Talk:Mary Sue Test/@comment-11555902-20140611205631/@comment-4536066-20140612010449

Character with haunted pasts, especially pasts that specifically involve absent/dead parents, evil/abusive caretakers, and children who ran away at an early age and survived on their own before adulthood, are very, very cliche in the roleplaying world. I don't just mean RSRP, but in every roleplaying community I have ever been in.

The idea, usually prevalent among more amateur character writers, is that these are traits that can make a character dark, mysterious, and sympathetic without costing the character anything significant in the present. (For example, it is absurdly rare for a character with this background to come out of the situation socially warped in a very negative way. More often than not, the trauma galvanized the character into becoming strong, driven, and independent.) These sort of things are effectively the Mahjarsassin of dark backstories.

They're also often cop-outs. A writer who doesn't want to have to deal with explaining why their young(ish) characters were allowed freely to leave a welcoming home that needed them can easily take out two birds with one stone by killing off the parents or making them hurtful. This not only removes the parents' familial authority over the character, but also offers easy and obvious motivation for a character to leave. Or, not even that - sometimes it's just a cop-out for just not having to deal with the parents at all. Plus, it's a painfully obvious plot device - why come up with something unique and compelling when your parents are still alive?

So, between their rates as very popular cliches and their abuse by lazy and inexperienced writers, those things that you have listed are very well-known red flags of Mary Sue characters. And it's not just the test's creator saying so: this is a literature-wide acknowledgement.