Editing List of Mary Sues (section)

== Mary Suetopias ==

As mentioned in the main article, there are some cases of entire civilizations getting the "Mary Sue" label with some justice. Here are a few.

* The Draka, before they become a species, are usually held to be a fairly strong example of a Villian Suetopia. See above in Mary Sue Races for more.
* Anarchist habitats in [[Eclipse Phase]]. To quote TVTropes, they "are apparently flawless societies where robots and nanofabricators provide for everyone, crime is virtually non-existent due to surveillance sensors everywhere and well-armed populaces, and there's no shortage of spare bodies like there is in the Transitional Economies."
* Aldis, from [[Blue Rose]], has this accusation thrown at it, with some justification.
* The various civilizations of Ayn Rand's science fiction are either Mary Suetopias or Villain Suetopias. No in-between.
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* [[Ultramar]]. Need more be said?
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There are some "special cases" (parodies, twists, and deconstructions), that are worth mentioning:

* Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is... odd. Go read it if you want more, because it's ''very'' short. <!-- For those of you who have read the story and want to add more: Remember, the thing about the child in the story is that it's phrased hypothetically; they may or may not exist, and if they do, it's only because *the reader* can't accept such a perfect place without any dark secrets. -->
* Rapture and Columbia from the Bioshock series are "functionalist" Suetopias: Because the games are about killing lots and lots of dudes, you need to have those dudes be crazy or assholes or both. Rapture under Andrew Ryan could actually be interpreted as a criticism of Ayn Rand's Suetopias by showing how they will go wrong in a less ideal world, while Rapture after Sofia Lamb's takeover is an equally scathing deconstructive critique of collectivist Suetopias. Columbia, meanwhile, is a very obvious attack on ultranationalism and religious extremism, while also serving as a demonstration that even the so-called "good old days" often had negative aspects to them.
* The original "Utopia" by Thomas More is interesting, in that it somewhat parodies the concept before it existed. To provide two examples, "Utopia" is a pun on ''eutopia''-"good place", and ''outopia''-"no place", and the frame story narrator's name translates as "Peddler of Nonsense". Yes, this means that the man who literally coined the term Utopia immediately considered it a wishful fantasy.
* Mordent, from [[Ravenloft]], has a somewhat interesting twist. Its Darklord focuses more on Ghosts than on the living, so the living aren't the focus of the horror, and as such, for Ravenloft, it's a relative Utopia ''for the living''. Once you die there, however...
* Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" is widely interpreted as a parody of such works.
* The Federation of [[Star Trek]] seems like a Mary Suetopia on the surface. However, because the show was initially focused on morality stories, they're rather prone to Insane Admirals in Starfleet (to the point that one of the show's writers joked about the Federation's training standards), an early sign of cracks in the foundation. Later seasons of TNG and all of ''Deep Space Nine'' brought those cracks directly into focus, with the Maquis and the consequences of the Dominion War. Captain Sisko even rants about this a few times during the show; sure, Earth in the Star Trek-verse is practically a paradise compared to most other planets in the galaxy, but "It's easy to be a saint in Paradise," and the Federation has a much harder time living up to that image outside of their home system, examples including the Federation spy agency Section 31 engineering a virus to use on The Dominion's Founders (aka rulers) or Sisko himself collaborating with a former Cardassian spy/assassin to bring the Romulans into the war via a ''massive'' fraud. Also, what some people forget is that the episodes from the perspective of the characters, take anywhere from hours to days and even longer during multi-episode storylines. Even the crew of the original Enterprise could spend weeks to get the solution shown during the final ten minutes or end up exhausting all other options to take a random shot in the dark that solves the current problem. Usually, this didn't involve pulling it out of the writers' collective asses or pressing the reset button, something that happened often enough on Voyager and Enterprise to an unrealistic degree that viewers started hating them.
* Wakanda, from [[Marvel Comics]] wasn't this originally - it was just an African nation that avoided getting buttfucked during the Scramble for Africa and which had instituted a policy of sending its best and brightest abroad to learn at the most advanced foreign schools before returning to share what they learned with their people, thus keeping it well ahead of most other African nations and on par with the most civilized "first world" nations. They still had Vibranium as an ace up their sleeves, but they were more "America during the Atomic Energy race... if America had the world's only known supply of fissile material". It was subsequently retconned that the presence of Vibranium meant that Wakanda was centuries ahead of the world technologically and always had been. Different writers have applied differing levels of counter-Sue-ishness to Wakanda on this basis, ranging from making them archetypical "smug Utopians", who think knowing the cure for Cancer makes them better than others, to presenting them as a technologically advanced nation that's still imperfect, having deep social and political problems like any other country. The first Black Panther movie especially interrogated the premise of this nation's existence by pointing out that they stood by while atrocities happened all over the world, including to other black people, and they did nothing about it to protect their own hides. The short-lived "Ultimate Universe" took perhaps the biggest piss on the idea of Wakanda as the "Mary Suetopia" by replacing the "because Vibranium" background with "we reverse-engineered a crashed alien starship", and emphasizing that this didn't make them as powerful as they thought, as they ended up needing the Ultimates (Ultimate Marvel's Avengers) to save their asses when the aliens who lost that ship in the first place came knocking looking for their property.
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* Alpha Complex, from [[Paranoia]]. Need more be said?
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