The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her into their nakama, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal. She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story.
She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws - either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.
She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. "The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment.
TV Tropes had a decent definition of Mary Sues. The whole gender thing really doesn't matter in my book. (I REALLY ought to get an account.) First of all, I was using Mary Sue to apply to both female and males, though males do have their own term (Gary Stu). And now I'm guilty of these same crimes of talking about something mostly unrelated to ponies in socks. The only difference is that their bodies and colorations were done in studio so there would be somepony standing in the background. But background ponies have no real personality or anything. (We need S2 badly.)Īnd along these same lines, why don't you complain about the use of background ponies in fanfics? I hardly ever see complaints about that. It's not like we've got a neverending pile of canon ponies on our hands. And I think that as long as they're not Mary Sues, OCs are perfectly fine.
Go discuss it in the Past Sins comments section if you want to hold this discussion.īecause someone is inevitably going to make me throw in my own two cents, I like Past Sins, though it's not my favorite. And this has turned from a discussion of sock-wearing ponies into a flaming argument over whether Nyx is interesting and if Past Sins is a quality fanfic, All because an OC pony got a lot of votes for looking cute.