Rehab for Roleplayers - Part 5

Welcome to Rehab for Roleplayers, a series of articles aimed at helping roleplayers more successfully make the transition into writing fiction.



Part 5 - Level 99 Druid Saves the Day (and Mary Sue, too)

Our old friend Level 9 Druid has been a really fun character, so his player has decided to feature him in a novel. Good for him! However, Druid's Player has never quite understood that other people don't much like his character, and for very good reason: Level 9 Druid never, ever loses.

He's handsome, of course. Extremely handsome (even with that strategically-placed and charmingly rogueish facial scar) — oh, and smart, and brave and of course magical and battle-proficient. Why, Level 9 Druid has mastered sixty-five crafts, all fields of magic and weaponry, and could show MacGyver a thing or two when it comes to warding off dragons with a hairpin and some chewing-gum. Needless to say, he's a hit with the ladies (especially those hot NPC barmaids, yo) and nothing can kill him because … well, his player really likes playing him; so he runs away, Brave-Sir-Robin-like, from all PK situations which might endanger his ongoing existence. Oops, did I say "runs away"? I meant, extricates himself from peril via his high level of intelligence, sword- and spell-proficiency and cunning— in the most heroic sort of way, naturally.

Yes, it seems Level 9 Druid has evolved into Level 99 Druid, hero of his player's novel, which is aptly titled, "Level 99 Druid Saves the Day, and Boinks Mary Sue". At the conclusion of which, in a wickedly twisted ending— he does! Surprise!

Sadly, the novel never makes it to publication. Druid's Player gets rejection after rejection (he doesn't, of course, send it to the publishers of a certain vampire series, because he wants to be regarded as a serious young author, and is well aware of how hard authors and readers of actual literature have laughed at Mary Suella and her lover, Mr. Sparkles.)

What somebody needs to tell poor Druid's Player is that he's committed a major literary faux pas and made his character a giant Marty Stu, thus ensuring his novel is interesting to nobody but himself.

So, What's a Mary Sue?

"Mary Sue" (or, in the case of our male Druid, "Marty Stu") is a term used to describe a character who is blatantly used to gratify the needs of the author's own personal ego. Most commonly seen in the realms of fan-fiction (where the term was originally identified and named) and in roleplay, Mary Sues are generally agreed to be a huge literary no-no.

In this section, I'll be exploring in a general way the various problematic character types which may freely exist among roleplay and fan-fiction communities but will not usually be well-received by literary editors and critics, or by a reading audience over the emotional age of fourteen or so.

Since the kind persons responsible for defining and explicating the "Mary Sue" character on Wikipedia have done such an excellent job, I highly recommend you read the entry on it there for more detailed information which I won't be repeating here in any great detail.

Briefly, a Mary Sue primarily exists as an idealised vehicle for wish-fulfilment on the author's behalf. In being a means of "author-insertion", a proxy or sock-puppet for the author him/herself, very often a Mary Sue/Marty Stu is not written with an external reader in mind, but is aimed instead at making the writer happy.

Here's a very typical example of Mary Sueism:

the author of a fan-fiction novel has a fixation on a character from the Harry Potter series, and he/she writes a story which fulfils their own desire to explore those feelings, rather than setting out to engage a reading audience - with the main character almost invariably being romantically and/or sexually entangled with Ron or Harry, and thereby gaining victory over various upstart love-interest "rivals" depicted by the original author.

Now, this is a deliberately stereotypical depiction of Mary Sue-ism, for the sake of clear example. However, there are various other, often more subtle, forms of author-insertion which are undesirable in mainstream fiction.

Self-insertion by an author into a fictional work is not necessarily a bad thing, and many fine authors have used it as a literary device. It should on the whole be avoided by a beginner author, though, at least until they are more familiar with other, more basic components of novel-writing. And certainly, the story's hero should not merely be a one-dimensional character like poor old Level 99 Druid.

While it's very likely that characters in many good novels have sprung from an author's own personal wish-fantasies, a good novel ought not to be simply  (and especially not obviously) an extension of a writer's need to feel manly, loved, desirable, super-special or successful. Too, a character ought not to exist solely as a vehicle for personifying an author's own self or emotional states.

I feel this an appropriate place to add a quote taken from the comments of my last article, made by Arkhein, which I thought sums it all up nicely:

"As roleplayers, we tend to be a bit possessive about our PCs and campaigns. The game is about a 117th level fighter (ME) rescuing Prince/Princess ME of ME-vania from the Not-ME (or some other Freudian crap.) Authors somehow have to take the characters and worlds they craft and GIVE them to the audience. They have to detach, but not only that, but make the gift something the receiver actually wants to accept."

Well said, old bean!


The problem with one-dimensional characters

A one-dimensional character, like Mary Sue and Level 99 Druid, is one who in the course of a story never learns anything, never changes, and never develops any of the real depth which makes a character not only believable but someone a reader can identify with.

"Okay," says Druid's Player. "Fair enough. I'll give my character some flaws. How about an allergy to wheatgrass, and a large (but roguishly attractive) facial scar?"

Sigh.

Shallow characters like our Druid, along with Mary Sue, tend have only those flaws which will never stand in the way of their writer's own happiness. They'll never be deliberately boring, smelly or fail to attract the kind of romance, acclaim, respect or status the author themselves would like to have. They start out appealing, and finish being even more appealing. They don't tend to die or lose a limb, or spend Saturday nights alone, watching re-runs of MacGyver.

I'm not at all saying a character has to be an ugly loser in order to have depth. But a character's journey through a novel ought to feature downs as well as ups, inner conflict and external conflict which the character cannot simply vanquish with a cute frown and stamp of heel, or a magical wave of a hand. Real problems, real challenges, which in real life are not always won, or are sometimes won at a cost, or which a character learns from and thereby is changed in some fundamental way.

Also, I'm not suggesting that the one-dimensional character has no place at all in fiction. Jane Austen's novels are crawling with them, but they are not main characters (sometimes they can make good main characters, though this is something I'd think twice about attempting) and are used to illustrate ignorance and folly rather than being used as a vehicle for playing Ms. Austen's own favourite fantasies.

I used Harry Potter as example earlier, and will again to illustrate a vastly appealing character who at the same time has depth: whatever one thinks of the novels themselves, it should at least be recognised that the character of Harry (while fulfilling several very old-hat stereotypes, which we'll explore later) is not at all one-dimensional. He starts out as a charmingly fresh-faced innocent, but by the end of the series has, via various conflicts, become quite a deal more jaded. He may ultimately win the war against evil, but he doesn't win every battle. Harry is fraught with self-doubt and faces his own lower nature more than once— but more importantly, he thus grows and learns as a character, and we can follow his development as an interest-sustaining, realistic and very logical means of moving the story forward.

Stereotypes and Cliches

Stereotypes are those characters everyone's seen, or stories everyone's heard of, at some point, and are also known as "clichés", especially when they are so badly handled that a reader cannot forgive their use. Most one-dimensional characters and Mary Sues will fit one category of stereotype or another, and also are usually terrible clichés.

Here's some oft-seen examples:

- The tragic/flawed hero

He's born into poverty/hardship/a cruel world/is disabled, but uses lessons learned via his suffering/his big ol' heart to rise above it all and win the day. Harry Potter and Forrest Gump fit this category squarely.

- The maiden-in-distress

She's awfully pretty— and haplessly caught in dire unhappiness/peril/locked in a tower either by Daddy or a baddie/cursed/kidnapped by pirates/etc., and is inevitably saved from her woes by one sort of handsome and manly hero or another. Hello, Cinderella! Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet (from 'Pride and Prejudice') also fits this category, being rescued from her expected fate of social and mental shallowness and banality by the quite dreamily interesting (and relatively deep) Mr. Darcy.

- Bad-boy-makes-good

Bad boy/rebel biker/jaded youth/arrogant sod/criminal/tough guy makes good/grows a heart/reveals his true and kindly nature. He starts out straddling the line somewhere between good and bad, but winds up a kind of anti-hero who saves the day, triumphs in some morally redeemable way, or simply learns that there's more to life than being a bad boy. Han Solo from 'Star Wars'  and Hellboy are both rebels/badboys with heart. Huck Finn is among my favourite literary examples.

There are hundreds of stereotypes and clichés, so I am not going to list them all here. Suffice to say that pretty much everything's been done already (look up TVtropes.com for an extensive listing), if not done to death; the trick to writing an interesting and hopefully saleable piece of fiction isn't so much to avoid clichés as it is to give these old chestnuts (which have actually become clichés and stereotypes because we love them) a fresh and interesting face.

But take a Mary Sue and/or a Level 99 Druid, and insert them into a stale cliché and you get… Well, you get sparkly vampires or yaoi anime slash fanfics. Sadly, even they can be published, but yeah. A thing which sells is not always good. Look at thalidomide.


Supervictims

To finish up this section, I'd like to take a moment to discuss the Supervictim, or Anti-Sue.

Just as a regular Mary Sue is an idealised version of her author, placed into an ideally gratifying (to said author) situation, the Anti-Sue (or for a male, the Level 99 Druid of Perpetual Angst) is designed  to evoke sympathy and very little else.

If you're a roleplayer, you're probably familiar with Anti-Sue. She's that frail, blonde elf or darkly beautiful vampire always snivelling into a hanky in a corner in the tavern or being raped, kidnapped and/or mauled by something. She's almost always got a tragic past in which everyone but herself dies, from whence she has fled to somewhere far, far away and is now all alone and miserable. Until,  that is, she finds a handsome and kindly hero who can stomach her misery long enough to fall in love with  her (ideally both IC and OOC) and live happily (or at least less damply) ever after.

As for the Druid of Perpetual Angst, he will have a tortured soul and most commonly be observed moping darkly in a corner in the tavern with a hood pulled over his pale yet elegantly put together face. He is either prone to uncontrollable violence (due to being cursed/crazy/emotionally wounded/possessed by demons) or is so highly sensitive and special that his mere existence in world which refuses to spend all its time trying to understand him rends holes in his deep, obsidian-hued and angst-filled heart.

I don't know about you, but these kinds of overly-flawed characters and their lightless, self-obsessed stories bore me ten ways to Sunday in RP, let alone in any kind of fiction. Really, the only ones I can think of off-hand whom I've found redeemable (thanks to the skill of the authors) is Emily Bronte's Heathcliff, from 'Wuthering Heights', and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both characters explore the darker side of the human soul and are about as emo as it gets while they do so, but in a way which renders them objects of empathy rather than sympathy, and people from whom we can learn something, rather than merely being vehicles for invoking emotional responses from a reader.

Overly-flawed characters who are not utterly self-obsessed (and have writers who are likewise so) or who are, but in an amusing way can, however, make for brilliant comedy. Such comedy is always best when entirely intentional, and the reader is laughing with your work rather than at it.



In Part 6, I'll be discussing the use of attributions ("he said") in dialogue.