Mary Sues

All right, I’ve been meaning to get this one done for a long, long time, and now I’m going to give it a go. The subject of Mary Sues is an incredibly important one, and I’m going to take as much time as I need to with it.

With that being said, a definition of a Mary Sue is certainly in order – in *roleplay*a Mary Sue is a character without true fault, often used to placate the reader or writer. It should be noted a Mary Sue is not simply an unhealthy character but a truly faultless one. This may seem like it would quickly eliminate most fictional characters from that spectrum, but on closer look that is unfortunately not the case. I should note too that I will bring up the idea of a Mary Sue “element” throughout this post – while a “Mary Sue” is a faultless character, a Mary Sue “element” makes a character Sue-like, but it’s possible to have Sue elements without being a Sue by definition. I would argue that’s a lot harder than it sounds, though.


To almost any writer over the age of thirteen the term or simply the idea of the Mary Sue is not a foreign one, and I should make it clear right off the bat that *no one* likes Mary Sues, conceptually. The issue lies with how people handle that. Tests for Suedom are all over the place, otherwise known as the Mary Sue Litmus Test, and they typically ask a range of really extreme questions from all sorts of angles. These tests have a lot of inherent problems, but I’ll get to that later.

For now, though, it’s important to understand that writers everywhere are concerned with this issue, but so often it seems like they absolutely fail to avoid creating Sues. It must be made absolutely clear that this topic should be treated with aggression and without mercy.

Because this is a blog about Roleplay, though, it’s important for me to make clear the difference between Mary Sues in other outlets of fiction (fanfiction, novels, short stories, movies, and so on) and in Roleplay itself. In fiction characters can have many more Sue elements without destroying the story or the narrative; indeed, it is actually very important for a protagonist, antagonist, or other major characters to have certain Sue elements in the interest of exploring the world and the story. This same rule applies to the idea of Special Snowflakes, but I’ll come back to Snowflakes on this topic in a short while. When we’re looking at Roleplay, characters should absolutely have as few Mary Sue elements as possible – preferably none. In Roleplay the world does not rotate around or depend upon the character; this allows for the wonderful opportunity of deeply flawed characters that can make mistakes in their lives without resulting in a terribly boring or depressing story. That being said, we can move on to the brunt of it: how to identify a Mary Sue. Well, theoretically this should be exceedingly simple if a Sue only exists in the absence of a fault, but that’s about where you run into trouble. People apparently seem to have so much trouble with this that we’ve even got “tests” to see if your character is a Sue or not. Before I get into exactly how I would find or establish Suedom, I’m going to talk about the tests and their shortcomings.

A lot of people are suspect of the test, as they should be, but the reason why is actually pretty important. There are some obvious ones that are common across all tests, of course. For example, I can be going through a 100+ question examination of my character and mark nothing as true except for “Does your character possess power that can take out entire cities/legions of soldiers/general all-around-evil?” The test will tell me the character isn’t a Sue at all and could probably actually be made a little more interesting. That’s a problem.

Furthermore again we face the disconnect between Roleplay and general fiction, though. A test will tell you if you get a score of 15 or so you’re just about golden. For general fiction this might be true, but for Roleplay a score of 15 means absolute disaster on your part as the writer. A true Roleplaying character should barely be able to get a score of 5, and those marked should be of some of the least notice.

On that note I bring up the prime reason the Mary Sue Test is not reliable, though. If a Mary Sue is defined based on their faults, or lack of them, then the tests ought to be determining how faulted your character is, or is not, before delivering any sort of verdict on the quality of the character. After you get past about 20 or so Sue elements on a test you’re already wasting your time.

A true litmus test for Suedom needs to approach the character from the perspective of “Is this character faulted, and if so, where and how deeply.” A fault, if it’s a real one, will weigh down any Sue-like element far more than just trying to play damage control and keeping those elements to a minimum. Start at the faults and work backwards.

Faults! What are they? I think a lot of people know the answer to this but refuse to actually think about it. So think about it! Think about this very carefully, because most people don’t. I’m going to grab a quote from some old friends of mine for this for they truly were the best people I’ve ever gotten to Roleplay with.

“Believable characters have multiple flaws. We mean ‘flaw’ in the true sense of the word, in that it impacts the character in a negative way.” http://scytheofsylvanas.net/about-the-scythe-of-sylvanas

A flaw, or a fault, is something that impacts the character in a negative way. Not just the IC workings of the character – we’re not talking about hindrances or obstacles for your character; no, a flaw negatively affects how the character is viewed by both the reader and the writer. Really think about this for a second and then throw some characters through the blender asking this question: is there anything about the character itself that negatively impacts my opinion of them?

A lot of people get tricked up when they start trying to make flawed parts of the character. Instead of actually negatively affecting the character, they instead try and do it from a sort of legalistic mindset. I’m going to appeal to the character of Han Solo as an example of this.

Han has a “dark streak” in him, shooting Greedo at the bar, borrowing money he can’t pay off, and generally sort of riding the line. From a legalistic standpoint, a person might call it a fault, but on closer inspection you can realize it’s not a fault; it doesn’t negatively affect Han Solo’s character and your perception of him. If anything, this adds a bit more allure to the character. This is partially because we can relate to the notion, but mostly just because it makes him more of a badass. I’ve talked about why that’s a bad idea before in Roleplay, so I’m just going to leave that there – hopefully the point is straight-forward enough.

Is it bad for Han to have that dark streak going for him? Not necessarily, but it’s important to understand that it is in no way faulting his character. So let me go through some things people think are faults, and some things that are actually faults. Keep in mind every one of these has the potential to be a little gray at times, but it ultimately comes down to that question: is this negatively impacting my perception of the character?

Keep in mind that any of these fake-faults can be a true fault given the proper writing behind it. In the absolute vast majority of cases, though, when someone says, “My character’s most glaring fault is he doesn’t deal with people well” this is *not* a fault at all. So here we go:

Anti-social or loner attitude (independence):
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had to rag on this one, but here we go again. I’ll complain about it until I stop seeing it. In real life being anti-social is a pretty big pain, by and large; it’s going to hinder you in relationships, school, work, family, and just about everything else. As far as day-to-day actual human interaction, this might negatively affect someone’s opinion of you, but in terms of fiction? Not as much.

In real life when a person is anti-social, that’s just the end of it. If the trait stops human interaction, then it’s not exactly like it’s going to get to the bottom of it. In fiction, though, that’s not the case. The writer has the opportunity to explain the “fault” and put reason behind it. Very quickly it stops being a character flaw and instead pivots to become a strength of the character, further adding to a positive, not a negative image, much in the way Han Solo’s “dark streak” does. For the sake of time, I’ll leave it at that, but if there’s any challenge to this then leave a comment and I will dedicate an entire blogpost to it.

Stubbornness:
This one’s great. Again, like the anti-social behavior, people often seem to think that this is a universal flaw because it gets people into trouble or makes them irritating or unreasonable. Once more, though, in fiction we have the opportunity to explore this to its fullest extent. Stubbornness is usually not a flaw simply because the character has good reason to be stubborn, be it a current situation factor or a part of their overall character and history. Is it possible for stubbornness to be a fault? Sure. It must, however, negatively affect the image of the character, and 99 times out of a 100 it does not.

Vengeance:
Very difficult to make this one a true flaw – once more it stands to be explainable and furthermore reasonable. Oh, this person had their family ripped away from them? I feel so bad! Of course they would want to have vengeance on those terrible monsters! Or something like that… It usually is to make the character more callous and badass, of course. If a character’s thirst for vengeance doesn’t make you or your reader go, “Wow, this guy is a disgusting human being. This is pointless and petty, and it’s destroying everyone around him” then you probably need to try harder.

Law-breaking:
It’s certainly going to depend on which laws, but much in the instance of Han Solo, if the blanket statement is just, “The law isn’t important to this guy, and he’s willing to bend or break it in order to get the job done” then you’re certainly not looking at a fault. Again, most people are going to find this more admirable than not, even if it’s not direct respect or allegiance. More importantly, it simply affects the character image positively, not negatively.

Bluntness:
Most of the time this one’s used it’s in the context of speaking truth, which instantly makes it really hard to call it a flaw. If a warrior bluntly tells a king to his face, “You’re a fool and this will cause the deaths of thousands” he’s not being blunt in a negative way but rather an admirable one. Being blunt is not the same as being insulting, which is a much grayer area.

Homosexuality:
This one isn’t particularly problematic or recurring, but I want to bring it up to get to a couple of other ideas. In the theatre of socially political matters there’s plenty of dispute as to the standing of this one. Lots of people will call this a fault while lots would instead say it most certainly is not. In Roleplaying, though, something that takes place on the internet with a pretty specific demographic and interest-group, the opinion of homosexuality is much less condemning than it might be in other places. Because the writer and their audience will likely not look at the character with disdain for this change in sexual orientation, we must say that it’s certainly not a fault.

Even though much of society is at ends over this thing, the parties involved in the reading and writing of the roleplay are not society as a whole. The bottom line is most writers will not use this as a means for the reader to think less of their character. With this line of thinking, you cannot consider it a fault in a character, just like those other ones previously mentioned.

Physical Inability:
This one is interesting. Instead of pivoting to make a character seem badass, it instead makes them seem in need of pity, which is not a negative attribute. Almost always this is used to generate a sense of vulnerability and to increase a sense of sympathy toward the character. It’s good to care about the character, but it’s important to understand that this is not a fault in the character. Once more it impacts them positively and not negatively. Now, it’s possible for it to be the other way around, namely in mocking the character or showing their uselessness over a subject matter. If this is the path you want to take with this attribute, though, be expressly clear and emphatic about it. You really need to be able to wrinkle your nose at it and go, “Do I really want to make a character like that?” for it to be a legitimate flaw.

Can you see the pattern?

I’ll repeat it again for absolute clarity—the critical question you must ask is this: does this attribute negatively affect my character, my opinion of them, and my reader’s opinion of them?

Another way to put it would be like this: were this character a real person, would finding out about this fault hurt your opinion of that person? Would you think less of them for it?

If it’s a true fault, then you would.

“Woah,” you might say, “that’s pretty heavy. I mean, after all, we’re all faulted, so isn’t that hypocritical for us to be thinking less of them, when we ourselves are so faulted as well?” This is an incredibly important question to be asking, because I think it’s one of the reasons people make Mary Sues so freaking often. We all want to be reasonable, so we bring up these fake “flaws” and then make them reasonable; very quickly they stop being flaws altogether. But, go back to that question I posed, there’s a key part in it…

“…after all, we’re all faulted...” Oh. Says who? Your friends? Or you. Everyone has things in them they wish were different. I wish I didn’t get so angry so quickly, but I do. I’d like to say it’s reasonable, but if I’m completely honest with myself I know it’s not. Because I know the very depths of my soul better than anyone else, it’s easiest for me to look inside and go, “Man, this part of me sucks. I wish I wasn’t this way.”

*We* know we’re faulted, but we don’t want to ever suggest anyone else is. Well, thankfully we’re just talking about fictional characters, so let’s be real here for a minute. You as the author know the depths of your character’s soul better than anyone else, or you should, so you are totally responsible for making them believable in this aspect. “No one’s perfect,” the cliché phrase goes, so stop pretending your characters are the exception! If the only “imperfections” you can come up with are quickly backtracked by, “well, I mean, it’s actually pretty reasonable because…” then you’re not going deep enough.

So with that being said, let’s talk about some real faults. Things no one like, but we still see them anyway—in ourselves and in other people.

Racism:
This one’s pretty easy, and it adds a surprising amount of interesting elements to the character. Once more, referring to this internet demographic we’re all a part of, most people are pretty much in agreement we don’t like racism and we don’t want to see it. Now, if we even have to say that line it assumes there are *other* people who are racist or do wish to see racism, but as far as our group goes it’s pretty safe to call it something we don’t want to see.

Keep in mind I’m not talking about racism for humor, dropping an ethnic slur or joke to be funny. No, I’m talking about true racism. Racist characters absolutely desire pure segregation, discrimination, and will be the first to incriminate those of the other race they loath. If they could, and perhaps they do, they would cause violent harm to this other race, whatever it might be. If we’re dealing with true racism here, it should cause pretty much anyone to shift in their seat uncomfortably at least a little bit. That’s a good sign! It’s hard to have something like that while keeping a character completely unbelievable.

The Selfs:
Selfishness and the other ones: self-absorbed, self-interested, self-righteous, self-concerned, self-justifying, and so on. Our culture at present very much condemns all of these things, so a fictional character who *has* all of them would, naturally, rub us the wrong way a bit. We might think less of them for it.

This is a great example of a completely believable fault, because pretty much everyone acts this way, but we do our best to cover it up, play it nice, and pretend like we’re truly selfless. Well, while you’re busy putting on the façade, let’s unmask it in your characters. It may be subtle or it may be blaringly obvious. The character may be aware of it, or they might be completely oblivious to it. If they are aware, they might care and wish a change, or they may think it’s completely deserved because they’re just that awesome. (By the way, if they *are* that awesome then this stops being a flaw.)

Be aggressive with faults, especially this one! Don’t be satisfied with just going, “Oh yeah he’s selfish. But I mean, so are we all.” No! Take it a step farther and be bold. Show me the true heart of this character and let me be disgusted by the blackness of it. Now we’re talking about negatively impacting the character.

Vanity:
This one goes in hand with the “Selfs” pretty well. Going off the back of the previous one, our culture does not like people very much interested in their own image. We want people to be real and authentic, and someone who is spending all their time obsessed about how good they’re going to look is simply not that appealing to us. Not everyone is vain, but it takes a tremendous amount of security to truly not care what other people think of you. Finding truly vain characters makes your skin crawl a little bit, but if it’s done well then it’s also insanely interesting.

Ugliness:
While our culture values being real, it cannot be forgotten that it also seriously values beauty. When we value beauty, it means we devalue ugliness. You might not believe me on this one, but go through a roleplaying site and count how many characters you get that are described to be extremely unattractive. Or even unattractive at all!

A great example of this occurred in the Mass Effect franchise with the character of Samara. In the first game, players got Liara, this perfectly proportioned alien model who descended from some crazy powerful matriarch. In the second game, though, you get this woman who’s kind of got this square jaw and just generally looks… old. People were pissed. Being unattractive really made Samara’s character seem less appealing, especially accompanied with some other faults she had, and the fans found themselves whining that they wanted hot-bodied Liara back.

Why? Well, they like beauty, and they wanted something to look at, more or less. By adding this fault, though, Samara proved to be a lot more interesting of a character than Liara ever was, if you took more than ten seconds to think about it. While Liara was a Mary Sue, Samara certainly was not. In case you’re not familiar with the two characters, I’ll drop a couple of links before you just google “Samara” and get a bunch of horror images.

Samara: http://images.wikia.com/masseffect/images/9/93/Samara_Character_Box.png

Liara: http://chaosmacherin.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/alien%5E%5E-3.jpg

Tl;dr, though, we like beauty, so making an ugly character would kind of lower your opinion of them, especially if you make it pronounced enough to actually affect them.

Stupidity:
Here’s one that might not occur to people right off the bat, but, similar to ugliness, is important. Our culture, especially the culture on the internet, values intelligence greater than gold. No one wants to think of themselves as dumb or slow-witted, but all the time people are complaining about “the idiots on the road” or “these stupid fans.” Okay, so we value intelligence pretty high, for better or worse; if you need more proof go look at roleplaying characters and see how many people are willing to characters who are slower than most people would like.

Stupidity is a great flaw to tie in with other attributes like anger. With this one you need to be careful that unintelligence doesn’t just mean pitiable, though. Let their lack of intelligence or perception lead them to more faults, like getting angry at people because they don’t fully understand a situation. You know it’s a fault because most people don’t want a character like that. But that kind of character is believable! They’re interesting! Give it a try.

Cowardice:
How about a character who is a true coward? We love courage, especially if it’s that sort of hair-flipping too-cool-for-school courage; fearless in the sight of danger. That’s boring, though, and quite unbelievable too. It could be simple like getting paralyzed with fear at the thought of just getting in trouble, or could be larger things like a cowardly man running away from a fight and leaving his family helpless behind him. Yeah, that’d be a fault. No one *likes* the idea of it, but at the same time you know these people exist; part of you knows that it could be your fate too if stuck in that situation.

Again, hopefully you’re getting the idea. I’m going to stop here in the interest of not wasting even more time, though. Just remember the goal is basically to have traits to the character are unreasonable and negatively impact your opinion of the character because of it. Let me briefly cover two more things involving identifying Sues before I move on completely, though.

Self or wish fulfillment through a character – does this make a character a Mary Sue? This is tricky for me to answer, because my definition of a Sue is a little different. Personally, I’m not going to call a character a Sue because when you took the Mary Sue Litmus Test you answered yes to all of these types of questions in the test:


- Does the character excel in a field you wish you excelled in?
- 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?
- Do you ever wish you could be like the character?
- Do you feel insulted, attacked, or defensive when someone does not like your character?
- Does your character tell off, beat up, humiliate, outdo, or kill a character to whom you would personally like to do the same?

If you could say yes to any of these, I wouldn’t call the character a Sue specifically, I would just call them an unhealthy and poor character. I’ve talked about self-insertion in roleplay before and why I think it’s dangerous and bad, but I think that topic is different from “Is the character perfect?” I will say, though, that characters with large amounts of self-insertion are almost invariably Mary Sues too; they tend to go hand-in-hand.

That being said, I’d also like to make the note in saying that I don’t consider “Special Snowflakes” to be Mary Sues either. A Snowflake is a character from a very unique set of circumstances that stands apart very clearly from everyone else. Just because of this, though, it doesn’t necessarily mean the character is flawless and therefore a Sue. Much like the self-insertion thing, they don’t have to go together, but they usually do.

All right, now that I’ve taken forever to establish who the Sues are and who are not, let’s get into some solution management.

From the beginning people should always be aware of the potential for Suedom in the characters. It happens freaking all the time, so if you think you’re exempt from this boat then you’re probably not. Defending against Sues first and foremost begins at character creation, so watch out for it there. Again, you’re looking for things that truly and negatively impact your character.

Keep in mind this is incredibly difficult to do when your character has a massive amount of virtues going for them, so I honestly start my characters now by establishing their faults before I go any further. The faults of the character, more than anything, will be the truly defining and memorable aspects of them. This is partially because hardly anyone actually flaws their characters, but also because it generally makes them much more believable, engaging, and interesting.

Once you’ve got a character thoroughly flawed, though, the next step is taking that into the roleplay. It’s totally possible to have a character in concept (on their sheet) but have them still be a huge Sue in the roleplay itself. This falls under the category again of being consistent in roleplay, but it’s worth re-emphasizing. Putting down a bunch of awful flaws onto the character sheet is one thing, but having the gall to carry them out in roleplay is another thing entirely. The effort is well worth it, though.

When trying to make characters who are not Mary Sues, remember that the very first checkpoint you’ve got to clear is yourself. In terms of character analysis, you absolutely should be your very own worst-critic. If you *don’t* find your characters repulsively faulted and wonder if you should really go with someone that mucked up, then you need to try harder.

Again, believable characters have flaws. Good characters are believable.

That’s the goal, ultimately, in avoiding Mary Sues. You want to make good characters. There are a lot of things that are going to make your characters better or worse, and avoiding Suedom is definitely a big one. Having characters that make sense are consequently a lot more fun to roleplay, but there’s even a bit more than that. Once you’ve got the Suedom out of the picture, the Roleplay process becomes a lot less about the puffery of the writer themselves. Instead, it becomes about facilitating good stories and character development, and that’s ultimately what we want to see more of, right?

All right, so let me wrap this up, because I’ve blasted enough time already. When looking for and avoiding Mary Sues? Be aggressive. Don’t hold back in faulting your character, because it really takes a lot to go too far (I’ve never actually seen a character that was faulted to the point of no longer being interesting.) Most people naturally have an issue faulting their characters, so don’t try and get off with, “Well I don’t want to be *too* extreme!” No, be too extreme, please. You’ll be instantly better than pretty much everyone else if you start seriously faulting your characters.

A faulted character should truly give you a bad taste in your mouth because of how well you know them. You know the very depths of their soul, and you know how dark it is indeed. I’ve never met a “Good” person—I’m convinced they do not exist. I’m not a good person, the people who I love most are not good people, and the further you look the darker it’s going to get. I’m not saying this to be depressing or anything, just to be real. Your character will, like any normal person, try and mask their faults they’re aware of, so it’s not like you’re going to be getting really strange roleplay. Instead, it should just be layering the RP with a lot more realism and life, if you take faults seriously.

As always, we’re looking at increasing both Roleplaying quality and also quantity. Roleplay isn’t some mass-produced item or something; as the RP gets better, people want more of it, and that can be done too. Make interesting characters, not Mary Sues, and enjoy the benefits. It’s going to be hard to do, but it’s well worth it to persevere through it all.