Mary-Sue: Who is She?

How Much Power is Too Much Power?

I’m sure everyone has heard that an obvious Mary-Sue is one that is too powerful, but no one has explained to me in enough detail when the line is crossed.  “Oh, an original character can control all four elements? That’s way too powerful!”  Since when?  Since it became a clichéd idea?  That idea was around since before Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon.  Aang, the main character in that show, along with eventually mastering all four elements, also practically came back from the dead a century later in the very first episode of the show, and no one called him a Gary-Stu (which he is not, I’m just saying that labeling a character over power is overused)!  As I said in my past two guides, Mary-Sues aren’t about clichés, they’re about lack of explanation and key details that would help in their development of the character along with the story.

The point is as long as your character has had enough time to learn about their skill, practice it, master and perhaps perfect it, then the character can have whatever power he or she is given by you the creator, original or already been used.  This does not leave out the power of influence on other people, or ranks in school, jobs, military or other social statuses.  In simpler words, the power in any story can also be the kind in normal everyday power in our real life universe.  Even when there are other kinds of ordinary powers, superpowers seem to be the biggest concern when talking about Mary-Sues.  

When a character has a high social status in the “normal everyday power” kind, just make sure that they’ve worked at it long enough to earn it, or greatly proved themselves on more than a handful of occasions.  As an example of what possibly not to do, in The House of Night series, Zoey earns the High Priestess rank after only a few days of her turning into a vampire, after saving her peers once, even though Aphrodite, the High Priestess before Zoey, had been High Priestess for at least a couple years.  Granted, Aphrodite was a snob in personality and had no regard to others, especially humans, or the rules, but why give that rank to Zoey, a fledgling?  The only explanation given was that Nyx had given her that power (along with the four elements plus spirit).  If Zoey had been saving people left and right and, or, she earned that rank by the end of the school year, then that would have been a reasonable amount of time to be handed the rank and would have been plenty of time to practice the elements, not just three days.

I was only talking about that nearly unexplainable rank jump aspect of the example I just gave, but the elemental power aspect was a bonus to another example.  

“I thought you said that learning the four elements wasn’t a Mary-Sue trait?”  That person who asked that hasn’t been paying attention.  There are no ‘traits’ whatsoever, only a lack of explanation.  

Zoey was given the four elements, and I didn’t mind that part, it was the fast pace of how she and her friends mastered it that bugged me.  Zoey and her friends only tried calling the circle once, maybe twice, and it seemed as if they had been calling circles for years after that, with only a snap of their fingers.  Again, the first book was only three days long.  The practice and mastering which was supposed to be one of the points in the series was ignored until the point that it was practically invisible.  The only explanation was that Nyx gave Zoey and her friends the power.  That shouldn’t be enough.

Nyx, a goddess, may have given the power, but it’s the receiver’s responsibility to practice, thus it’s the creator’s responsibility to portray those hours of hard work of mastering it.  Since supernatural powers are the most problematic, I’ll discuss those kinds of powers instead of the “normal everyday power”.

Immortality

Just to get this out of the way, let’s discuss immortality.  By definition of Microsoft Works Word Processor, it means “able to have eternal life or existence”, but it doesn’t mean that an immortal character can’t die.  Elves are considered to be immortal, but they can die just almost as easily as humans can.  Vampires can perish too although they‘re a lot more difficult to kill.  All immortal creatures can die, but it’s just that they have long lives.  Immortality isn’t even qualified as a power, but it’s still arouses arguments.