Your Favorite Mary Sues

Just for fun--who are your favorite, or least-favorite, or love-to-hate Mary Sue characters in fantasy, and why?

My all-time favorite has got to be a figure in a series that is only marginally fantasy: Nuala Anne McGrail from Andrew Greeley's "Irish" mysteries. I love Nuala. I have read the entire series. But she is about as Sue-like as it's possible to get without having silver eyes, being half-dragon, and owning a magic sword.

Nuala is beautiful, infinitely desirable, a famous singer, a powerful psychic, and suffers from endless angst, while living with an incredibly wealthy husband and solving mysteries. But the single most Sue thing about her is that any character who dislikes her, for any reason, will, invariably, be evil, damaged, relentless, and utterly unworthy. They will get their comeuppance by book's end.

Who are your favorite Sues?

That I don't know.

But if you want to know about my own personal Sues, I'll let you know about Amy Whifflepoof. She had curly ketchup-red hair and dressed like a flood victim, yet everyone thought she was beautiful. She had a tendency to enter someone's life and make the world revolve around her. Whenever a situation called for it, she knew how to do it (including safely landing aircraft), and if someone had powers that she wanted, she would take them but make them better and then flaunt them. At the end of her story, she would die tragically and people would miss having her around. I was only 11 at the time, but after a while I realized she wasn't nice, she kept stealing the spotlight, and I didn't like her one bit. She has since been shoved in a dark corner of my mind to rot for eternity.

After she was gone, I invented a new lead role, whom I've named Ductape. There wasn't much backstory behind him at first; I said he wore duct tape clothes since he was nine because he didn't like getting caught in the rain and that he did extreme rollerblading. I gave him acne, greasy hair and instead of coloring his shoes I just pasted new ones over the old, giving him immense, swollen feet, but despite these flaws he was still cute to me. He initially started as a recolor of another character, but when I wanted to use him in original stories for school I had to morph him from his recolor form to human. His primary trait is his dogged niceness and perpetually sunny personality (which isn't that far off from his source). I like him a whole lot, but he hasn't seen much use lately since I can't seem to find a story for him to star in.

Aly of Pirate's Swoop.

Tamora Pierce is usually really good about making her heroines awesome but not Sues. But Aly? I used to try to defend her by saying she's sixteen, and by the time the other heroines are sixteen they're awesome too--but they're mainly awesome at one thing. Aly is awesome at everything. She can lipread; write in and break codes; speak perfect, unaccented Kyprish (why would she learn Kyprish? What are the odds of her going to the Copper Isles? Why not Carthaki, or Scanran, or did she learn those too, in which case I am calling BS right now); she has the Sight with the same strength as her mother has the Gift, which basically lets her do anything with her sight, from zoom in to--I am not kidding--see lies; speak sign language (they call it hand signs, but it's pretty obvious it's a full language); fight three guys at once and win; fight with daggers, a staff, or unarmed; identify dangerous people at a glance; pick locks; pick pockets; teach people her skills over a single winter in order to put together a spy network; charm every guy around, including a crow; oh yeah, and orchestrate a rebellion that the natives of the country should have done, thus becoming a Mighty Whitey, one of my least favorite tropes in existence. *breathes heavily*

I basically gave her slack because it is possible to be that good. I was nearly that good at her age. There was (and still is) pretty much nothing that doesn't come naturally to me. But I'm not perfect at everything. I'm not perfect at anything. I'm just, to be frank, very, very good at most things. And I have flaws to make up for it--I'm socially awkward and I have two serious mental disorders, among other things--but not Aly. Aly makes exactly one mistake in two books, and bounces back from it better than before. She is also lacking the token fear that Tammy gives most of her heroines (which might be why Beka has a worse fear than ever). And even when she reveals who her real family is, no one cares. I'm done defending her. Tammy screwed up with this one.

Dante, Son of Sparda.

I love to hate Jaenelle from Anne Bishop's Black Jewels books. Bishop is something of a guilty pleasure for me, and I relished every scene with Daemon, Lucivar, and Saetan. But Jaenelle was SO annoying and a total Mary Sue. She is the Chosen One, and her personality can be described in one word: special. She is destined to be Queen. There are three types of magical powers in Bishop's world; girls can be a Queen, a Healer, or a Black Widow. Jaenelle is all three, one of the rare triple-gifted witches. There are 13 levels of power jewels in this world, and people get 1 birthright jewel. Jaenelle has them all. The darkest (most powerful) jewel is Black. Jaenelle gets Ebony, a new stone that is blacker than Black. She has incredible powers without having done anything to earn them, apart from being the Chosen One. The good characters (including a dragon, a unicorn, a magical spider, and a clique of powerful teens) love her on sight, or even prior to meeting her, and the bad characters savagely abuse her (before being destroyed, duh). She has no idea how exotically beautiful she is. She is skilled with weapons. She is mistreated by her family and handed over to be raped in order to destroy her powers. She descends into a traumatized coma, but emerges in a fantastic deux ex machina to single-handedly magick her enemies to death. Her Mary Sueness is supposedly justified because she is the incarnation of everyone's dreams, but this absolutely fails for me. No way would the compilation of the prayers, dreams, and wishes of all peoples and races from every reach of every Realm be so bland.

I'll go with the original: Cinderella.

I think the entirety of the Inheritance Cycle serves as a love-to-hate, but the characters just piss me off.

Take Eragon for instance. Callow young farm boy, can't read, has never lifted a sword in his life. Is basically a sword master after a few months of fighting with sticks, and then another few months of fighting with swords. In give or take a year, he's mastered the blade, a discipline which takes years and years of experience to hone. AND he learns how to read in... well, the timeline is a bit foggy, but it couldn't have been more than a month or so. And THEN he gets turned into some sort of freaky half-elf thing and after that "looks like a princeling." The only people who dislike him are either antagonists in some form or come around later, and he commits horrendous acts without anyone really calling him out. He sends the blinded Sloan to trudge across miles of land after essentially mindraping him, but no one REALLY objects. And when he ruthlessly kills a helpless soldier and Arya points out the hypocrisy, he gives some half-baked reply to which she basically admits she's been schooled in morality by a seventeen year old.

SPEAKING of Arya. Freaking Arya. Frankly, I think the only reason she really exists is A) To show how amazing elves are and B) So that Paolini can write purple prose about how gorgeous she is.

Amelia Peabody, from the Amelia Peabody series.
I LOVE Amelia and the series, but I will indulgently admit that she has some Sueish tendencies. She inherited her father's fortune over her elder brothers because she took care of him in his old age, she is a badass woman who married a former misogynist (after making him realize that women could be cool, too), she becomes an archeologist alongside her husband despite no formal training, she kicks the asses of professional thugs with a PARASOL (steel-shafted, mind you) and (drumroll) the antagonist, the master criminal Sethos, falls madly in love with her.
Now, Amelia has enough flaws and really human character traits to make up for anything sueish, and her stories are both fascinating and well-told. The author isn't afraid to poke fun at her, either. However, I can lovingly admit that she is a powerhouse woman.

A Sue I HATE would have to be Ayla from Clan of the Cave Bear and the rest of that godawful series.
Ayla is strikingly beautiful and was brought up by a different race of humans who convinced her that she was ugly but wanted to bone her anyways. She was given the most powerful totem despite being a woman and taught herself how to hunt despite it being forbidden. She gets to angst over her son (by rape) when she is forced to leave him by the rapist. She is the very first human to domesticate animals, create fire from flint, invent the sewing needle, invent the bra, invent the atlatl (spear-thrower), invent surgical stitches, and invent the travois. She has a photographic memory and can learn an entire language within a week. Also, EVERYONE - and I mean EVERYONE - wants to bone her. She has sex roughly ever four pages starting after her first time with Jondalar in book two and she always is perfect at it.
God, I hate her.

I love the children from Enid Blyton's Adventure Series. (Jack and Philip's animal and bird connections I am sure can come under 'magic') They are far from perfect, but they are pretty immortal and magical in the way they alway get out of scrapes.

Similarly Jo, Bessie, Fanny and Dick (or as they are in my children's copies Joe, Beth, Fran and Rick) from the Faraway Tree I just get so swept up in the stories.

It isn't fantasy (well actually it borders on paranormal with the ending), my favourite novel is Mist Over Pendle - all the main 'goody' characters, are Mary Sue's but I just adore Margery Whittaker and Roger Nowell. There only fault is they are not Puritans lol and they save a seminary from being hung, drawn and quartered. The whole story is so warm and colourful, I don't care.

The correct answer is Mara Jade. During the Bantam Spectra age when authors were scrambling left and right to get Luke to like their new girlfriends (lots of new girlfriends, most of which he scared off), Zahn decided to take his red-haired green-eyed sharp-tongued super-Jedi-powered worked-in-top-Imperial-position-then-went-good lady and had Luke marry her by setting his tale long after all the others. She contracted a deadly plague and survived. She was so awesome that no one called her out on this and everyone complained when she was callously killed off for drama rather than any important plot reason.

Well, it's a Gary Stu, but he definitely counts. Kvothe the Kingkiller hands down. He learns an entire language in a day and a half, gets into the university at fifteen and proceeds to show up the most advanced students there, is a master musician and storyteller, gets all the girls... But the books are so well-written that I find it hard not to like him. Besides, he literally needs to be able to do all that- except for possibly most of the romance thing- to survive.