Monday, January 6, 2020

Killing Mary Sue Is a Real Bitch

On my phone I spend a lot of time playing this Empire & Puzzles game that's sort of one part a D&D type strategy/questing game and one part Candy Crush in that your attacks are determined by matching crystals on a board.

Anyway, periodically they have these "events" that are usually based on some theme like vampires or Alice in Wonderland.  One was based on King Arthur and as part of that you have to fight Arthur and other characters to get some loot.

The absolute worst character was not Arthur or Lancelot but Guinevere.  She had a whole bunch of special abilities that were really, really a pain in the ass when I was trying to defeat her.  One was that she would heal her whole party.  And not only that but she'd take away your party's "manna" or the power generated to launch your characters's special attacks.  And there was even some other thing too!

If it were just her it would be somewhat manageable, but when combined with a couple of other powerful characters it was really, really annoying.  Because she was so overpowered for these fights I started calling her Mary Sue after that old thing in Star Trek fanfics where there was some character so perfect at everything without any weaknesses.  The label sometimes gets applied to other characters like Rey in Star Wars and so on.  It has a negative connotation as it's not really believable for the audience and it can be kind of annoying because it sucks up conflict and drama.

If you wonder what the big deal is, I think my experience with that game illustrates the problem.  If you have a real Mary Sue she's so perfect and overqualified/overpowered that it makes it a real pain in the ass to kill her or bring her down.  If Guinevere were the hero of the game, it would be really boring to watch her wipe out one team after another with little or no effort.

Now of course if I had Guinevere and she were full leveled up I'd have no problem with her on my team.  It's just trying to kill her that's the real bitch.

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