Ack, fanfic is eating my brain. College? What's college? Fuck preparing my presentation on STDs, I've got some serious fanfic to write.

I realized on the way home that I have something stupid like 12 pages of 'Seuche' in my writer's notebook waiting to be transcribed from page to screen. I need to type them up. I have a horrible feeling Chapter 19 is going to get Too Long and that the action scenes and general angsty evilnesses that I have planned are going to have to wait until Chapter 20. Damn scene building. Damn creating a mood of (hopefully) brooding tension. Damn trying to be descriptive.

I guess that's my evening booked, then. Unless I fall asleep and don't wake up, or decide to write an MST, or something else. Or maybe I'll just try and finish the fic where Youji 'accidentally' gets stuck in the stock cupboard with Ken. I guess it'll depend on how angsty and/or creative I'm feeling, and how much patience I have for typing up pages and pages of notebook covered in the scrawl that is my terrible handwriting, made even more terrible by the jolting buses I've been trying to write on. Or in. Whatever. But who knows what mysterious mysteries life my bring? Such mysteries are what make life worth living.

Oh. Hang about. It seems that what life has brought is another appalling update to another appalling Mary Sue fic. They don't make life worth living. No. They make suicide seem appealing. Why is it that every time I check out ff.net, some idiot has written another stupid Sue fic, or added a chapter to their own ever-multiplying monstrosity? Dear God, these things are multiplying like bunnies. Maybe it's some kind of asexual reproduction deal.

But maybe we can learn from Sue ficcers. Take the art of weaving a devious and twisted plot, for example. Here's an example of the kind of compelling and dynamic storytelling such fics specialize in...

A Mary Sue with an angsty past joins Weiss as apparently the boys can't cut it alone any more and desperately need her help to stop them from dying. They aren't told who she actually is because... um, because it's easier to work with someone you can't trust? Because teams worik better if you don't know who all your teammates are? Because that makes her Cool? I dunno. Nor can I work out how come four highly trained assassins with suspicious minds can prove incapable of noticing the similarities between their mysterious, beautiful teammate and the mysterious beauty who's hanging round the place. Anyway, she gets hospitalized after a mission goes wrong (how often does this happen in the series? Once?). Everyone worries about her. Now, shockingly, it's revealed she has vast and untapped psychic powers so Schwartz are after her and--

--hey, hang about, haven't I read this fic before?

Haven't I read this fic twenty or thirty times before?

You know something? I have. Maybe not this exact fic, mind, but all these damn stories - and characters, too - are so freakin' similar that I might as well be reading the same fic over and over as actually going to look at a new one. I don't actually need to read these stories to know where their authors are going with them. I could write one myself, with its own wonderfully generic plot about an unspecified and yet vastly overplayed threat that only my Sue knows how to handle, and subscribing to all the genre conventions, with absolutely no problem. God damn, why are all these fics so formulaic? And why do their authors think they're being so cool and innovative?

I'm beginning to think the Weiss fandom needs a Mary Sue Litmus Test.

But I can't find one.

I can't find one anywhere. I can't think why the hell not given the growing problems my poor fandom has with Sue infestation, for which I blame the US DVD release. In which case... well, I bet you can guess where this one's going. I've had quite enough of Mary Sues infiltrating my fandom, thank you. I think the Weiss Fandom needs a Mary Sue Litmus test to such an extent that I have written my own. Yes, I love my MSTs, but MSTs only take on one fic at a time. This way I can target many, many more...

Hence this: the Mary Sue Litmus Test: Weiss Kreuz Version.

Okay, that particular dollop of imaginative nomenclature is, for the moment, just a working title. I'm putting serious thought to changing it. The test is very much in its draft format at the moment. It still needs a fair bit of work. I'm just posting it here (and so far nowhere else) just to inform the world of my intentions. I've worked through this damned test with a hell of a lot of Sues, as well as some of my own characters and just to check it really is working right, some of the canon characters too. It seems, to my mind, pretty damn good at Sue-detection.

Yes, it still needs work. It needs refinement, and tweaking, and generally giving a seeing to. I need to write an introduction to the test, and advice on where to go from here for those characters who test Sue-Positive. But the idea's there, and I guess that's all that matters for a kick-off.

Going to write now. Must do... Stuff.