How the heck is Katniss a Mary Sue?

[the December King]

Not necessarily, the world can be absurdly and unnecessarily cruel or persecutor of the protagonist, but only in a way which makes them seem sympathetic and right and affirms that they are, indeed, the centre of the narrative universe. The point is that, whether they are in adoration or irrational scorn and contempt, everyone is singularly obsessed with the protagonist.

Fair enough, I suppose I should have said the protagonist was the focus of the world (narrative universe), either in adoration or contempt.

 

[Redryhno]

I couldn't possibly say as to whether she is a Mary Sue, as I haven't read the stories. But it seems to me that the tell would be if the world exists only in adoration of the protagonist.

Or I think so...

Is that the definition of Mary Sue?

She could be just an annoyingly over-capable and/or 'badass' protagonist.

She's like on the cusp of Sue-ness, which really makes it difficult from differentiating her being a shitty character and a shitty worthless character.

She's basically two baths and a hairbrush away from being considered gorgeous despite her going "I'm not pretty at all, teeheehee", has two overly capable guys vying for her attention despite her barely acknowledging anybody but herself(they are shown to be singular geniuses in their own ways), is the only one that dares to go out and hunt, with a bow that perfectly translates to being able to use ANY bow she finds despite there being a small, but recognizable difference between the recurve, compound, and traditional construction bows she uses throughout it all, ends up having more than a small crisis of "oh who will I ever choose" midway through the second book, and essentially becomes mentally scarred not because of what happens to her, but what happens to others, which is an important distinction even if there is little technical or psychological difference between them. Things happen to others, but they are always in relation to how they affect Katniss. (to compare : "My wife died" to "my Wife died")

I think the biggest takeaway from it is that women badasses are essentially always the same character in recent fiction with the same challenges, just with a different set of tits and a different specific, niche of specialty that just so happens to be the thing that wins everything in the end. And they're celebrated for the challenges that are thrust upon them, while the only challenges they take on are because they would feel guilty otherwise(as opposed to because it's the right thing to do or it helping someone they trust).

When you compare it with man badasses, it normally takes alot of getting their shit kicked in before they come upon their specialty that wins it all in the end. This translates into a feeling of progression for the character that is self-motivated and recognized, while about the only thing Katniss does that is self-motivated is going in her sister's place and killing the...whoever was in charge at the end there.

 

[Callate]

Hohhhh, boy.

No, I don't think Katniss is especially a Mary Sue, primarily for one of the reasons you list: She needs help.

But I don't feel a particular need to jump on the "Everyone who uses the term 'Mary Sue' is just a neckbeard MRA we can dismiss out of hand" bandwagon, danke schoen. @#$% me, I get that there are some toxic people out there, but the self-indulgence of making these kinds of massive generalizations combined with the utter unwillingness to recognize any sort of responsibility for helping to make the atmosphere polarized and toxic...

Ahem. Stepping down from the soapbox now.

 

[EvilRoy]

Like, this is a movie about kids murdering each other to save their home, and we get told that this main character is good at killing and she wants to kill and she gonna kill to save her village.

...

I just felt like we kept getting told how katnis was this crazy psycho badass only to watch the movie deliberately avoid ever letting her be one.

Er...no? She didn't enter the games to save her village or overthrow the government or cause she likes killing people, she volunteered because otherwise her little sister would be conscripted.

She wasn't good at killing people, beyond having hunted animals for food.

At least in the first book/film.

Theres definitely an element of sacrifice (although it all seemed to be incidental to the need to get her into the games) but I swear it comes right out and says she wants to kill somebody at one point and blah blah blah for the village. I don't remember anything about overthrowing. Its been a long time though, I'll have to look it up later to see if I'm missremembering.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

'Cos she's a girl and not crippled by her obvious cooties.

 

[Ninjamedic]

But I don't feel a particular need to jump on the "Everyone who uses the term 'Mary Sue' is just a neckbeard MRA we can dismiss out of hand" bandwagon, danke schoen. @#$% me, I get that there are some toxic people out there, but the self-indulgence of making these kinds of massive generalizations combined with the utter unwillingness to recognize any sort of responsibility for helping to make the atmosphere polarized and toxic...

You have to hand it to the thread for proving your point so well.

 

[CaitSeith]

And then she never kills anybody.

Not true. The guy with the lance was a clean one-shot kill; and she knew that the wasp's venom was lethal when she dropped the wasp nest on the other competitors.

 

[CaitSeith]

effortlessly won

Not the case here.

 

[Terminal Blue]

But I don't feel a particular need to jump on the "Everyone who uses the term 'Mary Sue' is just a neckbeard MRA we can dismiss out of hand" bandwagon, danke schoen. @#$% me, I get that there are some toxic people out there, but the self-indulgence of making these kinds of massive generalizations combined with the utter unwillingness to recognize any sort of responsibility for helping to make the atmosphere polarized and toxic...

The thing is, the character of Mary Sue (and ultimately, the idea of other characters being a Mary Sue) was a satire of the use of author insert characters in fanfiction. Mary Sue was created to mock the bad writing which stemmed from the fact such characters were created primarily for the author's wish fulfilment rather than that of the audience, and therefore often weren't created to be engaging for the audience to read.

The internet, of course, watered down and bastardised the term so now it applies to any character in any form of media who is simply seen as overly competent or overly important to the story. This is a general problem with the internet and media criticism. Terms like "Mary Sue" and "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" were created to criticise, respectively, author insert characters in fanfiction and female characters who possess no inner life beyond their ability to teach our poor miserable male protagonist to be less miserable. These tropes are bad because they both cater to the author's fantasies while alienating the audience (or most of the audience) through being transparent and manipulative.

But here's the thing. There is nothing actually wrong with having a character who is unusually competent, or a girly, quirkly love interest. These characters can be fun and endearing, they can cater to fantasies and wish fulfilment on the part of the audience, and yet here on the internet merely pointing out a trope's existence is somehow treated as equivalent to actual criticism.

And yeah, we may not like it, but there is a very distinctive pattern to characters who are called up as Mary Sues, because again, any character who seems unusually competent can face the accusation and sadly, it is actually easier for the competence of female characters to come across as "unusual". I'm not even suggesting it's intentional, but ultimately most narratives in our culture in which the protagonist is special or powerful do revolve around a male protagonist. Heck, Joseph Campbell back in the 40s was comfortable saying that the universal structure of a heroic story, the monomyth, was explicitly the story of a male protagonist. Whether you believe him or not, it says something about our culture and its approach to narrative.

At this point, the term should make us uncomfortable. It's become exactly the kind of stale, overused trope it was created to describe.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

effortlessly won

Not the case here.

I mean yeah, kinda. At least having watched the first two she just sits the Hunger Games out mostly. She kills what, 2 people? 3? Out of 20+ contestants per Games?
Granted its a legit strategy to just wait around and let the others kill themselves, but she's not Wonder Woman hacking and slashing her way to victory. The most she ever did was cut down a bee's nest, and that was only because the one girl told her to, and it only killed 2 people max.
Katniss really doesn't do much. She's just railroaded to victory. Like I know she's the main character, so the odds of her being killed are 0, but even in-universe it felt like the odds were always 0. Like if I was watching the Hunger Games, it would have been pretty obvious who the winner was going to be from the get-go.

 

[Ogoid]

Hohhhh, boy.

No, I don't think Katniss is especially a Mary Sue, primarily for one of the reasons you list: She needs help.

But I don't feel a particular need to jump on the "Everyone who uses the term 'Mary Sue' is just a neckbeard MRA we can dismiss out of hand" bandwagon, danke schoen. @#$% me, I get that there are some toxic people out there, but the self-indulgence of making these kinds of massive generalizations combined with the utter unwillingness to recognize any sort of responsibility for helping to make the atmosphere polarized and toxic...

Ahem. Stepping down from the soapbox now.

I see you too can still remember the distant, foggy mists of like 2012, back when however vociferously people would argue on the internet over the most insignificant minutiae of entertainment media, said discussion would be by and large focused on the media in question rather than the people arguing about it, and personal attacks would be restricted to their lack of knowledge on the subject or, at worst, their lack of intelligence to properly understand it, as opposed to insinuations or outright accusations of hating half the human population on the planet or some comparable moral failing.

Those were truly the days, weren't they?

 

[Redryhno]

But I don't feel a particular need to jump on the "Everyone who uses the term 'Mary Sue' is just a neckbeard MRA we can dismiss out of hand" bandwagon, danke schoen. @#$% me, I get that there are some toxic people out there, but the self-indulgence of making these kinds of massive generalizations combined with the utter unwillingness to recognize any sort of responsibility for helping to make the atmosphere polarized and toxic...

The thing is, the character of Mary Sue (and ultimately, the idea of other characters being a Mary Sue) was a satire of the use of author insert characters in fanfiction. Mary Sue was created to mock the bad writing which stemmed from the fact such characters were created primarily for the author's wish fulfilment rather than that of the audience, and therefore often weren't created to be engaging for the audience to read.

The internet, of course, watered down and bastardised the term so now it applies to any character in any form of media who is simply seen as overly competent or overly important to the story. This is a general problem with the internet and media criticism. Terms like "Mary Sue" and "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" were created to criticise, respectively, author insert characters in fanfiction and female characters who possess no inner life beyond their ability to teach our poor miserable male protagonist to be less miserable. These tropes are bad because they both cater to the author's fantasies while alienating the audience (or most of the audience) through being transparent and manipulative.

But here's the thing. There is nothing actually wrong with having a character who is unusually competent, or a girly, quirkly love interest. These characters can be fun and endearing, they can cater to fantasies and wish fulfilment on the part of the audience, and yet here on the internet merely pointing out a trope's existence is somehow treated as.. equivalent to actual criticism.

And yeah, we may not like it, but there is a very distinctive pattern to characters who are called up as Mary Sues, because again, any character who seems unusually competent can face the accusation and sadly, it is actually easier for the competence of female characters to come across as "unusual". I'm not even suggesting it's intentional, but ultimately most narratives in our culture in which the protagonist is special or powerful do revolve around a male protagonist. Heck, Joseph Campbell back in the 50s was comfortable saying that the universal structure of a heroic story, the monomyth, was explicitly the story of a male protagonist. Whether you believe him or not, it says something about our culture and its approach to narrative.

Of course there's nothing wrong with it, there's alot of Isekai manga that is fun that is full of Sue/Stu's, but it's not called the pinnacle of character writing either. Overlord still has the protagonist's knowledge of the rules of the game and laws of the universe conflicting with one another which leads to his own conflict that he can't just magic away with a thought, So I'm a Spider constantly has the girl having to change-up things to survive, and the 3 Dungeon Seeker parallels/copies/etc. all have the guy go through some manner of hell that he gets out of pretty easily.

The problem has never been that Sue's exist, it's that critics praise them, and the female monomyth is never going to fully emerge when mediocrity is continually praised because a woman is writing it or the detractors are brow-beaten with claims of sexism and neckbeard because they don't believe Katniss and her equivalents to be strong women.

EDIT: And I feel the biggest problem is that the main character in these stories never experiences true loss with the audience or actually hits roadblocks herself. Her sister is literally killed 10 pages from the end of the series(that has like a 2 page epilogue of "10 years later"), the rebellion is found out and taken down, but she's not there. The worst she ever gets it is with Salmon(Pike? Some girl's name to do with fish) that she watches from the brush because she fucked up. There is so little processing time despite the books taking place over like a year and a half or so. It's just rush from one event and setpiece to the next, which could work if they didn't act like she was going through something at the same time but never really spending enough time on it for the audience to get invested in it.

 

[CaitSeith]

It's funny how many people here aren't satisfied with Katniss because she isn't a blood-thirsty assassin with a double-digit body count under her belt.

 

[EvilRoy]

And then she never kills anybody.

Not true. The guy with the lance was a clean one-shot kill; and she knew that the wasp's venom was lethal when she dropped the wasp nest on the other competitors.

As with the village stuff I dont remember about lance guy but i do recall some of the hornet nest bit. It was actually part of why i think katnis had no agency in her own story.

There she is up a tree and up the creek. Dudes fighting eachother below BF might die. Look slightly to the right: the perfect weapon. The whole thing gets explained as an aside - not because katnis doesn't know what they are but because we in the audience have no idea what they are because it has never yet come up or been established. She does the thing. Everybody dies. Except her BF. Nice.

Yknow how chekoves gun insists that a gun in act one has to be used by three or don't show it? Well the reverse is true, if you didnt show us a gun in act one the hero can't conveniently find the perfect gun in the perfect spot to save them in act 3. You may as well have the author of the book walk up to katniss, hand her a bomb and walk away.

It isn't agency to drop the perfect weapon on an enemy if you have been handed the perfect weapon at the perfect time through no achievement of your own. A fat middle aged man like me could win the hunger games if i had god on my side.

 

[CaitSeith]

There she is up a tree and up the creek. Dudes fighting eachother below BF might die. Look slightly to the right: the perfect weapon. The whole thing gets explained as an aside - not because katnis doesn't know what they are but because we in the audience have no idea what they are because it has never yet come up or been established. She does the thing. Everybody dies. Except her BF. Nice

You certainly need to watch the movie or read the book again.
1. Dudes were hunting her and they pursued her up to a tree.
2. Her "BF" was allied with the dudes.
3. They decided to camp below and to wait until she climbs down to kill her or dies of thirst.
4. After she noticed the nest, the opportunity to drop the wasps didn't happen until several hours later.
5. Only one in the group died.
6. It wasn't perfect.

You seem to forget the parts where she has agency. In several parts she is told to not to do something, and she does it anyways (like not to go to the Cornucopia, twice).

 

[Terminal Blue]

The problem has never been that Sue's exist, it's that critics praise them, and the female monomyth is never going to fully emerge when mediocrity is continually praised because a woman is writing it or the detractors are brow-beaten with claims of sexism and neckbeard because they don't believe Katniss and her equivalents to be strong women.

While I won't condone Campbell's essentialism, he was a Freudian after all, the whole point is that there can be no female monomyth. To be a woman is inherently to fail, to fail to be a complete person, to fail to be the hero in your own story and to reconciling yourself to being a character in someone else's story instead.

To a certain extent he had a point, look at traditional fiction aimed at or written by women and you will overwhelmingly find this theme of finding your place in society (often explicitly through finding a man). Sometimes very young women are allowed to be tomboys and effectively live out a male story, but this is only socially acceptable when they are young. Ultimately, in traditional culture and in traditional story structure, women have to grow up and growing up means accepting your place as a woman.

Traditional story structures have never been kind to women, and thus I don't think it's particularly surprising that the first steps into writing "strong female characters" (I hate that term so much) have been fumbling. It's still a meme (and a meme with a lot of basis in reality) that straight men literally can't write female characters without having them constantly be aware of their own tits, so, you know, baby steps. We'll get there. In the meantime, I think the deeper question is why these "bad female characters" with "unrealistic" abilities and competence evoke such a strong and consistent reaction.. I mean, a lot of characters are "bad" in this sense right? Harry Potter gets to be the protagonist, and "the boy who lived" and have a tragic backstory and be some kind of Quiddich prodigy and defeat Voldemort multiple times despite being a goddamn child. Is he a bad character? Should critics have panned the books because of Harry's unrealistic Mary Sue qualities?

No, because it's an escapist fantasy for kids about a school for wizards.

EDIT: And I feel the biggest problem is that the main character in these stories never experiences true loss with the audience or actually hits roadblocks herself. Her sister is literally killed 10 pages from the end of the series(that has like a 2 page epilogue of "10 years later"), the rebellion is found out and taken down, but she's not there.

I think the point where I realised it wasn't working for me was actually in the first movie, because it made a problem incredibly obvious for me. Katniss and Rue meet and there's a whole scene where they just smile at each other a lot and it's supposed to be really sweet, and in the back of my mind I'm just thinking "you know, if you both survive you're going to have to kill her".

Like, in Battle Royale (which had an almost identical premise) the narrative payoff of the entire book is a dying character thanking two other characters for being his friends. That's pretty cool, right? It illustrates what this dystopian world and the program has taken from these people that even being able to call each other friends means something huge. It shows how the program works, how it influences them psychologically and how it ultimately maintains control across the whole of society. In a world where noone can trust each other, being able to call someone your friend is winning.

Katnis to me never felt like a part of the world she inhabits, or of a society which makes children ritually fight to the death. She felt like an American high school student, or rather an American high school student's fantasy of how they would behave in this situation, because remember, high school is really hard guys. It's basically like being trapped in a last-man-standing murder battle.

 

[Redryhno]

There she is up a tree and up the creek. Dudes fighting eachother below BF might die. Look slightly to the right: the perfect weapon. The whole thing gets explained as an aside - not because katnis doesn't know what they are but because we in the audience have no idea what they are because it has never yet come up or been established. She does the thing. Everybody dies. Except her BF. Nice

You certainly need to watch the movie or read the book again.
1. Dudes were hunting her and they pursued her up to a tree.
2. Her "BF" was allied with the dudes.
3. They decided to camp below and to wait until she climbs down to kill her or dies of thirst.
4. After she noticed the nest, the opportunity to drop the wasps didn't happen until several hours later.
5. Only one in the group died.
6. It wasn't perfect.

You seem to forget the parts where she has agency. In several parts she is told to not to do something, and she does it anyways (like not to go to the Cornucopia, twice).

And yet she comes out of everything basically without being harmed. There are kids that were born and trained to survive and thrive in so many environments with a variety of weapons in that bunch, but the girl that has basic woodsman skills is the one that survives it all. She doesn't ever suffer real consequences herself for her actions, it's always everyone else and she feels so bad about it, if anything happens at all.

She does not win because of her own actions, she wins because of the fuckups of others, and that doesn't translate to a "Hero".

 

[Natemans]

I don't like Katniss as I find her a dull character, but she's not a Mary Sue though.


Honestly the internet has made me sick of Mary Sue along with a longer list of terms thrown around like a form of hyperbole.

 

[Pyrian]

ITT: Katniss is too much of a hero (a Mary Sue), and also simultaneously not enough of a hero (opposite of Mary Sue). This sort of thing is why people start saying that the theme in common is simply misogyny. Few people blink an eye at male characters being too much of a hero or too little of a hero, but a female protagonist is always going to get hit with one, the other, or in this case, both.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Sixteen year old wunderkind, best at everything she does, discretely pretty, one makeover from being a bombshell, love triangle with two hunks, is the chosen one, saves the world, etc. And "impetuous, aggressive and antisocial" is just humble brag for badass. Your flaw can't be that you're too awesome.

Nothing against her, that's just the way YA heroes and heroines are written - perfect in every way yet treated as flawed, usually by adults, so the kids reading the books will relate to the underdog.

She's good at archery, some survival skills and that's kind of it. Her flaw isn't that she's 'too awesome' her flaw is that she's hotheaded and kind of stupid and her temper would have gotten her sentenced to death many times if Peeta and the others weren't there to guide her through the interviews. The book makes it clear that it's mostly due to Peeta's charm that she becomes so beloved by the nation. And she's not the chosen one, and she doesn't save the world, she's basically just an icon. She's an image that the revolution uses, she's not the leader and she doesn't get that much say in the events.

She's one makeover away form being a bombshell... with future tech and some of the nations most talented makeover artists in country obsessed with fashion.

I mean yeah, kinda. At least having watched the first two she just sits the Hunger Games out mostly. She kills what, 2 people? 3? Out of 20+ contestants per Games?
Granted its a legit strategy to just wait around and let the others kill themselves, but she's not Wonder Woman hacking and slashing her way to victory. The most she ever did was cut down a bee's nest, and that was only because the one girl told her to, and it only killed 2 people max.
Katniss really doesn't do much. She's just railroaded to victory. Like I know she's the main character, so the odds of her being killed are 0, but even in-universe it felt like the odds were always 0. Like if I was watching the Hunger Games, it would have been pretty obvious who the winner was going to be from the get-go.

Ok, I think thats basically what I felt i saw.

Like, this is a movie about kids murdering each other to save their home, and we get told that this main character is good at killing and she wants to kill and she gonna kill to save her village. And then she never kills anybody. People just kind of die on their own. There was one part where she tries to kill a dbag but for some reason the story basically takes the ball away from her, beats up the guy for her, then lets her finish him off. After he asks her to. Like what? If you were writing this story as an all knowing God of that world and you hopped in to talk to katniss after this part in the story how do you think she would react? I think she would flip you off.

I just felt like we kept getting told how katnis was this crazy psycho badass only to watch the movie deliberately avoid ever letting her be one.

She kills 3 people in the first book, that's over 10% of the total contestants. That's actually part of what makes her not a mary sue to me. She deliberately kills people, but it's not like she's single handedly a match for everyone in the in the games.

I never saw the movies, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe she comes off more Sue-ish in them than she does in the books...