MarySue confession thread

They say that the first character anybody makes is a Mary Sue... How was your first Mary Sue?.For most people a Mary Sue is a nessesaey part of growing as an artist.How it was your first Mary Sue?

If you never Made one congrats! you were Genre Savvy enough to avoid it!. Don't be be shy, Tropes Are Not Bad after all. having mistakes and leaving them behind is part of growing up and they are a Guilty Pleasure the first time :)

• My first was made by me as a child. He was a Possesion Sue: Superman. I didn't wrote him, I played with him as a toy. I used him as an invincible God-Mode Sue to beat my brother's toys.It got to the point that my brother still hates superman till this ver day lol.

edited 12th Jul '11 9:16:00 PM by FallenLegend

Samantha (now called Sa'mar'thra), who I made as a co-protagonist for a Soap Opera idea when I was young. She's a goth princess who saves the world...but never developed a proper personality.

Hey, I made her so I could play with my LEGOs.

Do toys really count? I don't think so (although if they do, then I've got a God-Mode Sue on my conscience I never knew of), and besides, it's Superman.

But as far as actual works I've written or drawn, I don't think I ever wrote a Sue/Stu. For one thing, I never followed the "teenager finds fanfiction, writes horrific Sue fic" pattern I've obsevered as most common with these things. I've never written a non-parodic fanfiction at all. And from another standpoint, I just plain don't like Wish-Fulfillment stories, possibly because I'm very averse to danger and even the most all-powerful Sue would be in situations that are at least theoretically dangerous. My old works are pretty terrible, but I think this is one pitfall I've managed to dodge.

Well, if you're projecting your own fictional character into a toy, it counts. You still have a story, it's just not written out.

A Doma survivor from Final Fantasy VI. Granted, she survived Doma because she left shortly before the siege to formally join the Returners, which I guess I still buy, but she also had a breathtaking singing voice, she stole Cyan's train scene in a very facepalmy manner, I attempted to incorporate game mechanics dead seriously into the story, she figured out a character was a scholar who escaped an Imperial raid pretty much by Bat Deduction, and most of all, she represented such an over-the-top portrayal of clench-jawed, resilient, somewhat masochistic heroism that it makes The Three Musketeers look understated. I think I've purged her from the Web. I really hope I have.

But you'll notice that even in my Mary Sue phase, I was still making my fanfics about random NPCs.

edited 12th Jul '11 10:15:25 PM by DomaDoma

Technically, every protagonist I write is a Mary Sue. My first love is comics, and every comic book superhero from the 60s or earlier would practically fail every Mary Sue Litmus Test in existence.

Well, if toys do count, then I had a toy knight named Sir Nicholas (my real name, although he didn't have enough personality to also be a Self Insert Sue). In the games I played with my assorted action figures, the normal rule was that Anyone Can Die in the course of the game. Anyone except this guy, anyway - he was completely invincible unless the game plot required him to lose, in which case he would invariably be knocked out or captured. Any other time then that, he won. Like most of the other "characters", he had no discernable personality, but as a character who broke the rules of the game world for no other reason than the fact I liked him, he fits pretty well.

I actually still play with these toys from time to time (yes, you can laugh now), but Sir Nicholas has been mostly Demoted to Extra, and I can't say it's a bad thing.

edited 12th Jul '11 10:25:25 PM by nrjxll

My borther did this a lot when we ere younger.

My childhood friend added a "Paper Doll" to "Rock, Paper, Scissors" which trumped everything else. (Don't ask me how it trumps scissors, because I don't think she knew either.) Essentially, it turned every game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" into a game of "I Can't Decide If This Is An Arm Wrestle Or A Thumb War, So How I Win Is Really Beyond Me". Needless to say, it ended in little-kid angry tears.

My first ever character was for a Pokemon and/or Mega Crossover story that I thankfully never wrote. It was... from, at the earliest, 2003, I think, and she was a Fiery Redhead Jerk/God-Mode Sue named Allison. It was your standard Mary Sue fare as written by an eight-year-old girl- everyone loved her despite her extreme jerkassery to the point of OOC-ness, she was indeed a goddess, and she was an older sister of a canon character (not saying who).

I stopped writing and making characters until late 2007, and then I went into my pseudo-Darker and Edgier anime fangirl phase. I was twelve. Pretty much all of my characters during this time flew in and out of Wangsty Jerk Stu territory until very recently.

My first character that I made back in 2007 is still around today as my protagonist, and he's come full circle in terms of his personality, all the way back to his roots. Better-written, of course.

And that makes me happy.

You wrote a Mary Sue at the age of eight? That's... impressive.

I was so worried about my character being a Mary Sue that I ended up writing an Anti-Sue. Basically she was a blind kid with awesome powers, so awesome that he could see the future and body outlines that automatically displayed the opponent's weaknesses.

Oh, and she knew kung-fu.

edited 12th Jul '11 11:13:16 PM by Fancolors

That doesn't sound like an Anti-Sue; it just sounds like you thought a big weakness would give you free rein to make the character as many other Sue traits as you pleased. Even if they cancelled out the weakness.

It's amazing how many people make that kind of mistake when they encounter a litmus test. Those things need to burn.

Isn't that what an Anti-Sue is, though? A character with "flaws" that do nothing to prevent them from warping the story around them like an everyday Sue? As far as litmus tests, I agree - in fact, I'd go so far as to call them So Bad They're Horrible. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

Nah, that particular Sue is still a "look at all the shiny powers" type, which is probably the number one thing an Anti-Sue isn't.

There were still some other stuff like the fact she was supposed to be incredibly ugly, but that's all I can recall. I'm also not really sure, but I remember having her as a completely unattractive person to every single male except her Prince Charming.

And it was terrible.

Ugh, Kiora, full stop. It's better in the rewrites, but in the original she never had anything resembling a challenge, and I piled a lot of angst on her shoulders.

But hey, you live and learn, right?

Yep. Just like laura, unfortunately.

edited 13th Jul '11 5:02:56 AM by CrystalGlacia

I tended more towards Canon Sue than regular Sues. Back when I wrote for Jak And Daxter I wrote what was basically an AU of the third game with Jak replaced by Dark Jak, except then I gave Dark Jak a Cool Plane and basically turned him into the Doctor + Indiana Jones. He even had a little flying talking Metal-Head for a sidekick!

Then again, that story was basically a Stephen Sommers movie but even more nonsensical, so who knows? Maybe doing that actually made him fit in nicely.

It isn't a far stretch to create a Mary Sue at age eight, if that child has a good enough imagination.

Isn't an Anti-Sue when, despite all her flaws, she still is the center of the story?

I had Kinetos, a character from the Teen Titans Tv Show, Terra's sister, Raven's power only pink, brainwashed to be Slade's apprentice.

I had a pokémon trainer who got a mew as a starter pokémon.

I had a character quite literally named AHR who was the most powerful magic user...well, ever, but that character actually took a back seat to the flawed cast of characters that AHR "taught" so it was sort of a growing process, and taught me how to handle supposedly all-powerful characters.

AHR's power dynamics later showed up again in the 13th Sage, which originally started off as a blatant self insert wish fulfillment, with a character who was indeed pretty much the strongest of all. However, as the story became less of that, and more of an actual story, I reworked the dynamics so I could keep the power in the character, but get rid of the sueishness.

edited 13th Jul '11 6:58:46 AM by MrAHR

Probably the most infamous (or at least the one who lived on as an in-joke in a future story) is my Taiki Possession Sue (from Sailor Moon) where I made her a 12-foot tall 8-year old girl with giant muscles, an IQ of 1 million and while she had traits that could've been flaws in some other work, I didn't think of them as being flaws so I always portrayed them as making her superior. And true to the Mary Sue type, she hated being so powerful because she didn't like being unequal to others. And anyone who hated her was simply jealous of her, too. I portrayed her as being an extreme Emotionless Girl too because that's what I admired at the time because I used to wish I could turn my emotions off when I wanted to.

Another one was arguably a Sue because I threw her in a story that had built a relationship between Hotaru and Seiya (don't ask, it was my favorite Crack Pairing back in the day) and trashed it so she could be with Seiya, who suddenly started falling in love with her. She was also telekinetic for no reason and never seemed to be treated as being wrong within the series. (she was Sailor Aurora, there were a bunch of other new Senshi in that story but she's the one who sticks out as being a Sue because of what she did to Seiya and Hotaru's relationship)

There is also one who was a self-insert (in another Sailor Moon fanfic) who I managed to fix (in my opinion) simply by parodying my own traits more and making her less unrealistically successful. In her Sue incarnation, she was Kimiko Aino, aka Neo Sailor Venus, the daughter of Sailor Venus (there were others in the story like her, and a few others who could also have qualified as Sues too if I didn't edit their more overly powerful traits when I redid the story). By the way, I wouldn't personally want to be a Sailor Senshi, so that part wouldn't be wish fulfillment for me. It was more that Kimiko had her stories made into a famous anime series at age 21 because her mom got it published for her and she hated her fans which was supposed to be a flaw but it never caused her real consequences. When I remade the series as the "Dessert Senshi" (with Edible Theme Naming) I changed her into Rainbow aka Sailor Peppermint who was younger and while Rainbow writes stories, they're not published and she visibly annoys/bores the other characters by talking about them too much. She's also portrayed as being obsessed with another character in the series who happens to be an Emotionless Girl like "Space Girl Spectra" who is based off of the Possession Sue Taiki I mentioned first (so this Rainbow character writes her own Mary Sue stories). There are also other characters with weird names in the series (it has a general Aerith and Bob style for the civilian names) so it's not like her being Rainbow makes her stand out, and she shares the spotlight with 15 others so she wouldn't have the "one character who stands out" trait. There are probably others who might more qualify for "in danger of being author's pet" rather than her (one of them is the Emotionless Girl character) but I do try to have them all fail or have consequences for their mistakes and since I spread the story over 16 characters it's not like there's one big Mary Sue star that everything revolves around.

Yep. To quote this very wiki on the subject:

I was sufficiently self-aware at twelve that I tried to parody the Possession Sue. The story took place inside a role-playing game where the main character had replaced the party archer. In the "original plot," they were supposed to rescue a young noblewoman from a mad sorcerer's experiments, and she would wind up following them as the team's mascot of sorts. Thanks to the protagonist's various errors, and the mounting chaos as he tried to fix them, they rescued her a bit too late . . .

So here we have a character who's gained a lot of power she's never earned and never wanted, at the cost of an unnerving bloodlust. I wanted to have her angst over this, but I worried that she was coming off as a Sympathetic Sue Cursed with Awesome. So I had the power change her personality more, but then I worried that she was a Jerk Sue. It did not help matters that the "original plot" called for her to be a canonical Relationship Sue, and that the shift in the plot made two more characters romantically interested in her (yes, on the litmus test I had to check the box for "gets more romance than all the other characters combined.")

I never did finish that story.

My oldest ones were Power Puff Girl Sues in uh...third grade I think?

Although a freaky one is the self insert I had for my original story in the 7th grade. Blond hair, brown eyes, short, shy but funny once you get to know them...Oh and also a boy. My self insert was me as a boy.

I'm very content being a girl so it's rather weird.

edited 13th Jul '11 3:57:34 PM by Hermiethefrog