dimetrodone:

I think the biggest setback caused by the “anti-Mary Sue” craze and the popularity of TvTropes a few years back online was that it caused a lot of people to start looking at characters as being just a list of traits, and tried to turn the process of creating and defining characters into a neat predictable chemistry, when it’s usually a personal or experimental process.

I always hated those "Mary Sue trait lists” cause they were nearly always void of context, and making any character a reflection of yourself means you write terrible self inserts. If your character scores too high on the Sue chart you just “add” 2 flaws and they go down -2 points and are now a “good character”

I still see people approach characters in a weird mechanical way, it still doesn’t feel right to be able to adequately explain a character’s identity and moral standpoints in a bulletpoint list…