Avoiding Sue Through Experience

One of the characters in my story is debut in 1994 and is one of the 3 people in the entire setting who live to seethe version of the year 3000. This happens due to events that prolong her life though the course of the story and I was curious how to keep her from becoming a Sue, since well surviving 3000 years would make her a pretty powerful person and while she is never a main character in her stories the idea is we see this reoccurring outlier character and we see how she grows in in experience and it should feel natural.

Pink starts the story off as a cheerleader and Fangirl of the group of heroes, she has a natural intellect but has never really taken advantage of it instead playing to the dumb blond trope and just being a chipper cheerleader, but when the heroes are nearly killed protecting their home town she pretty much drops her social life and dives into the book until she builds some Powered Armor of her own and dedides to become a protector of the protectors. Her powered armor has a massive back pack that provies her suit the power it needs to produce it's two effects a low power energy blast and a person targeted force field, she has converted the basement of her home into a massive station to recharge her battery pack, over the years she learns to slim down and refine the armor so i can't see that being very Sue. The suit starts bulky and cumbersome and slightly leaks radiation into the containment suit. This radiation coupled with a adventure to protect a nuclear reactor eventually leads to a genetic mutation which gives her shapeshifting and is par for her longevity but there are a number of problems and control issues, for one the shapeshifting is empathetic creating a feedback loop of shorts, eary on she has no control shapeshifting her body (and mind) to match the dominant desires of those around her. She eventually gains control but is always vunerable to the pyschic feedback indcing her powers so she is forced to for a very long time wear headgear of some sort to keep her mind from taking in empathic waves. The worse aspect of this is that all the mental shapeshifting flows naturally she may know the cause but to her anything she does or thinks 'under the influence' feels like the right thing to do. Even reflecting back years later those thoughts are the same "if i was in that situation again I'd do the exact same thing" even if said decisions were well, Evil. She might not make those decisions now but their never processed a "forign" thought.

Anyway that's the long and short of it. Thoughts?

I think what matters most is context(character's relationship with the story). for example the doctor from Doctor Who would fail many sue tests and going by the desciption alone he is a big one...But he isn't.

(friendly tip: try to use more paragraphs, 6 lines at most for paragraph.)

edited 9th Sep '12 9:58:12 AM by FallenLegend

i've actually thought of the Doctor from time to time, I mean he's Really 700 Years Old has has a consent harem sidekick, and is Immortal but only trolls would consider him a Sue.

But by the same token he doesn't really grow. His TARDIS is the same, his tools are the same, he's still the Last of His Kind, etc.

Pink on the other hand we see progressively grow stronger, it's like living out the the Vampire Diaries instead of flashing back to them. But by the same token they don't get appreciably stronger either.

So we have someone who's really old by the end, still in their prime, and is probably one of the most powerful people on the planet. How do you ground someone that powerful, is just giving them flaws and drives enough. Id power irrelevant as long as they still have some failings, even if it's only psychological?

Well the question is: Does this all happen through narrative or is this just your characters background and the story happens AFTER she accuires all this powers. If we look at The Hero's Journey a Character should be at his peak after he walked a path of challenges and drawbacks, from which he learns and improves on leading to the Finale. The way you decribe your character she appears to have had a journey to where she got and why she has the powers is explained very well, thats why most storys nowadays are Trilogys IMO becaue in order to setup an interessting character we have to start together with him and see How We Got Here

edited 9th Sep '12 12:20:48 PM by Kiefen

I gather you are unaware of the earlier seasons when the Timelords were all still alive and the Doctor was on the run as a renegade in a stolen TARDIS.

Or his trial (by the Timelords) and banishment to Earth etc etc etc.

The TARDIS itself has undergone a number of changes as the plot demands.

And that's ignoring the characterisation differences of the different versions of the Doctor and how those characters develop and change over the course of the actor's tenure.

I must confess I know know the Doctor via Broad Strokes that and TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life

Well she's in a lot of the book but id say as a essamble or secondary character never a main focus but yeah we see How We Got Here but the books themselves are self contained will it leads to Continuity Lockout if theirs a continious character threaded through the self cinatined books that requires other books out of that containment field to get her How We Got Here?

edited 9th Sep '12 2:14:48 PM by NekoLLX

Well having a powerfull side character isn't much of a problem if it doesn't lead to Deus ex Machina too often

Your problem, I think, stems from an overly broad idea of what experience can achieve; or rather, what perfection can. Experience allows you to perfect your technique towards certain goals; all things are tradeoffs towards some task and against another. Some weaknesses are inherent to the tools you use and the human body/psyche. They can be minimized, but not eliminated. Similarly random chance is not a neutral element to a combatant, but a deadly enemy. Things can be done to minimize it but it cannot be eliminated.

Someone with several thousand years of practice will be formidable, particularly if they've built up several thousand years of good relations and favors to call in, but they will not be invincible. And like anyone else, they can be overwhelmed.

edited 9th Sep '12 3:49:09 PM by Night

That's a key point to the character, i mean we should see growth, and perfection of technique but my main concern is given 2000 years of experience will any amount of flaws still keep her grounded and out of the City of Sue.

When writing Pink i sometimes compare her to SLASHLORD a antagonist with a great deal of raw pwer but so Nucking Futs he slaughtered a entire newpaper Crew because they Spelled My Name With AS instead of in all CAPS like it's supposed to be.

Pink by a similar token has a pot of power, and skill but is the fact she basically Becomming The Mask and basicly discarded her civilian identity, essentially being defined by her superhero identity, her epathy problems and basically assumeing different identities and starting over when she needs to take a break from being Defined as The Hero and becoming just a Badass Bystander essentially cutting her off from friends and family because of this single minded ness.

There are always personality flaws - real ones, not Sueified ones - that may never become resolved even over 2000 years. A character may be alienatingly arrogant and never ever see the need to change (after all, it works most the time and the very few actual proper knock-backs are infrequent on a scale of several thousand years...)

As they get better at skills, they could become even more arrogant, not less.

That's just an example, there are other personality flaws a character can have as well that wouldn't necessarily change over time.

I'm really sick of the idea that devoting yourself full-time to superheroing or related activities is a terrible idea. Essentially it's the equivalent of saying that being a soldier or a fireman full time is a terrible idea; which is demonstrably untrue. Not everyone is cut out for it, sure, but there's a whole lot of garbage in the mindset that a civilian identity is necessary.

But a full time cop still goes home, takes time off, has fun, Pink on the other hand

Wake Up Eat Breakfast Save The World in a very literal sense

edited 9th Sep '12 6:49:07 PM by NekoLLX

And your point? The stakes aren't really that much higher; kill or be killed at worst. You won't be alive to see what happens if you fail, which is actually a plus. There's no rule that says you can't go home as a superhero, and even you've established that she can go home and have down time from the job by using the description you have.

The need for a civilian identity is all crap. You can do all the superhero things as yourself like they're a job, come home, and live your life as yourself. If you happen to identify more strongly with your job, so what? If you happen to superhero under your own name, again, so what?

edited 9th Sep '12 7:03:54 PM by Night

but that's the thing she may be able to come home, she chooses not to. Basically she's a workaholic, she never takes off the mask, even when 'relaxing' at the beach. When asked her name she says "pink Defense" her super hero identity, even when among friends. She doesn't have down time just "bathroom beaks" between saving the world

So long as that lifestyle is played/portrayed realistically in the story - including the serious disadvantages to the character and others around it - it'd be fine.

It's when the consequences are shrugged off too easily or don't happen that Willing Suspension of Disbelief gets a kicking and the audience starts to tune out.

A true "workaholic" (addicted to workahol? Who'd buy something called that?) has serious social and physical/emotional problems that plague them due to ignoring all other aspects of their life for "the job". One would expect the same to be true of your character.

Likewise, the extremely lengthy lifespan's going to have negative aspects as well as the positive ones. If they get shown, then the "I'm really good at X because I've been doing it for over 300 years now" becomes more palatable.

My 200-year-old character is better than a normal human at sword-fighting due to spending way more time in training, he also has had time to learn a number of languages and do a fuck-ton of reading to boot.

However, he's also had to learn variants of his own language as time has gone on and has to constantly adapt to the changes in that language as spoken in his area (consider the differences between modern Breton, Welsh and Cornish and their common Brythonic ancestor).

He also has to adapt to the changes in technology, politics, social values etc - and he's seen only 200 years of changes.

Your 2000-year-old, assuming that the story's set in the here-and-now, has seen technology progress from steel swords, riding animals and tally marks to smartbombs, space flight and personal computers you can put in a pocket, taking in the Middle Ages (market economy and inventions), the Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, the Space Race, Nuclear Arms Proliferation and the Information Age along the way.

And that's only the technology. 2000 years ago slavery was perfectly acceptable, as was just killing anyone who pissed you off (providing you were of a social status that let you get away with it), political changes were mostly by succession or conquest, boundaries were enforced by a squad of guys with swords etc.

Your character would have seen social mores and values change over and over again. What was acceptable in her youth is a major "bad" now - and trying to say that she somehow upheld modern values way back then would smack of unrealism.

You can expect a fair bit of Values Dissonance in your character's background. Once she would have been appalled at a slave running away from a lawful master and seen nothing wrong with a woman being killed for adultery.

Hanging someone for stealing a loaf of bread. Hanging children for minor crimes - it was all perfectly acceptable once upon a time.

Clearly, as an intelligent being, your character's going to be able to learn new things, but think of how much stuff she's going to have to adapt to and how that (accelerating rate of) change is going to affect her negatively.

If you don't show that, it will come across as unbelievable.

edited 10th Sep '12 5:13:42 PM by Wolf1066

It occurs to me that some of that Values Dissonance may well cause your character to harbour some amount of shame/regret for things she did or allowed to happen back then.

If she has embraced the changes at all - for all we know, she could still secretly believe that an adulterous woman should be brutally killed and wish you could still just lynch some bastard kid for stealing your apples.

Before we get to off the rails i should clarify she is about 16 in 1994, and she lives to the years 3001. That said in that time there have been some major world changing events. Mages proved the existence of Gods, The most reknowled hero of the world The Wonder sacrifices his body to create a energy shield to protect earth from alien invasions (and also cuts off travel out side of earth just as humanity is opening trade negotiations with alien races, the only hole in the shield is a stationary W where the earth spins under it but the W and shield never move), and eventually Armor-Man declares a ultimatium, all meta humans (mutants, science experiments but not natural or technology based heroes and villians) leave or he nukes everything, and a couple near apoclypses. Indluding the day every dead body on earth rose up and declared war on anyone who defiled the dead, including zombie summoning necromancers

And I wonder what mores and social values, political systems and technologies she has to adapt to or learn up to the year 3001 and what effect they have on her.

I dare say that there would be Values Dissonance between our ideals and those of the future people as well as language changes (see how much "English" has changed since the time of Chaucer).

The events you suggest are ripe with possibilities for the character to suffer negative effects of such a lengthy life - show those and they'll balance her experience-based advantages and your character will seem more realistic.

I think i can do that in Pinks early life she saw Anthros treated a second class citizens, essentially pets, a Arms dealer running from the law (Armor-Man) become the savior of humanity by banishing the metahumans, and bioenginered anthros become trained from birth slaves. just to named 2 examples