Anti Mary-Sue

[prog]

What do you call the opposite of a Mary Sue character? That is, an intentional self-insertion who, rather than being the smartest girl in Starfleet Academy who will marry Draco Malfoy at the end, is instead a pathetic and unloved loser - who still manages to be the star of the show, mind you.

I want to call this class of character a "Kilgore Trout", but for the sake of symmetry, I think I prefer "Charlie Brown".

"Mary Sue" works too, but I don't think it works as well to mean any kind of character who is based on the author. To me the term strongly implies that the character is idealized and amateurishly written, as well, and that is certainly not universally the case.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Sue-Mary? Or Susan-Mary?

Given how dumb the reversed names sound it might be consistent with the sense you want.

Mary Sue does imply a highly idealized version of the author in badly-written fan-fic, so the negative version seems to want a different name.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Ignatius Reilly!

[prog.livejournal.com]

Wow, the fact of the bronze statue of him in real-life NOLA is great. I love stuff like that.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

If I were a traveling person I might like to visit statues of fictional characters around the world, like Alice in Central Park or the Ducklings in the Public Garden.

Examples from children's lit seem pretty common but I'm curious about how many examples are out there from grownup fiction. There's the Anna Livia monument in Dublin (from Finnegans Wake). etc.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately this is the first thing that springs to mind for me.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Aaaggh! My eyes!

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Copenhagen's Little Mermaid. Er, I mean, it's not adult fiction, but it's one of the more famous fictional character statues.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Apparently there's no shortage of statues of classic favorite kids' characters: Popeye, Peter Pan, Desperate Dan, Superman, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan.

There's also a recent wave of statues of "golden age" American television characters, in many cases funded or organized by corporate interests like the TV Land channel: Mary Richards from the Mary Tyler Moore Show (Minneapolis), Andy Taylor from the Andy Griffith Show (North Carolina), Bob Hartley from the Bob Newhart Show in Chicago, Ralph Kramden from the Honeymooners at the Port Authority in New York, and maybe Fonzie in Milwaukee. Eventually, we'll probably see the Cheers gang in Boston and the Frasier gang in Seattle and the Seinfeld gang in front of that diner in New York.

The good people of Fargo, MN have put up a statue of Marge Gunderson, the cop protagonist from the film Fargo.

But focusing on prose lit instead of comics and TV and movies, I don't think there are many. There are apparently lots of statues of Sherlock Holmes around. But it rapidly gets into gray areas of genre: does Tarzan count? Peter Pan is obviously from a prose book, originally, but certainly most people know him from Disney nowadays.

I seem to remember reading about a Wind In the Willows statue group somewhere but I'm tired of googling now.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Hm. I hadn't even thought about Mary Richards (and didn't know about the others).

Though I should note an important difference between the Little Mermaid and the kids' characters you mention is that the Little Mermaid is clearly a celebration of the prose character (and her author, Hans Christian Andersen), as opposed to a visual icon.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

The same goes for the Peter Pan statues I found (e.g. in Kensington Gardens in London). Definitely pre-Disney.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

The "Poor Me" story, is perhaps the term you're looking for.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Very good! This looks more like a listing of cubbyholes that student writing falls into, versus pro writing, but... it still resonates insofar as the one piece of IF I have ever published (and feel free to put scare-quotes around that word) was definitely a Grubby Apartment story. Alas.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

One would wish that pro writing wouldn't fall into these traps, but all too often it does.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Mais oui.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

TVTropes suggests the less-snappy Anti Sue but does mention Kilgore Trout as an example.

[dariusk.livejournal.com]

It'll always be a Benny Profane to me.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Roommate Aaron really likes the 'Charlie Brown' analogy and thinks more people will 'get it' than they would a 'Kilgore Trout' reference.

I kinda like 'Gregor Samsa' but that might be more fitting to a character who suddenly became pathetic and unloved yet is still the star.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Rudy Rucker.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Adaptation sort of had both a Mary Sue and an Anti Sue.

Then there's Woody Allen, where even his most idealized self-stand-ins are still pretty pathetic.

[mr-choronzon.livejournal.com]

kilgore trout ftw

case closed.