What is A Mary Sue?

We've all heard the term Mary-Sue.  However, the term is applied more loosely than it should be.  Some people have been known to call Seven of Nine from Voyager a Mary-Sue.  While she was rescued from the Borg Collective and has an extensive amount of knowledge because of it, she also has trouble interacting with people, can't manage the Borg children under her care and people on the ship don't trust her.  The true Mary-Sue of the show was Janeway because her abilities were unbelievable, one example being that she shouldn't have more knowledge of Klingon physiology than The Doctor.  She's also proven right because the universe wraps itself around her beliefs and anyone who dared disagree with her was labeled a bad guy.

While I'm not positive on every detail of the Mary-Sue, there is one simple way to tell if your character is one.  If you've seen Buffy The Vampire Slayer then, odds are, you remember the episode where Jonathan cast a spell to make himself Earth's BMOC.  He can fight better than Buffy, find plans better than Willow and can beat Giles at chess.  He also starred in The Matrix, has a PH.D. at 18, a singing superstar, a master strategist and literally everyone wants him.  He also defeated The Master and toasted The Mayor, Buffy's accomplishments.  In other words, we have a character who is a master of everything to the point where everyone else on Earth is useless.  It turned out that Jonathan cast a spell that makes him everyone's version of the ideal man.  Unfortunately, the spell had a side effect by creating a monster that was Jonathan's equal.  If Jonathan destroyed it, the spell would be broken.  In the end, Jonathan leads Buffy to the monster, who destroys it and everything goes back to normal.  Most people forgot Jonathan's influence, but the people that remember are angry with him.  When Buffy talks to Jonathan in the end, they have a conversation which, as a writer, will always stick with me.

"Jonathan: I just wanted to apologize.  Nobody was supposed to get hurt.
 Buffy: Jonathan, you get why everyone is angry, though, right?  It's not just the monster.  People didn't like begin the little actors in your sock puppet theatre.
 Jonathan: You weren't.  You weren't socks.  We were friends.
 Buffy: Jonathan, you can't keep trying to make everything work out with some big gesture all at once.  Things are complicated.  They take time and work."
-Superstar (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)

I'm not sure, but it might have been a play on fan-written stories where the authors put themselves in the story and are so wonderful that they reduce the other characters to walking statues who ooow and aaaw at everything their character does.  One example would be Jenna from the dreaded Zelda fanfic, My Inner Life.  In this story, a merchant named Jenna Silverblade manages to win the heart of Link, get power over the elements by finding out that she's the last of a race of Silverlites, receive everyone's blessing for her marriage with Link, gets to become the King of Hyrule's adopted daughter and gets everything handed to her for no reason other than she married Link.  Ruto, who is aggressive about Link being her "fiance," decides to accept that Link is happy with Jenna and build her and Link a house in Kokiri Forest.  Zelda gives her Triforce jewelry that belonged to her mother and the ocarina of time, the King of Hyrule treats Jenna like his own daughter to the point that he neglects Zelda, the seven sages bless their child with gifts and the Great Deku Tree gives Jenna a fairy even though she's not a Kokiri.  Had the story continued, it would have ended with Zelda giving up the throne to Hyrule to Link and Jenna and they rule Hyrule with beauty and prosperity and are loved by all.  In other words, the characters we know and love seize to become characters and turn into pawns for the author's own little fantasy.

Another example of a fanfic that defies canon the same way Jonathan's spell rewrote reality is the infamous Harry Potter fanfic, My Immortal.  In this fanfic, a goth vampire named Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way dates Draco, moves Harry "Vampire" Potter, Hermione "B'loody Mary Smith" Granger and Ron "Diabolo" Weasley to Slytherin house and spends her free time going to My Chemical Romance concerts, shopping at Hot Topic, cutting herself, worshiping Satan and hating preppy sluts.  The characters bear no resemblance to their canon characterizations by turning into goths who worship Satan and spend all their free time at Hot Topic, including Draco Malfoy, who always came across as more of a rich prep to me.  Despite it being a Harry Potter fanfic, there is little to no reference to the Harry Potter world to be found.  The writer threw anything to do with the Harry Potter stories out the window just to satisfy her own fantasy, reducing the other characters to mere pawns.

This can also happen in Original Fiction, with Bella and Eragon being prime examples.  Bella becomes a part of everyone lives when she moves to Forks to the point that no one has an outside life without her.  All the boys love her, all the girls want to be her friend and the Cullens take her in instantly.  Even any remote resemblance to a plot is all about how Bella's in danger and everyone has to protect her.  Eragon, I never finished all the way because no one was doing any funny sporks of it.  However, Eragon is the chosen child, an instant expert at everything and loved by all.  Anyone who hates him is evil, even if they have good reason to.  Bella and Eragon are little more than the author's fantasies to the point where they fail to develop the rest of the characters and use them the same way Jonathan used the rest of the world in the Superstar episode.  As sock puppets who live and breathe their names and those that don't can all go to hell.

I'm not saying that all fanfiction has this problem when they make OCs.  Terrence from The Interview is someone from Willy Wonka's past, but he does not steal attention from Willy Wonka and is not the focus of Willy Wonka's life.  Instead Terrence acts as a background character and is the Watson to Willy Wonka's Sherlock Holmes.  I'm also not saying that all fiction that stars girls has this problem.  Going back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while she is the chosen one, she's not a Mary Sue.  Buffy is book dumb, reckless and does have emotional problems of a typical teenage girl.  She also doesn't save the world alone.  The Scoobies work together to save the world from evil, like the situation in season 4 with Adam when Willow casts a spell to make Buffy strong enough to defeat him with the help of the rest of the Scoobies (save Buffy for obvious reasons).  There are also problems in the show that Buffy can't solve, like Xander living with his messed up family.  Instead, Xander gets a job and moves into an apartment when he can afford it.  In other words, the other characters are shown to have lives outside of Buffy and are instrumental to her success.  This is why Buffy is a feminist character and was my role-model throughout my childhood.  She's still my role-model today.

Now, I know a lot of you are probably thinking I'm some arrogant blowhard trying to tell everyone what to do but, the truth is, I have the same problem.  I do tend to put myself in my OCs and could easily turn my work into full-blown fantasy stories where I'm the hero.  I actually started out with pretty awful fanfiction that was about me having all these powers and saving the day, being a slayer, a witch, a mutant and everything else all rolled into one.  Lucky for me, I never heard of fanfiction.net when I first started writing.  Can you imagine the flames I would've gotten?  That's why I could easily fall back into that, especially with the characters of Karen from Be Careful What You Wish For (Animorphs) and Candy from Mind Games (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).  It's also why I seek constructive criticism on my writing and character profiles.

Tl;DR:  So, when creating a character for fanfiction or for original fiction, ask yourself a question.  Am I creating a genuine story where the characters have lives and problems outside of my main character, or (in the case of fanfiction) OC, that he or she can't fix and manage to build genuine relationships with time and work, or am I creating my own little fantasy world where everyone exists just to be actors in my little sock puppet theater?  If it's the latter, than you need to make a serious rewrite.