I’ve seen “Mary Sue” used to describe a lot of things, but I’ve never seen it used to describe a character created to patch what the author sees as flaws in the world or the storytelling. I have heard the term “fix fic”, which seems to cover much of that ground, but it’s not automatically pejorative.
That said, defining Mary Sue is fraught with the same difficulties as talking about D&D’s alignment system or comparing Kirk to Picard.
A “fix fic” is a type of fanfic, not a type of character, and doesn’t necessarily include a character that goes around doing the fixing. If a character fixes things by doing contrived things, especially if those things wouldn’t happen or the character wouldn’t be able to get away with them, then the character would be a Mary Sue.
Yeah, I still don’t buy it. You’re describing a bad plot structure, not a bad character type, and so’s the article you linked to.
I did my time on TV Tropes and don’t particularly want to get back into the game, but that read to me like someone extending a family of tropes with poor associations in an attempt to tar a story or stories they happened not to like—which is officially against policy over there, but happens all the time anyway. Long story short, the existence of a trope page doesn’t mean it’s reliable as analysis, nor as regards jargon that isn’t its own.
I’ve seen “Mary Sue” used to describe a lot of things, but I’ve never seen it used to describe a character created to patch what the author sees as flaws in the world or the storytelling. I have heard the term “fix fic”, which seems to cover much of that ground, but it’s not automatically pejorative.
That said, defining Mary Sue is fraught with the same difficulties as talking about D&D’s alignment system or comparing Kirk to Picard.
A “fix fic” is a type of fanfic, not a type of character, and doesn’t necessarily include a character that goes around doing the fixing. If a character fixes things by doing contrived things, especially if those things wouldn’t happen or the character wouldn’t be able to get away with them, then the character would be a Mary Sue.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FixerSue
Yeah, I still don’t buy it. You’re describing a bad plot structure, not a bad character type, and so’s the article you linked to.
I did my time on TV Tropes and don’t particularly want to get back into the game, but that read to me like someone extending a family of tropes with poor associations in an attempt to tar a story or stories they happened not to like—which is officially against policy over there, but happens all the time anyway. Long story short, the existence of a trope page doesn’t mean it’s reliable as analysis, nor as regards jargon that isn’t its own.