amusedI adore the Mary-Sue Litmus Test, and because people will go on and on about how new female characters are Mary Sues, I figured I'd try to run both Bela Talbot and Ruby through the test and see how they came out. (Actually, I wanted to see mostly whether Bela would score anywhere nearly as high as I figured Ruby would.)
I avoided answering "yes" to any of the self-insertion questions (for both characters), because I have no idea whether either of them have elements of that. And because they were created by a group of writers, not a single author. So my initial prediction was that both of them would score lower than they might if the actual creator were taking the test.
Bela scored a whopping 16 points.
0-16 Points
Most likely Not-Sue. Characters at this level could probably take a little spicing up without hurting them any.
I think Bela got this low a score mostly because we don't know a ton about her background yet, and also because she actually had a couple of de-suifiers at work.
Ruby, despite having the same downplaying tactics applied to what I scored, came out with 36 points!
30+
Fanfiction authors beware - Mary's on the loose. There's still a chance you can save this character with some TLC, though. Role-players and original fiction characters, you should also strongly consider giving your character a workover.
Or
36+
Fanfiction authors, you might just want to start over. Role-players and original fiction authors, at this point your characters are likely to provoke eye-rolling and exclaimations of "yeah, right!" from your readers. (Well, at least from me.) Immediate workover is probably in order.
Um. Yeah. Wow, that's actually higher than I predicted. (Mind you, I've very interested to see what they do with Ruby--the field is wide open from here. And I don't believe her pity-poor-little-demon-me act for a second.)
