Sue test

[easol.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if this has been posted before, but I'll delete it if it has been.

http://www.springhole.net/quizzes/marysue.htm

I ran Anita through the Universal MS Litmus test, and she got a whopping 233 Sue points in a test where 50 is considered irretrievable Sueiness. I should do Gillian Key next.

(For comparison, I ran Sam Gamgee through it and got 8 points).

Comments

[slayra.livejournal.com]

Yep. I didn't complete it, but the score was already 102 (for Anita Blake). This just confirms what we already know... AB is teh ultimate Mary-Sue. :p

[easol.livejournal.com]

So many of these things seem almost like they were tailored for her, like the carrying-dozens-of-weapons-just-in-case thing.

[dreamstrifer.livejournal.com]

Haha, that's hilarious. I ran my paranormal heroine through, and she got 2. Mostly because she got a lot of points deducted because she has crippling anxiety and has phobias or fears of everything (so she runs away a lot. XD)

[easol.livejournal.com]

2 is the lowest I've heard of! I suspect Sam would have gotten that low a score, except for his Numenorean sword and "noun" last name.

[dreamstrifer.livejournal.com]

Seriously, I was shocked. i would have thought she'd gotten higher since her appearance and some other things are based on myself. But I put that she'd run away from a fight and that she has a severe phobia that wouldn't disappear in a critical situation and I use her weaknesses as plot devices. XD

[kd-lalala.livejournal.com]

Well basing certain aspects of your characters isn't a bad thing, they're your characters dontcha know, I think those questions are just there on the quiz to detect blantant self insertation :P Like, oooooooooh sayyyyyyyyyyyy....LAURITA

[easol.livejournal.com]

I think some combinations may score higher than individual questions.

[bludflower.livejournal.com]

But isn't everyone's name a proper noun? That one kind of threw me... @_@

[wonderbink.livejournal.com]

I just ran my character through it and while it looked a bit on the verge of Sue-ish, but when I cut out the answers that had to be answered 'yes' because of the plot itself (i. e. stuff I couldn't get rid of without it being a completely different story) the score dropped considerably. I'm going to port this over to lashouts_writer for further discussion. Thanks for the link!

[dreamstrifer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree with the plot thing. Like, I want to run another character in the future, and I'm wondering if I should leave "is you're character an amazing singer" or however it's worded, blank. Since my character is an opera singer by trade. Of course she's going to be awesome and talented.

[wonderbink.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm, not really. I kinda thought the point was if the character has super-speshul powahs for no good reason beyond yay-coolness, then you're looking at Sueness. The story is pretty much ABOUT the strange things that start happening to her and how she deals with them, so there's no way to excise them without leaving . . . well, not much left to write about.

[pastygothchick.livejournal.com]

Have you put Merry Gentry through the test yet?

[kd-lalala.livejournal.com]

Merrykins got a 168 when I put her through it.

[easol.livejournal.com]

I got a 208 for Merry.

Eragon got 223, almost as Suey as Anita.

[medicineseller9.livejournal.com]

The proportions of Sue-ness for Anita Blake are astounding. It doesn't appear much in books about writing stories - the concept of the Mary Sue and not making your characters too perfect - but surely she understands that AB is boring if she can do nothing wrong?

Or that AB's blatant hypocrisy between what she says and actually does makes her unlikeable? I was under the impression that authors are supposed to make their characters somewhat redeemable to a reader.

It might just be her bloated ego - now she has thousands of "devoted fans" buying the books however trasy and slutty AB is, she doesn't need to think about the writer's craft anymore.

[runetraverse.livejournal.com]

Damn, this thing scared me for a minute - I ran one of my own novel characters and got a 61. Then after I cut out the plot specific stuff - like yes, she has cash to spend, but it's explained in-story and actually causes her problems - and it dropped a lot.

Sadly, there's no way to explain the "yeah, people are envious of her, but the specific chick who is a) is literally psychotic b) is a major villian and c) is really mostly pissed 'cause the guy she originally snubbed for arranged marriage fell in love with said hero and became God-Touched." xDDDD

[sfph.livejournal.com]

People who are all "oh, I got a hideous score but then I cheat and don't count some stuff so my score is okay now!" baffle me. What's the point?

I agree. Sueish traits which are important to the plot are still Sueish. See also Kushiel's Dart -- the plot essentially revolved around her being a speshul snowflake, and the plot wouldn't have happened if she wasn't a speshul snowflake from a young age, but that doesn't make her seem like any less of a flaming Sue. Maybe I'll take the test for her.

On the other hand, I don't think having a character be something of a Sue (or even a huge one) is a terrible thing. I've GMed for tabletop games where my players tried to play charaters who were completely normal in every way, and it just didn't work. They weren't interesting and it was really hard to get them involved in the plot. I believe the same thing is true of characters in books -- even if they start out normal, they have to end up extraordinary somehow. Otherwise nobody wants to read about them.

And sure, tests like this are completely inadequate for a lot of things. But I don't think this is supposed to be adequate for everyone. For example, if a writer was new to the concept of Sues, linking her (or him) to this might be a good way to get her to realise what's going on -- assuming she didn't do the 'oh, this doesn't count of reasons x, y, and z' thing. Somebody who knows very well what a Sue is and what they're like doesn't need this test for anything other than the lulz.

[sfph.livejournal.com]

Somewhat disappointingly (to me), Phedré only got 60-something. I would have thought there would be more points for things like... being the only one of her kind to be born in a century, having an ability that's a gift from an angel, being exceptionally beautiful even among all the speshul beautiful snowflakes in the speshul beautiful snowflakeland where they only get pregnant if they want to and don't have disease or STDs so they can have as much perfect beautiful sex as they want and never suffer any of the consequences...

Sorry, getting sort of carried away. I dislike those books rather intensely, although kudos to them for showing BDSM as something that isn't psychologically unhealthy. (*Cough* AnitaBlake *Cough*)

[wonderbink.livejournal.com]

In my own case, I'd never taken the test before and I wasn't sure how things were 'weighted'. And I didn't even get a 'hideous' score--it was 'borderline' at the absolute worst.

So when I looked over my answers, I tried to figure out "how much of this is genuinely necessary and how much of this could be changed without damaging the story?" Because that's kind of the point of why I ran it through to begin with--to see if and where I may have gone overboard, given that I'd already seen some rather bad Sue-symptoms in the initial draft.

[sfph.livejournal.com]

Here comes Extreme ExampleWoman! Watch her fly through the sky, alienating a lot of people by using her superpower of using really extreme examples to prove points!

Princess Lauralynne Sapphire Snowblossom was born the crown princess of all elves. However, evil Warlord Daa'iman Mashghuul kidnapped her when she was seven years old and pressed her into slavery. She was raped repeatedly because she was so beautiful and everybody wanted her. Because of this, she developed a hatred of men. One day, because of the trauma that came from the constant rape, she discovered her latent power to control light and darkness. She used this to slaughter Daa'iman's entire army and then make wings for herself out of sunlight to fly away.

Unfortunately, Daa'iman himself, being a tenacious bastard, wasn't content to let such a perfect treasure go, so he sent his remaining legions after the princess. The rest of the book is a war between Warlord Mashghuul and the kingdom of Faerie over the princess. In the end, she uses her powers to save the day and ride off into the sunset.

Is that a Mary Sue? Absolutely. Are all of her Sueish traits intgral to the plot? Absolutely. If you took away just about any of those things, the plot would unravel. Does that make it any less Sueish? I would say not.

That's how I see it, anyway. But keep in mind what I said in my previous post -- I don't think a certain number of Sue traits are necessarily a bad thing. Nobody wants to read about normal people going about their normal lives. Something has to be extraordinary.

[naeko.livejournal.com]

My most recently-created character only got a 5 on the test, which is weird because even I think she comes across a bit Sueish. I'm trying my damndest to tone it down, but if I were going to go by the test, I could apparently Sue her up a little bit more and she'd still be okay.

Basically, I don't think the test is so much about labeling your character Sue or Not Sue, but more about knowing what things you really need to watch out for and/or edit.

[easol.livejournal.com]

I think you can waive the "Sue name" and a few other characteristics (like being royalty) if you're retelling a story with previously established people/characters, like King Nuada Silverhand.