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I distinctly remember it happening sometime around March.

Alakazam can't Mega Evolve, my seventh 'mon may though.

I've never even watched Naruto and I'm pretty sure he's not a very bright person, haha. The only stuff I know about the series comes from memes.

It always makes me feel bad when there's a fic writer who seems really good but just wastes their talent on Sues. Like hon, please, you can do better...

Oh, Sisters Grimm! I've been meaning to read those books. Kind of feels like a jab to the stomach hearing about this fic though.

I had plans for writing a fic with some of my own OCs, but through some divine intervention or something those plans never came to fruition. They were *such* Sues oh my god. I think I still have drawings of them somewhere. I need to go burn them.

When I read about Mary Sues I just kind of had sudden flashbacks to fics I had read and was like "oh... I've seen these before..." and I felt kind of ashamed because I had actually enjoyed those fics at the time.

That's my favourite cake, besides 'Really Not Poisoned Cake' and 'Cake That is Actually a Cake and Not a Giant Knife'!

My gift upon you is: three pairs of sunglasses. To wear all at once. At the exact same time. Always.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

I'd have to say mine was the Naruto from One Man Team. Replacement Sue for sure. He was smart, ruthless, and had quite the tragic backstory. All of it was non-canon, of course. The issue wasn't with that alone, though. Everything was distorted around him, with only about four characters not being derailed by the end. Kakashi, the hokage, Hinata, and Gaara. Everyone else was either distorted massively, especially Sasuke and Sakura, or was given too little screentime to be distorted.

It's a shame, too. the author had plenty of talent, and the story was well written. But everything had changed for the dark and edgy sue, and it eventually ruined it for me.

I'd be willing to give this one a shot, if only because your overuse of "-ish" descriptions has me cracking up, and that backstory, oh boy. :P But alas, I don't know the show well enough to mission it, and I'd probably feel bad doing it anyway.

But glancing through it, the SPaG is good and the canons feel in-character, so your fic's really not as bad as you're making it out to be, I don't think.

This one, if you're curious. A friendly person on the message board I lived on at the time asked if I thought my OC might be a bit of a Sue. I was like, "Huh? What's that?" I don't remember exactly how they explained it anymore, but it was something like "a character with idealized traits of the author," and my response was pretty much "Oh. Then, yes, you could certainly say that!" It took me a while to figure out the more negative connotations. It was probably OFUM that really gave me a solid idea of why Sues are not good, and from there the PPC.

To this day I don't think Jen'ra is awful, though. The story's kinda wooden and awkward and predictable—oh, and the chapter with her backstory is particularly cringy—but I've never seen a clear angle to mission it, myself. *shrug* If anybody else wants to, though, you have my permission. I seem to have a problem with green-eyed female OCs, so one less in the stable would not be a bad thing. Plus, Jen'ra is literally an alien expy of Jenni, so she's expendable. ^_~

~Neshomeh

I'd just finished the second-to-last Sisters Grimm book and went wandering around the internet trying to find out if the last had been published already or not... and that was when I first stumbled across fanfiction. Someone had written an entire novel's worth of a story featuring the characters a few years in the future, and Sabrina became an amnesiac in a contrived coincidence, grew fairy wings, was hunted and on the run from Fairy society, married Puck and became a princess, and True Love's Kiss brought all her memories back and then she remembered she hated him and there was Drama. I loved every moment of it. (Unfortunately, I don't remember the fic's name because I'd love to go kill revisit it.) That was probably my first encounter with a Sue.

The first time I really learned what a Sue was, though, would probably be when I came across the term while reading reviews for a Fifth Marauder story, and I resolved to never, ever, ever make the same mistakes. That... turned out about as well as can be expected. At least I was actively trying to avoid writing a Sue, so I think my story wasn't too terrible for a first attempt at writing?

It was about two years after starting my badfic series that I found the PPC, really got a feel for what did and didn't make a good story, and finally killed my old shame.

So for me, it was less of an "aha!" moment and more of a gradual realization of what made a Mary Sue.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I wanted to know; when did some of y'all first read a Suefic? When or how did you figure out what a Sue is?

I remember my first Suefic was this *really* bad Megaman Battle Network fic on DeviantART, and the main character was a pretty big Sue. I need to find it again, if it hasn't been deleted. I think I learned what a Sue was when I came across the page for Mary Sues on TV Tropes.

Hope you have a good time here! I don't really have much in the way of newbie gifts, but here's a gel pen! It's got glitter, and not the Sueish kind!

"What kinds of stories have you been in?" Oh, no. That would not do. "Er, continua." Better.

...stupid low Oratory scores. Maybe grinding Charisma in Sims would help. Yeah, she'd have to do that once she got back to the RC.

But maybe she should focus more on the person in front of her for the moment.

Something like that. It's definitely not reapplying for Permission, though--

Oh, right, that's the thing. Refresh your memory on current PPC canon. Something along those lines.

...anyone got more detail? I'm kind of exhausted right now, and so have no desire to go Wiki-diving for exactness.

~Zing

(Self-evidently: it has dragons.)

hS

I'm only a few chapters in, but she's very irritating. I would keep giving it a chance and hope for substantial character development, but based on what you said, I don't have a lot of hope.

I'm not going to call her a Sue, but I feel like the author is using sexism in a way typical of Suethors. The main character is Extra-Special Cool for being in the army and being allowed to do important things when usually women can't, but there's no sense that this was something she had to struggle to overcome -- it just gets mentioned in passing to highlight how unique her abilities are/the importance of her job/how privileged she is as the king's niece (?). Maybe this changes later in the book. . . but all the rising action suggests that the book's focus will be on the intrigue surrounding a kidnapping and the main character's love life. I suspect it will only be ever treated as another feather in the cap of this bratty superpowered princess.

Heh, you know it's badly done when I'm thinking it's ridiculous for having a magical power to be so painful. Magical oppression is one of my favorite tropes. And technically speaking, I can find nothing wrong with its portrayal here -- it's not like it doesn't affect her and only exists to give her a tragic backstory -- but for some reason it falls quite flat. Maybe I'm just spoiled because Six of Crows does it so well. . .

Or maybe I just don't like this book. Maybe I just don't care about any of the characters. Yeah, that's probably it.

--Key

*politely takes a cookie instead*

Mamoswine, because where would I be without Mamoswine... Playing PO during the early days of Gen 5, that's where.
Alakazam, because you always need a glass cannon, especially since Gen 5
Rotom-W, Tankin' it up since Gen 5
Heatran, Doing things slightly weirdly since Gen 5
Togekiss, making people rage quit since Gen 5
Breloom, Because a custom made Techniloom set originating in Gen 5 is one of my claims to fame.

AKA Yes, I have been using this team in OU since late Gen 5. Yes it still works in OU. Bring it!

It is a considerable effort of willpower. I trust you're all suitably proud of me for doing so. =]

You've got very good Pokémon on your team. With stuff like Kommo-O, Haxorus, Minior, and (to a lesser extent) Tyranitar, all you have to do is point and shoot. I know what Douglas Adams (and Sean Bean, at least in Civilization VI) have to say on the subject of foolproof things, by selecting good Pokémon that are relatively uncomplicated in terms of strategy, you've got a much easier time of it than you had with your previous teams. Stop doing yourself down, Buzzard's Underside. =]

*eats cake*

*explodes*

Welcome to the PPC! Have two cents, so you can put them in to a discussion at some point.

And because no one seems to have linked it to you yet, here's an invite to our Discord server if you're interested.

So, there are good fics (there's obviously a pile of subcategories here, but there's no point in going in to them), which are obviously not missionable. Then, moving a few steps down the quality ladder (which is not a very strict ladder and is sort of fuzzy), you hit the fics that have a few issues (maybe they need a bit of copy editing, or there's some shades of OOCness) but are otherwise decent. These "mehfics" are more or less not mission material either. Like you could in theory do a mission to them if you really wanted to, but you shouldn't because they're not really all that bad.

Past the various shades of meh (which really isn't all that accurately named, since it spans from "just fix this one small thing and your story will be very good" to "this is not-good") you'll find straight badfic, where some combination of (among other possible problems) "that's not at all canon-like!" and "that's not how writing works!" makes the fic bad enough to mission.

The line between meh and bad is really fuzzy in a whole lot of cases. I have the impression that, if you're wandering up to the borders of missionability (for any reason) with a fic, you're expected either to not mission that fic or to be very careful about it so you don't give the impression of crossing a line. (Additionally, there's a political element to this, in that if you're taking that sort of risk, you need the community to trust you to do that.) A clear example of this way of thinking about things is the Despatch thread from a while back, where we decided "we would prefer not to write Despatch because that's straying too close to RPF", but doc's Despatch-style mission was far enough from objectionable and carefully done enough to avoid any complaints.

The above is my attempt at explaining why people (and probably me) tend to be conservative about picking fic to mission.

Ignoring all the general commentary, i think that, given the level of potential uncertainty about the source fic's badness (you and Ix both remarked on it) how you chose to do the mission was reasonable and appropriate. I also think that (and I'm going off of the mission) warping characters so you can fit them into the canon plot is certainly not a good thing, and the plagiarism puts the fic well into missionable.

I liked the non-standard exorcism method (I remember someone writing up a whole series of those ages back, and I've been wondering if anyone would run with them), and that's not just because Young Wizards is good stuff.

I enjoyed the agent interactions, and I think they made the mission fun to read. (That includes the bit where things get serious for a moment with Semele not liking being crowded.)

The only "complaint" (and this is more my fault for not being up to date on Driftwood) is that I couldn't get a good mental picture of the "watch-the-DVD" section of the mission.

- Tomash, who put general potentially-useless rambling about community norms and mission concrit in one post for no reason

Because for all that Team Cretaceous Calamity may be good on paper (and dang yoi, now it'll have a Minior named Katie in it), it's still got me commanding it. And I am not good at this game.

hS