I think that's the point. Is your character so UBER SPECIAL AND TOTES AWESOME that no matter how badly he/she behaves, no matter how horrifically stupid his/her ideas are, no matter what, everyone else worships him/her and thinks he/she is the best thing since sliced bread and anyone who disagrees are obviously villians?
She would give her right arm to be despised by someone, if only it meant someone knew she existed. Let alone worshiped by everyone. EDIT: she gets an 18 before de-suifiers, and 3 afterward. And that is applying the suifiers pretty generously -- "well, if people could remember her, then yeah, I guess that would be the case..."
After scoring a 119 for that test for one of my main characters, I looked at the article on how to make a badass who is not a mary sue: http://www.springhole.net/writing/write-better-badasses.htm Ok, so he survives several battles against vampires, zombies, and high tech mercenaries without his magic, gets beat up, shot, and captured several times, so is clearly not an unstoppable killing machine. Yet I can't get passed the other parts pertaining to him being an arrogant, smug, jerk. Part of what makes the character how I envision him is that he is arrogant, smug, and is kind of a jerk. He still saves the day in the end though. He is the son of an evil god for crying out loud.
I am actually impressed it is possible to score that high without just checking boxes for the sake of checking them.
Here is another Mary Sue test. It breaks the questions into different aspects and provides a sub-score for each aspect, which is nice. My character got a 12. The more I think about it, the more I want to write my own Mary Sue test based on better reasoning. The questions in these tests are generally along the lines of "does your story contain this trope?" (yes = more points toward the character's Mary Sue Quotient.) Which has limited diagnostic use, since tropes are merely tools. Mary Sues are bad because they are uninteresting, and something is interesting because it has interesting qualities, not because it lacks uninteresting qualities. In fact, some of the questions had the opposite of the test's intended effect: instead of getting me to notice tropes that I should remove, they they got me to think about adding tropes. For example, question 26 of the Springhole test: "Does your character express unusually free, enlightened, or "liberated" views on topics such as sex and equality for xir time/place?" Things like that could actually make the story much more interesting. I am thinking of some kind of test where a lower number = higher Mary Sue Quotient, and you increase the number for each problem that proves to be a real challenge for the character, each time the character must face the (negative) consequences of their actions, each way in which other characters are treated as important, etc.
Yes. Exactly. Well said. It's challenge and consequences that matters. And I also like the idea that other characters need to be important and equally well-developed. If a character wins every story challenge without batting an eye and overcomes all difficulties with amazing ease ...THAT, to me, is a Mary Sue. I've taken the various tests here, and feel they are DEFINITELY aimed at fantasy writers. About half of the questions don't pertain to a non-fantasy character at all. I don't feel my characters 'fit' with these questions much. I also feel that a character's past can have two effects on the story. If the character's past is traumatic, and its inclusion is to make us like/feel sorry for that character, then I think you're angling towards Mary Sue. However, if the whole point of the story is getting the character to deal with the trauma of his/her past, then that's a different thing altogether. These Mary Sue tests don't seem to make this distinction. If your character had a traumatic past, then they are a Mary Sue. That's a bit ...silly.
Score of 2. Interestingly, one of the de-suifiers is: "Does your character ever get ignored, snubbed, or overlooked by characters who aren't villains?" If you add "forgotten" to that list, then this de-suifier is the main point of the whole story. Not sure if it really counts if this is due to a supernatural cause instead of those characters just not caring, though.
Yep. Like the whole sections on exotic sentient species. Then again, I can see why there is a greater risk of Mary Sues in fantasy than in any other genre. Mary Sues are generally the result of some kind of wish-fulfillment, and what better way to fulfill authors' wishes than to imagine themselves in made-up settings where anything is possible?
I think that's the most balanced test on this thread, thus far. I felt happy with my score. Happy, in that I think it reflected my main character accurately enough. I'm not convinced that certain characteristics lean toward Mary Sue, though—even though they are counted as such in these tests. If your character's gender and gender orientation is the same as your own, then that counts towards Mary Sue? I think that's totally irrelevant. I'm a heterosexual female, so if I write my character as a heterosexual female I'm in danger of creating a Mary Sue? Rubbish. I also don't think a character based on yourself means a Mary Sue either. Some of the most honest and scathing writing I've read comes from characters based directly on the author. They are often inclined to make their characters less likeable than they are in real life, because they are honest writers. (I did not do this, by the way.)
Another good example of the fact that tropes are tools. Does the story serve the author by fulfilling the author's wishful fantasy? Or does the author serve the story by taking good material from wherever it might come from, including personal experience? That is what distinguishes a Mary Sue from a good self-insert, and that distinction is lost on questions like "Does your character have the same job as you or study the same subject in school?" I almost feel like I am arguing the opposite side of personality tests that I usually argue...
