy (on Doctor Who) a bit of a Mary Sue.

It's immature, in-group laziness.

While it may occasionally be misapplied, there's nothing lazy or immature about the concept.

There's a reason why it's usually applied to fan fiction characters. It's the writers of these stories who are lazy and more than a little immature - especially when you consider that a considerable amount of fan fiction either contains one of these characters or just goes for broke and makes the two male characters the author likes the most gay.

The example I used fits pretty much all of the conditions necessary to be valid. Lana Lang has the standard unusually tragic past, romantic success, unnatural physical combat skill for a five foot nothing woman, popularity amongst the other characters, well above average intelligence, exotic looks and very, very rarely fails at anything she attempts.