Post by Destiny on May 3, 2009 16:18:01 GMT 5.5
Your first question, quite rightly, must be: what exactly is a mary-sue/gary-stu? The answer can be defined in two ways, all of which are characteristics of a Mary-Sue:
- Perfection: Perfect characters are a complete pain to roleplay with. Battling with someone who is uber-good at battles, never gets hits, and throws spells completely unrealistic for their age/character is boring. So is posting with someone who looks up the HP Lexicon to answer every single question in class (without even bothering to change words, most of the time) or someone who has "jade-like, candelestine eyes" and a PERFECT appearance. Keep the attack of the perfect characters away, please.
An alternate is someone who seems the born loser - the natural rebel, who will go up against all authority and still ends up being the "cool guy". RPing has enough of Mary-sues, we don't need more. What we do need is some original, creative people with characters who can actually have some FLAWS.
What not to do:
- Make characters with excessive description of physical appearance but not enough of personality.
- Make flat characters that are made to be a wish-fulfiller. Basically, characters that are just a person like you, just without your weaknesses.
- Godmodding: Another thing Mary-sues are very good at is playing GOD and controlling other people's characters for them. Otherwise called powerplaying, Godmodding is a very serious offence, wherein someone controls a character played by someone else. This is absolutely not allowed. Below is a way your post should NOT be (with all the wrong parts in italics) :
Allie walked into the room and saw Kiara. She walked up to Kiara and pushed her, whereupon Kiara fell on the floor. Then she laughed and stepped on her, before Kiara could dodge her attack. She then sat down on a bench. The teacher entered the class but didn't see anything.
[Here, whoever controls Allie is trying to control Kiara and the teacher's characters. And I don't think I'll be rushing to her rescue when people playing those characters come after her with a butchering knife.
]
- Perfection: Perfect characters are a complete pain to roleplay with. Battling with someone who is uber-good at battles, never gets hits, and throws spells completely unrealistic for their age/character is boring. So is posting with someone who looks up the HP Lexicon to answer every single question in class (without even bothering to change words, most of the time) or someone who has "jade-like, candelestine eyes" and a PERFECT appearance. Keep the attack of the perfect characters away, please.
An alternate is someone who seems the born loser - the natural rebel, who will go up against all authority and still ends up being the "cool guy". RPing has enough of Mary-sues, we don't need more. What we do need is some original, creative people with characters who can actually have some FLAWS.
What not to do:
- Make characters with excessive description of physical appearance but not enough of personality.
- Make flat characters that are made to be a wish-fulfiller. Basically, characters that are just a person like you, just without your weaknesses.
- Godmodding: Another thing Mary-sues are very good at is playing GOD and controlling other people's characters for them. Otherwise called powerplaying, Godmodding is a very serious offence, wherein someone controls a character played by someone else. This is absolutely not allowed. Below is a way your post should NOT be (with all the wrong parts in italics) :
Allie walked into the room and saw Kiara. She walked up to Kiara and pushed her, whereupon Kiara fell on the floor. Then she laughed and stepped on her, before Kiara could dodge her attack. She then sat down on a bench. The teacher entered the class but didn't see anything.
[Here, whoever controls Allie is trying to control Kiara and the teacher's characters. And I don't think I'll be rushing to her rescue when people playing those characters come after her with a butchering knife.
] 