Talk:Mary Sue Test/@comment-11555902-20140611205631/@comment-5523905-20140612163219

The simple fact that you refuse to even entertain the notion that your character is built on ideas that have been done a hundred thousand times before you could even read is only further solidifying the evidence that your character is at least partially a Mary Sue, if only because you, as the writer, aren't able to separate yourself from him enough to acknowledge and criticize his original design.

In fact, admitting that you created him four years ago is its own red flag; if you're four years older and more intelligent now than you were when you created this character, I'd like to think that (with an objective perspective) you would easily be able to go back and find things that would be better off reworked. I know that I created my first character for this community about three years ago and since then I realized he was ripe with weak design and just outright trashed him for a more nuanced idea. I'm not saying trash Kaboto, I'm just saying that something you made before you really learned what you're doing can only grow in greatness from being revisited and revised, whereas it can only be hurt by insisting that the design is flawless and nothing anyone of any experience ever says could possibly have any grounding.

One flaw does not a sue make - it's rare to find a character who doesn't get at least a 5 before the counter-balances. It's when you pile special thing after special thing onto one single character and just let the list build up without any re-thinking that you end up with a crazy score that's double- or triple- the suggested warning. And even, Sues are not always the worst thing to have; they can be very positive in certain mediums - Link, for example, is a gigantic Mary Sue, and people love him. I'm fairly sure Rumplestiltskin from Once Upon A Time would get a nasty score on this chart, yet people love him. They're just very rough as roleplaying characters or, say, main protagonists in novels because they're gruelling to focus on and have been so overdone that they're basically the hallmark of mediocre fanfictions.

Honestly, if you're just going to cry and blame the test for your high score instead of taking it as unbiased feedback based on decades of professional literary review, then there's no reason to be taking this test in the first place.