"Is my character a Mary Sue" thread

Over-powered protagonists need over-powered enemies to give them a real fight. The problem there is that the stakes sometimes get a little ludicrous, and also that eventually both get able to destroy the whole universe in an eyeblink and where do you go from there?

A brighter future for a darker age.

One way I think works around that is that you should never measure someone's abilities in dead objects. It is far easier to justify someone who can kill an entire army of foot soldiers being defeated, than someone who can destroy an entire army of tanks.

That might just be me though.

Read my stories!

Multiverses.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

Well, yes, you can then go to destroying whole multiverses, but eventually the scale simply gets too big to be comprehensible ;)

@AHR: It at least manages to keep a ... human scale, I guess.

I generally just make sure that my characters have strictly limited superhuman ability. Soot might be able to go off with a bit of a bang if she wanted to kill herself (she has, essentially, a tiny fusion power source within, though in somewhat magical terms; she describes it as "a shard of Sun in my belly"), but we're talking about a dozen city blocks at most and she may have been designed to not be able to do that anyway. And that's my most powerful character.

A brighter future for a darker age.

My character's epic suicidal blaze of glory would likely hit less hard than a random Fireball spell she fires off.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

i look at these test and took them... I wish I haven't because of "Oh my god your a mary sue" crap.

Then you need to think how to make it so your character doesn't overwhelm.

A brighter future for a darker age.

I think you have to be careful with those tests. -_- Main characters are bound to be a bit special. If they're not, they'll become Bella Swan (sorry, Twilight fans -_-).

Plus, it's perfectly possible to make a likeable Mary Sue.

edited 4th Apr '11 10:14:41 AM by risingdreams

Really these test seem to not even really bother with the description, from what I see in them I know that this is my opinion, so don't take offensive.

From what I see its, "Your character has some dark past? Mary sue" "He acts out different from other characters? Mary sue" "Special powers? Mary sue"

My story is an original type(Not Fanfic). And the character has many flaws. Does that make them a mary sue? (Other characters have just about equal flaws, some more, some less.) Does having a tragic background in an orginial story make them a mary sue?

Honest, these test are just the creaters own preference.

Maybe I should delete the links entirely?

No, having certain combinations of traits does not mean your character is an utterly unsalvageable wreck, it just means that they're likely to piss off your audience if you don't handle them well.

edited 4th Apr '11 10:28:44 AM by melloncollie

If you have a dark past for the sake of having a dark past, then yes, something is wrong with your character, most likely.

And most tests do not say "OMG MARY SUE" if you check yes for ONE box.

Read my stories!

Yay! The two characters I tested are non-sues!

Here is one of them, who got a score of 12:

The Solitaire is an exceptionally skilled assassin. His father, when the Solitaire was 17, went insane. He trapped his family in a room, killed his wife and daughter, and subjected the Solitaire to a week in Hell. The Solitaire was forced to eat the rotting flesh of his dead mother and sister, brutally beaten by his father, lived in the rancid room in which his mother and sister rotted, was strapped to a chair during all of this. He was forced to urinate in his chair, and the spoiled, poorly-cooked flesh of his family caused him to vomit uncontrollably on himself. Eventually, the Solitaire tore the ropes that bound him, grabbed a knife his father left in the room, and stabbed his father in the shoulder. The father shot him in the leg and arm before running off screaming, never to be seen again by the Solitaire or the authorities. After spending a year in a psych ward recovering from the experience, he was declared mentally stable for the most part. He was recruited into the Conflict Intelligence Relay, an intelligence agency, and despite being better suited for analysis work he was blundered into Active Operations.

The experience took his considerable mental fortitude and strengthened it to levels other people cannot comprehend. He's rather intelligent with quite good analytical skills. He's pretty much lost the will to die and is now a prideful, determined survivalist. He rarely respects anyone, because he's fought for and earned the right to live whereas most people haven't. He'll kill anyone without hesitation if it means finding his father. He'll kill anyone without hesitation if they aren't conducive to his survival.

However, that event/experience as a teenager is obviously not without its drawbacks. Yes, it turned him into a Determinator that makes Batman look like a Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey. It also turned him into a proximity mine as he'll rapidly enter a mental/nervous breakdown if he experiences something related to That One Week, like eating meat. Think of it as Achilles's Heel- Achilles was dipped into that river/pool, making him completely invulnerable save for the one part that was used to dip him- his heel.

And the Solitaire is a good guy.

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

One obvious problem with those tests is that they are unaware of the canon where the work takes place.

Of course, if you hand over a character who has just crossed eight oceans and seven mountainranges to join the fray, it is just sanely likely that his name might be strange and hard on the tongue than your usual cast's. Unless everyone in your world speaks the same language with no local dialects.

Problem: what if everyone (human) has traits that would make them "above-human" in a certain setting? As we have examined in The Pokedex Extended Fanon Edition, humans have had to be hardcore to have survived along creatures who can shoot friggin'laser beams from their mouths and beat Mother Nature senseless often enough for the lulz. Even the canons display young kids surviving 3 or 4 stories falls pretty much unscratched.

So yeah, these tests work better as a series of warnings and any definitive answering on whether a character is or can be (or not) a Mary Sue. And even then, you have to be prepared to discard everything that does not apply as a judgment because of the canon you are working in. Key hint: always ignore rule #3 ("If you're trying to convince yourself that something doesn't really apply to your character, then it does").

For the record, a first character testing gave a score of 37, but most of those were because of the character history (left behind, killed another character, etc) rather than powers, looks and what else.

edited 6th Apr '11 8:32:38 AM by SilentReverence

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

Maybe it's just me, but I swear it said in the instructions that if it's something common/normal, then it doesn't count.

edited 6th Apr '11 9:17:30 AM by gamerex27

"USE YOUR WORDS NOT THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE" ''memyselfand I 2"

↑↑Not in that test, nor in 3 of the other 5 (I think) I have tried, one of them among the links above (the "original one" I think).

edited 6th Apr '11 9:04:38 AM by SilentReverence

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

http://www.springhole.net/writingandworldbuilding/egomobile.htm

This test kind of annoys me in particular. What bothers me especially is that the author says this:

Uh no. I'm going to choose something that sounds right for them. Putting a lot of care into your character's creation does not make the character a Sue. To be honest if a person only took fifteen minutes to choose a major character's name it would worry me. Names are important

Also she seems to be against the idea of choosing names you like for characters.

Actually I've seen published authors and agents say the opposite. If you don't care about your character how will you make the audience care. I adore my characters and they are extremely important to me, but I use that as motivation to make damn sure I do my best on this story and do it justice. Yes, liking your characters to the point where you can't take any criticism of them isn't a good thing. But neither is not caring about them much at all.

Paraphrased from the words of published authors ; "If you don't care about the character, why should the audience?"

edited 6th Apr '11 11:22:51 AM by JewelyJ

You know, one of the big problems with these tests is that people never get how to use them, and, perhaps subconsciously, try to tick as many boxes as they can, even if they're stretching the facts about their characters quite a bit by doing so. Plus since so many people are aware of these tests, it's easy to create a suish characters that flies under their radars.

Another thing to take into consideration is that many of the "make or break" questions on sue tests depend almost completely on knowledge only the author can have, namely intent. "Do you ever imagine you are this character", from the litmus test, is a great example of this. Ticking that box sends your sue rating up about 10 points, and I imagine most reviewers that use this test want to believe the character they're running through it IS a Mary Sue.

This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Well, that's because many Mary Sues are results of the author projecting his/her desires into that character and live a fantasy through them.

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

Well, I know at least one test has said "don't check if you're writing from their POV" or something like that.

Read my stories!

It was the Springhole test; it said, "Only check this if the only actual imagining you do is when you write the story" as in, thinking like the character to see how they would genuinely react to something. Which is a perfectly respectable writing practice that I do all the time.

The big thing about these tests is that no single test will give you the full picture about your character(s). The Katfeete one is genuinely, honestly the pickiest Mary Sue Litmus Test I've ever taken. However, I've avoided ever getting a very high score on it simply because I never, ever intentionally project myself onto my characters or name them after myself in any way. And a character can still be a Sue even if you don't do that.

Whenever I feel like running my characters through Mary Sue tests, I take at least three different tests to see if their combined results can get me a better picture. Of course, they all ignore at least a few story-specific things (like, for instance, adding points to your score if your character is a magic-user, even if the story is ABOUT magic-users). And there was one test for fantasy characters, no less, that would add a whopping 20 points if your character had wings of any kind, and specifically said to select it even if your character couldn't do anything with the wings or if the story was about Winged Humanoids.

So I guess the only way to genuinely see if your character is a Mary Sue or Marty Stu is to pull out the stops, write with them, and see what happens. Or, as I've been doing for the last few years, do some writing exercises not unlike the Character Setting series with some writer friends. That's helped me write and build my characters more than any Mary Sue Litmus Test could ever hope to.

edited 6th Apr '11 11:45:07 AM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

I have taken the 4 tests in the OP, combining my five main characters into one, which gives me pretty sueis characters. However I would give an arm _not_ to be one of my characters. Their lives are as normal as mine, then turns hopeless and grim.

But hey, in Homestuck/Sburb sessions, power tends to dump into your lap all the time...

... And they all die horribly in a hopeless battle, knowing that they are going to die... Does that count?

I guess I am just a power player :P

edited 6th Apr '11 4:33:04 PM by MHD

Pyroninja 42: I'm aware of that, but what I was talking about is how these tests are often used by [amateur] reviewers that "prove" that a character they dislike is a Mary Sue, and that those "make or break" questions are generally not things a reviewer knows.

This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

^Amen

A Mary Sue test taken by a reviewer (especially one who is known to dislike the character in question) can hardly be completely accurate.