The Mary Sue Test Thread

You've probably heard of the dread Mary Sue. If not, TV Tropes has a good rundown. (WARNING: Link goes to TV Tropes. Don't click unless you have a day or so to waste.) The short description is that a Sue is a character too perfect and good and awesome to live, one who always is the toughest, smartest, sexiest, most caring, most beautiful, most talented person in the story. If not done carefully, your character stops being a character and starts being a big bundle of cliche.

So how to check whether you're writing a Sue? I've always enjoyed the Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test as a metric of character realism. I'm not personally opposed to Sue-like characters (many beloved characters, from James Kirk to Harry Potter, score high on the litmus test), but they have to be done carefully not to be off-putting. And the litmus test is a good check to see whether you're treading into unrealistic territory -- because in Adventure fiction, that's really easy to do.

Anyhoo, what are your thoughts on Sues, and if you fill out the test, where do your MCs score?

Mine scored 33…apparently, I'm pushing it, lol. Though I've never really received complaints when I've shown my work to my friends (who would rip me to shreds if they felt my character was corny, which is what I want them to do), so I guess I'm on the safe side of the line.

Anywho…I think there's a difference between basing a character partially off of yourself and placing a new and improved version of yourself on the page. For my protagonist, I use parts of my personal background simply because it's what I know best. I would say my main character and I share similar backgrounds in some aspects, but I am definitely NOT my main character and vice versa. On top of that, I base most of my characters off of people I know simply because it's easier for me to write dialogue, personality traits, etc. with people I know well.

Mary Sues, from my perspective, are the ones usually written by adolescents with no writing guidance and little experience, where they take themselves, give themselves green eyes and tiger blood, and have horrendously bad dialogue that sounds like interactions between high school students.

My own personal Gary Stu has no magical powers and is of no strange race. In fact, he's a perfectly ordinary human. An ordinary human who happens to be slightly tall for his age, has long greasy hair, acne, a slight underbite and a gigantic foot size, yet is still fairly cute. And he is not the same gender as me, but he does resemble me vaguely... if you squint.

However, he is still a Gary Stu to me. He is everything I ever wanted to be. He's creative and funny, has a fair bit of physical endurance (he's no superhuman, but he's a terrific athlete) and always has a smile on his face and is generally nice and likeable by everyone. I gave him the nickname "Ductape", due to his uncanny ability to keep things holding together in the worst of times (and the fact that he makes his clothes out of duct tape ever since having to walk home in a rain storm when his mother forgot to pick him up).

Most Mary Sue tests wouldn't check for that kind of thing. So what if he doesn't have magical powers, a complicated bloodline, a bunch of weird colors (his eyes and hair are brown, but his shoes are lime-green; his feet are so large he has to custom-order them every time and that's his favorite color) or a resumé a mile long. And he doesn't speak in poser-dialogue. All he really is is just a guy who is really nice, likeable and can accomplish whatever he sets his mind to.

Trouble is, he's a plot orphan and I don't have a specific tale to write him into anymore. So he's currently floating around from hypothetical to hypothetical while never actually reaching paper.

Mine scored a 2. I'm going to make this girl suffer and she's not going to perk up at the end. Oops. She could probably do with a bit more personality.

I did run my race through the Mary Sue Race Test and I came out of that with a 4. High mortality rates and severe disfiguration far outweighs the ridiculously good looking part.

My character, Sean Devon, scored 21. That's actually a little higher than what I expected, but I think that's a little skewed. The reason he is so successful in life is because he's a sociopath who steps on people to get what he wants.

Sean is rich, ambitious, charming, and very intelligent. He's also a terrible person. I have found that it's very liberating to write about a character who never has to stop and think about if something he's doing is morally right or not.

Ahem.

Someone should run Cinderella through the Mary Sue test. (She seems to have done all right for herself nonetheless...)

My characters score between 3 and 28. It wasn't really a surprise that Quinn scored the highest. He's my favourite, and a character that's been floating around in my mind in one form or another for the past fifteen years. He retains some of the Gary Stu qualities I gave him when I was fourteen. I was more surprised that Fatma only scored three points since she can feel like a Mary Sue at times. She's a ninja-esque, stunningly beautiful woman who succeeds at everything she tries. Then again, she doesn't have the most pleasant personality and she has more than a few flaws. I should probably flesh her out a little more.

14 for my NaNovel's MC, which actually surprises me a bit because "child soldier" types get, I feel, unfairly high markings from this test because they qualify for the unusual talents stuff and the troubled past stuff and etc.

And then a remarkably low, in my opinion, 5 for my MC in an RP. Considering he's a child savant, I REALLY thought he'd get higher, but a lot of the de-suifiers qualified and brought his score down a good bit. I'm happy, because I tried to portray him more realistically than I've done in the past (i.e. he's completely naiive, likely to miss important things, a coward, physically weak, and has no usefulness in combat, because he's 10 years old and autistic and in a violent setting).

I scored a 13. My character is a psychic detective who can project his consciousness and intelligence into any organic structure, so I scored some points in the animal dept (he keeps a horde of beetles as pets to do surveillance with) and a few other areas. However, he's an overweight, 61 year old man with one bad eye and a pretty mild, polite personality, so he makes up for his animal horde by failing to be attractive or flamboyant.

Hopefully it works out.

My MC got a 19 mostly because he's a philosophical nutcase.
My FMC got a 21, but probably would have gotten a different score if there was some way to indicate that she's a rather murderous vigilante.

I put my main sci-fi species through the Mary Sue Race Test. It got an 11, making it a "Mos Likely a Mary Sue Race", but there weren't any boxes to check off for them being nice-looking to a bystander but actually a ruthless, oppressive, race that works behind the scenes with assassinations and bombings to keep the other species on their planet conforming to their view of society.

Hahah, my FMC scored a 6 (only 10 if I unclick the De-Suifiers). One of the points of my story is for her to be a relatively normal human being thrust into an extreme situation and how she has to deal with it.

On the other hand, the test did give me the idea to let her speak some Spanish (hardly fluent, but decent enough to get by if she had to) and that her roommate has her jog when she does.

For my MMC (I did the Mary Sue Race Test and only got about 11. Ya know, since he's kind on the level of a god. If you can consider gods a race... It was a little pointless for him), he scored a 23. Almost four times as high as the FMC. Haha! I plan on having quite a bit of fun highlighting just how strange this guy is, so I'm not particularly worried about how much of a Gary-Stu he is. He has no sense of personal boundaries and is kind of a creeper. It'll be great.

I think I stretched it to a five.

However, when you consider that just about every successful piece of fiction I could think of would have scored very high, I wasn't too relieved. I wondered for a minute if I'm making my stuff too flat and then decided that I don't care. My people are who they are and for reasons.

I combined all my main characters (there's four of them) and ran them through the test at once. I got maybe a score of 4. COMBINED. That's pretty good, isn't it? :D

Yay! 8 points! I was worried at first (As the kid of The Chosen One my MC has 2 magical powers, a steep learning curve, and quite a few old enemies after his skin), but the de-suifiers were surprisingly simple. Thanks, that test actually brought up a few things about his character I'd never thought of before!

No. Turns out she's too surly to be a Mary-Sue. I agree that the test does help in thinking about the character.

Taking the entire story arch I have in mind into account, including the ending, 35. Taking the slow build, back and forth, as well as things I say "Eh... kinda, yes." to "Mostly No" then we're looking at a 22.

The thing is that when I take all characters in consideration, they are specifically built around one another to elicit conflict and my main character is the center piece of all that so she has to vary.

It's also an Adventure Parody kind of deal, which means I'm naturally going to push that line into Sue-ness.

My MC got a 36. I don't think there were enough choice to allow me to say that, while he's a superhero and multi-racial and doesn't fit in, he's also awkwardly asexual and an idiot and a lot of people just ignore his actions. Still, I'm happy with a 36 for a novel laced with humor.

I got a 3. But then, it is Bearded Lemming Pirates; it's hard to be that silly and still be a Mary Sue (unless perhaps you're trying to subvert it).

Still, there were one or two amusing responses:

linky

My main character Derick got a -5 (4 without the de-suifiers). All my characters get really low since I never visualize them enough to know if they're good looking or not and I think of them too much as friends to want to go out with them.

I wrote a blog post (I run a writer's blog called Scribbling on the Computer) on this subject a week or two ago. I linked to several helpful tests, gave a run down of the different types of Sues, and offered some advice on how to fix your Mary Sues.

I hope y'all find it helpful: Testing a Character for Mary-Sue-ism and What to Do About It