3549: My Little Vampire series - Lana DuVey
It's tme for Tropes Sue Week either. I'm looking for help finding entries for said week. Accepting entries for the Thirteenth Annual Pottersues Contest.
Today's Mary Sue Trope is Mary Sue Classic.
“The original, often used, often parodied plot framework to be associated with Mary Sue, exclusively featuring the female Purity Sue dynamic.”
Even yesterday's Purity Sue isn't as pure as Mary Sue Classic gets.
“Mary Sue Classic is perfect. Everything she does is perfect and everybody knows this. She may or may not acknowledge this (after all, you can't be too humble), but deep down in her (perfect) mind, she's the most aware of everybody. […] Her (perfect) goodness is so powerful that her very (perfect) presence changes the world for the better.”
At one time the Mary Sue Classic used to be the most prevalent Mary Sue type, but many writers started mistakenly thinking the definition of Mary Sue was “perfect character” and started adding in flaws as well as making the Sues past not as perfect as it used to be. It's true that the original Mary Sue from Star Trek was perfect, but that's not the real issue with the original Mary Sue character.
Thus I decided to go with today's Sue as these days one is lucky to find a real Mary Sue Classic and this one as there are a ton of Mary Sue tropes packed into this one.
Today's link of the day is Hi, My Name Is Mary Sue, and I'm a Vampire.
TITLE: My Little Vampire: Part One and My Little Vampire: Part Two
PERPETRATOR: SlytherinPride2292
SUE-O-METER:
(awful)
COVER/BANNER ART:
SUMMARY: ”Exiled for being magic kind, and bullied for being a vampire, Lana DuVey just doesn't fit in-neither with her clan nor in the Wizarding World. Befriending another outcast, she matures into a sultry, confident female breed. Struggling with Puberty as a Vampire and learning to cope with discrimination, Lana will learn when to fight against the storm or dance in the rain. Snape/OC.” and ”Becoming Dumbledore's agent, Lana leaves Romania to work at Hogwarts so she can later protect Harry Potter. She and Snape are bound by the same promise, and have an unusual strong loyalty towards one another. Trying to pick up from where they left off isn't as easy as it sounds, and Harry Potter's arrival is not making it any easier. M - lemons, violence and language”
FULL NAME: Lana DuVey
SPECIES: She's a half vampire, but this really isn't made clear until the second book.
HAIR:
EYES:
MARKINGS:
POSSESSIONS:
CONNECTION TO CANON: The first chapter has Lana explaining things to the reader. She says at one point “Of course, at that time I had no idea that the wizarding world had their own government to make sure no one would rid the world of vampires.” (This makes me wonder when article twelve was written.) “My mom and I left the clan shortly after my aunts and uncles were able to get my brother back to the wonderful thing that is the ground. The King (my mother's father's grandfather-or rather my great-great-grand father) ordered my removal in any case I endangered their existence with my 'filthy magic blood'.” (I don't believe it because vampires should have magic blood. She's not from England. (I think the writer is trying to go with the idea that the character is a half-blood vampire because the prolog is named “Half-n-Half”.) The second chapter is about her getting her letter and how “Mother worked nights at a small construction site-her strength was magnanimous and it had gotten her promoted through the Muggle community...” because “Mother didn't have any money; our life didn't particularly require any more as we made our own clothes, found our own food (which I've explained quite thoroughly, I think), and we had lived in the trees and caves of our preference.” This is so they can afford her school books and eventually get a cottage to live in for about a year. “One didn't need to be a vampire to know that the neighborhood speculated we were an odd bunch. We slept during the day, awake at night...” Dumbledore finds her and tells her vampires aren't bad like people say. She becomes friends with Snape. (Ah. So the twelfth statute may not exist. Just noticed the story is marked as Romance/Horror with Severus and an OC as the main characters. Oops. Story isn't of the Horror genre though.) She talks to him about sustaining herself on cows blood. That's pretty much their relationship, so the story isn't Romance either. The first part is rather boring and ends with Snape apologizing to her in the second to last chapter, and then the last chapter we find out that her mother “was tortured... and then murdered by a group of teenage Muggles.” We then et this line at the end. “My vengeful heart would set aside its usual lawful biddings and in an attempt to get back at the filthy Muggles that had destroyed the only good part left of my Vampire heritage; I would join the most dangerous Dark Wizard of the age, and come to regret my hasty decision.” (The difference between her and Snape is that she honestly knows better then he does. He followed through youthful zeal and she through revenge.) The first chapter involves her having major angst over her mothers death. “For years, I struggled with my half-n-half blood, and after so many years of going back and forth, I had finally decided on my true heritage. My mother was there for me when my father was not. It was the only way I could feel close to her.” Apparently Voldemort killed the king and Dumbledore's seriously questioning how she could make the decisions she made. Despite this he's fine with her being Harry's protector. (Yeah right.) They talk for a bit about Snape and that's it.
ORIGIN: The writer is trying to play up the idea that Lana is different, but actually fails. They try making it seem as if Wizarding abilities among those who are vampires are unusual and frowned upon, but I don't buy it. Either vampires are a form of virus like werewolves or they're a separate magical creature like Goblins and House Elves and thus would have their own magic which could do similar things to what Wizards could do. The writer then tries painting vampires as different but then ends with her character saying vampires don't drink blood and really don't need to be feared.
SPECIAL ABILITIES: She's in Slytherin. The writer makes a big deal of this.
NOTES: I've no reason to like this character. In the first book she got no character development. In the second book we see her bad deeds are forgotten. I guess you can compare her to Snape, but Snape's case as I've already noted is different. I can also see this one jumping from Awful to Toxic rating wise
SAMPLE:
Sample from first book
Trying to tell your mother that you are different than the rest of your family isn't too hard, especially at the age of 10. Sometimes, they can already tell whether or not their kid is getting along with other children.
Explaining to your mother why one of the other kids was levitating in the air by their suspenders and you gazing at them, helpless and confused, was an entirely different situation. Especially when the parents of that kid was pointing fingers, yelling obscenities about 'right', 'wrong', and 'normal'.
Normality is an interesting concept, especially when describing my family.
There are nearly a hundred of us-and most people, especially Muggles, don't particularly like my family. We are 'killers'. Of course, as with anything, there are two sides of a coin; not all of us are frenzy hunters; unfortunately, there's the majority that make even the minority just that terrible, and with all due respect, I could definitely understand why the Muggles hated us so much.
Honestly, I doubt the Muggles ever had any clue as to what we really were...or, I should say, are.
I imagine though that if one saw us in its transformation, one would attack it or run in fear. In full transformation, we were beasts-our noses would become bat-like, our yellow eyes would nearly pop out of our skulls as they bulged and turned a deep shade of crimson; dragon-like wings sprouted from our backs; our hair would raise like the fur on an angry, hissing cat. Fangs elongated, and our tongues became like those of serpents. Our English would be spoken in angry guttural growls; pale skin became gray, and only those around us whom we truly cared for would ever be able to coax us out of frenzy. Because of this, The King even had made it a rule that no one go hunting alone, so if we ever overstepped our feeding measures, someone dear to us could talk us out of continuing the frenzy-my mother usually came with me as I was still learning how to control these urges to divulge and binge feed.
Our faces scared people; our habits were unknown, and eating people was not exactly the best trait to have when trying to befriend the locals. So while the Muggles could not always say we were what we were, they just knew we were 'monsters', and 'monsters' had to be put down.
Mind you, we are not technically cannibals. In order to be one, a human would eat a human and we were Undead and far from being humane. We don't even technically 'eat' people; to the untrained eye, however, I assume it would really look like that.
But we don't eat people.
We're Vampires.
I guess I should have mentioned that in the beginning.
Sample from book 2
There were days where I wanted to kill everyone in sight. Seriously, sometimes I had some interesting thoughts where I would just be making my usual Crimson Gin and I would imagine all the damage I could do to a little town if given the opportunity. At one point, I had done what no vampire would have ever dreamt of doing.
That was…unless they learned at the frail age of seventeen that their mother had been ambushed in broad daylight by a group of adolescent Muggles who had learned of her true identity after surfing the web and decided that it would be a 'brave' act for them to go in with sharpened wooden sticks.
They had thought it was good fun, I was sure. A group of boys who were so brave and so gutsy they had ambushed an older vampire, placed in the hot sun of the backyard, and staked her arms and legs to the ground with wooden pegs. Not only had they kept her in the sun where her skin burned, her blood boiled, and her skin became less flimsy than loose leaf white paper, but they had poked her with sharp knives and even lit her skin on fire, dousing her with water, only to do it all over again.
When they had done this for hours, steadily becoming bored, they finally put her out of her misery-the eldest one, almost an adult, drove a large stake into her heart with a rusty old hammer.
I shook at the thought of it as I sat in the office while listening to some of the other Dragon tamers talk about how more and more dragons were being shipped around the world, and we'd all start going into overtime, and by the way, did we notice the weather was becoming beautiful, and how the hills were alive with music and elegance. While I did agree with all of these things, maybe even with the thing about musical hills, I was still thinking of what had happened to my beautiful and loving mother nearly four years ago. The memory shook my body, and apparently, it brought an ugly expression to my face as my fellow witches and wizards asked me if I was alright.
"Yes," I said, smiling in spite of my seething. "I am fine."
They gave me a look of curiosity but they'd come to learn over the years that I just didn't speak about my past, and certainly not about my mother, although I did sometimes talk about my wonderful experience as a whole at Hogwarts. They continued to talk while I continued to seethe.
I had gone home and the torture had already finished, my mother had died after a period of time. I knew what had been done to her because they had left her in the same fashion of which she'd died-her body lay pinned to the earth, her skin dried and crispy black from the sun's rays. My mother was a full vampire-she couldn't stand to be in the sun for a long period of time and while she could walk about fully clothed, she would still get a bit of sunburn.
I was only half-vampire, and I could easily walk in the sunshine. I was grateful for it, actually. These days, especially, when the sun never went down until close to nine o'clock at night, being half-vampire had proven to be quite useful. On my mother's side, I was that. My father had been a wizard, so I was also half-witch, but out of love and honor for my mother, I rarely used magic and I opted to return to my vampire ways.
Home was no longer home with my mother's decay lying in the earth so I had left Hogwarts shortly after-not only to leave that hopelessness behind but to seek revenge. I hated Muggles-even the ones that never meant any harm. The boys who'd murdered my mother had been my age and I even knew them-one in fact was named Billington, who had been a ruthless bully the entire time I lived on Spinner's End.
Today's Mary Sue Trope is Mary Sue Classic.
“The original, often used, often parodied plot framework to be associated with Mary Sue, exclusively featuring the female Purity Sue dynamic.”
Even yesterday's Purity Sue isn't as pure as Mary Sue Classic gets.
“Mary Sue Classic is perfect. Everything she does is perfect and everybody knows this. She may or may not acknowledge this (after all, you can't be too humble), but deep down in her (perfect) mind, she's the most aware of everybody. […] Her (perfect) goodness is so powerful that her very (perfect) presence changes the world for the better.”
At one time the Mary Sue Classic used to be the most prevalent Mary Sue type, but many writers started mistakenly thinking the definition of Mary Sue was “perfect character” and started adding in flaws as well as making the Sues past not as perfect as it used to be. It's true that the original Mary Sue from Star Trek was perfect, but that's not the real issue with the original Mary Sue character.
Thus I decided to go with today's Sue as these days one is lucky to find a real Mary Sue Classic and this one as there are a ton of Mary Sue tropes packed into this one.
Today's link of the day is Hi, My Name Is Mary Sue, and I'm a Vampire.
TITLE: My Little Vampire: Part One and My Little Vampire: Part Two
PERPETRATOR: SlytherinPride2292
SUE-O-METER:
(awful)
COVER/BANNER ART:
SUMMARY: ”Exiled for being magic kind, and bullied for being a vampire, Lana DuVey just doesn't fit in-neither with her clan nor in the Wizarding World. Befriending another outcast, she matures into a sultry, confident female breed. Struggling with Puberty as a Vampire and learning to cope with discrimination, Lana will learn when to fight against the storm or dance in the rain. Snape/OC.” and ”Becoming Dumbledore's agent, Lana leaves Romania to work at Hogwarts so she can later protect Harry Potter. She and Snape are bound by the same promise, and have an unusual strong loyalty towards one another. Trying to pick up from where they left off isn't as easy as it sounds, and Harry Potter's arrival is not making it any easier. M - lemons, violence and language”
FULL NAME: Lana DuVey
SPECIES: She's a half vampire, but this really isn't made clear until the second book.
HAIR:
EYES:
MARKINGS:
POSSESSIONS:
CONNECTION TO CANON: The first chapter has Lana explaining things to the reader. She says at one point “Of course, at that time I had no idea that the wizarding world had their own government to make sure no one would rid the world of vampires.” (This makes me wonder when article twelve was written.) “My mom and I left the clan shortly after my aunts and uncles were able to get my brother back to the wonderful thing that is the ground. The King (my mother's father's grandfather-or rather my great-great-grand father) ordered my removal in any case I endangered their existence with my 'filthy magic blood'.” (I don't believe it because vampires should have magic blood. She's not from England. (I think the writer is trying to go with the idea that the character is a half-blood vampire because the prolog is named “Half-n-Half”.) The second chapter is about her getting her letter and how “Mother worked nights at a small construction site-her strength was magnanimous and it had gotten her promoted through the Muggle community...” because “Mother didn't have any money; our life didn't particularly require any more as we made our own clothes, found our own food (which I've explained quite thoroughly, I think), and we had lived in the trees and caves of our preference.” This is so they can afford her school books and eventually get a cottage to live in for about a year. “One didn't need to be a vampire to know that the neighborhood speculated we were an odd bunch. We slept during the day, awake at night...” Dumbledore finds her and tells her vampires aren't bad like people say. She becomes friends with Snape. (Ah. So the twelfth statute may not exist. Just noticed the story is marked as Romance/Horror with Severus and an OC as the main characters. Oops. Story isn't of the Horror genre though.) She talks to him about sustaining herself on cows blood. That's pretty much their relationship, so the story isn't Romance either. The first part is rather boring and ends with Snape apologizing to her in the second to last chapter, and then the last chapter we find out that her mother “was tortured... and then murdered by a group of teenage Muggles.” We then et this line at the end. “My vengeful heart would set aside its usual lawful biddings and in an attempt to get back at the filthy Muggles that had destroyed the only good part left of my Vampire heritage; I would join the most dangerous Dark Wizard of the age, and come to regret my hasty decision.” (The difference between her and Snape is that she honestly knows better then he does. He followed through youthful zeal and she through revenge.) The first chapter involves her having major angst over her mothers death. “For years, I struggled with my half-n-half blood, and after so many years of going back and forth, I had finally decided on my true heritage. My mother was there for me when my father was not. It was the only way I could feel close to her.” Apparently Voldemort killed the king and Dumbledore's seriously questioning how she could make the decisions she made. Despite this he's fine with her being Harry's protector. (Yeah right.) They talk for a bit about Snape and that's it.
ORIGIN: The writer is trying to play up the idea that Lana is different, but actually fails. They try making it seem as if Wizarding abilities among those who are vampires are unusual and frowned upon, but I don't buy it. Either vampires are a form of virus like werewolves or they're a separate magical creature like Goblins and House Elves and thus would have their own magic which could do similar things to what Wizards could do. The writer then tries painting vampires as different but then ends with her character saying vampires don't drink blood and really don't need to be feared.
SPECIAL ABILITIES: She's in Slytherin. The writer makes a big deal of this.
NOTES: I've no reason to like this character. In the first book she got no character development. In the second book we see her bad deeds are forgotten. I guess you can compare her to Snape, but Snape's case as I've already noted is different. I can also see this one jumping from Awful to Toxic rating wise
SAMPLE:
Sample from first book
Trying to tell your mother that you are different than the rest of your family isn't too hard, especially at the age of 10. Sometimes, they can already tell whether or not their kid is getting along with other children.
Explaining to your mother why one of the other kids was levitating in the air by their suspenders and you gazing at them, helpless and confused, was an entirely different situation. Especially when the parents of that kid was pointing fingers, yelling obscenities about 'right', 'wrong', and 'normal'.
Normality is an interesting concept, especially when describing my family.
There are nearly a hundred of us-and most people, especially Muggles, don't particularly like my family. We are 'killers'. Of course, as with anything, there are two sides of a coin; not all of us are frenzy hunters; unfortunately, there's the majority that make even the minority just that terrible, and with all due respect, I could definitely understand why the Muggles hated us so much.
Honestly, I doubt the Muggles ever had any clue as to what we really were...or, I should say, are.
I imagine though that if one saw us in its transformation, one would attack it or run in fear. In full transformation, we were beasts-our noses would become bat-like, our yellow eyes would nearly pop out of our skulls as they bulged and turned a deep shade of crimson; dragon-like wings sprouted from our backs; our hair would raise like the fur on an angry, hissing cat. Fangs elongated, and our tongues became like those of serpents. Our English would be spoken in angry guttural growls; pale skin became gray, and only those around us whom we truly cared for would ever be able to coax us out of frenzy. Because of this, The King even had made it a rule that no one go hunting alone, so if we ever overstepped our feeding measures, someone dear to us could talk us out of continuing the frenzy-my mother usually came with me as I was still learning how to control these urges to divulge and binge feed.
Our faces scared people; our habits were unknown, and eating people was not exactly the best trait to have when trying to befriend the locals. So while the Muggles could not always say we were what we were, they just knew we were 'monsters', and 'monsters' had to be put down.
Mind you, we are not technically cannibals. In order to be one, a human would eat a human and we were Undead and far from being humane. We don't even technically 'eat' people; to the untrained eye, however, I assume it would really look like that.
But we don't eat people.
We're Vampires.
I guess I should have mentioned that in the beginning.
Sample from book 2
There were days where I wanted to kill everyone in sight. Seriously, sometimes I had some interesting thoughts where I would just be making my usual Crimson Gin and I would imagine all the damage I could do to a little town if given the opportunity. At one point, I had done what no vampire would have ever dreamt of doing.
That was…unless they learned at the frail age of seventeen that their mother had been ambushed in broad daylight by a group of adolescent Muggles who had learned of her true identity after surfing the web and decided that it would be a 'brave' act for them to go in with sharpened wooden sticks.
They had thought it was good fun, I was sure. A group of boys who were so brave and so gutsy they had ambushed an older vampire, placed in the hot sun of the backyard, and staked her arms and legs to the ground with wooden pegs. Not only had they kept her in the sun where her skin burned, her blood boiled, and her skin became less flimsy than loose leaf white paper, but they had poked her with sharp knives and even lit her skin on fire, dousing her with water, only to do it all over again.
When they had done this for hours, steadily becoming bored, they finally put her out of her misery-the eldest one, almost an adult, drove a large stake into her heart with a rusty old hammer.
I shook at the thought of it as I sat in the office while listening to some of the other Dragon tamers talk about how more and more dragons were being shipped around the world, and we'd all start going into overtime, and by the way, did we notice the weather was becoming beautiful, and how the hills were alive with music and elegance. While I did agree with all of these things, maybe even with the thing about musical hills, I was still thinking of what had happened to my beautiful and loving mother nearly four years ago. The memory shook my body, and apparently, it brought an ugly expression to my face as my fellow witches and wizards asked me if I was alright.
"Yes," I said, smiling in spite of my seething. "I am fine."
They gave me a look of curiosity but they'd come to learn over the years that I just didn't speak about my past, and certainly not about my mother, although I did sometimes talk about my wonderful experience as a whole at Hogwarts. They continued to talk while I continued to seethe.
I had gone home and the torture had already finished, my mother had died after a period of time. I knew what had been done to her because they had left her in the same fashion of which she'd died-her body lay pinned to the earth, her skin dried and crispy black from the sun's rays. My mother was a full vampire-she couldn't stand to be in the sun for a long period of time and while she could walk about fully clothed, she would still get a bit of sunburn.
I was only half-vampire, and I could easily walk in the sunshine. I was grateful for it, actually. These days, especially, when the sun never went down until close to nine o'clock at night, being half-vampire had proven to be quite useful. On my mother's side, I was that. My father had been a wizard, so I was also half-witch, but out of love and honor for my mother, I rarely used magic and I opted to return to my vampire ways.
Home was no longer home with my mother's decay lying in the earth so I had left Hogwarts shortly after-not only to leave that hopelessness behind but to seek revenge. I hated Muggles-even the ones that never meant any harm. The boys who'd murdered my mother had been my age and I even knew them-one in fact was named Billington, who had been a ruthless bully the entire time I lived on Spinner's End.