Mary Sues

When creating a story, you want to make sure your characters are well-written and relatable towards the audience. However, there will be times where there's a couple of characters who may be too perfect, where he or she has little to no flaws and always triumphs a conflict without breaking a sweat. That's why they're called Mary Sues, or Gary Sues if a character is male. And because of this, these characters have been a laughing stock to the internet community, but I can't help but notice a double standards here. Superman is perhaps the original Gary Sue, because during the pre-crisis era, his powers were endless, and the only way to beat him is either kryptonite or another kryptonian such as General Zod. Because of this, a lot of people have trouble finding him relatable compared to other superheroes with actual flaws like Spider-Man. However, when they try to make Superman more relatable in Man of Steel, the film gets panned for not being the Superman they grew up with, which is him being a Gary Sue. And these are the same people who despise Kirito from Sword Art Online and that vampire chick from My Immortal for being complete Mary Sues. What are your thoughts on Mary Sues? Is it even possible to make one that's actually likable or has the term been constantly abused for characters people don't like other words nowadays?

I'll use an easy example. I think Bella from the Twilight series comes to mind whenever I hear this. She's basically a self insert from Stephanie Meyer anyway, but she had literally no negative traits, accept maybe being stubborn or clumsy, which never impacted her negatively per say and those aren't even really negative. She was monotones, bland, average in every way, yet everyone seemed to gravitate toward her, like 5 guys wanna jump her bones thought out the series and she becomes the strongest character for no reason, and every time she acts like a dumbass or a total bitch, it gets applauded, not called out. The author claimed she wanted to write the character this way for the audience to step into her shoes, but I call BS, she's just a bad writer. I think people are afraid to write characters as unlikeable, but being selfish, arrogant, immature or just plain unlikeable are very humanizing characteristics imo. Flawed characters are easy to relate to, and tend to have more dept, and I'm not talking about Christopher Nolan Batman angst where everything is a big dark brooding blah, that's why Man of Steel got eyerolls, not everything has to be an angst fest, not everyone has to be Rorschach from Watchmen. Everybody has negative qualities along with positive ones, but you need that balance. In most of my favorite series, villains tend to be my favorite characters. Also lack of character development, maybe not in all movies specifically, depending on the film or stand alones, but the character needs to have changed somewhat from the start to finish. This post ended up making no sense, I tried. ;(