213 things Mary Sue can not do in the fanfic.

[Keith Inc.]

The list: 213 things Skippy can no longer do in the Army is a litany of behavior that Skippy actually did do, or threatened to do. This list would be the opposite. Things that a Mary Sue character never does, or else the character would be disqualified as a Mary Sue, becoming merely self-insertion.

• Die early.
  
• Die suddenly.
  
• Die mistakenly (as in, her sacrifice does not resolve the situation, no matter how SURE she was).
  
• Die needlessly (as in, one of the first few victims that die before the powers that be realize there's a problem).
  
• Die a virgin (unless at least four characters bemoan the lost chance to sleep with her).
  
• Admit that the pivot point of the plot is outside her area of expertise.
  
• Trip while dancing.
  
• Fart.
  
• Use the toilet in an imperfectly soundproofed restroom.
  
• Sing off key.
  
• Scream when a mouse runs across her foot.
  
• Scream when an elephant steps on her foot.
  
• Throw like a girl.
  
• Punch like a girl.
  
• Lose control of the car in a skid (excepting right after a land mine takes off at least one tire).
  
• Admit she can't drive on snow.
  
• Admit she can't drive in mud.
  
• Admit she can't drive stick.
  
• Admit she can't handle hard liquor.
  
• Fall for practical jokes (except when falling for the joke is a charity to someone whose jokes always fail).
  
• Leave the meeting because her security clearance is not high enough for the topic under discussion.
  
• Apologize for being a lousy lay.
  
• Apologize for being frigid.
  
• Apologize for imperfect personal hygiene in the intimates.
  
• Seek therapy (except when the counseling session qualifies as a bragging session).
  
• Miss a chance to lecture.
  
• Miss a chance to speechify.
  
• Miss.
  
• Look in the mirror and worry about her looks.
  
• Look in the mirror and consider the plastic surgery to be money well spent.
  
• Avoid looking in the mirror before her morning coffee.
  
• Pour rum (or anything from the wet bar) in her morning coffee (unless it's to counter the effects of the drug the evil-doers slipped into her coffee).
  
• Spend more time discussing the technical details of her brilliant solution than discussing the moral imperitive that demands she pilot the device.
  
• Develop as a character.
  
• Be forgotten after she leaves.
  
• Have to clear her throat twice to get the attention of everyone else in the room, despite the urgency of their discussion or the volume of firepower in the shootout.
  
• Have to explain it all over again after the interruption.
  
• Have to explain it in a different way for those that didn't follow the first explanation.
  
• Have to accept someone else's correction of her logcial fallacy.
  

[dazzledfirestar]

That's fabulous!

[Leonhart29]

Hmmm - Reading that makes me realize that a hell of a lot of characters in my favorite fandoms ARE Mary/Marty Sues.

[ZombieDuke]

Yeaaaah, that sounds like a Mary Sue

[Keith Inc.]

Hmmm....half of my original list seems to have been lost in shipping.

But, hey, feel free, anyone can contribute.

[ladydeathfaerie]

great list, Keith.

i shared it with a friend and now she wants to write a fic using all of them. oh we of twisted minds.

[Keith Inc.]

Damn, i gotta find the rest of it, then.

Of course, some of them are mutually exclusive...or will be. Damn, this disorderly desk.

[Guest echtrae]

Definitely post more of it, if you can find it.

[Keith Inc.]

40. Wear mud, blood or crud when being introduced (unless the scene includes the phrase '...beauty shone through despite...').

41. Safety pin the snapped strap on her bra (unless the plot provides a point where she can MacGuyver a nuclear reactor using a flashlight battery and a safety pin she fortuitously has in her bra).

42. Worry about whether the account will cover the check.

43. Rotate her tires.

44. Choose the second-best wine.

45. Dump the entree into the guest of honor's lap.

46. Burn the entree.

47. Forget to cook the entree.

48. Forget to buy the ingredients for the entree.

49. Vomit from stress.

50. Cry (except within ten minutes of reading, hearing or writing a poem, love note or memorial entry in the log).

51. Improperly conjugate a verb, even in languages she doesn't exactly speak.

52. Speak about the Captain (or whichever character plays 'the heavy'), without knowing that he/she is standing right behind her.

53. Come in second place (unless the winner of First Place turns out to have cheated, or otherwise becomes unable to fulfill her office and must abdicate).

54. Incorrectly guesses the sexual orientation of another character (gaydar means never having to say, 'Whoops! Sorry!')

55. Arrive, as the cavalry, just too late to save the day. (Although the cavalry may arrive just too late to save Mary).

56. Miss the action by being on vacation.

57. Miss the action because she couldn't navigate her way out of a giant's boot if he tipped it over and shook.

58. Suffer from a phobia (except if she simply must overcome the phobia to save the day).

59. Get flustered during cross examination.

60. Find herself unprepared for the prosecution's questions.

61. Find herself unprepared for the defense's accusations.

62. Is at a lack for words (except within ten minutes of reading or hearing a poem, love note or memorial entry in the log).

63. Find a cockroach in her salad.

64. Find a cockroach in her neighbor's salad.

65. Fake a crush (Mary Sue's love is just too pure and powerful to mess with).

66. Fake disinterest.

67. Fake an orgasm.

68. Fear an audit.

69. Fear an auditor.

70. Feel threatened by the sexy young intern that just started working here, getting all the (wo)men's attention. If there is such an intern, she IS Mary Sue.

71. Suffer an inaccurate reputation.

72. Need a fluffer.

73. Find lover's porn stash (excepting old stashes that were completely put away after they became lovers and now spur intense adult relations).

74. Put a valentine in the wrong envelope or on the wrong desk.

75. Is outed by a bisexual lover at her wedding ceremony (although the captain performing the ceremony, or the man who gave her away, may respond to 'if there be anyone present who knows of a reason...').

76. Sit down and let someone else deliver the speech.

77. Sit down and let someone else emergency land the plane.

78. Sit down and let someone else find the murder weapon.

79. Accidentally break classic art (unless the art is a fake, and/or the clue to the murder is in the art).

80. Take the unglamorous but 'just as important' position of spear carrier while the fat lady sings.

81. Forget the words at karaoke.

82. Fail in an attempt to construe an original love song while on stage when her True Love enters the theatre/night club/auditorium. All Mary Sue's ad-libs come out as smoothly as if she'd written and rewritten them for hours at a keyboard in a distant bedroom or basement until they were polished.

[Keith Inc.]

83. Get tangled in the dog's leash (although she may drop the leash, so that Fluffykins can locate the body).

84. Have to stop talking until her listeners stop giggling over her inadvertent use of a word ("Heh-heh, heh, she said 'doody.' Heh-heh."). No one even snickers if Mary Sue suggests putting on a dickie, or talks about what's in her box, or says she pricked her finger.

85. Feel uncomfortable when cross dressing.

86. Feel unladylike when cross dressing.

87. Be unconvincing when cross dressing (although her True Love may feel disconcertingly attracted to the New Guy).

88. Get kicked in the crotch.

89. Get elbowed in the breast.

90. Suffer a failure of birth control device, practice or dosage.

91. Spend a frantic week waiting for confirmation of a failure of birth control device, practices or dosage.

92. Develop a smoking habit during the week spent waiting for confirmation of a failure of birth control.

93. Lose her temper at her True Love during the week spent waiting.

94. Say, 'No, wait, I told that wrong.'

95. Say, 'I don't get it.'

96. Say, 'I guess you had to be there.'

97. Tell a joke that falls flat.

98. Tell a joke that is too off-color for the assembled listeners.

99. Tell an in-joke when someone in the room won't get it.

100. Have to explain it.

101. Have to draw them a picture.

102. Have to act it out.

103. Screw up an incantation and release the demon (although the first time she sounds out the hieroglyphs, she will catch the intonation and rhythm so perfectly that she invokes the demon).

104. Have to spend her third wish wishing that she'd never made the second wish.

105. Be told that her wish violates the rules (excepting a wish that's so cleverly worded that it does an end-run around the rules and the djinni must respectfully acknowledge her skills as he grudgingly grants the wish).

106. Waste a wish on meaningless bullshit.

107. Clutch her chest and scream 'My pacemaker!'

108. Suffer cramps because she didn't wait half an hour before swimming.

109. Listen to someone tell her, "I told you so."

110. Listen to the 'it's all fun and games until...' speech while someone removes a nickel from Mary Sue's left nostril.

111. Have to explain why she's wearing rubber underwear.

112. Shave.

113. Get drunk enough to cry for her mommy.

114. Bite her nails.

115. Have the song 'It's a small world,' stuck in her head for three chapters.

116. Have occassion to call the suicide hotline number (except to locate a canon character who just called the hotline and gave a location which the operator will immediately offer up).

117. Get a noogie.

118. Worry that the armor makes her look butch (beauty shines through...).

119. Be hypnotized into thinking she's a hot dog on a grill (although her secret love for her True Love may be revealed while under hypnosis).

120. Begin to think that a hand puppet, Dragon Mike, is her only real friend.

121. Come out of the bathroom with toilet paper sticking to her shoe.

122. Come out of the bathroom with her skirt tucked into her panty hose.

123. Be interrupted by bombardments during her rousing battle speech to the troops. Battlefields fall silent for Mary Sue, even without the issuing of memos to the artillery of both sides.

124. Lose her glass eye.

125. Have a glass eye (unless....it's a MAGIC glass eye!).

126. Have OCD (unless it's a sexual form of OCD, in which case her case of the fuckbunnies is completely uncontrollable by medication or therapy...until she finds her True Love).

127. Have to say: "And it would have worked if it weren't for those meddling

kids..."

128. Find that she is not vindicated by the instant replay

129. Spend any time looking for trapdoors and hidden escape routes without

finding one.

130. Spontaneously combust.

[Keith Inc.]

131. Reincarnate at the bottom of the wheel (or the bottom of the marsh).

132. Show up more than two chapters into the fic. Usually, not even three sentences into the fic.

133. Make pets uncomfortable (unless she's a terminator AND does not know that fact until the end of the fic).

134. Have a name that's among the top five most common names for girls in the country this decade (except if that's the author's name or a gender-bent version of the author's name).

135. Have a weight problem (although someone may mention, in the first two paragraphs, that she USED to have a weight problem).

136. Have a skin problem (even if she's part gargoyle or half shark).

137. Have body odor (except when expressed as exactly one sentence by one character following more than two straight days of effort on Mary's part, which is also pointed out in the same sentence, so it's clearly not her fault).

[madlodger]

Wow, Keith, it's a very impressive list. 137 and they all seem to apply. Did you write them all? I like ones with exeptions, like:

125. Have a glass eye (unless....it's a MAGIC glass eye!).

[Keith Inc.]

Yes, they're all mine. No one wants to play, no matter where i post it. (sniff)

I'm having fun, though. Glad you enjoy it.

[Keith Inc.]

138. Get a form letter response to the letter she wrote her idol. He writes

back personally.

139. Throw a big party and only three people attend.

140. Have to decide where to put the couch she picked up at the landfill.

141. Settle for a job below her capability.

142. Settle for a man who's below her, mentally.

143. Be expelled from the bowling league for wardrobe offenses.

144. Ruin the hedge because no one ever taught her to use power tools.

145. Open the secret compartment in grandma's cedar chest and find only old dry

cleaning tags and empty gum wrappers.

146. Have to spend 'bring your pet to school day' apologizing to the owners of

small animals for what Mary Sue's pet constrictor has done.

147. Complain about how hard it is to adjust to bifocals.

148. Complain about the difficulty in getting signatures on her petition.

149. Have a double wedding (unless all three of the other people are canon

characters).

150. Shop for a casket. Well, not her own, anyway.

151. Come back from (Nashville, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Pocatello), bitter and

unsuccessful, to marry the guy at the gas station.

152. Reproduce AFF stories, by any means, print, electronic or other, without

prior written permission of the author.

153. Lose at strip poker (unless she wants to)(which would really be winning at

strip poker, wouldn't it?)(never mind).

154. Start a poetry publishing business that concentrates on other people's

poetry.

155. Start a poetry publishing business motivated mainly by the profits.

156. Start a poetry publishing business, but delegate the task of actually

dealing with the poets.

157. Call the office to find out that the temp hired for her vacation is better

at the job.

158. Splice cable illegally. Does Mary Sue even watch TV? Other than those

news bulletins that spur her to action, of course.

159. Set the bathroom scale ten pounds lighter until after the holidays.

160. Lose the bar bet and have to sing 'Watching Scotty Grow' while

accompanying herself on the zither.

161. Have to explain the sleeping arrangements to her mother when caught.

Mother Sue is the one that suggests Teen Heart-throb sleep in the girl's bedroom

in the first place, with impeccable logic.

162. Go down on a lover who is unwilling to return the favor in kind.

163. Climb into the wrong lifeboat after the ship sinks (the one with the

kitchen help, not the dashing officers).

164. Lie about her qualifications to get the job.

165. Lie about her job to impress the family.

166. Mistaken for a serial killer (save only that she escapes in order to bring

the killer to justice).

167. Be described by the phrase 'brought to justice.'

168. Be described by the phrase 'died in a shootout with authorities.'

169. Be described by the phrase 'restraining order filed against...'

170. Be described by the phrase 'and topping the list of Blackwell's Fashion

Failures...'

171. Receive a donor's organ (although she will donate anything and everything,

even things she doesn't actually have a spare of, or that modern medical

technology can NOT transfer).

172. Lose designer jeans in the laundromat.

173. Lose a designer jacket in the laundromat.

174. Lose an hour of her life in the laundromat.

175. Have to hitchhike back from Las Vegas (or any Indian Reservation casino).

176. Have to watch the killers escape due to her unfamiliarity with weapons

(although she has managed, at times, to dramatically spin the cylinder on an

automatic pistol, to dramatically pump a round into the chamber of a

break-action shotgun, to dramatically slam in a new magazine to a tube-fed

weapon, and to dramatically announce that her single-shot weapon is nearly

empty).

177. Knock herself on her ass by discharging a weapon in her hand that a pair of

250-lb Marine's would anchor and lean into to fight the recoil.

178. Get lost on a naval vessel due to unfamiliarity (although she uses port,

starboard, aft and foreward pretty much at random).

179. Have to spend hours, under deadline, rewriting her novel because her editor

thinks the love scene sucks the big Kahuna root.

180. Catch the conspiracy against her because she put new batteries in her

hearing aid and didn't tell anyone.

181. See Jesus in a leaf pile (Mary Sue's visions are technicolor affairs, with

a narrator and a musical score).

[Guest echtrae]

I have to say, I'm really liking this list so far.

I just wish I could come up with some to add to it.

[Keith Inc.]

182. Get sloppily drunk on what turn out to be non-alcoholic beers (or giggle foolishly after smoking what really was oregano).

183. Find that today's horoscope is obtuse or completely inapplicable to her day. Either she doesn't read it, or the damned things practically MAPQUEST instructions for the next 24 hours.

184. Have to work hard to COVER her company's actual pollution footprint (expose/stop/limit/prevent, sure, never 'enable').

185. Use the fire hose to open a path through the environmental activist blockade (unless the story is written for the Ann Coulter fandom).

186. Look tacky, even in the tacky fast-food uniform worn tackily by workers at tacky restaurants across the nation (beauty shines through, sorta thing).

187. Have to change her vanity plate because everyone thinks it says something obscene, rather than the poetic image she intended.

188. Have to say: "I only did one, and that was to pay for tuition."

189. Find that her significant other is more popular at HER family's reunion (not usually a problem for the habitually orphaned Mary Sue).

190. Have to explain the movie rentals on the receipt, and why all three of them have 'firemen' in the title (Her brother, Marty, has to explain the 'Cheerleader' trilogy).

191. Have pictures developed and find a fat half-naked drunk ruined the group photo (save only that the disappointment is immediately forgotten because the next photo in the stack has incriminating evidence that will become part of a major investigation and contribute to the conviction of the involved individuals, once Mary Sue makes sure the villains are aware of the evidence, then manages to foil their attempts to destroy said evidence and prevent her from testifying).

192. Find her house moved off of her property in a mudslide (except if her True Love's home is directly downhill and they're forced together when he comes out to survey the damage and they find that their bedroom windows are now perfectly aligned to each other).

193. Say something foul mouthed at Sunday School. She is far more likely to speak in tongues than drop the f-bomb.

194. Be laughed at by people who know what the lyrics really are, when she reveals what she always thought The Bruce was saying.

195. Have to put air back in tires after ex-lover gets petty revenge. Mary's ex will either tactfully disappear from the scene or go straight to felonious assault.

[Keith Inc.]

196. Find that the art gallery purchase is a fake (This is because she usually

buys art at the flea market and the cheap copy turns out to the original).

197. Have to postpone a public appearance because her dentures fell out.

198. Have to postpone a public appearance because her weave is unconvincing.

199. Have to postpone a public appearance because her left breast is leaking

silicone.

200. Have to postpone a public appearance because she's still recovering from

dysentery.

201. Defend her May-December romance when the boy's father confronts her

(although she may be in a relationship where she confronts her lover's

daughter...).

202. Defend the column she wrote for the paper with the phrase, "I was not aware

that the name of the band was a popular slang term for a sexual act."

203. Defend the politician she endorses with the phrase, "he's not EXACTLY a

supremacist."

204. Defend the product she endorses with the phrase, "Still, child labor laws

are a relatively recent development in human society."

205. Confuse DNA samples and accidentally convict a friend, True Love or family

member (although she has confused geneologist with an entirely difference

speciality, and told friends that a gynecologist looked up her grandma and found

a Cherokee grandfather).

[dazzledfirestar]

These are fabulous! Thanks for the giggle, Keith!

[Keith Inc.]

206. Take down the decorative and inspiring wind chimes because the neighbor threatens to pipe-bomb the porch if those tinkling things don't shut the F*** UP!

207. Have to pay increased insurance after a hurricane narrowly misses her home. (Mary's home is either completely weatherproof or she is left completely homeless after the storm).

208. Hear wedding guests ask 'what he sees in her?' (although she is often the only person on the planet that perceives the subtle worth of her True Love).

209. Experience a past life and find she was neither royal nor a star-crossed lover.

210. Have to replace her husband/manager because he is merely poor at the job Mary usually works with a brilliant enabler with contacts everywhere and/or a controlling egotist that makes brainwashing a fun family exercise).

211. Open the door to find that her lover is making fantastic love to the woman he really belongs with (although she will, sometimes, walk in to find her significant other humping a skank who is far below her in beauty, brains, grace and emotional capability. The skank may, in extreme cases, have bigger boobs than Mary Sue, as a plot device to explain the cheating.).

212. Open the door to find out that grandma is still sexually active.

[madlodger]

Wow, Keith, you've exceeded 200!!! These are excellent and funny. I am speculating that you may have read quite a number of Mary-Sues.

[Keith Inc.]

Not a one.