Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-34369352-20190812144928/@comment-34369352-20190813021526

SCP-Deadlock wrote: Depends on what you would consider a Mary Sue.

In my opinion, a Mary Sue isn't just a perfect character. You can have - subjectively, mind you - 'perfect' characters in fiction. A Mary Sue is a character whose 'perfection' detracts from the story. Overpoweredness is completely fine, but it has to be there for a reason, there needs to be a good explanation as to why a character has it, and not just for the sake of a power-fantasy. Another common trait in Mary Sues is that the entire universe is built around them, and that they are not bound by the rules of said universe.

In my opinion, personality isn't really a factor in determining Mary Sues. You can have Mary Sues without much personality at all (the typical one), you can have excessively angsty Mary Sues, and you can have Mary Sues who are complete assholes. They're all Mary Sues, characters who twist the rules of their universe to their benefit.

Relationship-wise, depends on any other characters in your headcanon. Many Mary Sues will have people randomly act against the way they usually should and side with the Mary Sue, and the character who only exists to hate on said Mary Sue. Like I said, entire universe built around [the Mary Sue].

There are also all the variations of Mary Sue, such as the Purity Sue (the naive one), the Jerk Sue (self-explanatory, the edgy asshole one) and the Sympathetic Sue (the one who has an excessively tragic backstory (or as TVTropes calls it, Deus Angst Machina) for the sole reason of trying to get the reader's sympathy). There's also the Anti-Sue, an attempt at making the Mary Sue as imperfect as possible but in turn making them a Mary Sue (twisting the rules of their universe to make them as shit as possible).

pls don't ignore this, i spent 15 minutes writing this (Oh hey you also know TV tropes)

So what I'm seeing here is that you're saying that entire universes built around a single character makes a character Mary Sue. And I can see where you're coming from.

But the thing is, Clementine was never designed to be the main character in the first place. I wanted to explore on what if the character was 'that one mysterious creepy person' or 'that random guy in the background that seems to appear everywhere across different stories' or 'the random easter', etc, etc, etc. It would've been an interesting idea. But then, my stories turned into a Clementine-centric stories because she was the most well known OC in my arsenal of original characters.

While quite a lot of my works right now has Clementine as the more 'major character', I always made sure to add stories where Clementine is only referenced and acts more of a background mastermind or an omnipresent observer. Yes, she is powerful, and yes, she can bend universes to her will, but that just comes with the package of being a goddess. There are infinite other inter-dimensional gods that also exist (just mostly on another plane of dimension). She normally doesn't interact with other gods, so she just...looks like the only overpowered god to people she interacts with. So, that hopefully counteracts 'a world built around one single character'.

While Clementine CAN make herself good looking and beautiful and all that jazz(shapeshifter), she doesn't. In fact, she's too lazy to make herself look decent. I think I have a picture of what she looks like around here somewhere...aha!

This is the form that she stays in 90% percent of the time she can manage her own appearance until Scientress decides to make her go brush her hair.

Relationship wise, heck, there are friends of Clementine that would kill her or eat her for sh*ts and giggles. And a few seconds after Clementine regenerates, they would just be friend and drink tea together with a couple of huge gaping holes still leaking blood on Clementine. That's not to say everyone likes Clementine. In about 80 percent of the worlds she interacts with, most of the inhabitants doesn't even know she exists. She makes other people uncomfortable with her antics, people thinks she's weird, she would go on freaking killing sprees on random worlds when she's angry (which often leads to angry heroes and heroines trying to find and get revenge on her despite the fact she already left the world), and there are many others that doesn't necessarily like her.

For an explanation on how she became a god, she would fit somewhat into sympathetic sue. She was abandoned by her parents, adopted, hunted down by humans, almost killed, saw their family die, tried to escape the world by making a contract with a god of treachery only to be thrown into countless other sh*tty reincarnations that usually ends in a tragic ending for her until she manages to become a minor god and escapes the loop after an indefinite amount of time where she probably went crazy more than once (and obtained a heck ton of mental disorders), and then hid somewhere to become more powerful (修炼) for a couple more eons in social isolation until she became more powerful.

Some might say it would be a pretty excessive tragic backstory but I think it's mandatory for such a powerful character, as with power comes responsibility. Somehow she manages to remain mostly sane and recovers most of her sanity after she came out of her isolation and she renamed herself to Clementine.

But considering how she never mentions her backstory and openly admits that she's a bad person quite a lot of times, I do think that she's not really a sympathetic Sue.

Clementine also might fit into the jerk sue category, but she's not always a jerk. And she's not that edgy.