Have you ever considered making a page for The Quest for the Legends on Tv Tropes?
I'd never make a page for my own work; it feels wrong and egocentric to me. If somebody else wants to, though, be my guest (somebody made one for Morphic the other day).
A while back (and I mean, a long while back) you mentioned a fanfic called Tangled Web, by Chicrocketjames. Do you know where I could read it? I found the first three chapters somewhere, but nothing more.
I'm pretty sure the only place all the chapters he wrote are still available is
here. Still got abandoned a tragically short way in, but it's quite a bit more than what you found.
Hey Butterfree, I took a Mary Sue Limitus Pokemon test on Mark and I got:
61+ Points : Irredeemable Sue. Did you base your character off Ash or what?
What do you think of this? I doubt you did base him completely off of Ash.
That wouldn't happen to be the one that makes you tick a box for every legendary the character comes into contact with, would it? Because I've run him through plenty of Mary-Sue litmus tests, and that's the only one where he didn't get graded as something between a normal, healthy character and an outright anti-Sue. And that is not a coincidence.
Mary-Sue litmus tests are inherently flawed because they can't test what actually matters, namely the mindset of the author. They can be nice clues that something could be going on behind the scenes, but for this fic, that particular question simply isn't indicative of anything at all. Sure, sometimes I guess seeing a bunch of legendaries is done to make the character more special, but the whole point of the plot here is seeking out many, many legendaries and, yes, catching them. It simply has nothing to do with the characters who are doing it, and exponentially less so with each subsequent legendary box the test forces you to check after the first one, because how in the world can the
precise number of legendaries that haven't already been caught by the other kids magically affect Mark as a character?
But really, to be honest, I don't need a litmus test to tell me that no, Mark is not a Stu, because as I said, Sueism is about the mindset of the author, and the fact is I simply do not have the mindset that would make him one. Compared to the characters I find interesting in this story, I really don't give a damn about him, I don't expect you to give a damn, he's emphatically ordinary and not special in any way whatsoever except that he happened to be there when Chaletwo was looking for recruits, and as far as I'm concerned his most fun moments are usually when he's being pathetically passive and failing to do the right/noble thing. The only things vaguely Stuish about him are his Pokémon team, which is a silly artifact from the past, and the fact he's out catching legendaries to save the world, where it's made abundantly clear that he's nowhere near the most useful person involved and the basis on which he was picked was terribly flimsy and had little to do with his ability at anything. I delight in Mark's sheer unremarkableness and lack of outstanding or heroic qualities. If any character in this fic is a Sue or Stu, it's most definitely not him.
I'm not offended and all valid points to be made about the characterization in this fic are gratefully welcomed, but I think I have very good reasons to consider this test result simply inaccurate. If you would like to argue otherwise, do so by all means.
