Mary Sue

A Mary Sue for female characters and Gary Stu or Marty Stu for male characters is an idealized and seemingly perfect fictional character, a young or low-rank person who saves the day through unrealistic abilities. Often this character is recognized as an author insert and/or wish-fulfillment.

Origin and development of the meaning

The term "Mary Sue" comes from the name of a character created by Paula Smith in 1973 for her parody story "A Trekkie's Tale" published in her fanzine Menagerie #2. The story starred Lieutenant Mary Sue ("the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet — only fifteen and a half years old"), and satirized unrealistic Star Trek fan fiction. Such characters were generally female adolescents who had romantic liaisons with established canonical adult characters, or in some cases were the younger relatives or protégées of those characters. By 1976 Menagerie's editors stated that they disliked such characters, saying:

"Mary Sue" today has changed from its original meaning and now carries a generalized, although not universal, connotation of wish-fulfillment and is commonly associated with self-insertion. True self-insertion is a literal and generally undisguised representation of the author; most characters described as "Mary Sues" are not, though they are often called "proxies" for the author. The negative connotation comes from this "wish-fulfillment" implication: the "Mary Sue" is judged as a poorly developed character, too perfect and lacking in realism to be interesting.

Mary Sue (given name)

People with the given name Mary Sue include:

Mary Sue Milliken

Mary Sue Milliken is an American chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and radio and TV personality working mostly on Latin cuisine in the United States.

Career

Restaurants

After working together in Chicago and Paris, Milliken and her longtime collaborator, Susan Feniger, settled in Los Angeles where they founded the critically acclaimed City Cafe in 1981. They eventually expanded to a larger space on La Brea Avenue, renaming the establishment CITY Restaurant. In 1985, they opened the Mexican restaurant Border Grill in the original City Cafe space, before moving it to Santa Monica in 1990. The restaurant later expanded to Pasadena (closed) and the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas. Broadening their culinary horizons, Milliken and her partner opened Ciudad in Los Angeles in 1998. The success of the three restaurants has often led Milliken and Feniger to be recognized for single-handedly changing Los Angeles' culinary landscape.

Publishing and TV/Film

In collaboration with Feniger and others, Milliken has published five cookbooks: City Cuisine (1989), Mesa Mexicana (1994), Cantina: The Best of Casual Mexican Cooking(1996), Cooking with Too Hot Tamales (1997) and Mexican Cooking for Dummies (1999/2002).