A boulevard of broken glass.

I worked on a book with some pretty typical young characters -- the dopey hero, the bully, the goofy sidekick, the girl genius who is smarter than the hero, the wise elder, the clueless elder, and so on. You call them stereotypes; the writer might call them archetypes. But they aren't archetypes, not really, not of the kind Frazer or Campbell or even Jung might recognize. They are, however, pretty common these days, and thus stereotypes.

The girl genius, of course, nowadays has to be totally "woke," to use that childish term that reflects its coiners' level of maturity. Fans of Harry Potter will recall that Hermoine Granger, girl genius, founded S.P.E.W., the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, to help the service-bound house elves. (That was in the Goblet of Fire book, published 2000, when this type was in its infancy.) To the credit of author J. K. Rowling, the fictional issue of house elf servitude turned out more complex than Hermoine realized, and she was unable to accomplish much.

That's not the case for the younger generation of tiresome shrews that populate newer novels for children and adults. If they do Mary Sue a cause local to the fictional world, they will be completely successful and their opponents vanquished, sometimes almost magically. And some other character will tell her something like, "You are the most courageous person I have ever met." Mary Sue's flaw is that she cares... sometimes too much.

But it's probably unfair to call this character a Mary Sue, since she's not always the hero -- perhaps Smurfette Brown, who can destroy an army of strawmen with ease.

The character is inevitably a fountain of political correctness, the kind of pest that in real life others would avoid. Any mention of Western Europe will automatically be followed by "colonialism"; any mention of the United States will bring up its uniformly dark history and its thievery from others, because the world's wealth is (to borrow from P. J. O'Rourke) just one big pizza, and if we get the last slice then South America has to eat the box. If someone mentions the heroics and brilliance of George Washington, he'll be told that Washington had syphilis (although there's no evidence he did, and syphilis didn't account for his wearing a wig because he did not wear one). She is a walking encyclopedia of woke facts, whether they are true or not. Everything another character might say will spark her to educate them, on pollution or history or politics -- God, the politics -- or racism or sexism or any other -ism, and because they are her friends they will appreciate it.

That's how you know it's fiction. Spending time with a person like this is like walking down a boulevard of broken glass; however careful you may be, you're going to get cut again and again. At least the sniffy and gossipy Church Ladies of yore might be convinced to stand down out of Christian charity once in a while. Nothing ever stops the Wokeheads.

And yet, real life has a way of playing out differently than novels. For a look at what happens in modern-day radical communities, I recommend "Sad Radicals" by recovering radical Conor Barnes:

Radical communities select for particular personality types. They attract deeply compassionate people, especially young people attuned to the suffering inherent to existence. They attract hurt people, looking for an explanation for the pain they’ve endured. And both of these derive meaning for that suffering by attributing it to the force that they now dedicate themselves to opposing. They are no longer purely a victim, but an underdog.
     However, radical communities also attract people looking for an excuse to be violent illegalists. And the surplus of vulnerable and compassionate people attracts sadists and abusers ready to exploit them. The only gatekeeping that goes on in radical communities is that of language and passion—if you can rail against capitalism in woke language, you’re in.

And even for those who don't quite go so far as Antifa-level wokeitude, there are surprises. Boys and young men who take their cues from novels might think that the way to a woman's heart is  supporting all her causes, but the College Fix reports that "a study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin says that women prefer men who display 'benevolent' sexist attitudes because these indicate men are willing to make an investment — 'protect, provide, and commit'—in a relationship." So, lads, you can either be a sexist, a loser, or an abuser; the options would seem to be limited to those three.

Probably the worst offense from Smurfette Brown & Co. is a literary one. The less-than-human characters, not just our sharp-tongued she-devil, are indeed stereotypes, meant to provide the author's bona fides, dull except to those unfortunate people who look at them as exemplars. And there are a lot of boring books out there. Checking the boxes of political correctness may win an author a contract, and maybe awards, but is not the way to enjoyable reading.

Even in real life I would encourage the enthusiastic wokemeister to cool down and get a sense of humor. Everyone around you will appreciate it. They may be sympathetic, they may be patient, they may be your parents and legally obligated to be in your presence for some portion of the time, but they don't deserve rudeness and lecturing. Clear away the broken glass.