by Marie Robertson
THE HOBBIT, TAURIEL, AND THE DREADED MARY
SUE LABEL
The term Mary Sue comes from fanfiction. It refers to flawless, idealized
original (usually) female characters created by inexperienced writers. The Mary
Sue character is beautiful, strong, smart, loved by all, and saves the day.
She’s also boring as hell. I’m sort of an expert on Sues, in the sense that I
wrote fanfiction at age 13 and inadvertently wrote tons of idealized self-inserts
(because at age 13, I not only wanted to be a Transformer, but the coolest Transformer. Who didn’t?)
More and more, I’ve noticed the term has
crossed over to movies, TV shows and books. “It’s a good movie, even though
Character X is such a Sue”, I hear. I can’t agree that being female in a movie
automatically makes you a Sue, but I can see the argument when it comes to
certain characters.
Characters such as Tauriel from The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug. Before
the movie even came out, accusations of Mary Sueism rang out from the fandom.
After the movie’s release, the cries abated, but didn’t stop.
The problem is that there’s a huge
imbalance in The Hobbit movies. We have one (sometimes two, if Galadriel shows
up) female character for… what, about twenty-plus male characters? And Tauriel
wasn’t even in the original book (seriously, Tolkien? Not one chick in The
Hobbit?), which doesn’t help her supposed Sueism. Fans see her as too strong,
too beautiful, too capable, too noble.
These movies are full of dwarves and
hobbits and elves and dragons and all sorts of characters with penises (I’m
assuming for the dragon here, though wouldn’t it be cool if Smaug were actually
a lady dragon? Actually, wouldn’t it be cool if we could find a way to film a complete
genderswap version of The Hobbit? Lady Thorin Oakenshield, anyone? Gandalf the
Wizardess? Miss Beorn?), which means you can afford to have them run the
spectrum of characterization from heroic to lazy to brainy to caring to
cowardly to handsome to fat. No one will assume you’re trying to make a
statement about men. But with our single female character, can we afford to
make her anything less than strong and noble and utterly capable? Like it or
not, she’s now a representative for her whole gender.
It’s hard to win when you’re a chick in a
movie. Too flawed, and people accuse the filmmakers of sexism. Too perfect, and
she’s a Mary Sue.
Tauriel is strong and brave and beautiful
and frankly, a textbook case of a Sue. But
it’s not her fault. It’s not really any female character’s fault if
Hollywood thinks one or two women in an otherwise male cast ‘balances things
out’. In a perfect world, female characters would always run the spectrum of
broken to perfect, because there would be enough of them to do it. After all,
flawed characters are fun. I’ve always preferred Veronica because perfect Betty
is boring.
For now, though, I’ll stand by Tauriel,
Mary Sue label and all, because it’s better than the alternative—no women at
all.
(…. Seriously though, can someone
genderswap The Hobbit movies for me? Peter Jackson? Anybody?)
Marie Victoria Robertson is a speculative
fiction writer and playwright, as well as the board president of Jer’s Vision:
Canada’s Youth Diversity Initiative (www.jersvision.org). When all the other
girls wanted to marry Johnny Depp, she wanted to run away with Worf on the
Enterprise. She enjoys giant robots, time-travel paradoxes, and forcing her son
to watch Futurama.
