/fanfic/ - Fan Fiction

Step 1: Forget everything you've ever been told about "Mary Sue".

There is not a second step. You are now free to write good creative stories based on your life experiences, without worrying about any bullshit checklists.

Mary Sue exists more as a parody than an actual thing people write, anyway. If you don't want your character to be that way, then don't intentionally write shitty things.

>>172
totally agree.

Just make sure nobody is overpowered and that's it.

The problem is that a lot of traits of the main character, like surviving at the dangers etc are considered part of a gary stu, the problem is that without that the novel will end in three pages

There's a test to check your characters for Mary Sue tendencies: http://www.unc.edu/~jemarti/marysuetest/

Better safe than sorry, right?
I think you should be well on the safe side though – and I wouldn't let some criteria deter me from writing a character the way I'd want to write them if I really wanted to write a story.

I'd like to have a thread dedicated to meta discussion; original characters, changes from canon, crossovers etc.,

>>183
That test pisses me off. Apparently, writing characters from personal experience and keeping your story focused instead of getting sidetracked by the tedium of work and school lands you in Mary Sue territory. Oh yeah, and having the protagonist of a story overcome challenges or defy authority gets Mary Sue points, too. Why would an abusive family life or unpopular childhood automatically score so many points? Are meaningful stories unable to contain such things?

Go outside and observe real people. Do not let this absurd shit warp your perception for even a moment. If you ever feel tempted to think in terms of tropes, drop everything you're doing and get into an argument with a friend for an hour instead. That's what I'll be doing. Pray they forgive my autism.

>>188
>Apparently, writing characters from personal experience and keeping your story focused instead of getting sidetracked by the tedium of work and school lands you in Mary Sue territory.
No, it's giving points for those who might try to write themselves into the story. Of course we are free to draw inspiration from our own lives, but we should try to avoid making established characters (assuming we are talking about fanfiction) a mouthpiece for ourselves.

>having the protagonist of a story overcome challenges or defy authority gets Mary Sue points, too.
Having the protagonist (or any other character) overcome challenges and breezing through these challenges without struggles and quite possibly any repercussion, should give points.

>Why would an abusive family life or unpopular childhood automatically score so many points?
It is a common trait found in many Mary Sue's - they've might have grown up in an abuse household, in an orphanage etc., - these experiences would have affected the character deeply.

I'm not saying you should follow it religiously or at all, but I think it could be a nice way to see how you can create more realistic characters with flaws, setbacks and struggles that maybe won't be solved easily or at all.

Rant coming through.

The problem with Mary Sues is that a lot of the time their characteristics are irrelevant or ill-thought through.

I think it doesn't matter what the hell you do so long as the story's kept interesting and the reader's kept engaged. Something has to make them care, whether it's characters or style. Some people like invincible characters. Others like watching characters gagged, suffocated, and flushed down the shit hole to emerge an even bigger shit with character development or as a polished, glistening turd.

The biggest thing is to think about the actual flaws. Some characters are lauded as Sues because they have too little, some because they have too many. Don't throw random flaws for the sake of them if they're never actually relevant in the story. If you can take out a character flaw and the resulting story is still literally the same, that either means the flaw is not relevant or you should stop babying the character and throw them to the wolves.

Case study: Twilight. So FMC's fatal flaw is her fatal clumsiness? The way it's written, take out the clumsiness and it's still a shitty story calling itself a romance. Set the novel in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, where it's reanimated corpses vs. vampires that fucking sparkle? Suddenly the universe has some kind of fucking conflict. Suddenly the flaw becomes relevant and even usable as not only a romance plot device but a characterization one.

Unless you want to see FMC completely ignore the fact that she needs to overcome her clumsiness, trip over thin fucking air and then get eaten by a zombie in front of Shitty Sparkling Vampire. Which is a characterization device as well. Plot twist: She returns as a zombie. Take that, romance plot.

Relevant flaws lead to interesting characters and story because they create conflict.

…Screw that being specific to flaws. You don't even need flaws for conflict or interesting characters. Poorly-written conflict is just as bad as not having any. Just make sure everything's relevant and nothing's just for the sake of it. Apply that to everything.

>>188
>Are meaningful stories unable to contain such things?
+1, anon. Mary Sue has become such a buzzword it literally means nothing now.

Unfortunately, fanfiction's self-gratifying first and good writing last, so there's a lot of shit that doesn't care about meaning and not a lot that do.

>>171
> im writing a book that of course will be considered a fanfiction since the subject was already covered
Are you basing it off whatever others have written, to the point where you're using their intellectual property, or is it entirely original in execution?

Really, anything containing mythological figures can even be considered fanfiction, but look at all the works there. It all depends on how you go about it.

>>180
Is this you asking another question, OP? The wording is really confusing.

>>192
sorry for that, i usually lurk, so my english is terrible

>Are you basing it off whatever others have written, to the point where you're using their intellectual property, or is it entirely original in execution?

I dont know, the story itself is a classic ww3/nuclear post apocalypse, where the nation is dissolved in a shitload of indipended city states and other little nations, the protagonist has to travel to point A to point B for some reason, and the travel is full of this little states, bandits mutated animals and whatever you can find in that setting.

So yeah its a cluster of ispirations from metro 2033, the road, roadside picnic and the war stories that my grandfather told me. I dont know if that can be called "original"

>>195
I wouldn't count that as fanfiction. Just a specific genre (post-apocalyptic sci-fi)

Fanfiction is using characters/setting from another specific source, not using an idea that's been done before.

That's also not what a mary sue is. Fuck rules, people may have said a character based on yourself is a sue, but that's pretty warped from the original idea. It's no good if the character's purpose is to a be a better you to self insert into, since that will likely be an uninteresting character. People get too caught up in these fucking arbitrary rules, no one will criticize you for setting the story in your hometown if it's an interesting setting. That's not self-inserting nor does it make the characters sues. Do what's best for the story, don't blindly obey boundaries that will only hold you back.

>>171

Sues come in all kinds and varieties, but so long as you write a character like a real person, you are perfectly safe.

Mary Sues are often the result of the author writing some wish fulfillment bullshit for him/herself and not having a lot of experience with writing. So many things like the Sue inexplicably getting along with the cast and the Sue having rivals for no reason are the product of the author trying to imitate things he/she saw in fiction without understanding how they work.

Many authors take a lot from their personal experiences; it's not a "Mary Sue" thing to write what you know. Writing what you *don't* know will be your downfall though.