Reforming Mary Sue

[truepenny]

The Virtu, Chapter 5: 50 ms pgs., 11,205 wds
Running total: 239 ms pgs., 54,563 wds

---

sosostris2012 made a post the other day about Mary Sues and the process by which a Mary Sue can become a real character--or at least a lens to examine the phenomenon of Mary Sues through. I commented with a link to this post of mine about Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice and the great Mary Sue-ness of its protagonist, and rereading that post of mine (and nattering at the ever-patient matociquala) prompted me to start thinking about Mary Sues, and Byron, and just what's at work there.


I use the term "Mary Sue" rather broadly, to indicate any protagonist¹ who is clearly wish-fulfillment, whether she² is the author thinly disguised and inserted into a daydream or whether she's a conglomeration of characteristics that the author, and the author's intended audience, are predisposed to consider "romantic." (And I use, as Cordelia says, sarcastic quote marks.) This is where Byron comes into the picture, because a lot of Mary Sues, especially in genre fantasy, are really Georgie Sues, in exactly the mode that Georgette Heyer pokes fun at in Venetia via the juxtaposition of Damerel with Oswald Denny.

The distinguishing features of this type of character, whether an uncomplicated Mary Sue or a Byronic one, go something like this (and feel free to add to my list--I don't pretend to completeness):

1. She's either extremely tall or extremely short. Height extremes are always a dead giveaway.

2. She is always thin, and usually stronger than she looks.

3. If she is in fact a she, she is very likely a tomboy. Or at least impatient with the normal lot of a girl trapped in a cod-medieval world.

4. If a he, he may be rather girly (e.g., Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel), though I don't know that this always holds true.

5. Long beautiful hair. Usually red or blonde. Or raven-wing black.

6. Tragic, guilt-ridden past. With scars. The degree of trauma depends on the inclination of the author and genre.

7. Unappreciated orphan child.

8. SPECIAL. Magic powers are good, or being especially empathic (Talia, also Lackey), or musically talented (Anne McCaffrey's Menolly). Or, you know, the long-lost heir to some kingdom or other, or the possessor of a miraculous birthright. It's not the specifics that matter; it's the Specialness.

9. Everyone who meets her either adores her or hates her. If they hate her, it's out of envy. People frequently adore her despite her acting like a spoiled bitch, because they can see the pain that causes her to lash out (see #6).

10. Drop-dead gorgeous. Often with peculiarly colored eyes.

11. A handicap or physical defect that nevertheless never impedes her in doing anything she wants. Myopia is a good one here, or some interesting illness, especially if you can finagle it to where the character coughs up blood on a more or less regular basis. (E.g. Raistlin Majere in Dragonlance, and hell YES Raistlin is a Mary Sue. And dripping Byronism all over the place with it.)

12. The more Byronic of the sisterhood frequently have borderline-psychotic tempers. Those who did not get the Curse of Georgie Sue are unfailingly gentle and sweet-natured and make friends with no provocation.

Now, it's easy to see why characters like this are appealing, especially if you're a teenager. (I loved Menolly and Raistlin in my time, so I'm not pretending to any moral high ground here.) They pander to the part of us that knows we are Special and misunderstood, and hold out hope that we will eventually, after suitable perils and suffering (which we endure bravely and from which we emerge possibly bloody but definitely unbowed), find a community or a person who will understand us and love us for what we are. Which is what we all hope for, and actually I don't have any problem with that as a plot arc.³ The problem is back there with the Special.

The message I wish The Incredibles had offered is that everyone is special, regardless of whether they have super-powers or not. Sadly, the movie only went with the inverse formation, and put it in the mouth of its villain, who wants to be sure no one is special, leaving the movie to assert that if you're special, you should be proud of it, and sure, using it to cheat is just fine, as long as you don't go overboard. Which is not a message I like very much. Being Special is a chimera, a mirage; even if you are special in some way or another, it doesn't make you a better human being or entitle you to anything more than the kid next to you. And being special in one way does not bring with it the attendant cluster of characteristics that make up a Mary Sue. That's the real problem with Mary Sues: they heap perfection upon perfection, or Byronism upon Byronism, until there's no room left for anything real.

Mary Sues also, as a species, have no sense of humor, and especially not about themselves.

As a writer, you start with Mary Sues because you have this nagging certainty that you have to make your character interesting, but you don't quite know how to do it. So you give her a shiny shiny surface and let her float through life without her feet ever quite touching the dirt. Byronism is actually a step up from that, because it grasps, however dimly, that making a character interesting has something to do with their interior life. So you go overboard, because you're still not quite sure what you're doing, and heap on the trauma in the hopes of generating sympathy.

And then one day you wake up and realize you've overloaded your poor suffering protagonist with attributes and traumas to the point that neither he nor you can keep the story moving for all the weight bearing it down, and you realize, blushing hotly, just what a little idiot you've been.

And you start over.

Which brings us to the idea of reforming Mary Sue. Because Mary Sues frequently do have an interesting character trapped somewhere inside them; it's just a matter of getting rid of the baggage. Or of letting the baggage be identified for what it is. Admit that your charismatic and beautiful character is an asshole. Admit that a Byronic past more often leads to PTSD than to romance. Like I said in my earlier post today, think things through. Let the consequences play out. Let go of the idea that Special equals worthy. Let Mary Sue get dirty; let Georgie Sue be laughed at. They won't thank you, but, you know, you're not in this business to make your characters happy.

Letting characters be real means letting them not be perfect. It means opening the carapace of Mary Sue and letting them come out. It means letting yourself breathe.

---
¹Let's stick to protagonists for this post, although secondary characters can certainly also be Mary Sues.

²I also refuse the masculine back-formations such as Gary Stu or Marty Stu. A Mary Sue is a Mary Sue, regardless of the character's sexual equipment.

³Actually, I think that's one of the best plot arcs there is.

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Hee. Yes.

Bakhtin has a thing about the classical vs. the grotesque body in art (meaning visual as well as verbal creations). The classical body, like a statue (Michelangelo's David is a good exemplar), has no orifices and doesn't even sweat, much less produce the more vulgar substances. Grotesque bodies have mouths and anuses; they produce sweat and urine and feces, semen and blood and tears and, yes, snot.

A lot of fiction is more comfortable with the classical body than the grotesque (Stephen King is one of the few authors I can think of who consistently describes the grotesque body), and of course the more idealized the character, the more likely they are to be a classical body. So no Mary Sue is ever going to excrete anything except beautiful tears.

[iagor.livejournal.com]

I cannot read Steven King. I love his stories, just not his prose. Oh well.

Bakhtin, in general, dealt in absolutes, part of being a product of that intelligentsia generation so enamored with Kant-Hegelian idealism. I found his Slovo V Romane a bit cumbersome to read, but I suspect Kazakhstan did not agree with him, and by that point he was a beaten horse, as Russian proverb says :) Curiously, Lenin was also enchanted by much the same philosphical and literary trends, but they fell flat on Stalin, who was basically a glorified thug with very little formal education.

The problem that I have with Bakhtin is that it's very hard to separate what was written by him specifically from what was written by his friends and the quality of published works varies rather wildly.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Bakhtin was very trendy in Renaissance studies in the 80s and 90s. I myself don't have much use for him--I agree with you about the dealing in absolutes, so when I was reading Rabelais and His World (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0253203414/qid=1127492926/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-7251415-0477765?v=glance&s=books), I kept saying, "But! But!" and scribbling long irritated notes in the margins.

The only bit of Bakhtin I've actually retained is exactly this thing about classical vs. grotesque, because it does what literary theory is supposed to do and illuminates the way that the culture behind the art affects the art.

[iagor.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately he was requiered reading for me in the Junior year of Highschool and I thoroughly hated him. The upside of it was having to read up on German idealism, of which up to that point I was blissfully ignorant, as all good and proper Soviet children were. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ick. The only thing worse than having to read Bakhtin would be having to read him in high school.

[iagor.livejournal.com]

That which doesn't break you, makes you hate literary criticism/exploration for a long long long time :)

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

if you're special, you should be proud of it, and sure, using it to cheat is just fine, as long as you don't go overboard.

This, incidentally, is also the message inherent in the Harry Potter series and one of the reasons I gave up on the series halfway through the second book.

[parallactic.livejournal.com]

I'm a lurker on matociquala's lj, and followed a link here.

I think a good rule of thumb is that for every virtue you give the person, think of a vice. So take super-beautiful looks. Make the character vain, have nasty people hit on them and think they're available, or make people assume they're an idiot and talk down to the character. Or make them bear an unfortunate resemblance to someone else, and have everyone project all these expectations on them. Alternate between having people falling over themselves to help the character, and the character being stuck in a situation where their looks don't have currency and now they have to rely on their rusty wits and wishing they'd paid attention instead of getting other people to do stuff for them. Be aware that while beauty opens doors, it also closes them. For example, have the character really want to be a plumber, but everyone is pushing him/her as model or trophy wife/husband. Or you could always play against expectations. "S/he's so sweet looking, you wouldn't expect s/he'd have a nasty temper."

Then again, I suspect I have the opposite problem, and go overboard with the Byronic character. I assume their virtues are already established, so I can play with their vices and flaws. In real life, I like nice and sane people. In fiction, I like them unhinged and screwed up, and that sort of thing tends not to produce nice, likeable people.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. Those of us still hammering out the ideas that will hopefully end up as a book really need to hear these things.

Frankly I think I have a bigger problem keeping secondary characters from turning into Sues, so I look forward to any further thoughts you have on this subject. :)

Re: 378567

[boji.livejournal.com]

Hello,

I usually just lurk on matociquala's LJ but thought your point:

Yes, there is. There is the one rule, the god of rules, the only commandment a writer need worry about (except all the others) -- make it work. And it's a lot harder taskmaster than most new writers believe it to be.

was so apt that I had to delurk. I am the aforementioned new writer. Journalistically published, fictionally - not yet. It's nice to hear work, graft and technique, affirmed. One can be inspired and 1,000 words can spill out easily, but not all those words are worth keeping and not all will seed others.

My point? Not much of one. Just that I like what you wrote and it currently resonates. Sometimes the real graft is in figuring out why it almost works but doesn't.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Yeah. The idea, which is mostly but not entirely subtext, that Muggles deserve what they get because they're stupid, and the even more pervasive idea that Harry can get away with murder because he's Special (I can never help sympathizing with the Slytherins at the end of the first book, because dammit they did win the House Cup, and there's all sorts of other problems there with the overidentification of individuals and institutions, but that's a digression), and everyone else should just accept it. Bleah.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The thing I had to learn to do was not to allow all the secondary characters to be helpful. Because, you know, you put them in the story to help advance the plot, and if you don't watch yourself, it's very easy to make them all Disney bunny rabbits, bright-eyed and cute and ever so eager to help the hero.

Remembering that your secondary characters have no intrinsic reason either to like or to help your protagonist can make a huge difference. If you give them an agenda of their own, ever so slightly at cross-purposes to the protagonist (not just turning them into blocking figures, because that's just the negative of the Disney bunny and still not much of a character), they tend to develop in less simplistic directions.

At least, that was a major breakthrough for me. Of course, as matociquala has commented, I now tend to go to the opposite extreme, and all my secondary characters are assholes. *g*

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I'm beginning to wonder if being clinically depressed for an awful lot of my teen years led to being a better writer. Even my earliest Mary-Sues had Tragic Flaws, Dark Secrets, and serious Byronic tendencies.

I'm beginning to think that The Fonz may be the best example of a reformed Mary Sue. He's still a total Mary Sue, but he's got flaws, and a little tragedy, and most of his flaws are comic. His Mary-Sue-ness is exaggerated for comedy, but it works.

The Mary-Sue tendency I hate most: for the Mary Sue to be a "loner" who "no one understands", whilst surrounded by helpful spear-carrying secondary characters. This may be particularly because I rather identified with the poor spear-carrying hopeless-crush girlfriend, and rather hoped that she, or I, would one day find the moxie to bitch-slap Byron Sue into noticing all those spear-carriers and stomp off, win the adoration of some boy with proper social skills, and refuse to let Byron Sue come crawling back.

So there.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The Fonz as reformed Mary Sue is a charming idea. And, yeah, he's too cool to be real--but the show knows that and plays with it.

Of course, I'll forgive almost anything if it's meta.

... And I hadn't thought about this before, but are the rules different in comedy? I don't write comedy, so I hadn't thought about Mary Sues in that context.

The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis, in The Great Race) is the Mary Sue to end all Mary Sues--everyone adores him, except for Professor Fate, who hates him because he's so perfect, and has a temper tantrum about it, to boot--and the movie lets him be that and makes fun of it at the same time. And I like Leslie, and root for him in a way that I wouldn't if I had to take him seriously. So that set of ground rules may make a big difference.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I think you're on to something there. After all, most Mary Sue writers don't tend to write comedy, nor can they have a sense of humor about their overblown characters. (Oswald Denny had no sense of humor at all about his own Byron Sue-ness. And no sensible older Heyer heroine falls for a man without a sense of humor.)

And the teenage mentality of the Mary Sue author takes Everything Very Seriously. Teenagers in the throes of angst and hormones hate nothing more than to be laughed at, or not taken seriously.

And Leslie, and a lot of other Great Heroes, are redeemed by humor, or a sense of humor. Damerel has a wonderful sense of humor; the Fonz and Han Solo are often redeemed by their humor moments. I'm sure I could list a ton of others. Humor may, in fact, be one of the greatest weapons against Mary Sue-ism. Make sure you can laugh at the character, and that the character can laugh at themselves. Vanyel's a lot more tolerable when he's able to laugh at his younger Mary Sue self.

And yes, many of us are suckers for meta.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I wonder if in these conversations, it's normal to feel like pouring your heart out and navel-gazingly express all your deepest fears about your story.

My concern, in this context, is that I find myself identifying much more with a secondary character. I mean, still a profoundly important character, but not the hero. I guess I'm trying to make sure that I'm not crossing the line between identifying and Mary Sueing. I've wrestled with not identifying closely enough with the main character for some time. Though he may bear more of the marks of a Mary Sue than anyone else does. I've actually completely tossed two years of manuscript because my secondary characters had too much agenda; too scattered, too many stories, too much going on. I've got lots to learn. I've been replotting the story I actually want to write out of the remains of the last versions, and trying to iron out at least most of the problems therein at the same time.

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts and your advice. I will cling to them. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I wonder if in these conversations, it's normal to feel like pouring your heart out and navel-gazingly express all your deepest fears about your story.

Certainly. And we all do it. Half of being a writer is flailing around trying to figure out how to do what you're doing. And if it isn't easier, it's at least less painful if you have somebody to talk at.

Okay. ObDisclaimer (unnecessary, I know, but I feel better for having it here): I make no pretenses of infallibility, and of course I'm only going off of what you describe, not any actual knowledge.

The problem with Mary Sues isn't the author identification. We have to identify with our characters in order to write them, even if it's only in one small thing with the rest of the character growing like a crystal in some completely different direction. If you don't identify with your characters, you write cardboard and unbelievable people. So that's no good.

What happens with the kind of Mary Sue I was posting about (and my definition is not the only definition out there, and it may not necessarily be the best one, either) is where the author idealizes the character. (For example, I identify very strongly with one of my short story protagonists, who's neurotic, introverted, and pathologically shy. But he's also timid, ineffectual, and rather selfish. It's actually hard to write him sympathetic enough.) Identifying with a character doesn't mean you can't be ruthless with him. Idealizing a character means you protect him, both by not letting him do anything stupid and/or bad and, if he does do something with potentially nasty consequences, being sure he has his Get Out Of Jail Free card.

That being said, when you say you're identifying too strongly with a secondary character, do you mean you're making them too perfect, or do you mean that they keep trying to take over the story?

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

You know, that's really helpful. Someone above was getting all upset about this talk about Mary Sues and the paranoia (from what I gather), but maybe this is the distinction that shifts us out of paranoia and into logical consideration of what we're doing. Identifying and idealizing. Though I suppose we'd be loath to actually admit to idealizing a character, were we prone to writing Mary Sues. This is an idea I will seriously ponder, and do some soul-searching.

And I think I just like this secondary character too much, which is probably a bad sign. I wouldn't call him perfect, and his actions are definitely not without serious consequences, but I'm going to be very careful about his construction in accordance with this discussion here.

I started out with a very clear hero story arc; purposely drawing on the cues from the genre to create a very classic hero who I can then sort of deconstruct and challenge. I don't think it's particularly revolutionary, but I'm interested in heroes and and what it means to be one in a society that needs you to do one thing and then disappear. So I have the clear hero who fits into that story, and then the people around him who either support him in being a hero (for good or for ill) or support him in pretending he's not a hero (again, for good or for ill). And then I'm trying to create a small cadre of people who are able to move past those binaries, and that's where this secondary character is.

I really appreciate the language you're giving me here to clarify some pitfalls. Rather than just generally hope I'm not making fatal flaws, it's really helpful to have some concrete ideas to pit my ideas against.

What's really freeing right now, for me, is that I'm really not thinking about what will or won't publish. I just want to write a good story, avoiding some of the more obvious pitfalls at least, because I just love my story and my characters and I want to do them justice. If the thing is publishable when I'm done with it, great. If not, fine. It's a great experience for me anyway. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Another freeing thing, as feyandstrange is pointing out in the next thread down, is a sense of humor. If you can imagine teasing your character (as opposed to mocking them), they're probably not a Mary Sue--especially if you can imagine really getting them going. Affectionate humor is only possible when you love someone in spite of their flaws, and that in turn is only possible if you recognize those flaws.

And I hear you about what a difference vocabulary makes. Writing is so verbal, and at the same time so much of it actually happens in the parts of the brain that don't have access to language and can't say what they mean for themselves. I do tend to think that finding language to articulate the problem is--well, not half the battle, but it at least means you've got your armor on the right way round and you haven't left your sword in your Sunday trousers.

I witter on occasionally about the importance of having metaphors for writing. (One of mine is here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/truepenny/355753.html) and another one here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/truepenny/347112.html). My Old Reliable is the Great Grimpen Mire, complete with Hound or Hounds of the Baskervilles.) And it's becasue it's the best way I know to get the brain to describe its own process to itself. If you can find or make up a metaphor that helps, it gives you something to hang on to.

---

If you're thinking in terms of deconstructing and challenging, I think odds are pretty good you're not going to end up writing Mary Sues. Because they don't stand up to deconstruction--as my original post proves. Deconstruct a Mary Sue, and you're left with something shoddy, sweet-sticky, thin. A checklist of characteristics with an apparatus of snide remarks. Accepting Mary Sues requires a lack of self-awareness, an ingenuous (or willfully disingenuous)

I think your project sounds really cool, btw. I am a complete sucker for the deconstruction of genre tropes (behold, after all, my novel about the Gay Mage and the Thief :P ), and heroism and Being A Hero are such contested issues. (I'm assuming your project is a fantasy, but I just realized I could be wrong--not that that invalidates my point, since I think heroism is something that our culture doesn't know how to deal with very well, and it either gets ignored or sentimentalized, and so there's all sorts of room in non-genre fiction to talk about it, too, She Says, Digressing Madly.) And getting past binaries is important; it's also something that's really hard to do, and I wonder if perhaps that's where part of your Mary Sue anxiety is coming from. Because writing somebody who can do that takes some careful balancing so that they don't come across Perfect and Special.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Damerel is the Heyer male lead I would most want to have lunch with. And, yes, it's because of his sense of humor, which is also why Oliver Carleton is my second-favorite Heyer male lead, even though Lady of Quality is not one of Heyer's better books.

(With third-favorite, we find Vidal, and revert straight to Byronism. ::sigh:: But #4 is probably Sir Tristram from The Talisman Ring, so I figure I can allow myself Vidal as a very guilty pleasure.)

But, yes, Heyer, especially in her later books, recognized that an inability to laugh at oneself is the surest sign of immaturity, and that it makes one dangerous. The younger brother in The Quiet Gentleman proves that. (Martin, his name is, but I'm blanking on the last name. Frane?)

Genuine self-mockery (as opposed to self-deprecation and false modesty) means a character is self-aware, which means the author is self-aware. Which means Mary Sue has probably been handed her hat.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I'm going to behold this novel of yours, as soon as I can! (I was a phd student in early modern history, oddly enough, so how about that for serendipitous simpatico! I dropped out and became an academic librarian instead, though.)

And I'm so glad to hear about the contested nature of heroism and being A Hero, I find it all very interesting. And you're completely right, it is a fantasy project. I'm absolutely loving all the conventions that go along with that genre too, because they're a lot of fun to work within/flout. I love using history for fiction, but I also enjoy the idea of medieval ideas mixing with modern elements. So yes, my project is completely fantasy, but not particularly medieval or anything. Partially rural, mostly urban. Lots of magic.

One of my prime motivations at the moment is thinking about creating a sort of tremendous hero figure, christ figure in a way, who really has no place in society once his world-changing act is complete. And how being that incredibly powerful, important person means losing pretty much everything that would ever be considered normal. And then of course finding how to live diagonally in the horizon between those two binary bookends (normal and Hero). And it's not this Mary Sue-sounding hero that I worry about. It's another one, a supporting character. The prime motivation I'm considering for him is faith. If faith is the thing that makes both the binaries exist (belief in the system), then what makes it possible for a person to see beyond the binaries is also faith, but of a more personal and direct kind. So while I enjoy my Hero, it's the faithful one that intrigues me most.

So there is specialness there, no question. I will ponder that specialness in light of this discussion, of course.

Anyway, blah blah blah! This conversation has prompted me to write up new character sketches from the point of view of a person who hates each character. All the annoying traits, everything that's frustrating. I always write character sketches from a place of a lot of love, but maybe focusing on the negative would actually help me to love them more. :)

Thanks so much for this, I can't even describe how helpful this has all been. And I so appreciate the ear. I really needed that just now.

Re: 378567

[katallen.livejournal.com]

At the moment I'm doing the rewrite on a novel I've written... the short version being that I've been told it's a good story that could be a much better story... if I can make more of it work.

Sometimes the real graft is in figuring out why it almost works but doesn't.

Absofragginlutely :o)

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I do have an entirely stereotypical weakness for Vidal. Both the Vidal men, really; it was years before I scrounged a copy of _These Old Shades_, and had only the younger Vidal to console me. And Damerel; men who quote literature... I didn't find him until later either, but he's very sexy. Carleton certainly has a lot of very good lines, for an otherwise not-so-good book. Lots of people seem to prefer Caverleigh to Carleton, but I don't. Maybe, again, it's because Carleton was a childhood friend.

Martin Frant. I fear myself for knowing that without more than a moment's hesitation, even though most days I can't remember my own address or phone number. Yes, those fellows often become at least mildly dangerous; Torquil couldn't be teased either, and it would have been very easy for Oswald Denny to have become dangerous to a slightly less durable heroine, or if Damerel didn't thoroughly trounce him. (I can remember thinking, the first time I read that ond, that perhaps Oswald would do something stupid like attempt to kidnap Venetia drive her to the Border.) Being able to handle being teased is a rather recurring theme, there; I can remember any number of young greenheads being given that advice by older gentlemen. I think even Sylvester is sucessfully teased by the end of things, although he does seem to be a bit of an exception.

...damnit, now I want to write a Mary Sue Heyer heroine and play with the concept. ...or wait, haven't we got one in there somewhere? Goodness, and they're both named Julia; in Devil's Cub *and* A Convenient Marriage.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Juliana (in Devil's Cub--you remember Frant, I remember the name of Vidal's silly cousin). And Lydia in The Corinthian is another Mary Sue played for laughs.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons Regency Buck annoys me is that Heyer reverses the usual dynamic, and it's her heroine who doesn't have much sense of humor--and doesn't really learn, either.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Like most writers, I love talking about writing, so it's not as if it were a hardship. But you're welcome. :)

And it sounds to me as if part of what's throwing you off is that, while the question of what happens to a hero when he's finished Being A Hero is a really good one, it's also one that is imposed externally on your character. But the other question, the one about faith, is intrinsic to who this character is--and therefore is a lodestone for attention from the moment the character is introduced. The actual Hero-type doesn't really get to the interesting bits (since we all know the dynamic of -You must save the world!- -But I just want to be normal!- We've seen it a thousand times, and while you can still ring changes on it, it's not got a lot to it to be intriguing) until rather later in his character arc.

I don't know. That may not be the problem at all. But I know that if I were writing the sort of book you describe, that would be an issue I would have to deal with. So I throw it out fwiw.