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... very, very insane. In a good way.

There's no way we're going to know each other as I only joined last year. Have a Generic Heavy Object. Useful for dropping on your enemies, but don't try and lift it!

I... guess you're sort of right with the quote, but there is a difference between "Gary Stu" and "protagonist". If you're being optimistic, I'd say it's the same as the difference between "Mary Sue" and "female protagonist".

I'm sick and tired of 'oh, no-one's visited this in six weeks? WELP SHUTTING IT DOWN NOW.

It's not like they even remove the files; all I have to do is go in and click on a page from the site editor.

GRUMBLE.

hS

Nothing bad, don't worry. :) I second doc in saying that it'd be great to get a pointer towards your published writing.

I've just half-mentioned this to Fire Sidoni, but I figure it's relevant here too: I've had a few thoughts along these lines myself. My response has been to alter how I write my PPC missions to make them focus a lot more on useful concrit (literally, my Driftwood series features an Agent Kaitlyn's Concrit section at the end). I'm sure it doesn't go as far as you'd like, but it's something!

hS

(If you're curious, the first record of you in the Board Archives is April 2005, and the last is December of the same; doesn't mean much, though, because the Archives are pretty patchy before '08.)

The way I think of it, the original definition of a Mary Sue was 'a badly-written female self-insert'. Over the years, different groups have focussed on different parts:

-The worst kinds have honed in on 'female', and they're exactly what you're talking about. The 'Rey is a Mary Sue!' crowd hit this button (especially ironic since this is the same canon where a nine-year-old flies through an entire hostile fighter fleet and blows up a military starship back in Phantom Menace), and while I'm not going to say they're awful people, their views stink.

-Almost as bad are the ones who focus on 'self-insert' - ie, the 'Rey can't be a Mary Sue because she's definitely not a version of Abrams'. This is not only a tool to put down any OCs in fanfic - most of which is still written by women & girls - but is also disproportionately used against female writers in published fiction. The issue, really, is that it's kept just enough of the 'badly-written' connotation to keep being used as a negative word, while not actually requiring you to check that bad writing is present.

-The PPC has taken what I think is the only reasonable approach: to focus on 'badly-written'. I've personally been advocating the use of Suvian, to refer to both Mary Sues and Gary Stus. Our definition doesn't care about what they're based on or even, specifically, what they look like (the Mary Sue Tests of the past, with 'falls in love with Legolas' and 'astoundingly beautiful' and the like, aren't really used any more); it's all about how they fit into the world - or rather, how they don't.

If you want to see what my approach to this looks like, PPC: Driftwood is the series where I've put it into practice. It's not the PPC of the old days, which did often take the easy path of saying 'she's a girl, she must be an author fantasy and a Sue'; but I like to think things have changed since then.

hS

I don't know if we ever interacted much, but anyway, welcome back!

As to the... joke? Is that a joke? Well, my answer is "a Suvian by any other name smells as poorly written."

And, I must contradict Delta, the definition we're currently using definitely can encompass the likes of Eragon and Drizzt do'Urden (and yeah, Bella Swann, too). While original characters in original works can't pull other characters and settings out of character in the same way as an original character in a fanfiction, they CAN receive incongruous treatment from other characters and break the rules of their worlds in ways that disrupt our ability to suspend disbelief, which amounts to the same thing: a protagonist with poor characterization and no real struggle placed in their path.

And we certainly spork male Suvians, if that's in question. Some examples are listed on the Gary Stu page that 61516 linked.

Not that there isn't bias in favor of male protagonists over female ones out there in the Serious Literature world, and probably in fanfiction, too. But fanfiction has always been more of a female hobby, as far as I'm aware. Speaking of OC protagonists in fanfic, then, you get more female protagonists than male protagonists, and therefore—talking strictly numbers—more badly written female protagonists than badly written male protagonists. Percentage-wise, though, I reckon it's exactly the same. The old saying, 90% of everything is crap, applies to fanfiction and Serious Literature, male and female and everything else, all alike.

~Neshomeh

I was, in the Elder Days, known as Techno-Dann. A few things have changed since then. :)

That's a great question, and one that's come up in discussion here too. My thoughts go something like this:

First and foremost, we specifically only use Mary Sue to talk about fanfiction characters. The measure of a Mary Sue is not how tragic her backstory is, it's not how much power she has, it's how much she warps the story around her. It's how far away from canon she pulls characters, settings, and themes.

We've stuck to that definition pretty hard, too - even in the face of Eragon, Twilight, Fifty Shades... the list of bad published fiction goes on, but those characters are by definition not Sues because the world exists for them, and their themes are the world's themes. Likewise, there are some truly good ladies in fiction out there who also cannot be Sues, because the story is their story: consider Imperator Furiosa from the latest Mad Max, for example. (Innuendo Studios does a really good feminist breakdown of Mad Max and tropes around women in action movies. (CW: violence, discussion of very violent tropes))

To get into some more personal thoughts: I've totally dreamed up wish-fulfillment self-insert fanfiction. I've written more than a few, although I usually lean on original settings instead of fanfic. I recognized them as things I was writing for me rather than the world, and I chose to not put them on the internet. (The earliest sign I have that I wasn't the guy I thought I was? I stumbled across a cache of my really old writing, 2005-6ish, and in every single piece, the character I identified with most... was a girl.) And yeah, it'd hurt to see someone go through them with a pair of Agents and mock them to fictional death, and yeah, I'm not sure if "having the self-awareness to recognize that this isn't something I'm writing to be good writing" is the best test for whether something should undergo that level of commentary.

(Quoth one of the hypothetical agents: "Oh bright Athena, Juliette, will you finish a scene for once?")

Anyways! I don't have any conclusions, but there's some thoughts. The joke is sadly accurate, "Mary Sue" has been an insult thrown at a lot of women in fiction who dared be competent/interesting/capable, and that's rather uncool - but it's also a misuse of the term, and we've been careful with its meaning here. And, yeah, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable making "this is bad art" the punchline of mine? But I've also only written like one mission in ten years.

So, hi! There's a lot of words, I hope you find some of them interesting.

-Delta Juliette

(Just adding this to an existing review thread so I don't bump all the new threads that went up in the last twenty-four hours. Hope you don't mind, World-Jumper!)

I remember for certain I watched the film adaptation of this back in high school AP Biology. I don’t remember why we watched it in a biology class, and I also don’t remember, uh, nearly anything from the movie. But when I saw a battered copy of Contact in a Goodwill, I decided it was time to add it to my list of known canons.

Spoilers for Contact.

I actually don’t know a whole lot about Carl Sagan beyond “scientist” and “writer.” From my perspective reading Contact in the 2010s, it feels like an alternate history, though of course, it was a speculative future when Sagan published it in 1985. And as a result . . . well, I feel sad that neither U.S. nor global culture has lived up to Sagan’s vision. Sagan presents a world with the U.S. has finally elected a woman to the presidency, where nuclear weapons are being scaled back, where space flight and exploration are becoming more and more commonplace, where the human species is becoming more of an identity than any national identity. It makes me feel like I’m living in the more backwards Earth. I hope things get closer to Sagan’s vision during my lifetime, but right now, I’m a bit pessimistic about the motivating power of human selfishness and fear.

I’m having trouble ordering my thoughts about the idea of our species meeting a sentient one from another planet. Given my very Kingdom Hearts- and PPC-inspired outlook on life, I would personally love for our cultures to meet another and start to see a very different and unique outlook on life. But I’m not sure our species is ready for that; we’re not very good at accepting each other yet, so I feel like the encounter with an entire new species is just going to lead to a whole new variety of racism. And depending on the beliefs and culture of the other new species, that may get us involved in a conflict we don’t have any way of surviving.

Mmm. I guess this isn’t much of a review, but I’m struggling to fins more to say. Anyone else have thoughts on this novel, or its movie?

—doctorlit, being mopey about culture

“Except only for a nearby supernova remnant in Cassiopeia, it was the brightest spoiler source in the skies of Earth.” “Except only for a nearby supernova remnant in Cassiopeia, it was the brightest spoiler source in the skies of Earth.”

Can we get a plug link please?

—doctorlit, ever hungry for fiction

Bradbury and Gibbs undergo non-standard training:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lEvEzCMtLTUwp8vzVBwH9cLaqSq_EupjTYaOzhNlDf4/edit

I haven't played Hexen yet, but I look forward to it.

And... yeah, guys do tend to get off a bit lighter. However, the PPC have a pretty stringent definition of what a Sue *is*, which helps us avoid this.

Although I will note some articles I've seen online about this are just... wrong. Like one that claims Paul Atreides is a godlike Stu and that's bad writing nobody noticed when Doom as a series (and particularly Doom Messiah) was all about deconstructing the Messianic Archetype: Making Paul like that was the point, so Herbert could show all the problems with it.

Heretic is... not my favorite Doom Engine game. It really is pretty much a Doom fantasy TC, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think the design stands up to the original, level-wise. It's just not quite as fun. Pick up the original Doom first, IMHO.

So, for posterity, here is Thoth's Definitive Commercial Doom Engine Game Review:

-(The Ultimate) Doom: The game that started it all. Doom holds up amazingly well to this day... once you rebind the controls so that WASD works and lookspring is disabled. But other than that... man, this game is good. It looks good, it plays good, it just feels good. And so much of the level design is just rock solid. Especially anything John Romero touched. That man is a master. (and he's putting a new levelpack out for the game soon, by the way).

-Doom 2: Doom 2 introduced a lot of new stuff. Chaingunners, Pain Elementals, Hell Knights, Mancubi, Revanents, Arachnotrons, and, of course, the amazing Super Shotgun. But sadly, I feel the design declined. Some of these levels are just exercises in frustration, and only a few of the 30 are really that memorable. The Icon of Sin is an exercise in frustration to beat, too. as in, I've never won it. However, the maps are still mostly solid and the game is pretty fun. Most of all, this is the game that most of the fantastic Doom mapping community uses as the base for their levels. That alone makes it worth a buy, even if the game was awful (it isn't).

-Heretic: Okay, calling it "just medival Doom" is unfair. Heretic also added an inventory system, its weapons were slightly different, it had new enemies... the problem, again, comes from the overall design. Raven always felt like id's B-team, and the levels are just a little less clever, the spritework just a bit less evocative, the game just... a bit less *fun*. It's still good, but less so.

-Hexen: Heretic was still more of that good-old Doom style shooting, albeit with a few new tricks in there. But nobody can say that Hexen is more of the same. You got to pick one of three classes, and you could jump, right off the bat. Polyobjects (level elements that move horizontally) and an actual scripting language as well as numerous other under-the-hood enhancements to circumvent the Doom Engine's limitations and add new functionality mean that Hexen doesn't look or play like any Doom Engine game before it. The world is more dynamic, and for once we're not just going level-to-level: there are hubworlds, and you may need to go back and forth between levels, or even go back into the same level from another starting point, slowly unlocking more and more levels. The item system has been expanded as well, allowing you to carry around key objects and do some more puzzling, and those puzzles, as well as combat that feels slower and more brutal, really set Hexen apart. Annnd... I really don't like Hexen much. Don't ask me why. I just don't. It's alright, but... no.

-Strife: Now Strife, while less technically advanced, is a much better game than Hexen in my opinion. It actually has a story, a dialogue system, not everything's trying to kill you, you can still jump... did I mention there are upgrades? And sidequests? And a (slightly) branching story? And a kinda-sorta stealth system? This game is great. Also, if you buy Strife (you want "Strife: Veteran Edition" not any of the unrelated games called Strife) on Steam, it doesn't play in dosbox, but actually in a modernized source port, and it actually includes a ton of content left on the cutting room floor (including a full multiplayer mode!) in it. If you have to buy one doom engine game that isn't doom... buy this one.

As for how to play these games... I don't endorse playing through DosBox like Steam does by default for most of them. Strife comes with a pretty killer source port, but for the rest of these, I suggest grabbing a sourceport from the internet, as they run better, are better supported, and tend to have more features than the original exes. GZDoom is the default suggestion nowadays: it's compatible with any doom mappack or mod you care to download (including the (in)famous Brutal Doom), runs all of the games mentioned above, and will automatically find game datafiles when you get them from Steam, so you don't have to do anything extra. For the true purists out there, Chocolate Doom (as well as Chocolate Heretic, Chocolate Hexen, and Chocolate Strife) plays these games the way they originally looked on DOS, but without all the bugs and glitches and nonsense. So yeah.

Have a laser pistol.

We currently call male 'sue a Gary Stu.

We have some examples on the wiki:
http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Gary_Stu

Hey everyone! Does anyone around here like Pokemon? How about Terraria? Or possibly Metroid, as some have compared this game to?

Well, this game isn't enough like any of those to be a ripoff, so you'll likely enjoy Monster Sanctuary, a low-fantasy monster-training platformer! You play as the descendant of one of four families, descended from the first four Monster Keepers, who saw that monsters could be trained to be the ally of humanity and not its enemies. Hatch a team of monsters, fight wild monsters to make yours stronger, learn about a unique combat and leveling system, and figure out what's behind the unusual overpresence of boss monsters in the Sanctuary...

Or at least you will in the full game. This is just a demo, with the full version still being in development, but it still has a significant amount of content, and I can confess that I have been coming back for more even after the end of the demo's plot. Plus also I'd love to get this game more support in any way I can.

Play Monster Sanctuary on Newgrounds here: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/719932

-Twistey
P.S. Ask me and I can help you if you're stuck for any reason other than a technological one. There's only one place in the game that I don't know how to get to.

I was a regular here ages ago - I want to say it was probably somewhere in the 2003-2007 range? I don’t know if anyone here remembers me; the only even vaguely familiar name I’ve noticed thus far is Huinesoron, and I have no memory of if or how much we interacted. Wow, it’s been a long time. I’ve been vaguely thinking about y’all for a while, but only found my way back when I happened to stumble on the PPC TVTropes page just now. Hi!

Something I’ve been thinking about a fair amount lately (and the reason I’ve been thinking about the PPC before now) is this:

Q: What do you call the male equivalent of a Mary Sue?
A: The protagonist.

Does anyone have any thoughts about how this, I don’t know, interacts with the core PPC concept? I haven’t (re)read any of canon yet, and I’m not intending this as an attack, I’m just honestly curious.

Y'know how the tall tale goes, with John Henry using only a hammer to whack a hole in a mountain that was 5 feet deeper than machinery could do? Anyone?

-Twistey

Although I don't like to admit it, I do in fact need a little help with my anatomy, hehe. I'm not sure how this would help for the Knights, since the drawing is more standing action poses, but it'll totally be useful later. I almost typed Sueful. Thanks!

-Twistey

1) Heretic. It's fantasy Doom. You can get it on Steam.

2) The Star War Gatherings, which are the Star Wars movies taken through several layers of Google Translate. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. More information here:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebOriginal/TheStarWarGatherings

That'll do. (Exaggerated British Understatement.)

HG

Since we don't seem to have one, I figured we could use a thread where we just toss in cool stuff we've seen, read, been playing, and so on.

The other reason I'm posting this is that I wanted to plug Into The Breach. The basic idea of the game is that you've running a squad of mechs who can go back in time to try and stop an alien invasion. Mechanically, the enemies plan out what attacks they'll be taking, then you take a turn to try and disrupt their plan (which can include interesting things like moving enemies around so they attack each other instead of your units or buildings), then they do their thing.

There's a few other cool things, like the fact that the missions are somewhat randomly generated and that, in between runs of the game, you can bring one of your mech pilots (who can level up and therefore give their mech buffs) with you to use in your next playthrough. (And there's a bunch of different squads that have various abilities so things don't get too repetitive.) Basically, this is a game I've been having a lot of fun playing lately, and I'd recommend it. (If it helps, it's by the same people who made Faster Than Light.)

- Tomash