Reclaiming the Mary Sue
My new comic interrogates the continued bias against Mary Sues—and brings one life.
“I’m in your floorboards with a box cutter” is the best death threat I’ve ever gotten on the internet. Most digital death threats lean heavily on the vague, because it turns out that people who are incensed enough to write death threats to strangers on the internet aren’t often relying on their creative skills. That’s what made this threat so memorable: the specificity and the vivid imagery, even if I wasn’t quite clear on how the poster got in my floorboards, or how much damage they could actually do with a box cutter.
The inspiration for this threat was a DC Comics story I had written about Tim Drake, the third Robin, and this particular social media poster had taken to the comments to express their distaste. In my work for DC, I wrote Tim deciding to go on a date with a boy, canonizing a long-held theory that the character was not as straight as previously believed. Hence, the death threats. I won’t bore you with the more common refrains, especially since I don’t really remember them, their vitriol washing over me like thousand-year-old sewer water off a London duck’s back. At their worst, they were incoherent, and at their best, they were bland, with a smattering of covert to blatant homophobia.
But what made this comment different, apart from the specificity and the imagery, is that it wasn’t about Tim Drake going on a date with a boy—but because off-panel, I’d broken up Tim and his long-time on-again-off-again girlfriend, Stephanie. A fair complaint, even if I didn’t have page space for it. I think that was the other reason why the threat became so memorable: it was the only one that had nothing to do with Tim Drake’s sexuality.
The truth behind all the internet threats can be found in what they aren’t saying. Even though these posters seemed angry about different aspects, they all culminated in the same question: “Why did you turn Tim Drake into a Mary Sue?”
The readers of Fansplaining know that’s not what a Mary Sue is. A Mary Sue is a character, usually female, who’s created by a fanfic writer and has a tendency towards being too perfect. The character everyone is drawn to, that’s best at their job, that all the other characters want to be or be with. My embracing an interpretation of a beloved character and making a subtext textual was not turning him into a Mary Sue, but rather exploring a rich, previously unexplored narrative vein, part of a long tradition of writing for characters that you did not originate.
