Ever Feel Mary-Sued?

[Crow'sia]

Ever feel like your characters are kind of Mary-Sued, and the other equivalents? It's like, awful. But more the feeling you figure people will see them that way.

I am really bad at applications for non-human characters I've got to admit. Or what I post, we all keep our own little secret records. ^^
Laziness, really.

For example, I just created two characters, and I s'pose everyone has a different idea of what a pretty horse is, although I'm not so descriptive on bone structure, I feel they aren't really good looking. In my opinion.
But their personalities lack flaws. Sure they have minor flaws, minor weaknesses, but they're only in my head, I don't emphasize them. Because it seems like they'll be blown out of proportion then. Not subtle things that are slow to manifest, as most things are in life. FSdhsdus.

Needed to rant.

How detailed do you think one should be? Exceedingly, or leave some room for interpretation and imagination?

[lucifer]

Detail really depends on what you think is important about your character that others may want to know. Though, I rarely give away some of the more unique quirks of each individual to make the RP unpredictable and interesting

The thing is, my characters are always flawed, usually in a pretty substantial manner, I've had the lovely OCD, paranoid, sarcastic, anger-stricken chars, and each will be very different from the other. I suppose I do this because It differentiates my writing style between my characters and lets me explore different mind sets in typing up a post. It took me a long time to find boldness in characters, I used to play it safe.

What is fun is if you really plan out your character, get to know it before even applying as that character, it is pretty interesting to see how a character evolves when not much is known about it. Just go with what you feel is appropriate and let your vision of the char evolve from there

[Kindred Blue]

ooof yes i often fiind it hard to create characters that aren't quite the mary-sue |: i recently signed up to harry potter based human RPG and it took me a loooong time to write my application, including flaws in the personality and all, along with trying not to make his appearance perfect without giving him some form of disability.

i always go with going into intimate detail in the application - no matter how straight you set it out there, theres always going to be room for improvement and creativity when you start roleplaying. your application is like a straight-to-the-point gene layout of your character, so i just describe everything i can think of until my mind hurts from thinking |3~ once you get into character, some of the faults and flaws kind of melt away until a situation rises where they become apparent (i.e. an obsessive compulsive greets a messy room, a sexist man meets a woman who is higher up than he is).

i dont even think im making sense here XD

[Crow'sia]

Mm, last human rpg I played was Harry Potter themed, in the future, non-canon, I loved it. Never found another good one and it kind of died. So, no more human rping.

I think you're both making perfect sense, actually. Particularly with flaws. It's quite a point, the opportunity for them to come out.

This is a wasted reply on my part, I'm too lazy to analyze my thoughts.

[Kate]

Truthfully, my applications really depends on what kind of mood I'm in. However I do play/admin on a Heralds of Valdemar site where we require in the application 2 paragraphs for personality, appearance, and character history. At first I really hated it, but now I rather like it. You have to get into a certain amount of detail, but not so much that everyone knows every little secret about your character. I really like it with the appearance and personality. I mean, you can always say, "My character has brown hair and blue eyes," and be done with it, but when you have to fill up two paragraphs worth of description, you tend to get pretty into their skin tone, bone structure, any scars and their significance, whether they have calluses or not, what shape their nose in, and even how they tend to wear their hair. It's the same with personality. You have to flesh it out a bit and not just say, "Oh my character is usually nice, but can be sarcastic at times." You can sit there and give them flaws that actually make sense with who they are. It's much easier to connect all the aspects of the character.