How and when did Findley die? And as for Mercury, I'll have either my runners or the bound spirit of Nigel Findley kill him. With a cow from space.

Died: Feb. 19, 1995 of a heart attack

Hail to the King

A little something to aid the digestion

"Even a fool can learn from his own mistakes. It takes a wise man to learn from the mistakes of others." -Nigel Findley

Nigel was the man

Those goold old times....

Back then, crap like Ryan Mercury wouldn't be possible, i'm sure.

Not sure. Wasn´t Wolf and Raven earlier than Derek? Raven had some Ryan Mercury tendencies I think. Fortunately he didn´t have a major part in those stories, and all the other characters were really cool.

(Not the book published in -98. but the short stories from Challenge Magazine the book is made from were among the earliest SR fiction written if Im not mistaken.)

That's the difference Ryan had a major part and was an important character.

The problem with characters like that is that it´s too easy to picture them being played by Steven Seagal.

Or worse: Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Or Pierce Brosnan as 007.

With magic!

's better than Fist anyways

Every time someone mentions Ryan Mercury, I get a mental picture of Ben Affleck.


It's *that* bad.

As presented in the novels Ryan Mercury has much much karma under his belt. When trying to build him during chargen, you'll need a lot more than 125 BPs.

at character creation he will be week liek Seth green, but with a Karma hot beef injection he will be like the Arnold i knew in the 80's.

Even with a great deal of karma, a normal magician can still outmagic him and a normal adept can still out adept him. With enough karma a MW adept can be awsome, yes, but he is always has to spend more karma than standard magic characters to be less awsome than they are.

Imo Ryan has so much karma that he can outmatch most "normal" magicians. And that's before he's using Dunkies Heart.

Well I have question about the Mary Sue character archtype. (haven't read the Ryan Mercury stuff, and I guess I'm glad I didn't.) What is the worst aspect of the Mary Sue? The all-powerful apsect, or the no negative traits aspect?

Neither. Sometimes Mary Sues aren't quite all-powerful (though they get everything done anyway), and they usually have a few "flaws" thrown in of the sorts that get listed when HR asks you what your main weaknesses are for your annual review ("he's a great guy, but he just works too doggone hard!").

No, the worst part of such a character is that you're continually being bludgeoned in the face by the author's metaphorical phallus. Worse yet, the character is usually obviously set up as "the guy you're supposed to like".

~J

That kind of "always has the answers" type usually gets written out quickly, or killed, in Joss Whedon shows. That's why I like him.

Who doesn't?

Me!

Admittedly the fact that I haven't read it yet may have something to do with that.

~J

Yeah, he's half-drake. Half-one-race-or-the-other characters have a 90% chance of being Mary Sues. The only real exception I know of is Inuyasha, whose brother's 50 times faster, stronger, and cooler. Even that's changing, though...

There's Meji!

~J

My dislike of David Weber falls into place. Honor Harrington scores 104 on the Mary Sue test, and that's after skipping all the portions of the test dealing with "canon" characters (since she, you know, is one).

I´m sure you don´t like The Sea Gul for being able to portray multi-layered characters with depth and precision, though. Forgive me. I can enjoy a good action movie too. What we´re all agreeing on here is that a litterary character with the same properties as a action movie hero is a bad thing, right?

It really depends on the context of the story. Superman and Harry Potter could both be seen as Mary Sue characters, but they're both wildly popular. If the plot of a story really requires a Mary Sue, and the rest of the story is balanced around that, then it's not a bad thing.

According to Steven Seagal's Submerged, my little country has Mayan ruins, jungles, nuclears submarines, evil terrorists with mind controlling devices, a cruel dictator and mad scientists. Also, phone booths are in French, and the fields are full of goats and Bulgarian blonde peasant babes (what, did I forget to mention that the film was shot in Bulgaria?).


Next time someone complains about CalFree or the Allied German States, remember what Steven Seagal did to Uruguay.

Now you know how we feel

IMHO Ryan Mercury does have his faults (besides no reader liking him, that is). Before his encounter with Roxxy, he was somhow dumb, he did not think about the things he did for Big D (or more euphemisticaly put, he was a deadly weapon to be used by Dunkelzahn). Altho it is probably not meant that way, can´t but imagin him as some stupid siegfried-typ.
After colliding with Thomas Roxborrow, he was an arrogant asshole, or at least it fealt to me that way.
Besides him beeing all powerfull, thats why I do not like him.

It depends on both the genre and the execution. Some authors can make a shameless Mary Sue likeable, and some genres, such as superheroes, require characters who would be overpowering in another setting. Plus, just being a heroic character doesn't make a Mary Sue!

I like Honor Harrington, mostly. I can handle her being superhuman, since the stories generally involve her running into some combination of superior firepower, complacent allies, and political treachery that you would need to be superhuman, merely to survive. If she breezed through effortlessly, instead of taking a beating along the way, then her power level would be more of a problem. The one really grating thing about her, though, is how overdone her self-effacing modesty is, and how she melodramatically blames herself for things that aren't really her fault.

Anita Blake is easier to take, because is still outclassed by a lot of the boo scaries that she goes after, and she really takes a beating. Plus, her angsting is more bearable because she has a wry self-awareness of when she is whining too much or making things complicated when they don't have to be. And she has some serious flaws to balance out how "badass" she is, and they aren't piddly little things like not being able to sing karaoke well, but things that have hurt or hindered her.


From what I have read about Ryan Mercury, he isn't quite a Mary Sue. He seems more like the annoying god-boy self-insertion type of character, like Wesley Crusher, Anakin Skywalker, or DJ Croft.

Glyph; You took the words right out of my fingers.

Just read the trilogy again with Ryan Mercury. I still do not know what's all the hubbub, Bub. He is a bit overpowered, but I can't see a Mary Sue (didn't do the Litmus).

I'd rather have Ryan than Daviar. But that might be, because I am biased.

Nah, not really.
I like my women a bit more. C urved.

Despite the desire on my part to add another snarky reply, since I have frequently been on the Ryan bashing band wagon, I feel that I should give a somewhat serious reply as to who Ryan Mercury is, with the emphasis on why the character is such a Twink.

[Personal Note: The people I gamed with in Junior High/High school did not use that word [Twink], so I had never heard it until I got to College and started gaming with a group of new friends. Not wanting to seem like a total gaming looser, I did not ask anyone what it meant [the general context was enough to get that it was a negative term having something to do with character abilities]. The word first came up in a conversation we were having at lunch one day, and after everyone broke up to go to class [my class not starting for another hour or so] I headed over to the library and availed myself to the schools computers to look up the word on the internet. I mention this only because, if you do not know what Twink means, as I did not, and type it into, say, google, the response that you get is decidedly not the way the word is being used here: Roughly, a character who's abilities are beyond what is generally appropriate for its type].

First, the books that he is in are important aspects of the Shadowrun plotline [they cover the circumstances of the Death of Dunkelzahn among other things], and he is portrayed as as Shadowruner-which is what the hope would be. That is not to say that having non-runner characters in Shadowrun novels is not cool, and that they can not give details about the game in cool ways, but for the really important books, it would be nice if the main characters were Shadowruners. The problem is that Ryan Mercury is not a Shadowruner, he is a Company Man working for the Great Dragon Dunkelzahn, and after his death, The Dunkelzahn Foundation.

He starts off as a Silent Way adept, of greater ability that it is possible to really conceive of a character achieving. He also has abilities in combat and military leadership that would be similarly difficult to achieve in a Warrior Way adept should a character focus on either of those approaches. As a result of his capture and the attempt by a crazy genetic mutant blob of a billionaire who sat on Azetch's board of directors [who attempted to take over his body by re-writing his brain to be that of said blob's, thus allowing said blob to gain freedom from his life support tank] he has all of the knowledge and ruthless cunning of one of the worlds great corporate masters [here in also we learn not just the erotic power, but also the vast medicinal properties of Vice President ND's nipples, as it is through them that Ryan Mercury is able to regain his original personality-retaining, of course, as I said, all of the knowledge and mental powers of said blob]. He briefly has the most powerful magic item in Shadowrun, however he gives that up for the good of the world. Which does not leave him in too bad of a position, as he has, in monetary terms, unlimited resources that he may tap without any sort of oversight in his ongoing task of protecting the legacy of the big D. In the process of completing the series of adventures he finds himself embroiled in surrounding the Great Dragon's death, he also learns that he is a Drake, and wins a comitment for traning in magic [now being a full magician along with a being a bad ass adept] from the most powerful wizard in the Sixth World [Harlequin].

The point of all of this being that for those [my self at least] who first entered Shadowrun along side Twist, as he learned his way about the shadows from the crew of Ghost-Who-Walks-Inside, Sally Tsong, Kahm, Dodger, etc..., there is a bit of sadness that the stories that started Shadowrun, the Runners stories, have in some ways been overtaken by other elements of the game. And, as Ryan Mercury is a sort of symbol of that aspect of the game, he gets a lot of shit.