Mary Sue
Cassie doesn’t have much of an in-person social life. Her former best friend, Bennett, can’t stand her now, and she doesn’t fit in at school or at the church events her mom keeps pushing her to attend. Cassie’s friends are all online, where they bond over their passion for the show Riverview. The Riverview fandom loves Cassie’s fanfiction, which features an original character named Jessica. Jessica is a fun, cool, beautiful vampire girl who is good at everything and liked by everyone – a classic Mary Sue.
Jessica is fiction, obviously. Cassie created her. But one day, Bennett is picking on Cassie when who should jump to her defense but a very real Jessica, fangs and all.
How is this possible? Jessica explains that all Mary Sues exist in their own realm, Mary Sue World, and they go hopping through different versions of reality anytime someone writes them into a new story. For a character like Jessica, Cassie’s “real” reality is just one of many where she might make an appearance. And while she’s visiting, she wants to help Cassie channel some of the confident, positive energy that she wrote Jessica to have.
Unfortunately, there’s another Mary Sue in town, and she’s not nearly as nice as Jessica. Which maybe isn’t surprising, given who created her: Bennett. Now this dangerous newcomer is targeting both Cassie and Bennett. To beat her, they will have to work together, get some help from Mary Sue World, and embrace the weird and beautiful realm of Internet fandom.
This is a smart, zany book celebrating the creativity and connection of fan culture. In particular, it is a defense of the Mary Sue. This character archetype in fanfiction has long been maligned as cringey wish-fulfillment, a way for the writer to insert an impossibly cool and hypercompetent version of herself into the story. But as Jessica points out (and other writers have noted), plenty of canonical characters—especially male ones – are just as hypercompetent and cool, and yet few people dismiss Batman or James Bond as “Gary Stus” (the much-less-commonly-discussed male form of Mary Sue). And any character can be written well or badly, regardless of whether they fit the Mary Sue description.
The fandom love continues with a series of interviews sprinkled between the chapters, in which the book’s creators talk about their own history and engagement with fan culture. They rave about their favorite tropes and tags, their first OTPs, and more. Here, and in the book’s main text, we see the joy that online fandom brings and the way it connects people, some of whom might never meet in person. As a fun visual touch, the pages with these interviews are styled to look like old websites.
The art is dynamic and expressive, and brought to us by Lisa Sterle, the illustrator of the popular Modern Witch Tarot deck. The settings are full of lived-in detail, and the characters look natural in their movements and postures. The color palette has a base of realistic earth tones, but includes pops of vibrant, 80s-esque purples, pinks, and teals, especially once Jessica shows up. The colors also help to establish the different settings, whether it’s a sepia-toned flashback, the gray-blues of a Star Trek ship in Mary Sue World, or the electronic landscape of the Digital Sea.
As a love letter to fandom, this book will be best appreciated by readers who are already at least a little familiar with the tropes and terms. Hand it to creators of fanfic or fanart, cosplayers, and anyone else who takes their passion for a fandom and runs with it.
Mary Sue
By Meghan Fitzmartin
Art by Lisa Sterle
BOOM! Box, 2026
ISBN: 9798892158855
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+), Older Teen (16-18)
Creator Representation: Bisexual,
