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Description
I like drawing attention to things that irk me.

As some of you may know, before I delved into the world of fanfiction/animation/whatnot, I was a writing tutor. My biggest problem back then was misuse of exposition. When I shifted to the world of fanfiction, I ran into a new common problem: the inability to write original characters.

The philosophy of a novice fanfic writer is this: the more cool costumes, cool powers, cool weapons, cool things you can pile onto the character, the more victories the character can have, and the more canon characters who admire this character, the more likable the character will be. However, this perfect character is an unrelatable daydream: a personification of everything the writer wants to do, but can't. In the context of Touhou, I call these "Gappy Stu's" since Yukari always gaps them into Gensokyo out of boredom, and a common thread among them is that they're different from all of the other guys who got gapped in at random.

Inversely, giving characters realistic flaws and real human needs and emotions would seem like a bad idea, since it'd make the character sound weak, but it doesn't. In fact, these characters seem stronger for their persistence, we empathize with their failures, they feel real for feeling the things we'd feel, and they're original because it calls for the writer to not call on plot contrivances, but actual human emotions. In other words, how others stories do things do not dictate the character's story (which is what leads to cliches), but the *character* dictates the story alone.

This is not to say a character must always lose. They should lose, but a character who never wins is just boring and depressing because we know they'll never succeed unless out of sheer contrivance. Even if that's "part of the joke," throw the dog a bone every once in a while before I stop laughing.

What's your theories on Marty Stus and original likeable characters?

Description
I like drawing attention to things that irk me.

As some of you may know, before I delved into the world of fanfiction/animation/whatnot, I was a writing tutor. My biggest problem back then was misuse of exposition. When I shifted to the world of fanfiction, I ran into a new common problem: the inability to write original characters.

The philosophy of a novice fanfic writer is this: the more cool costumes, cool powers, cool weapons, cool things you can pile onto the character, the more victories the character can have, and the more canon characters who admire this character, the more likable the character will be. However, this perfect character is an unrelatable daydream: a personification of everything the writer wants to do, but can't. In the context of Touhou, I call these "Gappy Stu's" since Yukari always gaps them into Gensokyo out of boredom, and a common thread among them is that they're different from all of the other guys who got gapped in at random.

Inversely, giving characters realistic flaws and real human needs and emotions would seem like a bad idea, since it'd make the character sound weak, but it doesn't. In fact, these characters seem stronger for their persistence, we empathize with their failures, they feel real for feeling the things we'd feel, and they're original because it calls for the writer to not call on plot contrivances, but actual human emotions. In other words, how others stories do things do not dictate the character's story (which is what leads to cliches), but the *character* dictates the story alone.

This is not to say a character must always lose. They should lose, but a character who never wins is just boring and depressing because we know they'll never succeed unless out of sheer contrivance. Even if that's "part of the joke," throw the dog a bone every once in a while before I stop laughing.

What's your theories on Marty Stus and original likeable characters?