Yeah, you definitely don’t want to create a Superman problem where there’s no stakes because the main character is too strong. And it does make for a more interesting story when the protagonists have their share of low points.
Power scaling seems to be something that a lot of anime struggles with.
My point about plot twists boils down to not have an adversarial view of the audience. One of my favorite pieces of media is Madoka Magica (at least the series and its sequel movie), and it pulls off several great plot twists by sprinkling breadcrumbs throughout the story about certain things not being what they seem and certain statements being half-truths. So I definitely don’t intend to say that plot twists are bad. The problem arises when a story feels like it needs to senselessly dangle mysteries in front of the audience to keep it interested while giving no useful information.
This is a big reason why I don’t like Three Houses. There’s loads of dialogue, but the characters rarely ever say anything. Those scenes at the beginning of every month where Rhea and Seteth exposit to Byleth are terrible. They raise all sorts of story elements without caring to finish any of them. Things like the Western Church’s involvement with Those Who Slither and the reason why Flaynn’s blood was extracted go nowhere and are left hanging. The worst case of this is probably Byleth’s origins. There was even an instance when Rhea was going to tell something about Byleth’s mother, but she gets interrupted by someone entering the room, and it never comes up again. Apparently it would have been impossible to continue the conversation later and that was the only possible time that information could have been revealed.
Going on, I played Golden Deer as my first playthrough, and the story drops all these hints suggesting the Church isn’t trustworthy, but then after the timeskip, Seteth is Byleth’s best bud, and we’re supposed to be all gung-ho to rescue Rhea. Things like Seteth removing books from the library are never brought up again. Golden Deer is also the route where where the truth of Byleth’s origins are spelled out by Rhea, but by that time, it doesn’t matter anymore. Sothis’s consciousness is long gone, and all that’s left to do is defeat an inexplicable zombie king. Byleth’s origins have no bearing on the plot anymore. The plot of Three Houses is, to me, just a web of bridges to nowhere meant to mask how little actually happens but dangling enough useless information to attempt to preserve interest. Heck, Three Houses couldn’t even be bothered to give anything on why Edelgard taking over Fodlan was something that needed to be stopped. It never suggests that any place that fell under her control was worse off.
Just mentioning this because it’s fresh in my mind, but I started Tales of Arise last night (I’m not very far so don’t go dumping the story here if anyone is one of those people who manages to finish games on release day), and I’m already getting fed up with the writing for Shionne because she’s constantly dropping suggestions that amount to “I have secret motivations and a secret backstory” but without adding anything new each time it’s done. It’s as if the writers don’t trust the audience to remember that a character is mysterious unless its reminded every ten minutes. I’m not sure if there will be a payoff for any of it at this point, but it’s pretty grating and a very bad case of telling that she has secrets rather than showing.
So pretty much my advice was more to say don’t tell stories in a manipulative way rather than don’t disrupt the status quo.
If you want some context for my gundam quip look up “Jesus Yamato” at some point. You’ll either be mad at the story or laugh at how poorly it’s handled. Dude is literally a gary stu (the lesser forgotten male connotation for of mary sue) by almost every definition.
Or i can post a cliff notes version of the bad narrative bits of gundam seed and gundam seed destiny for you to further exemplify how not to write a character.
I’m familiar with Gundam Seed. Why do you think the desert level in Deity Device is full of four legged monsters? I generally think Setsuna from Gundam 00 is worse as far as essentially being a god, at least in the second season.
I think something to note is that putting a mundane and entirely average character at the front of the story can work really well if a story is built around just how boring they are.
I think the best example of this would be the main character of Re: Zero, they are depicted at the start of the story as your completely average otaku that somehow becomes the main character of a fantasy story after being magically transported to another world, the only exception here is that this story is largely horror focused, our main character can go back to a certain point in time when they die, and the people that occupy this fantasy world do not see our lead as a great person
the horror of Re: Zero stems from the show knowing its audience and knowing exactly what they don’t want to see and hear, in order for our lead to overcome the many challenges he faces in the world he has to change himself throughout the series, transforming our boring and annoyingly generic isekai protagonist into a genuinely good person who people aren’t embarrassed to call a friend
so basically I think that having a protagonist start as a boring and mundane character can work as long as the world around them responds correctly and said lead doesn’t stay boring forever but that’s more going into character arc territory.
If you want to blame someone, blame Fukuda and his drama back then. It really caused the whole mess that we all know from today. Plus, Seed Destiny got written better in SRW Z by establishing Shinn Asuka as the main character.
Not exactly sure how his wife dying would be drama, but its actually far more damning then most notice since the two are actually just MSG and Zeta but somewhat worse.
Freakin Astray was originally made to cover the glaring plot holes in the two and still ended up as a better product.
Also haven’t played Z, But i know what you mean. I think it was just too hot off the heels of gundam wing to do much good with itself.
I’m a little confused about what the ultimate conclusion of this post is meant to be, in relation to this being a writing advice thread, since it mostly seems to be a write-up on the protagonists of the Tellius games far more than it is any kind of informative article.
On the Mary Sue thing, I really don’t see a lot of that term being used anymore, outside of reactionary circles at least, but I’d imagine that RD is a member of a long lineage of games where there’s been some poisoning of the well going on in terms of discussion about the game. I feel like the gaming community at large is still reevaluating a lot of games from the last 20 years or so, because a lot of them released in an age where discussion about games was so poor that you had major press outlets releasing articles titled “Top 10 Babes In Gaming!” We’re still working through some of the shitty attitudes that led to that kind of atmosphere, and I think part of that involves examining characters like Micaiah again and shedding some of the biases of the era where people’s first opinions were formed. It was an era where most major female characters were either sidekicks to a male lead, or were some kind of ‘woman scorned’ cliche, and a lot of them wore thongs, so there’s a lot of characters from the era that have sort of slipped through the cracks as there just wasn’t really interest in discussing those characters in the ways we do now.
A completely massive tangent
I would say, though, for the same reasons the term has mostly fallen out of favour, I don’t think it’s really fair to try to discuss Ike by trying to fit him into the label as a way to take the heat off Micaiah. Fantasy storytelling often leans on a “mythic” framework (I don’t know that this is a real phenomenon so much as a name I’m ascribing to something I’ve seen a lot of), where the story is more about tempering a character into some kind of grand hero, and the challenges that are placed before them are meant as ways for them to re-assert, and by proxy prove the virtue of, their ideals in some way, rather than as a challenge to those ideals themselves to force them to be re-examined and folded back into the new understanding of the world / characters / plot. A good example of this (not because they’re particularly emblematic of either approach but because they both exist in the same franchise) would be the differences between the first and most recent Dragon Age games, where the first game is far more about the steady ascent of your character from a youth with no life experience into a hero capable of slaying the world’s greatest evils, a la Baldur’s Gate and its contemporaries. In that game, the emphasis in the dialogue is much more about the ways that the protagonist (the Grey Warden) is going to assert his newfound power and authority to change the world according to his vision in preparation for the final battle, unifying a fractured and divided world by whatever means he deems most appropriate, and with the outcomes he deems most favourably.
In contrast, Inquisition has a very similar premise, but much more of the dialogue asks the player, several times by the end of the game, to reflect on how their character feels about the power being given to them. Very frequently, the Inquisitor has to answer a question they’ve been asked before, but now things have changed and they have a chance to re-evaluate if their position has changed in the face of new information. Often, this isn’t through grand sweeping choices, but through quiet heartfelt discussions between friends. In the game’s DLC (by all means, its true ending), the player is shown that power disintegrating around them as the world enters another crisis, and then once they’re at their lowest point, asks the player one last time: how has this power affected you? Are you proud of how you’ve used it? By the end of Dragon Age Origins, a game that’s more “mythic” in its presentation, the player has been asked how their character feels about the world they inhabit, and has made changes to that world based on those feelings. By the end of Dragon Age Inquisition, however, the player has instead been asked how their character feels about themselves, their role in the world, and even though both games end in defeating the ultimate evil that’s threatening the world, the road to get there is so different for both games.
I think this brand of more introspective fantasy is something that younger fantasy fans are much more fond of, whereas older fantasy fans tend to prefer the former. While I certainly prefer the more down to earth route that fantasy has been heading towards lately, I have a lot of respect for the loftier storytelling of a lot of fantasy stories for what they’re trying to accomplish – a kind of vicarious power fantasy, I suppose you could call it? I think Ike is a lot of fun as that kind of character, and watching his growth from “Greil’s Son” to “Crimean Liberator” to “Godslayer” is satisfying in a completely different, but still valuable, way to Micaiah’s more measured and personal character arc. Just as in the above example, much of Ike’s character development is far more relative to his relationship to the world around him, how he feels about it and how he chooses to act to change the way of things, whereas Micaiah’s arc is much more about internal turmoil and trying to find where she fits into things and whether or not she’s proud of that role.
The point is to not limit characters out of fear of being criticized by a having a rather meaningless term thrown at the work. Micaiah has long been the target of what I what I would consider rather bad-faith criticism where it’s said she’s a Mary Sue because of her special abilities and ultimately being the true apostle. Though that sort of criticism discounts that the setting is a different world from ours where those things are something that a person can be born into. But well reasoned or not, having that sort of criticism floating around can get in someone’s head and influence what he writes.
So the point isn’t to say Micaiah good, Ike bad. It’s to look at which of those two characters was really living a charmed life in spite of the common perception surrounding them. It is not to say, Ike is really the Mary Sue, not Micaiah, but rather that the concept of a Mary Sue isn’t worth thinking about. Ike is fine for the story he’s in. The problems I have with Path of Radiance’s story aren’t really with Ike, though I don’t find his arc enough to make the story interesting because he’s quite a static character and most of his growth is over by the first third of the game. Similarly, if a story is plagued by a true Mary Sue, to the extent that such a thing ever really exists, then the problems with the story are likely larger than that single character. I find it hard to believe that a truly amazing story could exist that is laid low by a single character and nothing else. I find Byleth detrimental to Three Houses, but I don’t think the problems with the storytelling would be solved by removing Byleth. Perhaps this is difficult to articulate as its countering a position that I find irrational. The saying that you can’t reason someone out of a position that he didn’t reason himself into in the first place might apply.
The main takeaway is this:
Particularly in adventure stories, a protagonist is a different sort of person from most people just by virtue of him doing all that adventuring while most are living out their lives. So the advice is to not be afraid of giving a protagonist the traits and abilities he needs to fit into his story because someone might look at him and lob a hackneyed phrase. And it’s also to say that being too ordinary can be a problem as its not satisfying to watch a nobody stumble through a story where his abilities aren’t related to outcomes.
Every time I see a late join unit with a low level. “oh it’s an est” I cannot escape it can confirm this happens in every hack that has one and it super loses my investment in anything going on.
Gonna add this Mary Sue was a term more or less created by people to blanket judge peoples (lack of) writing skill it was then adopted into common speech as a shorthand for an unrealistic character.
Except every character is unrealistic it’s a story people do amazing feats beyond normal all the time
Luke is a Mary Sue because hes the one that will bring balance to the force
Aragorn is a mary sue because hes Strider the legendary ranger and lost king
I don’t think it’s a bad faith term but rather short hand for “ok it’s unrealistic to me this bothers me i need to define it instead of thinking about why this bothers me ill just say mary sue and move on”
Sorry about my mini rant and appreciate the advice
Also tropes good you cannot make a story without tropes because everything is one playing them only straight get’s you a pretty good story that does what it wants to and there is nothing wrong with that
Subverting them for the sake of subverting them makes a story spin it’s wheels and never get anywhere
A good story balanced both Deity Device is my favorite hack right now for trying to be a little more ambitious then hacks that just play the tropes straight (again nothing wrong with that)
Alright, finally took the time to read most of the thread! Here are some thoughts about plot twists and Mary Sues (I don’t have anything to say about tropes that haven’t been said already), hoping it can bring something of value to the discussion.
Plot Twists
Something I don’t think I’ve seen written here is that one should always remember very few stories are actually meant to be experienced once. As such, while the main thing that makes twists stick with us is the initial “wow” factor, a good twist should never ever make the experience of other rewatches worse. Let’s take the Terminator franchise as an example (beware of spoilers for Terminator 2, and whatever number the last one is supposed to be) : In Terminator 2, the biggest surprise is by far the reveal early on (15-30 minutes in) that the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger is the good guy this time around. This provides an interesting change to the formula while keeping the previous movie and the first minutes of this one interesting to watch, even on a rewatch. By contrast, Terminator 6 (I think?), which happens right after T2, begins with the gruesome and sudden death of John Connor, which I admit did surprise me when I first saw it, but as soon as I thought about, I realized this made the previous two movies (chronologically) less enjoyable, since making sure John Connor survived was the entire point. To be honest, I’m pretty sure this is a problem that is becoming more and more common as time passes. I mean, there’s a reason why “subverting expectations” has become kind of a meme in some fandoms, right? In my opinion, some writers are mixing up “expectations from tropes and formulas” and “expectation from what the story has been building up to”. That’s why (Spoilers for Avengers : Infinity War) Thanos winning works, while (Spoilers for Game of Thrones season 8) Arya killing the Night King, while Jon Snow had been the one with the most personal conflict with this guy didn’t work.
Long story short : just always make sure your plot twist has a proper build-up and DOESN’T ruin any past build-up.
Mary Sues
Some people are of the opinion that Mary Sues don’t exist, and I disagree. However, I will agree that the term has lost quite a bit of its meaning over the years, now essentially boiling down to “character (often female) I don’t like”. In my humble opinion, a Mary Sue is simply a character who, by virtue of being too virtuous or powerful (or both), makes the story boring. With this in mind, I think we can divide Mary Sues in two categories, with of course some overlap : Self-Righteous Mary Sues and Overpowered Mary Sues.
Self-Righteous Mary Sues I feel are like the Ike example Permafrost gave. They are characters whose worldview, moral integrity, trust in their allies or mental state in general is never once shaken or presented in a negative light. I should note I find it particularly rare to see a character who only belongs in this category. Interestingly, self-righteousness is often subverted (Especially in indie games such as OFF or Lisa The Painful), or make for interesting characters (Superman is often cited as a Gary Stu, but some find his moral superiority to be one of his charm). Another interesting thing to note is that most Fire Emblem lords actually fall in this category, and yet the only one to ever receive flak for that is Corrin. Again, this is only my opinion, but my take from this is that high moral standing only makes a character boring and uninteresting when it feels like the story bends in a way that makes anything the MC right and objectively correct. This was kind of the main point of Permafrost’s rant about Ike, and probably the main thing that makes the other lord less easy targets than Corrin.
Now the second category, and the most common by far, is overpowered Sues. Now, I’d like to say it depends on three major things :
The setting. I’ve seen a lot of braindead debates where one side would claim they don’t understand why Saitama is never considered a Mary Sue, and it honestly baffles me. I admit I’ve never seen One Punch Man so I may be wrong here, but I feel like a comedic setting would allow the creator much more freedom in terms of creative freedom. Also as mentioned by someone else, it also depends on how the power level scales in-universe. I haven’t watched Dragon Ball Z but I’m almost sure that’s why Goku works as a character here.
How much the character has worked to achieve their prowesses. I’ve seen this argument used a lot in the context of Captain Marvel, and I do agree with it. It is much easier to empathize with a character who went through a lot of shit to get to the level they are than a character who has been gifted with powers. This is a very common criticism of not only Captain Marvel, but also the latest Star Wars trilogy as well as the isekai genre in general. (Which by the way is one of the reasons why Konosuba is the best)
Whether they have some other fatal flaws despite their powers. That one’s kind of a given, but I feel like it’s SUCH an easy fix for overpowered OCs that I should mention it. If your characters has a flaw that makes them powerless, this most likely will take them out of the oh-so dreaded Mary Sue zone. For example, Edward Elric would most likely have been one of the most OP anime protags if not for the fact that he’s rendered powerless when alchemy is disabled/his metal arm is torn off/he can’t clap his hand for whatever other reason. Having flaws that are likely to be met at some point (Because no, not having power if you catch a cold on a day where the stars align isn’t a power flaw) is something a lot of aspiring writers could benefit from taking into account.
Lastly, I’d like to note that usually, being the opposite of one of those categories make you a good character, even if you 100% belong to the second one. As my last example I’d like to use a character anyone who’s been in prolonged contact with me knows I love : Velvet Crowe. Girl is among the strongest people on earth, has a demon hand and yadda yadda, but all overpoweredness is counter-balanced by her being morally bankrupt (at least most of the time).
In the end, I think the major problem Mary Sues encounter is that they encounter no problem within the story. People don’t hate Rey because she’s a woman, people hate her because no matter what, there doesn’t seem to be any obstacle she has trouble passing through, which makes the SW sequels incredibly boring movies.
And here we are! Hope that made sense, and I didn’t end up rambling way too much lol. Anyways, I’m impatient to see what your next advice will be about
Im kinda suprised you dont like three houses cause I feel like it kinda has a lot of story and character traits that go along with your OP.
In the Blue Lions story it has many moments that weren’t really twists but were still interesting and impactful, like what happens to Rodrigue that ends up causing a shift for Dimitri or what Edelgard does at the end. It also has a couple characters that seem tropey for how they act and feel but have development that gives meaning to their personaloties.
But thats just what I think, we can agree to disagree, lord knows I dont want to cause a big 3H discussion.
The thing is that, so far, I’ve been writing about story elements, and I haven’t even touched execution yet, which is where Three Houses flounders. You bring up Rodrigue, but he actually falls into what I consider a very ugly trend in RPGs where there is an older mentor character who feels like a walking death flag because he is either very obviously a temporary party member or he never becomes playable despite travelling with the playable characters. Xenoblade 2 had one, and a recent release I’m playing now had one.
The issue is that they don’t even feel like characters. They feel like animated vehicles for the MC’s growth, usually along the lines of “finding a cause worth fighting for.” When these sorts of “characters” die, it makes what the writers were likely planning as an emotional moment feel cheep and tacky because those “characters” only ever existed as a sacrifice to the MC. And the writers are doing the bare minimum to produce an emotional response without harming anyone too important.
And the sad thing is that death of a party member was done well decades ago. Final Fantasy IV is pretty much the grandpappy of story driven RPGs to the point that a decent percentage can be argued to be twists on its story or borrow heavily from its pool of characters and plot elements. And FF IV had Tellah. Yes, he dies in the story, but he wasn’t thrown on a pyre so that the MC could learn something about himself. Tellah’s a fiery old coot who walloped a guy with a stick for running off with his daughter. And when he died, it wasn’t about the MC, it was his own drive for revenge. He had his own motivations and ultimately wound up killing himself in his desperate thirst for revenge. He was a person rather than a construct orbiting the MC, so his death and unfinished goal actually hits. By contrast, when one of those sacrificial characters gets their death scene my thoughts are usually along the lines of, “Oh, it’s happening.”
I could go on about the execution of the plot in Three Houses, but that’s just one example to clear up your confusion on why I dislike Three Houses.
If fire emblem were strictly about the story then id agree with you, but theres more to the characters than their role in the main story, rodrigue for example also helps shape Felix’s character, so I dont really agree that he just exists as a plot device for the main character.
I think its kind of disingenuous when people write off certain characters for their role in the story from pretty much every game past FE3, where there are more interactions between characters outside of the story. People do it with every game, and im not saying that a character or even a game has good writing just because of that, but its worth mentioning. Especially if you are going to make a post talking about characters and tropes, you have to acknowledge that characters are more than just their role in the story. Unless someone is ONLY going to have a story in their hack, that is.
this is by far the worst example for handling character deaths, there are so many character ‘deaths’ where certain characters are presumed and by all accounts should be dead just for the sake of opening a party slot for the player, and since nearly every character that joins you has a fake death when Tellah dies it isn’t seen as a shock at all, and in all honesty Tellah being the only playable character that actually dies makes his death seem more like an asspull than anything else, sure we can expect Rodrigue to die because he doesn’t join you however one could argue that the way FFVI fakes most if not all character’s deaths just to open a new party slot and by doing so heavily stilts its pretty average story was far worse executed, Tellah’s death never actually hits because the player sees that literally every other death was faked making them count on Tellah coming back, at least when Jeralt or Rodrigue dies we aren’t thinking ‘‘when’s the game gonna say psych?’’.
I do agree that the way three houses handles characters that die in story poorly but you used a horrible example to prove your point.
I generally think Setsuna from Gundam 00 is worse as far as essentially being a god, at least in the second season.
