What are the "Mary Sue/Gary Stu" characters of the soaps?

[dragonflies]

Oh and Krystal on AMC was a Mary Sue till like the last year of the show

[DRW50]

A big difference between Erica and a lot of Mary Sues is that she was written as a burden to her mother. Yes, she loved Mona, and stood up for her, but she also hurt her at times.

Greenlee, for instance, was never, ever written as being wrong or unfair towards her mother, or anyone in her family. She was always the victim.

[Darn]

Well, that's good because she wasn't a villain. She was absolutely imperfect and did some vile questionable things but not an out and out cruel person. She was incredibly selfish but never evil. Just immature and shortsighted.

By the end of her run Erica had no one to fight against anymore. Brooke was gone, they refused to have her call Krystal or Greenlee on their sh.it on a consistent basis and there were no women in her age range on the show anymore. She was an island occasionally touched by the drama of her children. She hardly had anyone TO be nasty to anymore, the show was so utterly gutted.

Skin's only talking about the Erica of the last 10 years. I don't think (or I hope not) anyone thinks Erica of the 70s/80s/early to mid 90s was a Mary Sue.

[DRW50]

I see your point. I guess I see Erica as a consistent character over the years, not so much the type who made radical changes.

[dragonflies]

I think it could be argued Erica in the last decade had some Mary Sue qualities, but overall, she wasn't one. People did call her on her crap & then some

[Skin]

Greenlee had no Mona figure to burden. Her family treated her like an ATM. I don't think Greenlee started out as a Sue. No one loved her, she was continually jealous of other characters, she was the antagonist to virginal, purity Sue Becca and she had to fight tooth and nail for everything that she received for the most part. She fought for Ryan, she accidentally fell in love with Leo, she fought to create Fusion, etc. She had plenty of obstacles and she conquered them reasonably for better or worse. She was not told to be exceptionally beautiful or talented. She just came from money and was deeply insecure. She was basically Kendell 2.0 with funds. She eventually became a Sue once they defanged her and paired her with Ryan. That was also around the same time they resolved her status quo bitchiness. Greenlee's Mary Sue personality was more transplanted then genuinely created. The same thing eventually happened to Kendell, Amanda and other female entities on the same show as well. The show couldn't have any bad girls.

Exactly. I would say it started happening around the late 90's with Enchantment and then it got unbearable because she became a fantasy. The last time I think Erica was a real character was around the time Kendell came into her life and turned it upside down or during her pill addiction storyline.

[DRW50]

As soon as Greenlee started the whine about how she was rich in money but poor in love, the Mary Sue stuff began. That may not have been the start but was early on. At that time they also made sure viewers chuckled along with her schemes or insults, even when throwing around homophobic insults.

[dragonflies]

That and making her the victim in a storyline in which she was the villain, that put her over the top as a Mary Sue.

[All My Shadows]

Erica being good at being a catty bitch doesn't make her a Mary Sue. Some characters gave up fighting back against her jibes because they just couldn't. They couldn't hang with the Queen when it came to talking sh!t. Others, like Brooke, gave up because they grew up and matured. Erica was always ready to go that round with Brooke, but Brooke got to the point where A, she wasn't in the mood to always play games with Erica or B, she played games with her because it amused her in a condescending way. I can't speak for everyone, but I never got the idea that Brooke backing down from Erica was steaped in "See how perfect Erica is and how weak Brooke is?" Soooo totally not what they were going for, IMO.

[Cheap21]

Its funny you mention Babe bc seriously one could argue she was MMT's personal Mary Sue during her stint on the show

[Ms. Chandler Quartermaine]

We are on page 5, and NO ONE has mentioned the woman with the Golden Coochie, Brenda Barrett?!?!

Even when she did bad, it was played for the greater good.

[Khan]

Brenda Barrett was not a Mary Sue.

She was the Virgin Mary.

Big difference.

[Skin]

If that's all that you have gotten from my posts regarding her then I guess we are just going to have to dissolve this argument and agree to disagree. That was not my argument at all.

Even Babe got smacked down by all the Kane women though. She was despised by everyone for the most part. The fusion girls hated her. the Chandlers hated her for a time. Brooke was not supportive of her. That's not typical Sue behavior. There truly were characters who despised and detested Babe for who she was and what she did to Bianca. Let's not make any mistake about that. A true Mary Sue wouldn't have gotten that. She had to build her reputation up and make new friends and she had to force people to see her as something else other then 'a baby stealer'. Most of the characters who loved Babe came to love her after the babyswitch through friendship and her being their for them (i.e. Amanda, Zarf/Zoe, Josh, Ritchie/Wes, etc.)

As to her being a Sue I could see arguments for it but she was written too poorly to be one and Megan never guarded her as much as she guarded her other favorites or creations (Ryan, Greenlee, Kendell), she threw her into the mud to further her own stories to consistently for me to believe she was a beloved self-avatar. Babe's characterization changed too drastically in any situation where Megan could wring plot created drama out of her stories. She was almost always used as a tool in which to further Megan's plot.

Babe probably was one of her top favorites but her affinity for the Babe character was ultimately finite. As you can see by the way her character would change on a dime whenever she wanted to tell her more favored stories. Babe went from being a comedic villain in the vein of Opal/Gloria to being a gumption-less ingenue to keep the babyswitch going to a rough riding heroine to pair her with JR and cause his downward spiral to eventually being some odd mix of an anti-heroine/anti-villian so she could straddle both sides of the fence and play Blair to JR's Todd. Her writing of the Babe character was far to inconsistent to be a pure Sue. Writing favoritism perhaps but the she didn't give a damn about Babe's characterization. Megan loved Kendell, Greenlee and Ryan foremost and above all others. Look at the way she wrote them in comparison she wrote Babe. I'm not convinced Megan truly loved anything about the Chandler/Martin/Carey/Hayward group considering the way she wrecked all of their characters so spectacularly to create 'better stories.'

[Ms. Chandler Quartermaine]

Tell me about...but in reagrds to Mary sue

All the men wanted her, every woman who came after her was compared to her, Carly, Sam, and whoever else orbited in Sonny and Jax’s orbit. And if that wasn’t enough they turned her into a 5ft world-renowned supermodel charity giver for goodness sakes.

When she did wrong, like wearing the wire, it was explained as her trying to do the right thing. When Sonny was cheating on Lily with Brenda, Lily was the one who was made out to be the bad person who couldn’t let go.

And once she kicked the bucket, she was made into a Saint. I don’t know how many times I heard “You’ll never be Brenda”, “You’re just a bed warmer for Brenda”, “You’ll always be second place to Brenda” etc etc. Then she comes back, sniffing behind a married man, and Skye was thus thrown under the bus for her. And then you had Alcazar, Jax, Sonny, the Quartermaines AND Jason all bending over backwards for her throughout her whole stint. And throughout that whole saga Carly, Courtney, and Skye were all made out to be insecure and jealous of Brenda.

I won't even get into her last stint, but how Edward would contiunally make her out to be the next Lila made my eyes roll.

[MissLlanviewPA]

How soon did her role change from being a bad girl into being a heroine? When she was first on the show, she wanted to take Jagger away from Karen and tried to humiliate her. How was she treated in regards to how she treated Karen?