Okay, for those of you who don't know what a Mary Sue is, it's a fanfiction term that is sometimes applied to original fiction as well. It refers to a character who is just too perfect - beautiful, good at everything, popular, a genius, extremely powerful, no flaws, gets all the hot guys, and so on. They either have Superman Syndrome (so powerful that there's no way to have a plot around them) or Barbie doll syndrome (Barbie is, if you look at all the dolls, a vet, a doctor, a mom, a princess, a movie star, a fairy, and so on). In general, people dislike them and wish you would hurry up and kill them off.

So, because I'm paranoid, I looked up a Mary Sue 'litmus test' and used it on my characters. I was shocked to find that even the characters I'd gotten great feedback on registered very high on the Mary Sue scale. Out of annoyance, I took the quiz again using myself as the character. Guess what? It said I was a Mary Sue, and the only reason I wasn't as bad a Mary Sue as my characters is because I'm unable to defend myself and wouldn't survive three seconds in the stories I write! (that, and I have no love life)

The moral of this story? Always trust your friends more than a computer quiz.

(Oh, and by the way - I don't think I'm perfect or amazing, and that is in no way the intention of this journal. I'm just laughing because the litmus test was supposed to critique realism, and it said a real person could not exist.)




(Actually, it's a wolf pack, and there's only one...)



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