| abstract | - The Historical Sue is a Mary Sue character in a story either written before 1960 or considered a "classic." She is not to be confused with a Mary Sue in a historical setting. Mary Sue may be older than we think she is. As long as authors have existed, they have been tempted to put themselves into their own stories, to play favorites with their own characters, or to create characters who are either so sickeningly sweet, or else so ridiculously powerful, as to be completely unrealistic. Because only the best stories stand the test of time for fifty or more years, Historical Sues are generally less egregious and poorly written than their contemporary counterparts, and most of the works mentioned below are worth reading. They are also almost always Canon Sues; fan fiction is a relatively new phenomenon. (Plagiarism, however, is not, and probably gave us the first examples of non-canon Mary Sues.) Over the years, the conventions of storytelling have changed. Today, it is considered a mark of bad writing to write about an unrealistically perfect character who easily influences everyone around her; but realistic characters were not always so important to writers. Especially in the field of children's literature, it was quite normal to create a perfect or near-perfect main character, so that the reader would see the character as an example to live up to, rather than a realistic human being to get to know. (Mark Twain parodied this tendency quite viciously in "The Story of the Good Little Boy," and followed that up with creating at least two realistically fallible child characters, proving he knew what he was talking about.)
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