Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Seriphyn on 17 Jan 2011, 09:54
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Come on, we all know we accuse each other of this behind each other's backs with others...so why not we come out to admit publically the elements we are aware are "Mary Sue"-esque or Peter Pan-esque. Failing that, have a think about what elements are, and post them up...
For example, your character being a direct copy paste of yourself, or having a 10 inch dong when you've got a 4. Lol. Or being impossibly nice in every single situation with unflinching emotion.
I'll start...
- Anette is one. She isn't a Mary Sue per se, but my character having a young, beautiful and blue-eyed daughter is. Her existence is wish fulfillment in that regard, though their exact relationship and interaction I distance from myself, and attempt to make it as distinct as possible (rough 'n' tough dad versus elegant, well-spoken daughter)
- The look of Rhea. Busty, voluptous, red hair, full lipped, blue eyed? Yes please...
- Seriphyn's self-consciousness and timidity in the presence of certain women. Sometimes getting teased or flirted with, he does not react with a self-confident or cocky manner, instead sometimes he ends up blushing or otherwise going meek/sheepish. That said, this area of RP (romance, sex etc.) is the most susceptible to being a direct RL->RP copy+paste from my experience, as most other areas of him are different.
Phoneticizing an accent goes a LONG way to separating yourself from your character....for example.
Me (OOC) - "yeah dunno tbh. i think we'll see"
Seriphyn (IC) - "Yea', don't 'ave a fuckin' clue to be 'onest with you. Guess we'll just 'ave to wait and see, I s'pose"
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Phoneticizing an accent goes a LONG way to separating yourself from your character....for example.
Me (OOC) - "yeah dunno tbh. i think we'll see"
Seriphyn (IC) - "Yea', don't 'ave a fuckin' clue to be 'onest with you. Guess we'll just 'ave to wait and see, I s'pose"
Oh lawdy please save us from the fake written accents.
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Didn't we have a thread like this already? :O
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Phoneticizing an accent goes a LONG way to separating yourself from your character....for example.
Me (OOC) - "yeah dunno tbh. i think we'll see"
Seriphyn (IC) - "Yea', don't 'ave a fuckin' clue to be 'onest with you. Guess we'll just 'ave to wait and see, I s'pose"
Oh lawdy please save us from the fake written accents.
Amen, brother! Let us pray.
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Only one I can come up with from Lallara is the fact that she has pure Faith.
I've noticed that life is easier for people with that capability.
Life is harder when you know that all gods are just fiction.
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I'm going to go off topic here, because I cannot STAND Seriphyn's abbreviations and lack of letters. No offense to you personally, but I think of some lumberjack from Warcraft.
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My character.
All of it.
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I'm going to go off topic here, because I cannot STAND Seriphyn's abbreviations and lack of letters. No offense to you personally, but I think of some lumberjack from Warcraft.
Zug zug!
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I'm pretty sure Ghost's cybernetic extremes qualify in some capacity.
Not sure his absurd old age counts, although Screwie called me a special snowflake
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For Inara, it's her ZOMG security. Easier to walk into the White House bedrooms in the middle of the day, unharassed, than to get onto any of Inara's estates if you don't have clearance. And having a personal 'honor guard' that ghosts your every movement... She's Properly Paranoid (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProperlyParanoid), but is also Crazy Prepared (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrazyPrepared) and a touch of Well-Intentioned Extremist (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WellIntentionedExtremist). Oh, and she's a Family Values Villain (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FamilyValuesVillain) for the most part (Family is very important *nodnod*).
For one of my others that I commonly RP on, sees themselves as a Necessary Evil (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NecessarilyEvil) for religious reasons.
I'm sure others could be applied, but these are the main ones that stick out off the top of my head.
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If I had to lay out three points in my/Esna's RP that could seem sue-ish...
I'd that Esna's staff is one (he has a lot of highly skilled people working for him, and will send these people to watch, track, and occasionally attack other people and locations).
Two would be Esna's cybernetics - while none of them are refuted by PF; he does have fairly extensive enhancements, some of which could seem sue-ish in use.
Three is that I don't shy away from including or using the kind of hardware - including military hardware - that a fantastically rich person (with Amarrian military contacts at that) could get his hands on.
Overall, I try to moderate the effects of these by saving them for "critical situations" and not slapping them in peoples' faces every couple of seconds, as well as OOCly poking people I'm RPing with and asking if there are any ways they would like the storyline to go (including possible failures of the above) and considering if I could include any requests without horribly breaking character.
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The fact that my character controls a spaceship with his mind and if you manage to kill him, he just wakes up in another body.
Definitely a Mary-Sue imo.
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The fact that my character controls a spaceship with his mind and if you manage to kill him, he just wakes up in another body.
Definitely a Mary-Sue imo.
(http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2756/14697276054808680f06.jpg)
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I don't think everything you enjoy playing because you think it's cool is actually Mary-Sueism. Such as having a spaceship, say. ;)
In my case, I am actually quite unable to tell what of say Else's current position and about her sense of purpose is Mary-Sue for me, and what's just stuff she evolved to because I found it fun. Some of those things, if I felt I had designed them to be able to do that sort of wish-fulfillment would definitely count, but as the character was not really planned that way and as I have demonstrated that if RP takes me there, I can give them up too, I am not sure...
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I have none. >.> <.< -.-
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I was going to make a joke about Shin obviously not being a Mary Sue, but I just can't get past the general conceit of the game. I mean, as Vendrin says, we're all immortals who control spaceships with our minds. The poorest of us are fabulously wealthy. Hundreds (if not thousands) of "mundane" people die on our whims. No Mary Sue there at all.
Surprisingly (to me, at least), I don't see a lot of Mary Sue in Eve. It was my first "real" MMO, and when I first started I was amused by what I saw as the rampant Mary Sue-isms. All the living gods striding among the human worms, and all that. Then I took a break and played a few other MMOs, where I came face to face with reality. I think it ultimately comes down to pvp. Eve revolves around pvp, to the extent that there is almost no way to really avoid dedicated attempts to pvp you. If someone wants to shoot Shin, they will find a way to shoot her. This automatically cuts off a huge swath of potential Mary Sue-ism. We've all played (or heard of) games filled with people who love to RP unbelievably deadly killers. It's one of the staple Mary Sues of MMOs. It's easy, in most games, to claim this because there are few options to translate that into actual game actions. In Eve, it's different. If I play Shin as an unbelievably deadly killer, I'd better be able to back that up in game. At the same time, if Shin is an unbelievably deadly killer, then that fact speaks for itself without any claims being needed.
It's like Istvaan. In any other game, if you ran into a character that claimed to have organized the downfall of nations, you'd snort to yourself and go "sure". In any other game Istvaan would be a Mary Sue of titanic proportions. In Eve he is not, though, because in Eve he actually has organized the downfall of nations.
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We've all played (or heard of) games filled with people who love to RP unbelievably deadly killers. It's one of the staple Mary Sues of MMOs. It's easy, in most games, to claim this because there are few options to translate that into actual game actions. In Eve, it's different. If I play Shin as an unbelievably deadly killer, I'd better be able to back that up in game. At the same time, if Shin is an unbelievably deadly killer, then that fact speaks for itself without any claims being needed.
QFT. Why EVE is superior, part #N.
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I'm only 19
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Question does not compute. So I have no opinion.
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Define Peter-Pan isms?
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Define Peter-Pan isms?
Believing you can fly, and doing it.
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And never growing up.
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And never growing up.
Then by that logic, most of the male population are Peter Pan...
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True. (And female population, tbh, judging by the outfits I see in public. ;) )
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Touche. Let's just agree that no one of the Homo sapiens species likes to grow up.
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To your point, that's pretty much how I approach Mary Sues in RP: I just treat them the same way I do the cougars at work (or the 50 year old dudes hitting on the 20 year old girls): people who haven't come to terms with the banality of their own existence.
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We've all played (or heard of) games filled with people who love to RP unbelievably deadly killers. It's one of the staple Mary Sues of MMOs. It's easy, in most games, to claim this because there are few options to translate that into actual game actions. In Eve, it's different. If I play Shin as an unbelievably deadly killer, I'd better be able to back that up in game. At the same time, if Shin is an unbelievably deadly killer, then that fact speaks for itself without any claims being needed.
QFT. Why EVE is superior, part #N.
Yeah, this as a reason I love EVE. If a pilot cant kill me in space, or hire other characters to do it for them, I generally dont worry about about their nifty training/background/cybernetics/genetics/super-whatever. Godmodding (or one "d"?) your way to badass-dom doesnt work in EVE.
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Come on, we all know we accuse each other of this behind each other's backs with others...so why not we come out to admit publically the elements we are aware are "Mary Sue"-esque or Peter Pan-esque. Failing that, have a think about what elements are, and post them up...
I'm the opposite with Aphox. I make her excessively flawed, well educated but wasteful of it, uninformed and of generally very little patience. I abuse her and put her in situations destructive to her psyche. Experience has given her much less wisdom than a reason to not care anymore. She is, effectively, the worst result of the inherent fault of transhumanism; without the pressure to appreciate life as mortality looms overhead or a need to improve and produce so that she or those she might care about can survive, life becomes meaningless. The only reason she never considers suicide is because, to her, there's no longer a line separating life and death but for the opportunity to experience something new and the natural desire for self-preservation.
She's certainly not condemned to this attitude nor applies it to the rest of Humanity, it's just that no one has really offered her an alternative beside psychoactive drugs.
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I did somewhat of the same thing with Saint. I took the tragedy route and gave him charater flaws instead of strengths. It's given me a fun character to play, but there's only a few so far (I think) who enjoy interacting with him.
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I did somewhat of the same thing with Saint. I took the tragedy route and gave him charater flaws instead of strengths. It's given me a fun character to play, but there's only a few so far (I think) who enjoy interacting with him.
I play a sociopathic bitch that off-handedly offers general murder. People are tools are they not? And useless tools are disposed of.
That said, she's trying to be nice right now.
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Aria has:
Unusual eye color (hematite silver-black; happily doesn't actually seem all that uncommon on Achura)
Unusual physique (teeny-tiny, bird-like)
Unusual complexion (pale and tragic! [less now, with the new character creator])
Tragic family background (domestic violence leading to murder, orphan, resentful extended family)
An unhappy childhood (see above)
Formal training in an East Asian-inspired religion/philosophy
Formal training in a martial art
Formal training in a romantic weapon (long knife)
Taken a horrible revenge on those who (she feels) mistreated her
A lifetime supply of semi-suppressed angst
Become a PIRATE!
Social jutzpah (read, "sharp-tongued, callous bluntness," if you like).
... In spite of all of which, I still think she's too complicated, conflicted, and flawed to actually be a Sue (the Mary Sue test of late seems to agree). She's definitely not an anti-Sue, in any event.
Edit:
Also, a mixed racial background-- half Civire, half Achura.
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Only one I can come up with from Lallara is the fact that she has pure Faith.
I've noticed that life is easier for people with that capability.
Life is harder when you know that all gods are just fiction.
The realization that nobody has yet been able to invent a god who actually deserves to be worshiped makes disbelief in their existence a whole lot more comfortable, to be honest.
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Anslo is a walking science experiment gone wrong with all sorts of madness, weird skin condition, eye condition, long hair (to whip back and forth), edge, and a guitar.
Ya'll got nothin' on me.
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The necro is strong with you lately, Sir.
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Well I see these interesting threads that are hella old and would likely spawn a lot of conversation with VERY different answers than their older contemporaries. I dunno, I'm sorta hoping people see a contrast? What the community was and what it is now? I mean could you imagine the back room grr poster rage if someone made this thread, now, as an original versus a necro? Maybe people will stop and notice things more this way (mostly cause I'm really bad at putting together in words everything I think is wrong. So, actions versus words).
W-W-W-W-WAKE UP CAAAAAAAAAAAAAALL.
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Elmund has blood of millions of innocents and grease of a hundred machines on his hands. He shrugs and carries on shooting/fixing shite.
He has a crippling caffeine addiction and an obsession towards his spaceship.
He goes insane if left in a station for two long.
He does things because it's interesting.
His life motto is 'Everything sucks, carry on'. He does the 'carry on' with alot of snark and live ammunition.
Acts like a geezer once in a while and reminiscent on his days in the RMS and in the Clan Enclave. Takes long walks on city streets, annoying baristas everywhere.
Lives in a room-turned-scrapyard. Sleeps in a room-turned-scrapyard. Half the scraps are mines. Especially the kitchen implements.
Has a grudge towards the CQ door. Tried everything to open it. Rewiring, cutting, hacking, demo charges, detonating 150mm Fusion rounds on it, nothing worked. Now exits CQ via vents. Swore someone in the cluster had something against him since every station he visited had the same problem. Wears tinfoil whenever the CQ door issue is brought up.
Makes guns out of scraps. Trained to beat someone to death with close quarter combat skills due to military training. Favors shotguns and drones for personal defense. If all else fails, hit the offender to death with the largest spanner he can find and/or a screwdriver.
I felt he is in the wrong universe.
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I approve of necromancy. It is a skill and art.
Saede is...kind of a walking nest of well pruned mary-sueisms. I keep her pretty decently well balanced, but still.
She's a multiple, she has 8 active clones, violating concord law.
Mixed race Brutor and Sebiestor
All of her clones are cyborgs, some very basic, others very elaborate and replacing most of her body. She has:
*A 'toy' clone featuring an entirely synthetic body with all sorts of tools and hidden compartments.
*A 'military' clone featuring a mix of upgraded organics and cybernetics. Designed to be incredibly strong with internally mounted weaponry.
*A 'pod' clone that never leaves the pod and is probably something akin to a brain in a jar with limbs degenerated to the point of uselessness.
*5 'flesh' clones, designed to go into semi-dangerous situations where if the clone dies its not too expensive to replace.
tragic backstory featuring fiancée from her hometown getting gunned down during riot control actions, and extreme childhood/teenage poverty forcing her to act as a drug dealer and prostitute to survive for a while. Took revenge on the security officer who ordered the riot control teams to fire on the group.
Weird eye colour (gold/amber) dunno if this is weird from the perspective of the minmatar, but its a pretty uncommon colour irl.
Saede's not an outright Mary Sue though I think, she's not perfect, she's got quite a bit of baggage and self doubt, she's not a badass warrior monk or anything like that, she's never received any formal military or martial arts training and relies on her toys to make up for her lack of skill.
And then there's the quasi-mary-sue-isms associated with Origin itself. Its almost a borderline Mary Sue society compared to the rest of New Eden (much less so compared to say, Star Trek, but EVE is such grimdark). Everyone has clone backups, there's little crime, there's no poverty, its effectively a post-scarcity society in many respects, albeit one somewhat artificially propped up by the capsuleers.
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Aedre is the first character I specifically had plans to RP with from the beginning. Also the first I seriously wanted to play the game with, as opposed to wandering about listlessly (I've been poking the game since 2006, off and on again) I thought I'd want to get into it eventually, and that took longer than expected because lore, and RL. :psyccp: Somehow it's been two years.
Aedre's composition in a lot of ways reflects my skill level in EVE, there's something avatar-like about him, which is maybe the opposite of Mary-sue - He kind of sucks, and so do I. It grated on me tremendously to have a sort of tough-looking guy and just be bad. Why not make someone sort of naive instead?
I sure as heck don't have to live up to anything on a KM looking like this. So he's self-depreciating too. He considers himself to be normal-looking, but Capsuleers are so intimidating generally speaking, that to compete seems kind of ridiculous. Being new to something everyone else is already good at - or, already looks like they are anyway - has sort of become a persistent character trait. Aedre and I will probably be kicking ass before he'd be willing assert himself with other capsuleers.
As for the wish fulfillment aspects? Doesn't everyone want to be sort of average and handsome with planetside bank? Sounds like you can't go wrong with that really. But I guess that's a safe answer.
Being from Caille itself might seem like specialness-fishing, but the point was to be from a privileged city, so why not the believable extreme? There's also a little bit more written about the place than other places of similar level. I had two years to really put a tack into where exactly Aedre's from, an I chose Caille pretty carefully, I think.
The world of EVE is shitty for most, but perfectly clean and futuristic for some. I wanted to see the perspective of someone who hasn't had to drag themselves through EVE's various hells. It's not an interesting backstory, but it probably ends up being uncommon - having a spread is good for RP. Aedre left because he cares about stuff, but EVEhell is pretty difficult to leap into feet first if you haven't been tempered by it.
There's definitely some elements of my experience I thread in to my vision of Caille (and how it's affected Aedre) and the privileged section of the Federation. I liked Caille, because it was older - Our city is also one of the older ones in North America, so there's some feels-parallels there, too, pride and such, the source of culture be that true at all or not, that kind of thing. We're named a culture capital, but whose? Ourselves. We're an island city sitting in a province we don't identify with sitting in a country we don't identify with, sitting one hours' north of bananas America. The idea that we even could understand anything of our neighbors' experiences is pretty silly and often proves to be insulting. Caille doesn't represent anyone either realistically, despite being the birthplace of the whole thing. The 'city state' that is really only interested in itself lends itself to 'writing what you know'.
I also think now that Capsuleers have been around for a decade, the idea that you could have grown up with the fact of them pretty interesting. He hangs onto the baseliner image that Capsuleers are terrifying to some degree, all of them, and that they can't be trusted. This mostly explains his absence up to this point, so that has an emphasis because OOC, but he is starting to realize that's unsustainable realistically and that he really should be mingling for sanity's sake.
There's where he's starting from, anyway. I have no idea where he'll go from here. That'll be up to his interactions over time. I think it's open more or less. Will he grow more jaded? Less nervous? More so? Interactions are the only way he's going to move, now. Looking forward to it.
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Ok, so copy/pasta RL: Guilty for a large part, especially during creation. I mostly did this to have a somewhat mundane char background, in order to prevent what I thought was mary-sue-ism, but the joke is on me I guess.
But...many of Ché characteristics that may seem mary-sue-ish are actually also things that I am/do/have in real life.
Wish fullfilment: I guess I'd like to explore space, help and save people and be ridiculously rich, but I am very glad that the darker chapters in Ché's life did not happen to me.
I guess I'll end with a list of Ché's possible Mary-Sue-isms that I can think of at this time:
- Generally wears distressed clothing, and nearly always black
- Is very forgiving, non-judgemental, and can even form unlikely friendships or romantic relations with "bad people".
- Has some philosophies that are in sharp contrast with the setting.
- Is reasonably skilled at singing and playing instruments.
- Has scars that don't make him look ugly.
- Has a wife that allows him to sleep with others.
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Kala literally grew up on a farm.
Watch out every fantasy novel ever, I'm coming for you!
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Playing a character that could be described as a Dandere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_anime_and_manga), perhaps. Which obviously comes from the initial archetype on which was based the character concept : the fugitive naive princess discovering the world.
It may also be a self projection of some of my asocial traits, but not that much. Probably the closest character to myself that I have played so far though, since most of the others I play are usually rather opposites.
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Silas' slightly Mary Sue "Aristocratic special lady" background has more to do with being taken out of Amarr central casting and my early noob take on the race than anything else. Had very little knowledge about the Amarr PF when I was new so it was an easy place to start (as you may notice many of the older True Amarr RPers are cut from a similar cloth). She was originally just True Amarr special lady but as I started RP she was re-written as Khanid Kingdom True Amarr special Lady; many of which have a particular chip on their shoulder with relations to Imperial True Amarr.
This was back in 2006 when Khanid Kingdom / Empire were in still in centuries long cold war / not reconciliation mode.
I thought the Khanid Kingdom gave a great opportunity for a more interesting spin on True Amarr aristocratic background. Imagine being the descendants of the True Amarr families that gambled and sided with Khanid II during the civil war and left the Empire? They probably thought they'd win, and be right back on Athra in a few generations, not 'exiled' to the relatively backwater (by Amarr standards) Kingdom for 500 years.
As I planned to be a PVPer I gave her a military background and appropriately Mary Sue Navy career, which thankfully I backed up shooting something like 99% on the killboard for pvp and doing the pew pew FC thing for years.
So although I suppose she's guilty of a somewhat Mary Sue background, I think it's a case of working for it and growing into an eventual game resumé and RP that eventually supported those sorts of outlandish claims. [pew pew all the things, "space rich", commanding lots of pew pew people, being space popular (whatever that means)].
As far as real life injection into the character thankfully very, very little of the petty, shallow, space-racist, insanity sorts of behaviors are shared with me.
I'm pretty affable IRL and I do lots of event hosting and socializing with large groups of people so I think that leaked through a bit. Interesting topic though!
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Is being a commander with lots of soldiers so Mary Sue when you actually gave yourself the means to achieve it concretely ?
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Is being a commander with lots of soldiers so Mary Sue when you actually gave yourself the means to achieve it concretely ?
I think it's a bit Mary Sue to start with that sort of special background, I'm not sure I'd roll a new character with such a background now. Or if I did I would much more place emphasis on the baseliner special person background meaning very little to other capsuleers and it giving them zero capsuleer reputation.
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Is being a commander with lots of soldiers so Mary Sue when you actually gave yourself the means to achieve it concretely ?
I think it's a bit Mary Sue to start with that sort of special background, I'm not sure I'd roll a new character with such a background now. Or if I did I would much more place emphasis on the baseliner special person background meaning very little to other capsuleers and it giving them zero capsuleer reputation.
Yeah this. Like, JFR claiming to have a small private baseliner army? That's pretty reasonable. Having Newplayer 287 claim at day 2 out of the Science and Trade school that they have a private baseliner army is a bit more out there.
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Personally, when I decided to RP, first thing I thought was look at my activities. Then I look at my character. Then I look at faction and bloodline background. Then I figured, how to spin it all to make it sound interesting?
End result is a guy from Skarkon who came from a semi-isolationist clan out in the woods (with very dim view on the Republic) and a family of mechanics, technicians and engineers who went out into the world because the clan needs to know more about what's going on out there. Then I load him up with as much Matar culture and characteristics as I can and try to refine and polish him so he makes sense as a Matar freelance capsuleer trying to live his life out there in space full of sharks (other capsuleers), while struggling to stay grounded as a person rather than a sociopathic technical-immortal with a God complex.
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Sounds like a good approach!
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Gaven being nobility is less a mary sue thing and more (As Silas already pointed out) a product of the Amarr character creation information. Similarly, given the career in PIE, the naval background just made sense.
But his particular foibles like wearing a dress sword and extremely fancy clothing to formal events.... those are more than a little mary sue.
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Gaven being nobility is less a mary sue thing and more (As Silas already pointed out) a product of the Amarr character creation information. Similarly, given the career in PIE, the naval background just made sense.
But his particular foibles like wearing a dress sword and extremely fancy clothing to formal events.... those are more than a little mary sue.
Makes sense. I suspect only Holders are the ones with the money to be a capsuleer in the Amarr Empire. Anyone else will need to be sponsored by a Holder or an organization.
And nobility have bourgeois dress sense typically.
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Not *only* holders. But roughly 2/3rds of specifically True Amarr capsuleers are nobility (assuming random spread of background choices, in practice I imagine it is more lopsided). So roughly 3/9ths of Amarrian capsuleers should be nobles (the extra 1 comes from non-True Amarr nobility). A much smaller percentage of that would be actual holders, which means they are certainly both over-represented among RPers and underrepresented in the larger player base. This is reconcilable IC by suggesting that bona fide holders would be the least likely candidates to go 0.0ing, so they are more likely to still be connected to empire happenings, i.e., to RP.
But in the Silas and Gaven case, it's worth pointing out that the distinction between holder as a class and holder as the official title was much less clear in those early days.
These days we talk about someone being a holder as specifically being a title. So you can be noble while not being a holder. Back then I thought of holder more as like a caste, so nobility and holder were synonymous. I don't think I would have made Gaven a head of household type holder in the modern RP sense if I was making him today, but that sort of got grandfathered in over the years as things crystallized.
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Halcyon isn't noted for suffering from back pain. I have vague reasonings for that. I think that's as crazy op as I get.
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But in the Silas and Gaven case, it's worth pointing out that the distinction between holder as a class and holder as the official title was much less clear in those early days.
These days we talk about someone being a holder as specifically being a title. So you can be noble while not being a holder. Back then I thought of holder more as like a caste, so nobility and holder were synonymous. I don't think I would have made Gaven a head of household type holder in the modern RP sense if I was making him today, but that sort of got grandfathered in over the years as things crystallized.
You have it exactly right I think.
Interestingly enough it's an odd case of many of the RPers with 9 or 10 year RP characters that started off a bit Mary Sue that sort of through sheer patience and being old bittervets eventually get all the 'end game' content and their characters get less Mary Sue the older they get...
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Here goes:
- Raised in extreme poverty(initially): check
- Raised by someone other than her parents(later): check
- Sexually abused as a child(nearly): check
- Tragic loss of a family member(while very young): check
- Skilled in martial arts or hand-to-hand combat(learned in teens + Navy): check
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Anya gave birth inside her pod while in Anoikis. Then she ate the still birth because red god told her to. Not sure if that is mary sue or not. But that is what made her search for the voice in her head which she discovered is red god. She still hears voices even after every clone death so it must be red god. Also, she tortures and/or eats people.
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Mixed race Brutor and Sebiestor
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You as well? Arnulf has the same mix & I half expected him to get some static from people playing tribal traditionalists. Never happened though.
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<snip>
Mixed race Brutor and Sebiestor
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You as well? Arnulf has the same mix & I half expected him to get some static from people playing tribal traditionalists. Never happened though.
I RPed there being some racism regarding being a mutt in Saede's backstory, but nothing I've ever actually really addressed. Its never been made a big deal of ICly by anyone.
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<snip>
Mixed race Brutor and Sebiestor
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You as well? Arnulf has the same mix & I half expected him to get some static from people playing tribal traditionalists. Never happened though.
I RPed there being some racism regarding being a mutt in Saede's backstory, but nothing I've ever actually really addressed. Its never been made a big deal of ICly by anyone.
After all the space bullshit we had been through, mix-raced anyone doesn't make us bat our eyelids.
Unless we are hardcore U-Nats or True Amarr zealots or Provists or other forms of extremists or whatever.
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But in the Silas and Gaven case, it's worth pointing out that the distinction between holder as a class and holder as the official title was much less clear in those early days.
These days we talk about someone being a holder as specifically being a title. So you can be noble while not being a holder. Back then I thought of holder more as like a caste, so nobility and holder were synonymous. I don't think I would have made Gaven a head of household type holder in the modern RP sense if I was making him today, but that sort of got grandfathered in over the years as things crystallized.
You have it exactly right I think.
Interestingly enough it's an odd case of many of the RPers with 9 or 10 year RP characters that started off a bit Mary Sue that sort of through sheer patience and being old bittervets eventually get all the 'end game' content and their characters get less Mary Sue the older they get...
Yeah, there is a certain sense in which Gaven should be more mary sue than he is just because his employment history is... well... pretty damn unique. Instead, I have been toning down the mary sue elements that 18 year old me thought were decent ideas and 28 year old me thinks are idiotic ones.
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Yeah, there is a certain sense in which Gaven should be more mary sue than he is just because his employment history is... well... pretty damn unique. Instead, I have been toning down the mary sue elements that 18 year old me thought were decent ideas and 28 year old me thinks are idiotic ones.
I'd argue simple age carries the day for some of this stuff. For "older" Amarr characters like a Gaven or Graelyn you don't have to talk about all of the Mary Sue bits, you can often get the +10 RP acknowledgement of your things just by people looking at your character bio and employment history. I've always liked that part of our little RP world, where fresh out of school capsuleer might say something pithy to a Graelyn sort, and then someone else might say "this guy was out doing X purging blood raiders while you were still getting teased in baseliner academy school, show some respect."
I happen to like both sorts of characters; the young upstarts who are eager to make a mark and maybe don't agree with some of the older established lines of deference and respect and conduct, and then the older types occasionally laying the verbal smackdown. This is especially dynamic in "today's" PF situation, where the Amarr PF bloc is undergoing tremendous social upheavals and there are lots of 'new money' and different sorts of holders and the society is becoming a bit stressed related to the old school social orders. I find those dynamics interesting in the Amarr sphere of RP, but I imagine some very similar sorts of interactions in say a Caldari corp where the younger 'employees' are expected to not mouth off to the XO's or whatever.
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I'm a Mary Sue IRL.
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I've always felt what makes something Mary Sue as a subjective thing, that really comes down to intent and execution. It's the intent of implying how remarkably special a character is to the point of stretching credulity.
Reading through this, I don't see what's Mary Sue about having a capsuleer character with say a Naval background on its own, for example.
However it would probably stretch credulity for me if said character not only graduated from the Navy, but they graduated with 101% grades because they were top of the class of all the people who also graduated top of their class at age 14. Then they became Top Grand Admiral of Admirals at age 18 because it was secretly actually they who defeated the Minmatar Fleet over Mekhios and Jamyl Sarum was so thankful to them they made sweet love (but you don't know that because it's a secret) and gave them personal capsuleer training.
Then again, compared to the rest of humanity in Eve, a capsuleer by default comes with what could be said to be Mary Sue aspects. What with the whole having unique genetics, superior intellect and willpower, and so on. That's just on the first day, never mind when you're rolling around in mind boggling expensive ships and celestial death machines.
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If your character is so special that he gets special and positive treatment with no effort and when others do not like the character he is wrong and bad, your character is officially a Mary Sue.
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Is being a commander with lots of soldiers so Mary Sue when you actually gave yourself the means to achieve it concretely ?
I think it's a bit Mary Sue to start with that sort of special background, I'm not sure I'd roll a new character with such a background now. Or if I did I would much more place emphasis on the baseliner special person background meaning very little to other capsuleers and it giving them zero capsuleer reputation.
Yeah this. Like, JFR claiming to have a small private baseliner army? That's pretty reasonable. Having Newplayer 287 claim at day 2 out of the Science and Trade school that they have a private baseliner army is a bit more out there.
I haz army.. army of JFR cultists. Confirmed.
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Is being a commander with lots of soldiers so Mary Sue when you actually gave yourself the means to achieve it concretely ?
I think it's a bit Mary Sue to start with that sort of special background, I'm not sure I'd roll a new character with such a background now. Or if I did I would much more place emphasis on the baseliner special person background meaning very little to other capsuleers and it giving them zero capsuleer reputation.
Yeah this. Like, JFR claiming to have a small private baseliner army? That's pretty reasonable. Having Newplayer 287 claim at day 2 out of the Science and Trade school that they have a private baseliner army is a bit more out there.
I haz army.. army of JFR cultists. Confirmed.
I've kept Halcy from picking up anything like staff for a while, beyond the obvious ship crews and people who mind your stuff. Still trying to keep it modest; 20 man security team, kitchen staff, waiters, maids, barmen, a band...etc...
Caldari RPers should give me names for my security team and specify male/female
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As I think others have mentioned, Eve tends to make it a bit tricky in that capsuleers are, by default, not an average citizen. Unfathomable power and wealth, etc means that a number of the metrics you might use to judge a character in another game, or the protagonist in your Twilight fan fic, don't apply. Other metrics though, I think, do still apply.
I don't think I've got a lot of Mary Sue type stuff with Silver, in particular. He is largely a product of the character creator, and although his story has at times gotten a bit exotic I think most of it developed in a pretty natural way. Medical training and being a pilot might have been stretching it, but then again being a pilot is how he segued into being a capsuleer and he's had a long time since then with fancy implants and essentially unlimited resources to pursue his interests in the medical field. Plus there was the whole Happy Chip thing and I needed him to have a bit of a useful background for that. :D Also, I try and make sure that if my characters are very good at some things, they are terrible at others. Silver is great at press releases and pretty good on rhetoric, but fairly terrible at relating to anyone on a personal level. He would also get his ass kicked in person by almost anyone, can't really hold his liquor, and has a sense of style that runs to suits and other suits that are just a slightly different color.
Hilion rather intentionally hits some Mary Sue tropes. He was intended from the start as a bit over the top. He's over 100 years old, he's constantly practicing substance abuse (well, I say practicing, but he's really an expert by now), he has a weird and rather variable accent, he's an unusual height, etc. On the other hand, I think he is lacking an important Mary Sue ingredient, which is that noone is expected to take him very seriously. He will tell you, with a straight face, that he once escaped the clutches of a hyperintelligent Fedo the size of a VW Beetle and that there is a planet where he is worshiped as a deity and that he is a Brutor (in spite of being a very short Khanid).
One thing I think has been mentioned that is cool in Eve is that you don't need to make up a crazy story for your character to be a special snowflake - you can sometimes have the opportunity to do it through the game. You can actually be an expert if corp infiltration, or have your own industrial empire. Some of us have also had the opportunity to participate in big events or bits of Eve history whether player or CCP generated.
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Lets see. Gottii is chalk full of Mary Sueism, though like Silver, some of it was from the character generator.
Slave...check! (Mostly from the Character Generator. Slave Child gave good PER back in the day, though I screwed up reading the background, thought Gottii was rescued as a child, not smuggled out as an infant)
Martial arts...check! (admittedly, martial traditions are the entirety of Brutor PF pretty much)
Huge size...check! (part of this was "brutors are intimidating in the flesh", part of it was lazy characterization early on, and eventually I lived it as a metaphor for a slave whos body isnt really his own)
Criminality...check! (figured an ex-slave would be hard on his luck, even in the Republic)
Special forces training...check! (I wanted Gottii to be a hardened/broken veteran of a penal battalion who was lucky to be alive....then CCP made sure to clarify that the Valklear were spec op badasses....so I had to go with that....I loved that I could simply not talk about it )
Raised by someone else other than his parents....check! (character generator again)
Sexually abused as a child....check! (slavery sucks, its institutionalized abuse, sexual abuse is part and parcel of any meaningful representation of it)
Tragic loss of family members....check!
Unique genetic legacy....check! (granted, I made it a standard high-gee strain of the Amarrian eugenics program, which would make sense if youre trying to make slaves for various planets)
I'm sure I'm missing some. I kinda tried to make him extreme, but portray him as human as possible.
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Not really at home with the terms 'Mary-Sue' and 'Peter Pan-isms' Guess I live a sheltered life? Could someone explain me what they mean?
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Mary Sue is a character type in which the character is essentially flawless, perfect in every way, loved by anything and everything and may or may not be omnipotent, all without exerting effort by the character.
Peter Pan-ism refers to ability to live without growing old.
Both are, I believe, designed for wish-fulfillment.
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Mary Sue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
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Is being a commander with lots of soldiers so Mary Sue when you actually gave yourself the means to achieve it concretely ?
I think it's a bit Mary Sue to start with that sort of special background, I'm not sure I'd roll a new character with such a background now. Or if I did I would much more place emphasis on the baseliner special person background meaning very little to other capsuleers and it giving them zero capsuleer reputation.
Yeah this. Like, JFR claiming to have a small private baseliner army? That's pretty reasonable. Having Newplayer 287 claim at day 2 out of the Science and Trade school that they have a private baseliner army is a bit more out there.
I haz army.. army of JFR cultists. Confirmed.
I've kept Halcy from picking up anything like staff for a while, beyond the obvious ship crews and people who mind your stuff. Still trying to keep it modest; 20 man security team, kitchen staff, waiters, maids, barmen, a band...etc...
Caldari RPers should give me names for my security team and specify male/female
Something interesting to think about with retinues is that for some characters having a retinue makes them *less* of a special snowflake if they come from classes that are supposed to have lackeys.
That is, the princess that refuses the help of her servants is a larger than life character in my view. An Amarrian holder should have a small army of servants as a matter of course, and you are making a bit of a statement if you play the Amarrian holder who doesn't have any servants. Conversely, a character that was born in poverty having a retinue is saying that they have this group of people following them despite not coming from a class where that is normal.
As a rule, I think it is really useful to identify what "normal" is for a character of your chars background. You don't have to always follow normal to avoid problems, but you should be aware when you are breaking out of the normal for your character.
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Is being a commander with lots of soldiers so Mary Sue when you actually gave yourself the means to achieve it concretely ?
I think it's a bit Mary Sue to start with that sort of special background, I'm not sure I'd roll a new character with such a background now. Or if I did I would much more place emphasis on the baseliner special person background meaning very little to other capsuleers and it giving them zero capsuleer reputation.
Yeah this. Like, JFR claiming to have a small private baseliner army? That's pretty reasonable. Having Newplayer 287 claim at day 2 out of the Science and Trade school that they have a private baseliner army is a bit more out there.
I haz army.. army of JFR cultists. Confirmed.
I've kept Halcy from picking up anything like staff for a while, beyond the obvious ship crews and people who mind your stuff. Still trying to keep it modest; 20 man security team, kitchen staff, waiters, maids, barmen, a band...etc...
Caldari RPers should give me names for my security team and specify male/female
Something interesting to think about with retinues is that for some characters having a retinue makes them *less* of a special snowflake if they come from classes that are supposed to have lackeys.
That is, the princess that refuses the help of her servants is a larger than life character in my view. An Amarrian holder should have a small army of servants as a matter of course, and you are making a bit of a statement if you play the Amarrian holder who doesn't have any servants. Conversely, a character that was born in poverty having a retinue is saying that they have this group of people following them despite not coming from a class where that is normal.
As a rule, I think it is really useful to identify what "normal" is for a character of your chars background. You don't have to always follow normal to avoid problems, but you should be aware when you are breaking out of the normal for your character.
This is an interesting point I was previously aware of but hadn't really thought much about. I don't know that I would go so far as to call just deviation from the norm for someone of a particular background being a 'Mary sueish', but I know it is something I do try to keep some track of in my characters. My thinking is that if their story is the same story that you might see repeated over and over among New Eden's inhabitants, I don't need to worry very much. If it is something that you aren't likely to see repeated, then that is when I need to be more careful to maintain its integrity.
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Mary sue-ism and my absolute will to get away from it made me bring over and over at first a lot of changes that eventually leaded to a convoluted character background to go around said mary sueisms... It can be a nightmare when you are dealing with your first character that you started befire knowing a lot about the PF itself besides the basics... :\
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Well. In mild defense, I originally built Vel with an eye to Achura attribute and skill distribution points given at creation time due to history & background choices before taking RP or any particular character concept into mind.
Which led to the following 2-isms:
Ancestry: Monks
Occupation/professional background: Special Forces
When Malkalen occurred character build background aside, she was otherwise rather vanilla and mundane. It impacted her personal life and family quite acutely. There were losses. In defense, she's never really publicly dragged it around with her or cried about it too much.
Later she performed a meek attempt at assisted suicide of her mortal body while piloting a shuttle. The cause stemmed from a particularly early career mission. Ultimately, the drama was due to a rather naive perception she held of the State and its relationship to the Mega Corps. Yes, Vel, yes. Megacorps do occasionally fire on State vessels and employ capsuleers to do the deed.
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Something interesting to think about with retinues is that for some characters having a retinue makes them *less* of a special snowflake if they come from classes that are supposed to have lackeys.
That is, the princess that refuses the help of her servants is a larger than life character in my view. An Amarrian holder should have a small army of servants as a matter of course, and you are making a bit of a statement if you play the Amarrian holder who doesn't have any servants. Conversely, a character that was born in poverty having a retinue is saying that they have this group of people following them despite not coming from a class where that is normal.
As a rule, I think it is really useful to identify what "normal" is for a character of your chars background. You don't have to always follow normal to avoid problems, but you should be aware when you are breaking out of the normal for your character.
Background wise, Halcy would have been accustomed to servants, then gotten used to not having many and not trusting them. Even in her current situation I have her deliberately avoid verbal interaction with her staff.
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Mary Sue is a character type in which the character is essentially flawless, perfect in every way, loved by anything and everything and may or may not be omnipotent, all without exerting effort by the character.
Peter Pan-ism refers to ability to live without growing old.
Both are, I believe, designed for wish-fulfillment.
It is a peculiarly defining trait for Mary Sues that even their flaws make their characters stronger and more admirable. Too loyal. Too generous. Too hardworking on behalf of others.