Ain’t She Sweet?
April 2nd, 2007 by Kathleen Bolton
Last week I blogged about embedding contradictory character traits into your protagonists to keep them fresh. At the very same time, Elena Greene over at Risky Regencies was blogging about the opposite kind of character, one with no compelling traits at all. She called it something I’d never heard of before: the Mary Sue.
What is this thing of which she writes? I was intrigued.
Allow Elena to explain:
“According to Wikipedia, Mary Sue “is a pejorative term for a fictional character who is portrayed in an overly idealized way and lacks noteworthy flaws, or has unreasonably romanticized flaws. Characters labeled Mary Sues, as well as the stories they appear in, are generally seen as wish-fulfillment fantasies of the author.”’
Ahh. I didn’t know they had a name for that.
How do you know if you have a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu) for a protagonist? Take the Original Fiction Mary Sue Litmus Test and find out!
The OFMSLT is also a humorous look at some of the worst offenses writers make when creating their characters. Though the test is tongue-in-cheek, if you get a high score the result is anything but. For example:
Does the character have a name you really, really like?
Is it Raven?
Is it a variation of Raven?
Is it Hunter?
Uh, I read a suspense novel a few months back with a character named Hunter. He was hardbitten but still ruggedly handsome despite the scar he received from a knife-fight against some baddies. He’d had some hard knocks in the romance department that made it impossible for him to trust a women, let alone drop his defenses long enough to fall in love with one….
You see now, don’t you. Hunter was a Gary Stu.
Does the character have an unusual eye color, or otherwise exceptional eyes?
And are these eyes a color that does not occur in nature?
And will they have something to do with the plot?
Hunter had blue eyes the color of a Montana sky at dusk. His love interest had jade-green eyes with hair the color of a raven’s wing. Not that this had anything to do with the plot, so they saved themselves a point.
I took the test (warning, it’s pretty long) and my character got a score of 23, which is borderline Mary Sue. So a few tweaks should save it from being insufferably sweet.
Are you brave enough to take the Mary Sue litmus test? Can you afford not to?
Oh, that picture! It hurts, it hurts!
I, too, came away with a borderline score. Maybe my protagonist should wear a dog collar necklace or something.
LOL! The questions that really had me cracking up are the ones for fantasy authors: is your character immortal seeking the peace of death? Is your immortal character achingly beautiful with centuries of weariness deep in their eyes?
Too funny!
I ran the heroine of my current mess-in-progress through the test and she scored 19 (Non-Sue). Whew!
Some of my writer buddies have reported similar borderline scores. Since most of us write either romance or fiction with romantic elements I think some of the questions are tricky.
Ex. Does the character fall in (reciprocated) love with, or have sex with, a character you would like to fall in love with or have sex with?
Could be “yes, of course I think the hero of my current romance novel is a hotty” or “no, I’m happily married and wouldn’t leave my husband for a fictional hotty if he came to life”.
I think it’s a matter of degree. Our characters express parts of us but if they are too obviously a wish-fulfillment fantasy it can feel like author intrusion.
I scored a 10, although a couple of the questions I could have gone one way or the other so maybe a 12. At 10 the test said my character is the Anti-Sue!
A lot of the questions seem oriented towards cliche fantasy novels.
19 and 10, those are pretty good scores. I had a couple borderlines too, so I gave myself the benefit of the doubt.
My guy got a borderline - he’s an enigmatic assassin/spy with a tortured past, and is one of my most popular characters. No, he’s not called Raven or Hunter and he can’t fly!
We fantasy writers are likely to score higher on this. My earlier books contain elements suggested here, even though I had read almost no fantasy when I wrote them. It makes me wonder whether some of the qualities identified as cliche (especially in relation to magical abilities) actually derive from mythology, which is the cauldron of story from which fantasy writers dip their raw materials.
I think you need to give a protagonist a spicy past so you have a place to go when you need conflict and tension. I guess the hard part is keeping it from being a cliche.