Close Enough

This is wonderful.

January 18 is National Polygraph Day. I decided to give you, as a writer, another kind of test. The Mary-Sue Litmus Test. This is a test designed to figure out whether your character is guilty of being a Mary-Sue, or "perfect" character. There are three main types: average, who is perfect in every way, shape, and form; clone, which is the author inserting themselves into a main character; and trauma, who has had an undeserved amount of abuse, has infinite mental disorders, and uses that as an excuse to either do horrible things or cry in a corner the whole time.

The most in-depth and my favorite is http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm, but a close second is http://www.katfeete.net/writing/marysue.html. Please note that those two strictly apply to humanoid creatures. For a wolf one, I found http://quizilla.teennick.com/quizzes/8164465/the-mary-sue-test-wolf-versionrequired-for-entrance-to-ethereal. While it is supposed to be for entrance to a roleplay, you can still get a pretty accurate score.

If you're looking to find out if a whole race in your fantasy story is too perfect, you may be looking for http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysuerace.htm.

Stock Character: Contender

Rocky Balboa is a Contender
stock: He loses the fight in
the end, but that was okay.

Contender

Stock Type: Hero

Hero Subtype: Reluctant Hero

The contender is the type of character that is a complete and total underdog who is expected to go up in competition of any sort against someone who shows much greater prowess than he. This can be anything, from boxing to baseball to swordplay. The contender usually has a kind of coach or mentor character watching over him and training him how to get better. While he may occasionally win, it is tradition that the stock character loses this major competition, but then he learns something from his failure and can sometimes try again. Some notable examples include Rocky Balboa, Daniel LaRusso, The Bad News Bears, Ryu, Ted "Wildcat" Grant, The Charlestown Chiefs, and Terry Bogard.

THE Fantasy Cliche

Vorpal swords: good for
killing jabberwockies, not for
your fiction.

This plot is basically the synopsis of everything wrong to do when you're writing fantasy. If anyone does this, I will personally go to their house and make them apologize for writing such a travesty.

A hero lives in a land that eerily resembles medieval England if medieval England were romanticized and otherwise inaccurate. There, he is a poor farm boy just trying to raise money from his family. Meanwhile a dark lord with a name like Gramir of the Wicked Death comes back from the underworld where he came and is seeking revenge. Gramir or one of his goons kills the farm boy's family, and he mourns. After he mourns, he decides to avenge. He finds an all-powerful sword that once belonged to either the greatest hero of this land's history or the strongest god in the pantheon (there's only one religion, and it's polytheistic). Behind the sword there's an elderly mentor that tells hero the truth; that wasn't his real family, and he's prophesized to kill Gramir. The mentor teaches little that the protagonsit needs to know and then dies. It doesn't matter how. The protagonist feels as if he will fail, but keeps going. Meanwhile, the king's daughter (always blonde and pale) is captured by Gramir, but the hero is on a long quest and doesn't know. As the hero travels he meets a handful of interchangable but awkward sidekicks. When the protagonist faces Gramir, he throws away these sidekicks (who would be perfectly useful as human shields, in my opinion) and takes out his sword. Despite the fact he barely knows how to hold it, he kills Gramir because of the power that the sword holds. He finds the princess and takes her back. Her parents know that she's betrothed, but they get married because he saved her. It ends with a lavish wedding where the groom is offered large sums of money for what he did, but he refuses, saying that it's only for the honor.

The End

Fantasy Cliches that Aren't



Without adequate character description,
your character may be a Lego brick.

Sometimes people create lists of fantasy cliches that they can't stand, and yet some of them aren't really cliches if you can make it your own. Here are some examples:

• No apostrophes in names. I sometimes put apostrophes to indicate another pronunciation. In one novel that was eventually scrapped, a character had the name "J'akal". This was to prevent his name from sounding like "jackal", but rather "juh-akall."
• Urban fantasy with vampires, werewolves, or zombies. This is a big possible cliche, depending on how you treat it. Vampires are portrayed either as haunted romanticists in paranormal romance and bat-like heliophobes. Werewolves are portrayed as muscular, courageous that become half-wolves under the light of the full moon. Zombies are portrayed as lurching, brain-devouring corpses. If you can find a way to make a vampire, werewolf, or zombie that doesn't fall under one of these categories, you're safe.
• Fantasy in medieval England. If you know how to portray medieval England with the utmost realism, I find nothing wrong with this. It's only when you start making it incorrect that I have a problem.
• Made-up names in fantasy worlds. I actually have the opposite problem; I can't have an alternate world where peoples' names are still "Joe" and "Bob".
• Describe your character as little as possible. I find this absolutely ridiculous; don't spend three pages talking about what it looks like, or break from the action to do it, but I at least want to know what the character looks like. It's not good enough to say "man" or "woman".
• Don't make up your own religions. In an alternate world, nobody's going to know who Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, or Siddhartha Gautama is; you need an alternate religion. Similarly, some people say not to create too many religions, but think of all the religions in our world.
• Don't make your own language. If you can make it sound like an actual language, and you can conjugate the verbs in this language by yourself, that's fine. If you know anyone skilled in linguistics, get them to help.
• Don't have everyone speak the same language. In most of my work, societies have their own primary languages, but educated adults know an IAL.
• No prologues. This can usually prevent a first-page infodump. In one of my scrapped novels, the prologue told the story of a battle between a goddess and an invincible lord, as she decides to take him to another world to defeat him there. On the first page of chapter one, a new character is introduced that turns out to be her.
• No taking from mythology. Greek/Roman are overdone, and Egyptian is coming up on this. I'd like to see more Celtic mythology integrated (who wants to be the first to create a YA series about Celtic demigods?), as well as Mesoamerican and Middle Eastern.

If you can find a way to make these your own, they're fine. Otherwise, stay away from the original voice.