Parody Sue

Now featuring running commentary, complete with Face Palm.

Mary Sue makes great Snark Bait. Who doesn't love to pick apart these paragons of failed attractiveness? But wouldn't it be even more fun to create an intentional Sue and play it for comedy?

A Parody Sue intentionally evokes a generic Mary Sue storyline with one of the following resolutions:

  1. The character succeeds and the whole universe ends up falling to her buxom charms, usually being made into her all-encompassing harem, except for maybe one snarky guy who knows exactly how stupid this is.
  2. The character fails, either because there's just too many other stock Mary Sues competing for that position or because the other characters see how genuinely shallow and uninteresting the character really is.
  3. The character is perfect in ALMOST every way. The ways she's not perfect affect her life the most.

This character can overlap with any of the other Mary Sue types, so long as it's fairly obvious the story is basically a big Take That at Mary Sue. One good sign of a Parody Sue is when the story points out the Canon Defilement caused by the Sue's presence and actions. Don't be fooled if somebody claims this is what they were aiming for once they suffer the backlash of their storyline. And of course, just because somebody intends to make their story a hilarious parody doesn't mean they'll actually succeed—sometimes Parody Sue can end up just as tedious as the original.

See also The Ace, which does much the same thing but with a supporting character. The author may choose to create a Parody Sue by having their fictional character create a very obvious Mary Sue character for themselves—if so, this will be a case of Her Codename Was Mary Sue.

If you come across a piece of blatant Sueishness in fanfiction and feel the need for some justified cruelty, it can be wiser (or at least, fun) to assume that it's a parody. If you're right, you're right, and if you're wrong, you've insulted the author far more than any accusation of poor writing ever could.

Examples of Parody Sue include:

Fan Works

The Abridged Series

  • Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series turned Shogo Aoyama, the one-shot movie character in the first Yu-Gi-Oh! movie, into a straight parody of this named "Gary Stu". In practice, he was more like the Only Sane Man when it came to everyone's obsession with card games ("I just don't see the appeal").
    • He learned.
  • Lelouch from Code MENT. He's a prince who's also related to Death the Kid and Alucard with incredible power and influence over others, gets away with stuff that can only be described as batshit insane... and yet he spends most of his time just being a Jerkass, scoring drugs, blowing stuff up, and contributing nothing but menace to society.
    • His solution to C.C. holding him at gunpoint is to attempt suicide, since a dead body can't be harmed by being shot. And it gets worse from there. The best bit? He did it in canon, Code MENT just made it look far sillier.

Fan Fictions

  • The term Mary Sue actually comes from a parody of Sues in Star Trek.
  • The Vampoife Dude Who Lifed Mega Crossover story famously parodies the Mary Sue trope, with a heavy dose of snarkiness.
  • The main characters of anything by Squirrelking of Half Life Full Life Consequences fame. They are always the brother or son of the canonical protagonist and usually ridiculously overpowered. But please don't be fooled—they were intended to be about as serious as a duck glued to a lemon used to fight crime.
  • This Knights of the Old Republic fic neatly skewers the tendency for fanfic writers to make female!Revan into a Mary Sue. (Note the character's first name.)
  • Arwen, the Warrior Babe takes to a ludicrous extreme the Action Girl change that some feared the movie version of The Lord of the Rings would bring.
  • "The Game of the Gods" has not one but thirty Lord of the Rings Parody Sues, all of whom meet their end via the invoking of Logic. And it's pretty darn funny.
  • Many wonder whether the infamous My Immortal is a Stealth Parody or not.
  • Don't Let A Mary Sue Into Titans' Tower A Teen Titans fic that hilariously parodies traditional Mary Sues, with the titular Mary Sue (who has the required super-long, super-stupid name) being incredibly lame and all the Titans trying to get rid of her but being unable to.
  • Sakura-Rose Sunblossom Orange Juice Annie-Marie McFate.
  • Maridah Sumaya, a parody of bad Aladdin series fanfic (especially Mozenrath fanfic).
  • Attack of the 50 Foot Eyesores, a parody of Transformers fanfiction with all the usual: twins of opposite factions with awe-inspiring powers who refuse to fight, forcing (almost) everyone to fall in love with them, freaking out and accusing others of being sexist for little remarks, and even making characters that don't fit right into "their" world vanish. Followed by Return of the 50 Foot Eyesores, which revives them and adds a mysterious long-lost sibling with a mysterious dark lover, and also turns Megatron into a Canon Sue on purpose who immediately makes Starscream fall in love with him.
  • The Human Whose Name Is Written in This Fanfiction, a Death Note Mary Sue parody.
  • The whole point of the Anti Cliche and Mary Sue Elimination Society is to get rid of such Parody Sues (because none of the authors want to pick on a real life Sue and incur wrath of the Sue's author). Some of the Society agents themselves are Parody Sues.
  • Just the Best Mary Sue Ever is possibly the jewel of this trope in the fandom for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The author, Bamfwriter, deliberately set out to create a character about whom she could answer "yes" to every question on the LXG Mary Sue Litmus Test. The entire first chapter is little more than a description of her improbable beauty. The rest of the story includes a lot of sex (including a five-way), some swearing, two characters coming back from the dead, and a cameo by Harry Potter.
  • There exists a tiny sub-genre of stories wherein the characters of a series find and read a Suefic. Results vary by author, but are usually hilarious as the canon characters attempt to explain what the hell is happening.
  • At World's End is not a comedy, but it does have the character Don James, who is introduced in chapter eight and appears to be a Marty Stu, until he dies at the end of the chapter, and then at the very beginning of the next chapter it's revealed that he's been a traitor the entire time, and later on it is revealed that the reason for this is that he was actually driven to madness by his own Marty-Stuness! Though it doesn't say that last bit in as many words, obviously.
  • John Su's "My First Fanfic is the ultimate example of Parody Sue. Don't look directly into the Man Wave.
  • Latias' Journey portrays "Berry Stoo" and "Mariah Susanson" as darkly humorous Humanoid Abominations.
    • More specifically: they are, during the Tournament Arc, revealed to be another hideous result of the Big Bad residual evil; a Team Rocket experiment with human and Pokemon psychics that involved a piece of the shattered crystal core of the Big Bad backfired, killing the psychics horribly, and in their dying moments, the psychic backlash was pulled together by the crystal and created Mariah Susanson, who became a Reality Warper and was influenced by her combined psyche's desires and wish fulfillment fantasies. Barry Stu was a random guy she tore the soul out of and remade to fit her desires; when the first Stu was defeated in a battle, she destroyed him and turned his opponent into her next Stu, and so and so forth. In other words, a more twisted take on the Sue problem.
  • A story arc in Invader Zim: The Series (a fanfic adaptation of Invader Zim) involves a group of these, the leader of whom is named Sue, and murders Jhonen Vasquez for the cancellation of the original series, then becomes the girlfriend of Nick Grey (a self-admitted Fixer Sue) after his old girlfriend leaves him. During this, she also provides assistance to both Dib and Zim from behind the scenes, using her assistance to partly brainwash them into loving her to some extent. This leads to the two becoming vampires through having them eat something during the process of becoming vampires. Naturally, Zim and Dib become vampires that feed on chinese food and corn, respectively, as well as taking on mutations related to what they feed on. After this, she reveals to Nick that her full name is Relationship Sue, a half-Irken, half-human with the power to draw an infinite amount of guns out of thin air, and that her plan is to enslave Zim so that the two can conquer the universe as king and queen. She then kills him. This ultimately leads to an epic battle between the Sues and Zim, Dib, Gaz, GIR, Johnny C, and White, which concludes with Gaz crushing Relationship Sue to death with a monster truck.
  • In the Ouran story Too Perfect to Be True, the canon characters plead with the audience to stop replacing their beloved Haruhi with Mary Sues.
  • Nine Men and a Little Lady by Kielle neatly skewers The Lord of the Rings Sues.

Galadriel's Journal
 Lothlorien, February 15, 3019
 Today the Fellowship moves on. A great evil passes from my domain, and a vast dank shadow lifts from the hearts of my people.
Oh, and the One Ring is leaving, too.

Tabletop Games

Web Animation

Web Comics

  • The trope images is from Ensign Sue Must Die, where Ensign Mary Amethyst Star Enoby Aiko Archer Picard Janeway Sue has been unleashed on the Star Trek universe. But her life isn't all perfect, she suffers from a horrible case of Pedal Transient Paresthesia.

"... Your foot's asleep?!"

"And order is restored to the Sue-niverse..."

  • Dragon Ball Multiverse gave us this. She ends up as a mix of Type 1 and Type 2, as while her mere presence forces all the canon characters to fawn over her, the alternate Arale she's up against knocks her into orbit while she's waxing Sue-ish before the fight.
  • In one Death Note fan comic, a Parody Sue claims to, among other things, have been kicked out of the Wammy House for being too smart. Light asks her to write down her name, and she does... in the Death Note.
  • Meimu as depicted in Touhou Nekokayou (the original concept was a more straight example of a Mary Sue) is type 2 in her first appearance, although in her case she only thinks she's particularly powerful/special/interesting/etc. She was intentionally given a signature ability which superficially resembled that of Yukari (her mother), but which is considerably less useful or applicable.

Web Original

  • The web-novella Under the Moons of Riadorf takes on the softest of soft SF to ludicrous effect. The authors' whole site follows the theme, complete with fake author biographies. There's also a Choose Your Own Adventure Sue.
  • Trope-tan and the Stealer of the Spotlight is a deliberate attempt to invoke this and as many other bad fanfiction/other tropes as possible in half a page.
  • This World of Warcraft character.
  • A verbally epic example came up during the Freelance Astronauts, a group of Let's Players during their run of F-Zero GX's story mode. Witness the epic tale of Sephiroth Goku the Stampede.
  • Seireitou Hyuga, from a Naruto RP, not only rips off every mainstream character (even managing to rip off Code Geass despite the other rip offs being a whole other genre), but makes a God-Mod Sue who would make every other one wet their pants if they ever saw him. However he's apparently a spoof of God Mode Sue to show how not to make a fanfiction character for the website. The author simply uses his user name, blatantly steals from other series, and the pictures he uses are simply screen shots (sometimes badly photoshopped usually not) from the series he ripped off from.
    • The author later revamps him, but he still serves as good example.
  • Meet MaRAY-Sue.
  • Trollslum Team Sparklegrub attempts a Thirty-Sue Pileup with fancharacters of Homestuck 's trolls. Mostly type 2, with some 3 thrown in for good measure.
  • SCP-10101-J and SCP-777-J, of the SCP Foundation.
    • SCP-732 turns Foundation documents into bad fanfic, which makes for a handy excuse for the periodic Sue-purges.

Canon

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  • Similar to The Most Interesting Man in the World, John Jameson from the Jameson Irish Whiskey commercials. Here's an example.
  • "Big Jim" from the Progressive commercial here is a parody of cheesy 1960s style animation "tough guys". Although in truth, Jim is just daydreaming.

Anime & Manga

  • Nabeshin, the Author Avatar of director Shinichi Watanabe from Excel Saga, Puni Puni Poemi, and Nerima Daikon Brothers who even has his own ongoing B-Plot in the former. Not that these shows take themselves seriously anyway....
  • The eponymous character from Hayate the Combat Butler skirts this. He's fast, near-perfect in all regards, liked by almost every major female character who meets him (though he doesn't really understand how to return their love), but is counterbalanced by the fact that the universe loves to screw around with him. He also seems a little Book Dumb, especially compared to a Teen Genius like Maria and Nagi.
    • Ditto Hinagiku Katsura, the 15-years-old Student Council President and fencing expert, who's also fallen in love with the hero and in later manga chapters, is revealed to have a home life and past that's almost as screwed up as Hayate's. Some tropers have once remarked that Hina "has Mary Sue written all over her, in several languages, with glowy marker". Even her character description in the manga is extra-flowery compared to the other characters. She is rather popular in the real world, though, so...
      • She gets an ending theme all to herself, too. Hinagiku is definitely a Parody Sue... And is loved because of it!
  • Punie from Dai Mahou Touge would most certainly be a normal Mary Sue under most circumstances: she's cute, strong, has magical powers, and everyone loves her. It's just that little bit about being truly and disturbingly evil, complete with a Stepford smile, to the point where even her adorable mascot Paya-tan is out to kill her.
    • Then again, Paya-tan is a dick too, not to mention a Vietnam veteran and a Yakuza boss.
  • Miko Shirogane/Shirogane Z from Powerpuff Girls Z is a Villain Sue parody, being multi-talented in many areas and forms a plan that successfully humiliates the Powerpuff Girls. And she does this all in an over-the-top fashion.
  • Mr. Satan/Hercule kind of falls into the second type in Dragonball Z, especially as far as Earth's normal populace is concerned.
  • Medaka from Medaka Box. As a freshman in high school, she becomes the Student Council President with 98% of the vote... and single-handedly executes the duties of the entire student council, with some help from her childhood friend. She's absurdly rich, trained to near-Naruto levels of martial arts (everyone else is pretty much normal), is a master of deductive reasoning, and that's just for starters. She's also completely out of touch with normal people: she once ran a tutoring session for an entire class that consisted of tips on how to make sure your handwriting was clear enough, because she couldn't conceive of actually getting a wrong answer that wasn't because of a handwriting mistake. (Things like this cause her childhood friend to remark, at one point, "She's so smart that she's come back around to stupid.")
    • The series actually takes this to 11—being a Sue is a genuine superpower (called being an abnormal), and the school is part of a government program to artificially create Mary Sues. The way they test if someone's an Abnormal? They have them roll a cup of dice—Abnormals get all 6s. When they have Medaka do it her dice make a tower on the table. Medaka is so Sueish that she's more sueish than the sues.
    • This continues to be played with as the series goes forward—dealing with the "Minuses" takes up the biggest arc so far, which are God Mode Anti-Sue characters with psychotic (negative, or minus) personality traits. (The standard Mary Sue characters are called "Pluses.") The most recent arc has two "Not Equal" characters show up, which are heavily insinuated to be so far beyond human mentalities that they're actually of Eldritch Abomination level of psychosis and power—the main one shown so far has been clocked at having over 13 quadrillion various superpowers (normal Abnormals get one). Worse, they're Medium Aware—they're waiting out the main character and her True Companions, as they'll graduate in a few years and thus not be there to stop their plans; they know to do this because they know they're in a Shonen Jump manga and the hero always wins in Shonen Jump, even against impossible odds.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya has probably become the definitive deconstruction/parody of the God Mode Sue in Anime. She's brilliant (though prone to doing stupid things regularly), she's in great shape (having been in, but gotten bored with, every school athletic club), and an entire organization exists with the sole intention of keeping her happy and making sure that she never loses at anything (because they are afraid of her). In fact, the only reason she doesn't count is that she's totally disillusioned with reality due to her childhood and faced with a completely unflappable Deadpan Snarker. She is a literal God Mode Sue. There's also the fact that her "literal" God Mode is a direct obstacle to one of her main goals—to experience the supernatural. Much of the series involves the others running around trying to keep her in the dark. Her presence also makes their lives harder instead of better, with no actual upside. It also really complicates her relationship with Kyon. She'd probably be mortified if she knew that Kyon can effectively read her mind at times based on what her reality warping powers do.
  • Erika Furudo in Umineko no Naku Koro ni is a Black Hole Fixer Sue of an Amateur Sleuth who just so happens to wash up on Rokkenjima so Bernkastel has her own piece when she takes over the anti-fantasy side of the game. She proceeds to wander around being an insufferable Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, attempts to supplant the protagonist, helps Battler find the gold just to make the chaos worse, and frames Natsuhi for the murders. She's basically Bern's self-insert Sue, and she's virulently loathed by both the fanbase and the other characters. In short, Parody Sue Played for Drama = messy Deconstruction.
  • The most powerful weapon in Soul Eater is Excalibur, a sword that can turn any Meister into one of the greatest meisters of all time (a loser meister uses it to defeat three of the top students). He's also really obnoxious, has 1,000 provisions that a person must follow, calls everyone a fool, and constantly talks about how awesome he is. The result is that no one can actually stand him enough to use him.

Comic Books

  • Squirrel Girl is canonically the most powerful character in the Marvel Universe. The fact that her powers relate to talking to squirrels makes the parody aspects of this all the more obvious.
  • Ultimate X-Men had the character of Elliot Boggs, a.k.a. the Magician, who was brought to Professor X after accidentally killing his parents when his powers manifested, at which point he is promptly invited to join the X-Men, defeats the Blob in front of reporters causing the media to embrace the X-Men for the first time ever, and even singlehandedly takes down a group of attackers that had already beaten the rest of the X-Men. Eventually it is revealed that he actually has vaguely-defined reality-altering powers that he'd used to manipulate the team into accepting him and to create villains for himself to defeat and reporters to praise him. The plotline was not largely well-received, as many readers gave up in disgust during the opening issues of the arc where Elliot appeared to be a traditional Mary Sue; others were put off by the fact that the reveal basically boiled down to "He's not really as great as he seemed... he's just omnipotent," and that he just walked off at the end.
  • Max Piper of Fables is a parody of Villain Sue God Mode Sue characters in general. Jack can also easily be perceived as this.
  • The DC Comics universe has the legendary Rex the Wonder Dog. He's a decorated veteran World War II experimental supersoldier. He's an investigative journalist. He can drive vehicles. He can speak every language that exists, has eternal youth, and has ill-defined magical powers. He once nuked a T. rex. He almost certainly knows more than Batman and Mr. Terrific combined. He's also a dog, who gained the ability to talk after he had already accomplished most of his impressive stuff.

Comic Strips

  • The infamous "His Code Name Was The Fox" arc in FoxTrot, where Roger Fox wrote an abominable novel that cast himself as a generic Tuxedo and Martini superspy. You can read it starting at page 20 here (although the arc it's a part of starts earlier). Created its own trope.

Films - Animation

  • Metroman from Megamind is seen as a cocky, handsome, and powerful expy of Superman. Everyone in the world loves him and there are shrines for pretty much anywhere. However, the subversion is that he believes that being a Boring Invincible Hero is what's expected of him, and his true passion is to be a musician.

Films - Live-Action

  • You Don't Mess With the Zohan has a main character who can do impossible wire-fu martial arts, feels absolutely zero pain, has a massive budgie stuffed down his trousers.[1] All this is played for laughs. Also, he is shown to be attracted mainly to (besides the main romantic interest) old and/or fat women, whom he very loudly bangs after giving them a haircut.
  • Didier, the French exchange student from Son of Rambow is a sexy, young Johnny Depp-lookalike who is so cool that he has two unwanted harems, one of girls, and one of boys. Yet underneath his cool and bored exterior he is just another sweet and innocent pre-teen boy who wants to have fun and make believe with other children his age. It also becomes evident at the end of the film that he's not even remotely popular back home.
  • The title character of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. Neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, multi-instrumental rock star and comic book hero—and that's the "real" one. In the film, he also saves the human race from an alien invasion effortlessly. And then there are all the Shrouded in Myth moments such as references to his former wife. All of this is very intentionally over-the-top and meant as comedy.
    • The character was originally not intended as so much of a parody, described as more of a renaissance man by the actor who played him.
      • According to the movie materials, everything in the movie is a dramatization of real events.
  • The film Her Alibi is an overlooked gem for parodying this concept. The main character writes almost nothing but books featuring his Author Avatar, and rewrites events in his life to fit this character, making him look like an over-the-top James Bond.
  • The film American Dreamer was about a woman who has a concussion, and wakes up believing she's a character in her favorite pulp novels, and an over-the-top female James Bond.
  • Rushmore begins with Max Fischer dreaming he's popular and can solve an unsolvable math problem.
  • Pleasantville took a subtle jab at this. When the main characters, a brother and sister are transported into a fictional 1950s-era sitcom in which everything is (apparently) perfect, the sister is forced to assume the role of the daughter in the fictional sitcom family, who is, of course, loved by everyone. The name of the character she is forced to become? Mary Sue.
    • Furthermore, it was her who took the initiative in messing up the Sugar Bowl Utopia, by introducing them to sex.
  • Secret agent Derek Flint of Our Man Flint and In Like Flint.
  • Austin Powers is, like Derek Flint, a Parody Sue of secret agents.
  • Similarly, Dr. Neil Connery (played by Sean Connery's brother) of Operation Double 007
  • Rustlers' Rhapsody, itself a parody of western films, features the protagonist Rex O'Houlihan, a heroic cowboy with impressive gunslinging skills and an absurd amount of Genre Savvy.
  • Black Dynamite.
  • The Other Guys has a type 2 example with two Cowboy Cop characters played by Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock. In universe, both are definitely in the Jerk Sue category, loved by all and chick magnets, routinely creating massive property damage, and huge jerks to the "little people" at the station. They kill themselves early in the film in what is clearly a case of believing too strongly in their own hype/assuming too much that the world works the way it does in cop movies.
  • Gary from The Muppets. He's basically you're most cliched feel-good movie hero, but Played for Laughs. The fact that he's played by Jason Segel, the director, helps.
    • He also has a girlfriend named Mary

Literature

  • H.P. Lovecraft, of all people, wrote a clever skewering (metaphorically speaking—none of his Eldritch Abominations appear in the story) of the Purity Sue type called "Sweet Ermengarde".
  • Dearly Devoted Dexter pulls this on a God Mode Sue in typically vicious fashion. When a Mad Doctor inflicts terrible revenge on one of his former Special Forces coworkers, the feds send in Agent Kyle Chutsky. He's an Adonis, physically fit, expert at most everything, swiftly gets into a Slap Slap Kiss relationship with Dexter's sister Deborah, and has a personal history with the villain. So is our Villain Protagonist about to be pushed out of the book? Not quite. Remember that personal history? The mad doctor grabs Chutsky, and by the time Dexter finds him he's lost two of his limbs and all of his composure.
  • Donald Ogden Stewart's short story "How Love Came to General Grant", a parody of novelist Harold Bell Wright, establishes in this paragraph the purely pure pureness of Miss Ella Flowers:

A hush fell on the crowd as they caught sight of her face -- a hush of silent tribute to the clear sweet womanhood of that pure countenance. A young man on the edge of the crowd who was on the verge of becoming a drunkard burst into tears and walked rapidly away to join the nearest church. A pr-st---te, who had been plying her nefarious trade on the avenue, sank to her knees to pray for strength to go back to her aged parents on the farm. Another young man, catching sight of Ella's pure face, vowed to write home to his old mother and send her the money he had been expending in the city on drinks and dissipation.

  • The character Donna Inez in Lord Byron's Narrative Poem Don Juan may well be an early example. The Lemony Narrator spends many verses praising her beauty and accomplishments in an overblown manner, describing her as so morally perfect that "her guardian angel had given up his garrison". She is also an Insufferable Genius and has absurdly high moral standards.
  • Jerzy Kosinski's Being There has most everyone becoming fascinated by and even in awe of Chauncey Gardiner, a brilliant-yet-humble socio-political thinker who brings hope and clarity to a complex world with his simple sayings, looks described as a cross between Cary Grant and Ted Kennedy's, and elegant manners. No one can dig up a single bad thing about his past; he's a man with nothing to hide...of course, the audience knows that his real name is Chance the Gardener, who is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, mentally challenged, was isolated from the world until middle-age, picked up what little he knew of it from TV, and happens to look like someone intelligent because of his nice clothes and manners. The poor guy is passive by nature and while he's a good person at heart, the things the other characters love about him are all based on their preconceptions and misinterpretations of what he says and does, which he is virtually incapable of correcting due to his mental shortcomings.
  • Major —— de Coverley from Catch-22 does almost nothing at the Air Force squadron but play horseshoes and rent apartments, and his few lines of dialogue paint him as very simply minded, but everyone in the book holds him in godlike reverence. In a novel full of Deadpan Snarkers, no one dares turn a bit of snark his way; in fact, they're all so terrified of him that no one's ever even asked his first name; that's why he's Major —— de Coverley.
  • Aliera in the Dragaera series has been seen by fans as one of these. While she has a number of Sue-ish traits, being a strikingly beautiful Action Girl, but she is very far from being a Sue, instead presented as a hot head with morally questionable beliefs (admittedly this is her House's hat).
  • Discworld's Captain Carrot. (Presumably) Royal blood? Relentless charisma? Godlike physique? Check, Check and Squeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!! It can be said that Carrot would have been a blatant Mary Sue character, were he not a gentle parody of the "Action hero" archetype.
    • Carrot's Sue-ness is more apparent in his reality-bending powers than in any superficial trait. He has the inexplicable ability to turn bad people—or at least, ordinary people in bad moments—into good people, because he believes so earnestly that all people are good at heart that nobody can bear to disappoint him. People are aware of this reality-warping ability, and it's commented on several times in the text, but somehow it still keeps on working. It's temporary, though; enough to quell a riot but not to so enthral that underlying conflicts won't reappear unless Vimes and others remove the cause.
    • Indeed in one book it's implied had Vimes not left to address the problem at its source the entire watch, Carrot included, would have died in the rising turmoil.
  • Stanislaw Lem's Ijon Tichy character, hero of The Star Diaries, strays into Parody Sue territory at times; typically with sharply satirical results.
  • Captain Benjamin Avery, square-jawed hero of The Pyrates, Master Swordsman, Cunning Linguist, Chick Magnet and Celibate Hero, is one of the most blatant—and enjoyable—in history.

In short, Captain Avery was the young Errol Flynn, only more so, with a dash of Power and Redford thrown in; the answer to a maiden's prayer, and between ourselves, rather a pain in the neck.

  • James Meyer in the Torchwood novel Border Princes by Dan Abnett. He's Torchwood's best agent, the team's banter and social life all revolves around him, and Gwen dumps Rhys for him. It turns out that he's a victim of his own Reality Warper powers; he can't help changing the world into the one he wants, and the realisation this isn't the way things should be terrifies him.

Live-Action TV

  • Brilliantly done in the Frasier episode "The Show Where Diane Comes Back", in which Diane's play Rhapsody and Requiem is a thinly veiled reproduction of Cheers, with "Mary Ann" as the Author Avatar. Everyone loves her in the bar (even delivering an ode to her), which drives Frasier nuts, particularly since everyone also downplays the time that "Mary Ann" abandoned her fiance at the altar—which, since Frasier was the fiancé who got stiffed in real life, he has some alternative perspectives and objections towards. When the actor "Franklin" openly asks why his character would forgive Mary Ann so easily for leaving him at the altar, it causes Frasier to explode in a famous speech:

Frasier: What you are feeling is that this woman has reached into your chest, plucked out your heart, and thrown it to her hellhounds for a chew toy! And it's not the last time either! Because that's what this woman is! She is the Devil! There's no use running away from her, because no matter how far you go, no matter how many years you let pass, you will never be completely out of reach of those bony fingers! So drink hearty, Franklin, and laugh! Because you have made a pact with Beelzebub! And her name is Mary Anne!

  • Appears in the 4th season Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Superstar", similar to the Futurama example. Loser Jonathan uses a reality-altering spell to make himself everyone's "Someone Better" — he fights better than Buffy, beats Giles at chess, advises the Initiative, plays basketball, fronts a band, and starred in The Matrix. Unfortunately, the spell also conjures an ugly monster terrorizing the populace; destroying it would end the spell.
  • Parodied on Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, in which Garth casts himself as Rick Dagless, MD, described by his priest as "the most sensitive man I know, and I know God."
  • One episode of My Wife and Kids has Betty White guest-star as a Mary Poppins-like housekeeper who can do anything perfectly, and in doing so elicits an awed "... Wow..." from everyone around her...except for wife Jay, who feels put out by the attention she's getting. At the end of the episode, the Kyles' neighbor runs into the house, saying that he just saw her flying through the sky with an umbrella, garnering one final "...Wow..."
  • Tek Jansen, hero of Stephen Colbert's (fictional) novel Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure, and the related comics and animated adventures that have been seen. He is super awesome spectacular ultra-spy who has obviously had hundreds of girlfriends, and the fact that he physically resembles and is voiced by Colbert is surely a matter of coincidence.
  • Monk seems to have envisioned himself as one of these as a child as an insert to his favorite show. It's actually incredibly disturbing.
  • On an episode of Yes, Dear, Jimmy (Mike O'Malley) was a contestant on Big Brother, and within days became the most popular member of the household, prompting everyone (except poor Ashley) to use him as a decoy to get Ashley eliminated in the first ceremony (using something of a Batman Gambit, no less). Jimmy ended up disqualified when Greg snuck onto the set to try and warn him of treachery from the others (though it turned out that it was just part of the gambit, the revelation footage not having been televised on the episode they were watching).
  • After watching "The Antwon Walker Story", Dave Chappelle wrote "The Dave Chappelle Story". He is portrayed as being born with a huge penis, is on first name basis with Richard Pryor & Eddie Murphy and had had sex with Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, some of the girls from the "Big Pimpin'" video, and Halle Berry. But he always kept it real.

"Did I tell you sell drugs? No! Hov' did that. so hopefully you won't have to go through that."

  • The Red Green Show had, in the later seasons, a segment featuring Ranger Gord's 'Educational Films', featuring him as almost everything the real Gord isn't. (Well, Gord and the cartoon-Gord are both male Canadian forest rangers.)
  • Jool in Farscape possibly. Hot young student who accidentally finds herself dumped on the existing cast? Check. Kaleidoscope Hair? Check. Remarkable voice? Check. Hot Topic Goth dress sense? Check. The crew, however, spectacularly fail to fall in love with her, or even give the faintest crap about her for quite a while. Unfortunately the writers overdid it and made her a full-blown Scrappy to many of the audience.
  • Dr. Angela Hunter on Green Wing. She's stunning, brilliant, great at her job, (almost) everyone loves her, she's one of the few competent people at the hospital and seemingly kind and generous. In actuality she's very bitchy and just fakes a lot of her kindness in order to get ahead.To top it off she becomes the star of of a documentary that comes to film at the office and manages to leave with a great acting job. And then she gets murdered by a moose.
  • Jason on The George Lopez Show is probably meant to be a parody. He plays baseball, is on the debate team, spends his free time wheeling around his disabled brother, and has daddy issues.

Music

  • The Alice Cooper song "You're a Movie" is about an overconfident soldier who embodies this trope.

Bullets repel off my medals
 And my men are in awe when I speak
All chaos my strategy settles
My mere presence gives strength to the weak
For me it seems really alarming
I'm really just only a man
With five million sheep in this army
I seem to be the only one fit to command

Tabletop Games

  • Vampire: The Requiem parodies the Villain Sue of its previous series, Caine, with Vampire-As-Jesus Longinus and Vampire-As-L. Ron Hubbard Dracula. Both are mythic founders of magically inclined covenants, both are dead convinced they are the Best Vampires Ever and both are hilariously deluded as to the universality of their creations. Caine would swat both of them with a pinkie toe, but their advantage is that Caine doesn't exist in this scenario.
    • That doesn't stop the Lancea Sanctum from INVENTING the Cainite Heresy in the Camarilla Fan Club supplements, just to add a level of meta on top that nobody seems to really be "getting".
    • Dracula's "Rites of the Dragon" is a supplement prop book specifically designed to parody "The Book of Nod".
      • And let's not forget the Jack Chick parody Bible tract in the Daeva clanbook...
      • White Wolf released a "new translation" of The Testament of Longinus on PDF, which reads like other holy scriptures if the narrator (of the first part) were a raving egomaniac. Including repetitions, contradictions, and historical inaccuracies... and translator notes which argue with each other about the significance and authorship of various verses. It's a hoot.
  • Dungeons & Dragons, as usual, has a handful of everything.
  • Witch Girls Adventures includes a "Mary Sue" trait specifically intended for playing a Parody Sue.

Theater

  • Princess Winnifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress has one defining character trait: she's spunky! Luckily, the play is a madcap comedy, so we're not asked to take her (or anybody else) too seriously. And a good actress can make the character fairly endearing.

Video Games

  • Fraziska Von Karma from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is considered one of the Jerk and Villain varieties, complete with several Common Mary Sue Traits. Daughter of the previous game's Big Bad—Check. Like Brother and Sister relationship with The Rival from the last game—Check. Gets away with physically assaulting any and all law enforcement officers and even using illegal evidence in court—Check. 18 years old lawyer who started her illustrious career at 13—Check. Beating her is a big Take That at the typical Mary Sue that Edgeworth fangirls tend to use in their self-insert fics. Also in case 4 of Investigations a couple of the people she tries to intimidate either shrug her off or laugh at her. So she just takes it out on Edgeworth and Gumshoe.
  • In the Play Station 3 version of the game, Flynn from Tales of Vesperia is a Type 3 that is played for drama. His best friend and eternal rival, the protagonist Yuri constantly snarks about how he gets the treatment of a God Mode Sue in-universe when it comes to fighting and politics. However, Yuri is also aware that Flynn is the single most Lawful Stupid human being in existence. When his devotion to the rules cause him to screw up, Yuri really lets him have it... and Flynn reluctantly realises that he's in the wrong for once when he does.
  • Zed from Wild ARMs, moreso in the remake Wild Arms Alter Code F. He is a demon who sees himself as the incredibly awesome protagonist of the story and claims that the main characters are villainous, until he finally ditched Ziekfried and, in the remake, can eventually join the party. In the original game he also dropped the "Doom Bringer" sword which was very powerful but reduces Jack's luck the the worst possible value when he uses it - which sort of explains Zed's comic ineptitude throughout the game.
  • The Disgaea games give us Kurtis. He's handsome, he's badass, he is a genius, a cyborg, has a quite tragic backstory and is The Rival... And then he does a Heroic Sacrifice and ends up transformed into a Prinny. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Duke Nukem, though the "parody" part was subverted in Forever. Word of God has said that in that game he's meant to be taken completely seriously, and that he is supposed to be the coolest thing and center of his world. Most people who played the game seem to have thought it was a parody regardless of the intent.

Web Animation

  • Strong Sad's fanfiction character, Twelve Times A Day Man, from Homestar Runner.
  • Shadowleggy is very aware of playing this trope when she appears in her videos.

Web Comics

  • The Girl Genius webcomic has an Affectionate Parody called "Fan Fiction" that mines all the Common Mary Sue Traits including eyes that change color, and Mary coming back from the dead. Shaenon Garrity, the creator of Narbonic, Skin Horse, and Smithson, wrote this for the Foglios.
    • The story ends up playing the Sue author pretty sympathetically—her brothers whine that she's telling the story wrong, but her mother comforts her by telling her she made her own Mary Sue stories when she was a girl.
  • In this strip of The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, the author claims in the Alt Text that his Mary Sue character is an annoyed elderly rooster.
  • Lewis Powell of Terror Island took that idea even further, claiming in this strip that his Mary Sue character was a fake magic cube. Ben wrote Lewis's commentary that day, for what it's worth.
  • Mary Sue Academy is about a school for Mary Sues, and is appropriately full of these. It's right here.
  • Shadow and Chug of Powerup Comics are (stealth) parodies of the Jerkass Stu model. Since they represent all of the authors' viewpoints, it's deemed acceptable for them to dismiss the recurring strawman character with a bullet to the forehead simply because he has the "wrong" opinions.
  • Dave Anez has admitted (and lampshaded) the fact that Bob is Bob and George's Marty Stu. He dresses like Proto Man (easily the coolest Mega Man character), he's able to beat the main cast in combat and able to out-program Dr. Wily. He's the mastermind behind the events of 5 and 6 parodies, and a demi-god to boot. Since Bob And George was a Gag Series, he ends up as the butt of jokes a bit more often than your average Marty Stu. Given the often ridiculously exaggerated things he's done (like killing a ghost/hologram), he may even qualify as The Ace.
  • There's still some debate among fans as to whether Jade from the MS Paint Adventures series Homestuck was intended to be one of these or not. She does have a ludicrous number of quirky hobbies, skills, and "cute" flaws (narcolepsy and general ditziness). Jade also has a magical pet, crazy supernatural powers, future technology, a grasp on the unfolding plot, and she lives under the wing of her equally talented and rich Grandfather who is deceased, making her Conveniently an Orphan in addition to everything else. What makes her seem like a Parody Sue instead of a straight example is the fact that her Sue-ness (like every other trope used in the series) is exaggerated to the point that it becomes funny. Then she loses her powers, her gear and her pet, and spends so much time dozing that all the other main characters zoom past her. Time to start earning your keep, miss.
    • The troll Kanaya Maryam, being essentially Jade's gothy friend Rose raised in Jade's circumstances, is the wannabe vampire to Jade's magic princess. Just count how many times the phrase "one of the few of your kind" recurs in her introductory bio.
    • Vriska Serket has a FLARP character named "Marquise Spinneret Mindfang". She gained all the levels. All of them.
      • Andrew has confirmed that Vriska herself is a metafictional commentary on the Mary Sue, although she might be better said to be a Deconstruction Sue. She thinks she is prettier, smarter, and stronger than everyone else, inserts herself in major plot events simply to make herself important, and never suffers any negative consequences for her actions untill she dies. The result of this is everyone who speaks to her (except John) thinking she is either a psychotic bitch or simply a Jerkass, with a similar effect on the fandom.
    • Feferi's status is ambiguous due to her Mary Sue traits, such as having the highest possible blood color in a hematocracy and being heir apparent to the Empire while being very nonchalant about it. She's incredibly nice (remember that the trolls are a bunch of murderous bastards), has a guardian that can kill every single person in her species excluding herself, the Troll Empress, and possibly other sea trolls at the drop of a hat (compared to the other guardians of the trolls who can't really do much at all by comparison), and wears bright clothes and gold accessories where almost everyone else is decked out in blacks and greys. She's dead too, by the way.
  • Living with Insanity features a parody on bad writing as a whole, starring a character actually named Marty Stu who can convince nazis to stop being evil just because he is sexy.
  • Tsukiko from The Order of the Stick is this to an extend. She has several Common Mary Sue Traits—heterochromatic eyes, great beauty, skimpy clothing, unusualy skilled for her young age, oppressed by a stuck-up society not understanding her greatness.... Parody comes in two aspects. First, she is terribly Wrong Genre Savvy, acting like she is in her own self-insert romantic fanfic and can do whatever she wants to get Xykon to fall in love with her and others are just obstacles for her to dispose without consequences -- which gets her killed once she tries to get rid of Redcloak. Second, that "oppressed by a stuck-up society not understanding her greatness" part? She was jailed for necrophilia and her entire reasoning for that behavior is based on Insane Troll Logic.
  • League of Super Redundant Heroes has a super-heroine literally called Mary Sue, who is clearly the most perfect example of a human being (or superhuman being for that matter), but still points out her "defining flaw" that goes hand-in-hand with her perfection to define the trope.
  • Chainsawsuit got a few entries, including "Brightshadow Academy for Mary Sues". Its newest student is Jane Peters, who "had no unique powers and a very normal past":

poor jane peters... but little did she know that she was going to become the greatest student that brightshadow academy had ever seen

Western Animation

  • The Mary Sue concept in general, as well as Always Someone Better, is parodied in the Recess episode "Here Comes Mr. Perfect", in which a Marty Stu from out of town shows up whose sympathetic character flaw is that he's Marty Stu—his perfection always makes everyone immediately hate him because he's so much better at the stuff everyone else is known for, and he actively tries to avoid showing it off for this reason.
    • He also gives a speech in his own defense that, in a meta sense, can be taken as a sort of defense of the Mary Sue—not that they're good characters, per se, or or not annoying, but that it isn't the character's fault -- they didn't decide to be perfect.
  • An episode of The Little Mermaid cartoon has an old acquaintance of Sebastian who has the same problem. In a last-ditch effort to beat him at something, Sebastian challenges him to pretty much tell Sebastian's life story. The old acquaintance not only does so, in perfect detail, (which, in itself is pretty damn creepy) but also manages to mix a heaping helping of The Reason Sebastian Sucks while doing so. Cue the Flat What from everyone. Including the viewers.
  • Appears in Doug. When Skeeter helps with one of Doug's Quailman comic, his character is a blatant God Mode Stu, gaining whatever power most quickly solves the situation at hand (said character is also an Expy of the Silver Surfer, who is in comics at Story Power Breaker). This is heavily lampshaded in Doug's dislike of the character.
  • The Venture Brothers: Brock Sampson is a parody of over-the-top Heroic Sociopath characters. While he does get plenty of asskicking scenes, he is also shown doing less adventurous things with the Ventures (such as helping effeminate Dean put on his plays and/or dressing up for costume competitions), whom he sees as a family unit. In fact, when Femme Fatale Molotov Cocktease invites him to abandon them and join her as a mercenary, he happily tells her that he prefers the Ventures to the moral ambiguity and weirdness of spy work.
  • In Code Lyoko episode "Kadic Bombshell", Brynja Heringsdötir is an obvious parody of the Relationship Sues so prevalent in the show's Fan Work. This one-shot character has every trapping of a Mary Sue and Odd (and Ulrich, and Jérémie, and every other boy in the school) falls for her, but she's quickly revealed too shallow to be a serious love interest. She leaves at the end of the episode without having any lasting effect on the status quo (the heroes not even bothering with a Return to the Past).
  • If you think about it, Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender is a Type 3 Parody/Deconstruction of the Villain Sue archetype; she's insanely powerful and skilled; related to major characters but appeared out of nowhere at the end of the first season, much like the standard Copy Cat Sue character; a fourteen year old girl who looks about nineteen, and not a bad nineteen at that; and she can Magnificent Bitch with the best of them. However, by constantly pushing herself to reach a Mary Sue-like level of impossible perfection, she eventually suffers a total mental and emotional breakdown, having first lost the approval of her father and the friendship of the only two people who genuinely cared about her. At the end of said breakdown, she's just had her ass handed to her by a Water Tribe peasant, on the day of Sozin's Comet when her Firebending should have been at her very strongest no less; the official website caps it off by explaining that she was hauled off to a mental institution soon afterwards.
  • In Invader Zim, Tak has Sue tendencies: arrives at the Skool out of nowhere on an incredibly cool and expensive-looking jet, gets Dib's attention (while shooting down Zim's futile courtship attempts), turns out to be another rogue "Invader" like Zim—only incredibly more competent, and so on. And yet, she's still so Genre Blind as to put a Big Red Button to disable her master plan and gets defeated by the very people she denounced as worthless.
    • One episode cast Dib as a God Mode Sue. After throwing a muffin at Zim in school, he's visited by Energy Beings that sought him out to be their champion against the Irken Invaders. They give him superpowers that allow him to do pretty much anything he wants, which he proceeds to use to talk Zim into turning himself in to the authorities, expose every single paranormal mystery, singlehandedly fought and defeated the Irken Armada, and "even got to ride a moose". As it turned out, it was all a virtual reality simulation orchestrated by Zim to get him to admit he threw the bran muffin.
  • In the episode of Futurama parodying Star Trek fandom, they produce an episode of Star Trek based on an alien energy cloud's fanscript, wherein members of the regular cast fall in love with and are overwhelmed with admiration for the alien energy cloud.
    • There's also Barbados Slim, who won Olympic gold medals in both Limboing and Sex. His pecs also wiggle by themselves. He has been described as both an adonis, and a 'mahogany god'.
      • He gets some minor comeuppance in Bender's Big Score, when after Hermes steals back his wife from him, Slim tries to storm out of the room, being forced to limbo underneath a malfunctioning automatic door...which then shuts on him partway through.
  • Lila from Hey Arnold! is effectively a sickeningly sweet parody of a Mary Sue.
  • Family Guy: The Griffins bring in a new dog after Lois points out that Brian's getting old. "New Brian" is polite, perfect, multi-talented and instantly befriends everyone (sans Stewie), who rightly realizes that he's Brian's "replacement". New Brian goes on to improve everyone's lives and supplant Brian completely. However, he makes his fatal mistake when he... gets a little intimate with Rupert the teddy bear. Stewie is not pleased...
    • Don't forget Derek, Jillian's late husband. He's depicted as a parody of a Relationship Sue .
  • An episode of The Fairly OddParents has Timmy wishing up a big brother named Tommy. He was so perfect that he actually got Tootie to lose her crush on Timmy. This, of course, backfires when Tommy wants to take Timmy on a long charity trip to a third world country.
  • Home Movies: You let Fenton play in your movies at your peril.

"You're the dirty villain, and I'm the hero, and you suck. A-and you're really stupid and I'm really smart. OK? And you're fat and have bad skin, and I'm thin and I have small pores."

Stan: Wow! Who would have thought that Mintberry Crunch had powers?
Cartman: *sighs* Fucking Mintberry fucking Crunch.

  • Animaniacs: Hello Nurse, according to the song about her, her list of accomplishments includes winning the Tony, Nobel Prize, and Pulitzer, obtaining several Ph.Ds, playing Chopin without rehearsing, singing opera at the Met, solving math equations, winning a scholarship to Yale, starring as the lead role in King Lear, and becoming the ambassador to China. Oh, and she doesn't smoke.
  1. ↑ that bulge is revealed about a third into the movie as not his penis, but just a veritable jungle of pubic hair. "The bush! It's like a cushion for them."
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