The Problem With Mary Sue

How a storytelling trope broke the Internet, pissed off the “woke” left, and made a ton of money.

Photo by Michelle Cassar on Unsplash

On Friday Morning, my Twitter buddy Joshua Lisec wrote a thread that broke the internet.

Two days later, people are still losing their minds.

He even managed to get the term “Mary Sue” trending.

If you’re not familiar, “Mary Sue” is a literary trope used to describe a poorly written female character.

A Mary Sue character weakens the plot of a story because she has no obvious flaw. And a protagonist without a flaw isn’t interesting.

There is no character arc.

And because there is no character arc, there are no stakes.

In a story…

Stakes Are Everything!

Joshua’s thread made such a fuss that even TMZ wrote a piece on it.