MARY SUE - Terrible Writing Advice

One thing every story needs is a protagonist. But what kind of protagonist, one might ask? Why a perfect one of course! Let's get started! At first, creating the perfect protagonist may seem like a daunting task. But, don’t worry! Let's just start with a name. We will call our protagonist... Mary Sue. See. We are already halfway done! Utterly lacking in self awareness? Perfect! They say write what you know, and almost everyone knows themselves better than anyone else. So just put yourself into the story. Some might worry that they will make for a poor protagonist. Fear not. That's just because we need to get rid of the one thing that makes audiences not identify with a character. Flaws! Yes. Just scrub all of your flaws away and make your protagonist an idealized version of yourself. Now that we have removed all flaws, let's start adding strengths. Make Mary Sue young if not immortal because she is a half dragon, half vampire, half angel, half eleven princess. Always have everyone else describe her as beautiful while she remains completely unaware of her own gorgeous looks. Have her be so attractive that guys literally fight over her, but make sure Mary Sue is never actually smart enough to figure out why. That would make her look vain, which is a flaw. Now some of you might believe that flaws make characters believable and are a useful tool for humanizing our protagonist. That means if we must give Mary Sue flaws, then we should give her things like she 'cares too much' or 'she is too kind and selfless'. We can even have her die tragically at the end of the story and say that she was simply too good for this sinful Earth. It's okay. We can always resurrect her later. If we need to add some drama, we could always give her a tragic backstory she constantly angsts about, but never actually affects here outside of getting her pity points with the other characters. But before that, we need to make sure that everyone knows Mary Sue is special! Have a prophecy in the story? Make sure it's all about her! Is Mary Sue not in the scene, have every other character there talk about her. Shifting focus to the villains? Make sure they don't waste time actually running their evil empire or otherwise bringing their dark desires to fruition. Instead, they should be worrying about what Mary Sue is doing or plotting to take her for themselves. Does Mary Sue have parents? Make sure they are either outrageously abusive or perfect except for being tragically dead. Or both! Have her real, special parents killed in the backstory while she is stuck with abusive, normal foster parents. If they are abusive, make sure they inflict such terrible atrocities upon her like forcing her to wear dresses or attending school to better her education. Need to make a clear distinction between good and bad characters? Mary Sue makes it easy! If a character disagrees with her, then they are most certainly a bad guy while all those who agree with her are 100% virtuous without fail. This removes any character who could call out Mary Sue for her mistakes, which she never makes so it isn't needed. One thing to watch out for is to ensure that Mary Sue never fails. Have her effortlessly overcome every challenge. Make sure she bests all veteran characters in the setting in-spite of having only a fraction of the experience. Are the villains ruthless and supremely powerful? Not compared to Mary Sue. They should crumble before her in the most anticlimactic way possible just like the story's narrative stakes. It's not like our readers actually want to see a close contest. If any villain ever manages to actually hurt Mary Sue or any of her friends, make sure she dishes out a hundred fold more than she receives. Ensure that she makes the villain suffer far more than she did and that she shows him no remorse. After all, we don't want Mary Sue to display unheroic traits like mercy or forgiveness. Is Mary Sue starting to look a lot like the villain she is fighting? We could use their similarities to show Mary Sue's flaws while highlighting the positive traits of the villain to showcase the story's deep themes about the razor edge difference between heroes and villains, adding a layer of depth to both the story's symbolism and characterization. But that's dumb, we don't want the audience to actually think about depressing stuff like that. Thankfully this is easy to fix. Simply make the villain even more despicable for extra contrast. That should stop the audience from rooting for him. Now we have a perfect protagonist for our story. Good luck, and may your story be too good for this sinful Earth. Wait wait wait! I don't think this will work. My self insert should be a guy. There! I'll call him, Marty Stu.

Channel: Terrible Writing Advice

Views: 1,800,812

Rating: 4.9565682 out of 5

Keywords: Terrible Writing Advice, Not to guide, writing, Bad advice, That was a terrible idea, How to, How not to, guide, comedy, sarcasm, Talentless hack, How did you end up here?, Novel, Novel writing, Writing a book, book, J.P. Beaubien, J.P.Beaubien, Parody, Spoof, How desperate are you?, Terrible, JPBeaubien, JP Beaubien, Mary Sue, Protagonist, Fanfiction, Terrible Writing, Shouldn't you be writing rather that watching youtube videos?

Id: YhrfhQbY0K8

Length: 4min 27sec (267 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/DjangoWexler]

The problem with the whole "Mary Sue" debate is that people confuse the trappings (powers, perfection, etc) for the substance. The essence of Mary Sue is pretty simple: it's just a character that benefits so obviously from author favoritism that it breaks the reader's suspension of disbelief. It's not about who has god-like powers -- it's about how a character relates to the rest of the story. (And, since it's about reader suspension of disbelief, it's subjective...)

[u/Retsam19]

I avoid the term Mary Sue as much as possible during discussions; it's such a broad term that it tends to lead to a pointless semantic debate over the precise boundaries of the term, and it's such a pejorative term that it doesn't usually set a good tone for discussion, anyway.

And the fact is, tropes are neither good nor bad: basically every aspect of the traditional "Mary Sue" character can be done well, in the right story: so just pointing out that a protagonist is "over-powered" or such isn't really a good criticism, in and of itself.

[u/ArmanDoesStuff]

On the other hand, I hate a boring protagonist.

It doesn't have to be Anime levels of plot armour/power but if I'm reading a story, the main character should be important.

[u/mak6453]

Funny video but the audio makes it sound like i'm listening to you while riding one of those spinny platforms at a park playground.

Anyway, my mind instantly jumped to Rand from Wheel of Time for a lot of these examples and I was happy to realize that he's pretty well grounded in a lot of these aspects despite eventually becoming godlike. In fact, a lot of the characters in modern fantasy series are pretty reasonable (not that WoT counts as modern). All of the examples I can think of are from rather old books or TV shows. Not sure if that means popular fantasy has been written better, or I'm getting old enough to identify better writing, but I'm happy for it.

[u/PM_ME_LEGAL_PAPERS]

I've actually seen a professionally-published YA fantasy series where the main character is part human, part dwarf, part elf, and part dragon. And the books take themselves way too seriously for it to work.

[u/[deleted]]

KKC-rants and apologies in 3..2...1...

[u/DrDudeManJones]

Man, I'm going through Kingkiller Chronicles right now. Kovthe can definitely be characterized as a "mary sue" (as much as I hate the term). The series still kicks ass. There is a right way to execute on any trope.

[u/SF_Bluestocking]

Someone should be sure to send this along to Patrick Rothfuss.

[u/BestFantasyBooksHQ]

I will never look at heroes (or villains) the same again.....