Is Your Character Too Awesome?

[Chilari]

I'm going to hazard a guess and say that at 17 you were not a member of this forum. Do you believe that, if you had been a member at the time and had this community available to you, you would have done the same things to your characters, or would you haven taken a more balanced approach?

Not a member of this forum, no, because it didn't exist. But I was a member of a different fantasy writing forum then, along with others of varying levels of experience though perhaps a lower average - more people who were at a similar level to what I was at then and fewer, beside the forum founders, who were published.

I think if I'd never learned the existence of a Mary Sue test I would have made progress more quickly.

As for the topic at hand, Brian may well be right - this could be an issue over definitions. Like Penpilot, I'd argue that those traits make a character cliche, but not necessarily a Mary Sue. I'd say a Mary Sue is a character who doesn't grow or adapt over the course of the story but rather is shown to be right time and again, never wrong, and never in the wrong.

 

[Steerpike]

I think it comes down to awareness by the writer. You can write a successful story using a character many would consider a Mary Sue, if you're aware of that fact and it fits your story. It's when you stumble unwittingly into things that you have problem.

Look at characters like Jason Borne or Jack Reacher. They're good at everything, rarely wrong, mess up only occasionally, stay relatively static. Clive Cussler wrote a consistent stream of wish fulfillment, Mary Sue type characters and people have bought one after the other.

 

[Ireth]

I think it comes down to awareness by the writer. You can write a successful story using a character many would consider a Mary Sue, if you're aware of that fact and it fits your story. It's when you stumble unwittingly into things that you have problem.

Look at characters like Jason Borne or Jack Reacher. They're good at everything, rarely wrong, mess up only occasionally, stay relatively static. Clive Cussler wrote a consistent stream of wish fulfillment, Mary Sue type characters and people have bought one after the other.

Exactly. Someone like Luthien from The Silmarillion would score pretty dang high on one of those tests -- she's an uber-powerful half-elf, half-demigod who basically flips the bird to Middle-earth's equivalent of Satan, his deputy, and all his servants, then helps her boyfriend steal from him and gets away with it. Then when her boyfriend is later killed and she dies of grief, she buys both of their way out of the Halls of the Dead by singing to the Lord of the Dead and making him feel pity for the first and only time. Plus she's also basically an author avatar of Tolkien's wife, with her boyfriend being an avatar of Tolkien himself. And yet it totally works for the story.

 

[Jess A]

These tests are kind of for fun, aren't they? I think a lot of role-players rely heavily on them.

I read somewhere on here that a lot of people like a bit of 'Mary Sue' in the characters they read about. Bourne and Reacher are definitely along those lines. Then there's Dirk Pitt (Clive Cussler) as mentioned above also. Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake has been called a Mary Sue. She's a popular author. Not someone I'd generally read, but entertaining in many ways.

Other characters are highly interesting because they have a very flawed side to them but they either overcome it, or it drives plot. If you give them a flaw that people can't relate to, or it makes them hate the character, then what's the point? Characters should evolve in a story (or at least, I enjoy stories where they do).

I'll put a book down if I don't find the character interesting in some way.

People-watching (sitting in a cafe or public place, observing human behaviour) is a good way to learn about human nature Or just looking at those people you know.

 

[Sadie]

Scrooge McDuck scored a more moderate 44, which is still well into what the test considers a Mary Sue. I just ran the Doctor from Doctor Who through this and he scores an absurd 77 points.

Oh God, I just laughed out loud at the idea of Scrooge McDuck as a Mary Sue (or isn't it rather Gary Stu?...), I am in a public library and everyone is giving me looks now. If you think of Mary Sue in fanfiction, especially fanfiction based on some fantasy book or movie, it's usually a girl from our world ending up in the magical realm of the original and impressing everyone with her awesomeness. I think Middle-earth and Hogwarts have been particularly abused in this regard, so much in fact that I imagine poor elves and Hogwarts students must have got used to their share of Mary Sues popping up every now again and doing their work for them. Imagine their surprise if their next Mary Sue was Scrooge McDuck... oh I have to stop, or they'll throw me out of here.

My character scored a -6 on the first Mary Sue test. But I feel that in a lot of ways, she is a Mary Sue, and in my attempts to de-suify her she gets more and more Sue by the second. I might have to drop her from the story completely.

I agree that you cannot establish the mary-sueness of a character by these tests, but Mary Sues and Gary Stu's exist and are very annoying.

Recent fantasy example? Kvothe from The Kingkiller Chronicle. [SLIGHT 2ND BOOK SPOILER]A typical Mary Sue who is a natural at magic, music, and gets to bang the hottest fairy in town which is his first time and of course he is so good that this ancient vixen who's had many men before him is surprised he was a virgin.[/SPOILER]

 

[PlotHolio]

It's okay Sadie. He has that magical birth control root.

Also, before you drop your character, you should make a post on here about why you're considering it, so that other people can take a look and give you their input.

As these earlier posters don't seem to get, the tests are writing aids, and you shouldn't put too much stock in what they say. Especially if you got a -6, which is really difficult unless you filled out almost nothing in the top sections and clicked all the de-Sue-ifiers at the bottom. Like I said in a previous post, even my "dry toast" character Jacobus scored a 2.

 

[Steerpike]

Recent fantasy example? Kvothe from The Kingkiller Chronicle. [/SPOILER]

A lot of people love that character, though. I think it underscores the point, above, that a Mary Sue character isn't necessarily bad, if that's what the author intends to write. It is bad when the author stumbles into such a character in a clumsy and ham-fisted manner, unaware that he's writing one.

 

[Anders Ämting]

He never implied that. It sounded to me that he was saying the test does more harm then good because it may cause a writer to abandon a perfectly good character.

I think that's pretty spot on.

You know you have a problem with a character when actual readers don't like that character. There are no arbitrary character traits that are inherently "wrong" and wether or not a character is "too awesome" depends on the context of the story. Writing is not an exact science.

It's very dangerous to rely on this test because it teaches you to doubt your own judgement, while at the same time being fantastically inaccurate to judge the quality of any given character. You must have very little faith in your writing ability if you would rather trust a piece of online quiz algorithm created by some random person of unknown literary authority, rather than your own senses of taste and reason. And if you are the sort of person, using this test is a very, very bad idea.

I understand that you don't like them, but they're not completely useless. You did not benefit from them. I did. The Litmus Test got me thinking about what I needed and didn't need in a character, and got me to dump some of my old characters and ideas. I don't regret doing it, because I was growing as a writer and some of my characters were laughably strong for no reason or had ridiculously Sue personalities (Evil for the sake of being evil, etc).

Stuff like "evil for the sake of evil" are not Sue traits. That's just bad characterization, and most of us learn how to avoid that just by talking to other writers and reading a lot. You don't need a highly questionable internet test for that.

All those "pointless" questions are on there for a reason. Learning almost anything takes time and practice, so if your character knows how to play six musical instruments, speak four languages, hunt, cook, fence, and cast spells better than most others by the age of 15, that's not good.

I disagree, there is absolutely nothing inherently bad about that. Thinking that way is highly presumptious and only limits you as a writer.

For example. A Mary sue would be something like this.

I played six musical instruments, spoke four languages, could hunt, cook, fence, and cast spells that could devastate a city by the time I was fifteen. Leaders came to me for advice. Girls fell at my feet. I was a golden god ...

That's Mary sue.

This is not.

I played six musical instruments, spoke four languages, could hunt, cook, fence, and cast spells that could devastate a city by the time I was fifteen. But for the life of me, I couldn't ask Suzie Smith to the prom. I couldn't stay out past eleven, and if a movie had an R-rating, Mom still said no.

How about this:

I played six musical instruments, spoke four languages, could hunt, cook, fence, and cast spells that could devastate a city by the time I was fifteen and I have no idea why. Seriously, I can play a nyckelharpa perfectly and I'm not even sure what that is. Don't get me wrong, it's cool to be a master swordsman without having to train for it but I still wonder why, you know? Leaders come to me for advice, because I have vague yet frightingly accurate visions of the future that I cannot explain. Girls fall at my feet, only not in a good way but, you know, in kind of a disturbing and unnatural way? Oh, and on my last birthday, my skin turned golden and now I'm on the run because the High Council of the Lord Wizards want me dead for some mysterious reason.

Is that a Mary Sue?

I got an 89 before the de-Suiferers, then ended with a 73.

Yeah. The de-Sueifiers are pretty much bullshit.

I think it comes down to awareness by the writer. You can write a successful story using a character many would consider a Mary Sue, if you're aware of that fact and it fits your story. It's when you stumble unwittingly into things that you have problem.

Look at characters like Jason Borne or Jack Reacher. They're good at everything, rarely wrong, mess up only occasionally, stay relatively static. Clive Cussler wrote a consistent stream of wish fulfillment, Mary Sue type characters and people have bought one after the other.

As I've said before, power fantasies aren't the same thing as a Mary Sue, because power fantasies can still be well written. A Mary Sue is bad writing by definition.

If I had to boil the definition of a Mary Sue story down to a single sentence, it would be: "A story wherein there is a major dissonance between how likable you find the character to be, and how likable the character is presented to be."

Dissonance is the important thing. It's not that Mary Sue is always right and everybody loves her. It's that Mary Sue is always right and everybody loves her, for reasons that do not make sense to you.

 

[Zero Angel]

If I had to boil the definition of a Mary Sue story down to a single sentence, it would be: "A story wherein there is a major dissonance between how likable you find the character to be, and how likable the character is presented to be."

Dissonance is the important thing. It's not that Mary Sue is always right and everybody loves her. It's that Mary Sue is always right and everybody loves her, for reasons that do not make sense to you.

I think you have a very specific definition of Mary Sue and anytime someone says the phrase "Mary Sue", you get a little worked up over their chosen semantics (which is cool, we are all writers after all—we get worked up over words).

My semantics say that a Mary Sue is a character in which the author has created themselves as they wish they could be and how they feel others would/should react to them. Regardless of if this is healthy or not, to me, a Mary Sue character can be good or bad. To you, what I am saying is not a Mary Sue character. To you, a Mary Sue has the dissonance phenomenon you described, to me that is called "personal opinion".

Question:
I tend to read the manga my fiancee likes, and she reads manga written for girls quite a lot. In those manga, there are usually characters (male love-interests) that are ridiculously popular (character popularity polls are a common thing in manga, but they are also popular within the world of the manga). I sometimes feel that those characters are absurd and am annoyed by their very existence, let alone their actions and the gut-wrenching reactions of the female protagonists to them. According to your definition, they would be Mary Sues?

 

[PlotHolio]

Question:
I tend to read the manga my fiancee likes, and she reads manga written for girls quite a lot. In those manga, there are usually characters (male love-interests) that are ridiculously popular (character popularity polls are a common thing in manga, but they are also popular within the world of the manga). I sometimes feel that those characters are absurd and am annoyed by their very existence, let alone their actions and the gut-wrenching reactions of the female protagonists to them. According to your definition, they would be Mary Sues?

A reader has gained sentience. This oversight must be... corrected.

Your fiancee should read real manga, like Dorohedoro.

NOTE: Never let your fiancee read Dorohedoro.

That entire post was off-topic, but I feel like this thread needed something to lighten it up a bit.

 

[Zero Angel]

A reader has gained sentience. This oversight must be... corrected.

Your fiancee should read real manga, like Dorohedoro.

NOTE: Never let your fiancee read Dorohedoro.

That entire post was off-topic, but I feel like this thread needed something to lighten it up a bit.

The first comment made me laugh aloud. I've never heard of Dorohedoro before—any good? (To keep on topic, any Mary Sues present )

For the record, my fiancee and I enjoy many different types of manga, but she tends to gravitate to the girly ones (while adamantly denying 1. that she enjoys girl manga, and 2. that they are considered girl manga at all). I think a lot of "girl manga", especially the ones written by female writers have these characters that many readers and apparently the author like quite a lot, while others will experience the dissonance mentioned by Anders. I don't think that necessarily makes them a Mary Sue, I just think people are bat crap crazy.

 

[Nihal]

All this manga talk reminded me of the other kind of "Sue" character, often present in romantic (and ecchi) mangas. The awkward hero/heroine who isn't special in anyway... supposedly. For absolute no reason the most perfect characters (now I'm looking at these super popular and pretty manga boys/girls) fall for them and often some happy accident make those awkward penguins highly popular.

This kind of clumsy but (artificially) likable character is usually the author's avatar. They shouldn't be perfect, being seeming plain at first sight but being amazing somehow. It's so badly overused that I often want them to die gruesome deaths.

 

[Zero Angel]

All this manga talk reminded me of the other kind of "Sue" character, often present in romantic (and ecchi) mangas. The awkward hero/heroine who isn't special in anyway... supposedly. For absolute no reason the most perfect characters (now I'm looking at these super popular and pretty manga boys/girls) fall for them and often some happy accident make those awkward penguins highly popular.

This kind of clumsy but (artificially) likable character is usually the author's avatar. They shouldn't be perfect, being seeming plain at first sight but being amazing somehow. It's so badly overused that I often want them to die gruesome deaths.

I agree it can be bad, but sometimes it can be done well (and thus not bad). I can think of three examples of anime with a male protagonist where all the female (and sometimes male) characters fall for him that I felt was done very well. Still, I think you are correct in that some of them are author avatars (and thus at least borderline Sues by my definition). Are there any particular Sues that you want to share as an example that you especially wanted to die a horrific death?

I always find it concerning that in these anime/manga (at least the ones that I watch) that any non-main character male (assuming the protagonist is male) is usually a crappy individual. They usually don't have good intentions and are obnoxious to the point that they make me itch with annoyance. In those cases, it's no wonder that the relatively-perfect female characters all fall for the average Joe male character! It's like, are there really no good guys around?

 

[Nihal]

Yes, if it's done well it's not bad. Isn't this the same situation of those perfect awesome characters?

I don't watch or read too often the genre of anime/manga where this kind of character is present.

Still, I can think of Kensuke from "Ga-Rei". I watched "Ga-Rei Zero" and loved it, the first episode managed to fool me and I really liked to watch the characters' conflicts. Most of them weren't good or evil because they were, or likable "because yes.". Then I read the manga and really struggled to finish it. The character development was just plain bad, I went from a well done OVA adaptation to a shallow schooldrama manga.

Then, I think in Yukiteru from "Mirai Nikki". It's bearable since his annoying personality is well built and compliments Yuno's personality. While he is the passive, awkward (and cocky) character and she's the psychopath stalker, strong and likable in a twisted way. Well, I still wanted to Yukiteru to die, but I could bear him.


P.s.: Not always all the other male characters are mean, but it happens often. Yes, in this case somehow it makes sense the smoking hot girls falling for the awkward guy, hahaha.

 

[Anders Ämting]

I think you have a very specific definition of Mary Sue

Well, it's a pretty specific type of bad writing.

Heck, some people argue it is exclusively a fanfiction phenomenon - you introduce an original character in for example Star Trek, and suddenly all the established characters start acting wildly out of character, and you just go: "There is no way Captain Picard would hand over command to a fourteen year-old ensign in the middle of a space battle just because he has 'a good feeling' about it!"

I've seen it done plenty of times in original fiction, though, so my definition is actually a bit broader.

and anytime someone says the phrase "Mary Sue", you get a little worked up over their chosen semantics

That's true, I don't deny it. But that's only because I feel this is a very important issue. You can't just pick and chose your own definition of a term, because that just leads to fuzzy wishy-washyness and before you know it, you have people who argue that: "This character is a Mary Sue, hence she must be badly written" rather than the other way around.

And that's when you get morons who look at your perfectly legit MC and go: "Dur, your character sucks, because this here test tells me you writed it wrong!"

Believe it or not, some people can't subjectively tell the differance between good and bad writing and end up using arbitrary rules and lists of traits to evaluate fiction. These people must not be encouraged.

My semantics say that a Mary Sue is a character in which the author has created themselves as they wish they could be and how they feel others would/should react to them. Regardless of if this is healthy or not, to me, a Mary Sue character can be good or bad. To you, what I am saying is not a Mary Sue character. To you, a Mary Sue has the dissonance phenomenon you described,

Your definition is actually pretty decent - better than a lot of others. My one concern would be that it doesn't say anything about the quality of writing. You're just using it as a synonymn for "self-insert." Self-insertion is someting you should be very careful with, bit it's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Mary Sue, on the other hand, is almost universially regarded as something bad.

You may disagree, of course, but I think you will find yourself in the minority.

Basically, I' say what you describe can be a Mary Sue. (And, indeed, frequently is.) I just think it's wrong to say that's always a Mary Sue.

to me that is called "personal opinion".

Yes, well, "opinion" isn't the same thing as "subjective." Even a personal opinion can still be objectively true or false. That's why we have discussions.

Question:
I tend to read the manga my fiancee likes, and she reads manga written for girls quite a lot. In those manga, there are usually characters (male love-interests) that are ridiculously popular (character popularity polls are a common thing in manga, but they are also popular within the world of the manga). I sometimes feel that those characters are absurd and am annoyed by their very existence, let alone their actions and the gut-wrenching reactions of the female protagonists to them. According to your definition, they would be Mary Sues?

Under my definition, it would depend on wether you find these characters to be absurd because they themselves are unrealistic, or if the absurd thing is how unrealistic the narrative treats them, or both.

I mean, if a character is unrealistically likable, that may not in itself be good writing, but at least there is a solid reason everybody like that character.

Still, going by the shoujo, etc, I have read, I doubt these characters are Mary Sue. More like... idealized dream princes? They are designed to appeal to over-emotional teen girls (I'm going to assume you don't belong to that particular demographic) so they can be pretty unrealistic. Sorta like that perfect girlfriend teenage boys dream about that obviously does not actually exist.

For that matter, one should keep in mind that anime and manga uses a lot of highly stylized character archetypes. Complaining about that is sorta like complaining about the stereotypes in Comedia Del Arte. It's basically expected of the medium.

Anyway, I don't want to generalize and entire genre down to a simple "if they are like this, are they that" question. Since I regard Mary Sue to be something rather specific, you pretty much have to decide it on a case-by-case basis.

That's sort of my point: You can't really go by broad definitions and lists of common traits.

All this manga talk reminded me of the other kind of "Sue" character, often present in romantic (and ecchi) mangas. The awkward hero/heroine who isn't special in anyway... supposedly. For absolute no reason the most perfect characters (now I'm looking at these super popular and pretty manga boys/girls) fall for them and often some happy accident make those awkward penguins highly popular.

Eh. It's a fantasy of gratification, just another kind of gratification.

This kind of clumsy but (artificially) likable character is usually the author's avatar.

I'm not sure about "usually", though that certainly happens. Keitaro Urashima from Love Hina is pretty blatantly based on Ken Akamatsu as a young man, and the creator of Tenchi Muyo, Misaki Kajishima, actually went as far as naming the main character after himself.

I wouldn't say that's a bad thing in itself, though. It comes down to wether or not the writer has enough skill and sense of self-irony to pull it off well.

They shouldn't be perfect, being seeming plain at first sight but being amazing somehow. It's so badly overused that I often want them to die gruesome deaths.

Well, that's fair enough, I guess. But again, anime and manga does this a lot, and it's much more accepted than it is in western literature. Quite often, it's an established part of the genre itself - you can't really have a harem comedy without making the main character ludicrouly popular with the ladies/boys. It's really more of a stylistic thing.

 

[PlotHolio]

The first comment made me laugh aloud. I've never heard of Dorohedoro before—any good? (To keep on topic, any Mary Sues present )

If you saw that picture before I was link-blinked, you may have noticed that the characters are in a forest of mushrooms. In fact, one of the characters has an enormous knowledge of magic, but all his magic is mushroom related. The mushrooms should be a big hint.

Here it is anyway.

I can't even begin to describe it, so my advice is just to read the first chapter. Once you get into it, it's quite clever, but it's easily the most ****** up manga I've ever read. To enjoy it, you need to be the type of person who believes that it's okay to laugh at things like head trauma in the context of fiction. If you're thinking "head trauma is never funny; it doesn't matter if it's real or not", then Dorohedoro is not for you.

I use the example of head trauma because my favorite character, Ebisu, suffered several blows to the head early on, and from that point is so mentally handicapped that she needs someone watching her at all times lest she accidentally harm herself or others.

Or, in some cases, allow herself to come to harm because she doesn't realize she's being eaten by a zombie...

As for Mary Sues, I don't think it has any.

 

[Steerpike]

I
As I've said before, power fantasies aren't the same thing as a Mary Sue, because power fantasies can still be well written. A Mary Sue is bad writing by definition.

I disagree. Going by the generally-accepted definition of a Mary Sure character, at any rate. I find your definition to be too limiting.

 

[PlotHolio]

I'd like to direct everybody's attention to the latest front-page article (at the time I posted this). It's not directly about Mary Sues, but it's about how flawed characters are the ones we like more.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I like flawed characters more. In fact, for my tastes, the more flawed the better. I don't think I'd be willing to claim that everyone feels the same. There are "non-flawed" characters that have captured audiences over the years.

I never worry about "Mary Sue-ness" in my characters. I do effort to make them distinct from one another. I labor to have realistic or at least plausible characters and actions. Keeping that frame of mind will go along way towards avoiding the types of characters people here are warning against.

Edit: in retrospect, I suppose most characters have at least some flaws. I'm referencing major characters flaws.

 

[PlotHolio]

My favorite kinds of characters are anti-heroes/anti-villains. One of my favorite themes is when the big bad and his trusted lieutenant are best friends. It leads to some interesting moments.

I burned down that village for friendship.