JX Valentine
Your aquatic overlord
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- Harassing Bill
- Seen Aug 19, 2020
There's also the matter that sometimes, a prompt calls for a character from a particular universe. Sometimes, an author sees a prompt, and it automatically speaks to them in the voice of a particular character who is only seen in one part of the universe, or the particular personality of a multi-verse character that is only in one particular universe.
Also a good point, which is probably why both prompts and canon restrictions will probably be completely optional. It's just easier than saying, "Okay, write a fic in the anime universe. Your prompt is orange."
About the Sue, going to have to agree with the others, and this is mostly why:
She doesn't do anything special. She has no special qualities to her that make her even come off as a Sue. ... And the meeting is not one that makes her a Chosen One, where afterward she has to save the world from any sort of danger.
Really, the basic definition of a Sue is any character that suspends logic and canon and bends the laws of reality (whatever they may be for that particular universe) for the sake of being awesome/getting his or her way. The reason why legendary sightings tend to be red flags isn't so much the fact that the legendary is sighted in the first place as it is what happens after. Legendaries tend to be marks of super special characters. Writers insert legends either to explicitly make their main characters become Chosen Ones or to symbolize that this trainer will soon become one. In other words, in the hands of most writers, legends are God, and the characters? Jesus.
(Excuse me while I die in hellfire for implying that Jesus Christ was a Gary Stu.)
Anyway, the point is if you don't have a character who ends up becoming the Chosen One or otherwise overly *~*~*special*~*~* in one way or another, then what you're doing isn't a Mary Sue. Rather, it's more like an averted trope, I think, where the reader expects a Mary Sue when the legend appears, but it just doesn't happen. It's clever, not cringe-worthy.
'Course, you'd have to make it clear that you're not heading down the Chosen One kind of path as well. Parodies tend to do this by having this kind of character exist in the foreground with a Chosen One running around in the background, but in a serious fic, just emphasizing the idea that there's no room for a Chosen One in the legends of the region should do.
I had some weird ideas recently, heh. One even involves a guy with a split personality. Of course, I wouldn't know how to go about that exactly. XD
Metric **** ton of research. Google is awesome. (I tried to do a DID fic awhile ago, but then I sort of wandered off because something else was shiny. So, yeah, I know there's a bunch of websites that just take some awesome Google-fu to get to and which will totally help you figure out how DID would be presented. Unfortunately, I lost the links, so I can't help you there. If all else fails, try Little Details.)
If you want to see DID done well in fiction, though, I tend to like plugging Kagerou: An Electric Manga. But that's also because I'm a fangirl.
The only thing is that I wouldn't want to see the fic turn into a Pokemorph story... >.>
XD Well, it won't be like the Serial Game or An Exquisite Corpse if that's what you're worried about. Everyone will get to write their own, separate fanfics of a certain length within a certain time frame. If we do get Pokémorph stories, yeah, that'd be only slightly amusing (and impressive for only 7k words), but you don't really have to write that kind of storyline if you don't want to.