#i personally love mary sues

[an-entity-i-think]

You know what it really genuinely annoys me when I'm reading fic and they girlbossify every woman ever. "The boys are idiot messes but the girls have never done anything wrong ever in their lives <3" makes me scream like why are you doing this???? They are ALL idiots!!!! Make her an idiot too!!! Woman aren't perfect!!! Men aren't idiots all the time!!! I'm not perfect and I'd like to be able to connect with a female character but you keep writing them like they are omniscient perfect at everything beings!!!! FNIESJHSHSDB AHHHH

[yourocdoeswhat]

*raises hand* if we're getting rid of the term mary sue i propose we throw out "tumblr sexyman" along with it. its 2023 time to stop shaming people for loving specific fictional characters

Hm!

I know exactly what you're getting at. I had a conversation with a friend recently, where I was talking about how my DnD character would be seen as a mary-sue since she's the daughter of some powerful archfey and has multiple love interests, and he said 'Oh my dude's a tumblr sexyman for sure' because he's a tall white guy with a tragic backstory who loves blood and knives.' Both terms would really reduce our characters down to just bare minimums.

If your character is called a tumblr sexyman, you presume he's (usually) a tall, white, skinny, conventionally attractive man in a suit, sometimes of a character who isn't human-like. Ala: Onceler, Sherlock, Loki; Wheatley, Bill Cypher. It's largely seen as an archetype and a meme. And that's gotta suck, to make a guy who fits a certain image and then have him be treated like a joke.

Speaking from experience, it's hard out here for a Mary-Sue lover. You don't see a Mary Sue poll, or Mary Sue being used as a meme. Mary-Sue used to just mean a woman character who steals the spotlight in bad fanfiction (which I disagree ever needed mocking in the first place. Fuck the haters, how else can writers learn?) But now people use it to refer to any competent, smart, beautiful, or just annoying female character.

It's really unfair to people just having fun.

[304wv66]

8.28.2023 // it's her!!! it's aoi!!! aka just.. just a. really unlikable type of person.

[aeons-domain]

[melonisopod]

Idk I think more mentally-unwell lonely nerds who develop parasocial relationships with the anime girls in their gacha games need to learn how to write fanfiction and make AUs. Or idk commission a fanartist. They literally have the money to blow on glorified slot machines, like bro just toss some cash at your local artist and commission them to draw your waifu making out with your self-insert. Better use of your money imo.

[heartplaces]

been watching supernatural again lately and felt like drawing my spn oc, magpie martin!! everyone’s favorite psychic and my personal victim of the narrative. sorry for all that trauma baby but I appreciate your hope and unyielding optimism in the face of it anyways

[alienheartattack]

Me: All fanfiction is valid!

Also me, gripping my bejeweled chalice in rage: Character x reader is a pox upon the land

[laurelindebear]

I wonder how much of the 'Mary Sue' thing is born of insecurity. I am always afraid of my characters being Mary Sues because I am deeply insecure and have a really baked-in fear of being unlikeable, cringey, annoying, burdensome...of existing, really, in a way which others can perceive negatively. Perfection is the path to love and acceptance and worth (for me; I can and do love others even while acknowledging their faults. Or at least I think I love them as far as I understand love, which is possibly not far.) (I am aware this is hugely fucked up, almost as much as my parentheses usage.)

But when I roleplay or create characters, my biggest power fantasy is 'kinda like me, but better in every way'. I want to be good, I want to be courageous and noble and heroic and strong in all the ways I am not in real life. I've had some chaotic-neutral type characters in RP, but even there they have often trended towards goodness and altruism over time, or at least have a solid moral code.

I've never made it through an 'evil' playthrough of a game. It's not fun, I don't want to do it. Maybe that means I'm not, deep down, inherently cruel and harmful. Maybe it just reminds me too much of the darkness I know is there that I have to try to keep locked down. I suspect it's the latter.

If I want to put a character in a world to, on some level, act out an imaginary scenario for myself, I do feel pressure to make them 'special' in some ways. Partly this is so they'll be interesting, but partly it's so they'll be worthy and good enough to 'earn' their place somehow. Because even in my own fantasies, I am not and could never be brave enough, clever enough, interesting enough, and certainly not beautiful enough to be worthy of renown, of adventure, of great deeds, of love, of power, of desire. So it has to be someone else that's relatable enough, but far, far better than me. How realistic can they be, if I'm real, and I'm not enough?

Given all that, it would hardly be surprising if I ended up with Mary Sues. No lesser figure could carry that much weight.

[spectrum-color]

It is extremely annoying how it’s impossible to start a positive thread about Egwene on r/wot without her legion of haters over there talking about what a horrible arrogant monster she is (sometimes with the backhanded compliment that she’s a great character to be as memorably hateable as she apparently is.) That sub is insufferable

[arabian-batboy]

I have been in the mood to watch some Shoujo so I finally got around watching Fruits Basket since its one of the most iconic Shoujo out there and it just feels like I’m missing out on not watching it and while I’m definitely enjoying it so far, I have to admit that Yuki’s (and Kagura) annoying ass almost made me want to drop the show...

[bogunicorn]

Being shady in public about people's custom characters in games unprovoked is and was Loser Shit. People post about their PCs because they're having fun. It's not, like, systemically harmful or anything to bag on bland or ugly OCs, nobody's identity is being attacked or anything, obviously, but something can be shitty loser behavior without being bigoted, you know? Becky making a white girl elf with pink hair and a weirdly modded face isn't harming anyone or anything, and if Becky is acting shitty and running her mouth about how much better her OC is than someone else's, her OC is not the thing causing that issue, her stinky attitude is.

Like, man, when people make custom characters, they're just vibing. It's not for you, and nobody's OC is "adding representation" or "taking representation away" in fandom. Your social obligations are how you treat other human beings, not in making custom characters for literally anybody's sake but your own. No other person in fandom "benefits" if I as a white person make a non-white OC and post pictures of them or if I romanced a relatively unpopular character, I didn't do anything with that. I also didn't do anything by making white characters or romancing a popular love interest character, either.

I am all here for harmlessly clowning, especially if it's clowning on some nonsense. But I think fandom also needs to examine why they're so overly invested in what kinds of PCs that strangers on the internet make in their video games, and why they feel the need to feed into some narrative about competition over, like, elves and dwarves and shit.

You're not ~sticking it to the man~ when you make a post that's just "if your OC is boring to me then she's ugly and you're delusional for thinking she's cool" unprompted, you're just acting like you're still in high school. Bitch about other people's ugly OCs in your cunty little group chat like a grownup. You never, ever have to like what other people have made, but "this style of OC is fucking hideous and tacky and I hate it" is, like, an Inside Voice kind of sentiment. Saying it in public where you know that the people you're talking about will see it makes you the one making people feel bad for no good reason.

[undead-potatoes]

I don't recall seeing it (if you've already addressed it whoops), how did Jay come to be a druid?

I've mentioned lil bits here and there, but I don't think I've typed it up in any coherent way before so thanks for the excuse B)

TL;DR: He always had an innate connection to nature, especially animals, which manifested itself in the form of being able to speak to animals and use simple wild shapes as a pre-teen. He was then taught how to harness more advanced druidic abilities by actual druids, first by a spore druid living in Baldur's Gate, and later by druids in a circle somewhere outside of the city.

I'm basing most of this on the fact that 1) Forest Gnomes have "Speak with (small) Animals" as a racial trait, and 2) how much of a druid's skill comes from simply studying and emulating nature - they're as much felt and intuited as they are taught.

Jay has always been very attuned to the animal life around him, being able to communicate with them for as long as he can remember. Strays, rodents, and birds were as much friends to him as the other humanoid kids, and it really shaped how he interacts with the world.

As a child he'd study the various animals to see how they moved, and then try to emulate that when he was playing and pretending to be those animals. You know, normal kid stuff. Which is why it took him by surprise when he suddenly stood there one day, having turned into an actual cat. It was more an accident than anything else, almost how sorcerer kids can have sudden and unpredictable surges of magic, where he connected with something more primal for just a moment.

It took him years before he could do it again, and even longer before he could consistently wild shape on command, but he got there eventually. He also tried his hand at other city animals like stray dogs and rats to varying degrees of success, but his cat form was always the one that felt the most "true" to him.

This was another thing that fundamentally shaped him and how he moves, the wild shape being a natural extension of his own humanoid form. As he got older, changing and morphing into other forms became almost as easy as breathing to him, something he barely even offered a conscious thought as he did it.

For years that's all it was, using his minor skills to play, travel around the city, and commit minor crimes like stealing food and trinkets. Nothing throws the Flaming Fists off quite like running into an alley and disappearing into thin air, leaving only an inconspicuous-looking cat behind.

He would eventually bump into Nana, an older spore druid who lived in and oversaw her own little corner of the Baldur's Gate sewers. She took him under her wing, and taught him some of the fundamentals of druidism, both in the form of the most basic skills, but also as an ideology. It's from her he learned to have deep respect for all forms of life, even the ugly and uncomfortable, and how death and decay are mere extensions of life itself.

Nana soon realized Jay's talents laid outside the realms of her own capabilities, and used her connections to druids outside of the Gate to send Jay away to a circle where he could really hone his wild shape abilities. He spent a few years at the circle learning a wider variety of skills, in addition to how to better control his shapeshifting.

He really could just have stayed there and become a permanent fixture at the circle among the other druids, which probably would have been a better life for him overall. But he longed back to the city, and so he returned to Baldur's Gate where he quickly fell back into a life of crime, just with a more advanced set of tools at his disposal.

I imagine he'd been about 14 or 15 when he left for the circle, and somewhere in his late teens when he came back; the perfect age to be genuinely useful, yet easily influenced and manipulated by people seeking to take advantage of him and his abilities.

[memento-mariii]

The way dudebros* will froth at the mouth and scream mary sue any time a female protagonist dares to be competent or have any agency in her own story but then they turn around and go gaga over male characters who are treated as basically infallible by the narrative 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

(*oftentimes male, but actually gender neutral)

[nthflower]

Showing my current far harbor gaming experience with my shitty doodle also main girlie oc

[lesenbyan]

Decided fuck it and making the wikis for my girls in gdocs bc I think I can format it well enough and I've gotten 1K words into Eve's, just hitting Sastasha (wherein details likely more scattered bc there on they follow story with additions) and desperately trying to find the line between "she's a sex worker" and "I'm wildly horny for my own OC and am unashamed about it"

[mina-tepes]

I give you, Life with Picasso Moments that I’m Just Always Thinking About