I never wanted this more than I did with Naruto. The main three were boring af trope constructs, I wanted all the stories about the rest of the kids in the village.
That's why the stuff I am doing for the PPC are things like "Oedipus but with mpreg" and "edgy edgy self insert written by a twenty something"
*sigh* I found a fic of 'what if Artemis crock was raised by the arrowverse team arrow,' which is an interesting plot idea, the dialogue is quite funny and well written so normally I'd eat this up. But. The kid does not act like Artemis. At all. Her child self or teenage self, the kid is a decent kid character but she is not ARTEMIS.
My sibling calls "everyone in this story is more interesting than the main characters" "Naruto Syndrome" for that reason.
I did some of the harmless teenagers' stuff as a PPCer and kind of regret it now, but mostly ended up sticking to the mind-boggling fail written by people old enough to know better later. I recently felt guilty about picking on squickfic now I've written grosser, but I felt better after rechecking the wiki pages and remembering that wasn't actually why they were bad.
At this point I find Mary Sue to be an almost useless term. The typical lists for what define a Sue do not define a bad character. Jame should count as one and scores hideously well on those stupid tests, yet she happens to be one of the best written characters I've seen. She has things like the absurd power, people finding her bizarrely beautiful with no effort on her part, an overly tragic backstory, the narrative warping itself around her, and so on. The actual useful bits of the definition I find tend to be ignored in favor of bitching about stupid bullshit. Like the aforementioned incredibly shitty tests that do nothing but encourage other, different poor writing habits. I suppose the term does have uses for being mean to people, though. Which isn't terribly great. It's kind of like the hero's journey in which we have something that could be useful analysis wise, but often proves too useless or too problematic for me to be happy with the fucking thing.
Granted best written for me can mean absolutely fucking nothing to someone else. Because everything's an argument.
The inverse of "so absurdly powerful that it wraps the story around them" is "so absurdly boring that absolutely nothing of merit occurs at all" and honestly, I'd rather read characters that are the former. There was a trend for a while where roleplayers would fight to make the more boring, average, bland characters possible, because whoever had the one with the least amount of interesting bits won the "definitely not a Mary Sue" card and could dictate the standard for everyone else. I mean, I think that's part of why particularly domestic AUs that strip the original characters of everything interesting exist. A lot of them can be super well written and preserve all those interest bits in a completely new context-- but some of them seem to kick around because if you write something bland, at least you won't be attacked for being too weird, or absurd, or attention-seeking. The worst anyone ever says of boring stories is that they're boring. They don't get torn to shreds and spread around as gleeful examples of the worst writing ever.
The litmus tests are often doubly useless because the specific traits that are common in even the most textbook of Sues vary with the medium/fandom/genre/whatever and with fads and trends, so the litmus tests have gotten steadily broader and broader to try to encompass every possible variation and it just doesn't work. I remember back when the Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test had "is their name a variation of Hunter or Raven" on it, and last time I looked it had been expanded all the way to "is their name a noun or adjective." And then they have to cover the test in disclaimers about "unless this is normal in the story," and the end result is that depending on how you read it you can make practically any character come out as either a flaming Sue or a complete non-Sue.
This just in, nearly every transformer is a Mary Sue. (Except the ones who have bullshit supposedly latin names) :P
It also doesn't help that you can rack up points absurdly easy with like, three or four Super Bad Things (more than one romantic interest? FORTY POINTS TO GRYFFINDOR SUE) and the ranges can run from 'slightly reasonable' to 'even one question answered yes denotes the worst Enoby cloen ever' so none of it means anything.
Really if I am going to tear anything to shreds it's boring writing. For me there is no bigger sin than boring me with your entertainment. You can fail beautifully at what you intended to do and so long as it brings me some sort of joy I will be happy with it. But boring? No. Fuck you. That is horrid.
Also if we want to be really picky a lot of characters have names that are nouns or adjectives. They just aren't ones that the reader necessarily recognizes them as that. Linguistic nitpicking that misses the point!
Yeah, exactly. Or even ones that are in English- the names "Lily" and "Iris" and "Ruby" are all pretty unremarkable. I assume they were trying for the equivalent of, well, Enoby (Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way = 4 ~edgy~ nouns and the author's favorite celebrity), but trying to catch everything like it results in massive false positives.
Honestly my big litmus for a Mary Sue or Gary Stu is whether or not they are ever allowed to be wrong. Thats why Mary Sues in roleplaying annoy me infinitely more than in fiction
That's one of the more useful parts of the definition. But again the definition is so cluttered I'd rather spend the extra words stating exactly what I mean instead.
