Thoughts on Mary Sue characters.

[EmilyMiller]

I think it's a case of someone being a good director but a bad fit for the project.
Some material doesn't play to an artist's strengths.

Agreed. Johnson tried to put his stamp on the work. Star Wars doesn’t need his stamp IMO. Still love his stuff. Brick is one of my favorite movies. Like Looper and Knives Out as well.

Em

 

[LonRivers]

Isn't that the whole point of that person being the Main Character? let's not bring Rey Fakewalker back into it because she is the epitome of a Mary Sue. Luke Skywalker was a highly skilled sharpshooter to begin with (killing whomprats and all) who got better when he learned to use the Force. His arc was stretched out between three movies, hundreds of novels and comic books. Rey learned her shit in the first half of the damn movie.

If you don't want your character to be Mr. or Mrs. Perfect, then don't write them that way. Give them flaws. Make them earn their prize. Don't hand it to them.

 

[AlinaX]

Luke blew up a death star on his first time out in an X-wing.

I don't have a problem with Luke, but please don't say, "Let's not argue about Rey because it's completely obvious I'm right about her."

ETA: First time in an X-wing, first time in Space with no air resistance and no gravity.

 

[Bamagan]

Luke blew up a death star on his first time out in an X-wing.

I don't have a problem with Luke, but please don't say, "Let's not argue about Rey because it's completely obvious I'm right about her."

ETA: First time in an X-wing, first time in Space with no air resistance and no gravity.

I think the underlying 'Mary Sue' problem in Star Wars is that they overused it. In the original three, Luke can get a pass from most of the audience because he's the only such character in the principal cast. By the time they were making the prequels, they were asking the audience to accept Anakin in the same way, but even moreso. Some people were okay with that, and made various excuses related to him being Luke's father/Darth Vader down the line, but there was no point in the prequels that I'm aware of when a large portion of the fanbase was rooting for him (Clone Wars depiction not being in consideration for this discussion, though).
So by the time we get to Rey, she's got an uphill battle to win the older audiences because she's the third such character introduced, or maybe fourth if you want to count Finn. And in order to make it seem like an escalation of stakes or whatever, she's even stronger or at least quicker-learning than the ones who came before. There's a certain story-telling rationale behind that, especially if one accepts the idea that it was the Force causing them to be born, but the delivery vehicle of the movie didn't sell it particularly well. It falls as flat as the scene where they're comparing the holographs of the new stupid doomsday weapon with the old Death Star. "It's bigger and nastier than before! Grr!"
I personally thought Daisy Ridley did a good job with what they gave her, but the antagonists suffered from the same general problems, or worse. Kylo in the first movie is a brat with a cool sword, Snoke is completely pointless and quickly dispatched, and the return of Palpatine happens offscreen and mostly unexplained and he's lost any gravitas he might have once had as a villain. When the bad guys progress from silly to sillier to silliest, well, that doesn't do the hero who defeats them any favors.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Luke blew up a death star on his first time out in an X-wing.

I don't have a problem with Luke, but please don't say, "Let's not argue about Rey because it's completely obvious I'm right about her."

ETA: First time in an X-wing, first time in Space with no air resistance and no gravity.

It wasn't his first time in space, remember the fight in the Millennium Falcon?
Also, there is no reason to think it was his first time in an X-Wing.
Do you seriously think he got zero training, no check ride, nothing? That all happened off camera because it would have been boring.
Also, as has been noted earlier, he only succeeded because Han bailed him out at the last second.

 

[LonRivers]

Luke knew how to fly and was an experienced pilot. If you happen across one of the special editions with added scenes deleted from the original theatrical release, they tell them that Luke is the best bush pilot in the Outer territories. Meaning he can fly, and fly quite well. Maybe no X-Wing training, but it wouldn't take much for a pilot like him to get a pretty good grasp of the cockpit.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Luke knew how to fly and was an experienced pilot. If you happen across one of the special editions with added scenes deleted from the original theatrical release, they tell them that Luke is the best bush pilot in the Outer territories. Meaning he can fly, and fly quite well. Maybe no X-Wing training, but it wouldn't take much for a pilot like him to get a pretty good grasp of the cockpit.

Yup. Pretty much his only marketable skill best does fixing vaporators and cleaning droids.

 

[AlinaX]

I know he was a good pilot, but there's no suggestion there's any luxury of time for off-screen training. A ship like the X-wing designed for a wide range of combat environments and also interstellar flight is going to be very different to a bush craft. Suggesting otherwise is just lazy plotting.

Ultimately, Rey comes off as a problematic character because the trilogy does not commit to a single coherent narrative. I would love to learn more about the Rey in Ep. 7, her childhood and struggles to survive, but the films never care.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I know he was a good pilot, but there's no suggestion there's any luxury of time for off-screen training. A ship like the X-wing designed for a wide range of combat environments and also interstellar flight is going to be very different to a bush craft. Suggesting otherwise is just lazy plotting.

Ultimately, Rey comes off as a problematic character because the trilogy does not commit to a single coherent narrative. I would love to learn more about the Rey in Ep. 7, her childhood and struggles to survive, but the films never care.

Based on your experience with the differences between Bush craft and X-wings?
There is no suggestion there isn't time for some training either.
Also, it's been established that the T-16 he flew back home had similar controls to the X-Wing because they were products of the same manufacturer.

And more importantly, at no point in the battle does he prove to be a super bad ass pilot. He makes ONE lucky shot after getting bailed out by Han. He isn't out shooting down dozens of Tie Fighters, he's staying where he's supposed to and being a wingman.

 

[AlinaX]

Like I said, I don't have a problem with Luke, and I do recognise that Rey's characterisation lacks a coherent vision.

I do have something of a problem with people who give Luke the benefit of the doubt but deny Rey the same.

Calling her a Mary Sue is a failure of imagination.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Calling her a Mary Sue is a failure of imagination.

Failure of imagination on the part of the writers and directors.

Rey's character could have been so much more powerful if they had just justified how she was able to go toe to toe with Kylo, for example, with no DOCUMENTED training with her force abilities, especially a light saber, which is a very specialized weapon. You're not going to dismember yourself with a staff. We got intimate detail on how difficult the training is by watching Luke's struggles; on the Falcon with the training droid, Dagoba with Yoda. We got none of that With Rey, so yeah, Mary Sue, and I blame the writers.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Like I said, I don't have a problem with Luke, and I do recognise that Rey's characterisation lacks a coherent vision.

I do have something of a problem with people who give Luke the benefit of the doubt but deny Rey the same.

Calling her a Mary Sue is a failure of imagination.

No, calling her a Mary Sue is an accurate description of what she is.

Notice how people don't argue that she isn't, they just try and paint Luke with the same brush. It's whataboutism.

 

[Wifetheif]

I'm trying to remember the name of a short Science Fiction story that played wonderfully with this trope. We meet an astronaut he returns to earth a hero he goes into politics and becomes the president of the United States along the way, he woos and marries the sexiest actress in the world and writes numerous best sellers cut to our final pages where we learn that all of this was the dying fantasy of a geriatric zero on a new experimental medicine to relive the fear of dying! It was perfectly written, Just when you are yelling BS and Marty Stu, the author pulls the rug out from under your feet.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Failure of imagination on the part of the writers and directors.

Rey's character could have been so much more powerful if they had just justified how she was able to go toe to toe with Kylo, for example, with no DOCUMENTED training with her force abilities, especially a light saber, which is a very specialized weapon. You're not going to dismember yourself with a staff.

The opening establishes that Rey's been fending for herself on an inhospitable and lawless planet since childhood, making a living by climbing around inside wrecks, and presumably having to hold her own against the local scum and villains.

Not much risk of getting dismembered with a staff, no, but getting hit with your own weapon is still something to be avoided in just about any armed combat style. Both because of the possibility of injury, and because having your weapon trapped against your body is a bad situation to be in. While no two weapons are identical, it's not obvious why adapting from a staff to a light saber is more of a stretch than, say, adapting from firing an aircraft-mounted pneumatic cannon at rodents, to firing a vacuum-craft-mounted missile/torpedo system at a space station that's shooting back.

Plus the non-gunnery combat skills that Luke would've needed to learn - tactics, formation flying, etc. I knew a guy who'd been a WWII fighter pilot; at a time when pilots and planes were sorely needed following tremendous losses in the Battle of Britain, he took several months of training for general combat skills, a couple of weeks intensive gunnery training, and then another couple of weeks just to update from one model of Spitfire to another.

As far as I can tell from a quick look at the fan wiki, Vader had about 30 years of training over Luke when they faced off (plus cybernetic limbs for whatever that's worth), and Kylo had about 20 years over Rey, not counting any melee skills she might've learned on Jakku. In both cases the good guys win out not through having anywhere near their opponents' level of experience, but because they're the good guys, and maybe because their opponents don't have their heart in it, and perhaps because it's a law of that universe that the Dark Side is inherently self-destructive.

Bottom line, it's all highly cinematic and several vigintillion parsecs away from anything approximating realistic physics or combat. If we can buy Luke's training montage and "oh the controls are similar" as storytelling justification for the impossible, it's hard to see why "childhood spent fending for herself on Jakku" is less acceptable.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

The opening establishes that Rey's been fending for herself on an inhospitable and lawless planet since childhood, making a living by climbing around inside wrecks, and presumably having to hold her own against the local scum and villains.

Not much risk of getting dismembered with a staff, no, but getting hit with your own weapon is still something to be avoided in just about any armed combat style. Both because of the possibility of injury, and because having your weapon trapped against your body is a bad situation to be in. While no two weapons are identical, it's not obvious why adapting from a staff to a light saber is more of a stretch than, say, adapting from firing an aircraft-mounted pneumatic cannon at rodents, to firing a vacuum-craft-mounted missile/torpedo system at a space station that's shooting back.

Plus the non-gunnery combat skills that Luke would've needed to learn - tactics, formation flying, etc. I knew a guy who'd been a WWII fighter pilot; at a time when pilots and planes were sorely needed following tremendous losses in the Battle of Britain, he took several months of training for general combat skills, a couple of weeks intensive gunnery training, and then another couple of weeks just to update from one model of Spitfire to another.

As far as I can tell from a quick look at the fan wiki, Vader had about 30 years of training over Luke when they faced off (plus cybernetic limbs for whatever that's worth), and Kylo had about 20 years over Rey, not counting any melee skills she might've learned on Jakku. In both cases the good guys win out not through having anywhere near their opponents' level of experience, but because they're the good guys, and maybe because their opponents don't have their heart in it, and perhaps because it's a law of that universe that the Dark Side is inherently self-destructive.

Bottom line, it's all highly cinematic and several vigintillion parsecs away from anything approximating realistic physics or combat. If we can buy Luke's training montage and "oh the controls are similar" as storytelling justification for the impossible, it's hard to see why "childhood spent fending for herself on Jakku" is less acceptable.

As I stated, the issue isn’t that Rey’s training wasn’t plausible, it was that the writing was lazy and didn’t even make an effort to establish it. Hence Mary Sue is earned.

 

[MrHereWriting]

The opening establishes that Rey's been fending for herself on an inhospitable and lawless planet since childhood, making a living by climbing around inside wrecks, and presumably having to hold her own against the local scum and villains.

Not much risk of getting dismembered with a staff, no, but getting hit with your own weapon is still something to be avoided in just about any armed combat style. Both because of the possibility of injury, and because having your weapon trapped against your body is a bad situation to be in. While no two weapons are identical, it's not obvious why adapting from a staff to a light saber is more of a stretch than, say, adapting from firing an aircraft-mounted pneumatic cannon at rodents, to firing a vacuum-craft-mounted missile/torpedo system at a space station that's shooting back.

Plus the non-gunnery combat skills that Luke would've needed to learn - tactics, formation flying, etc. I knew a guy who'd been a WWII fighter pilot; at a time when pilots and planes were sorely needed following tremendous losses in the Battle of Britain, he took several months of training for general combat skills, a couple of weeks intensive gunnery training, and then another couple of weeks just to update from one model of Spitfire to another.

As far as I can tell from a quick look at the fan wiki, Vader had about 30 years of training over Luke when they faced off (plus cybernetic limbs for whatever that's worth), and Kylo had about 20 years over Rey, not counting any melee skills she might've learned on Jakku. In both cases the good guys win out not through having anywhere near their opponents' level of experience, but because they're the good guys, and maybe because their opponents don't have their heart in it, and perhaps because it's a law of that universe that the Dark Side is inherently self-destructive.

Bottom line, it's all highly cinematic and several vigintillion parsecs away from anything approximating realistic physics or combat. If we can buy Luke's training montage and "oh the controls are similar" as storytelling justification for the impossible, it's hard to see why "childhood spent fending for herself on Jakku" is less acceptable.

Luke's failures

Episode 4
Knocked out by a Tusken Raider, saved by Obi-Wan.
Get's picked on in the cantina, saved by Obi-Wan.
Gets shot by that little laser ball trainer the first time we see him practice with a lightsaber, then Obi-Wan gets him to "use the force."
Han Solo gives him shit instead of worshipping him.
Watches Obi-Wan die, the last known Jedi at the time.
Wins a space fight in the Falcon, but misses a million shots, told not to get cocky instead of being celebrated.
Scores a HUGE victory in the X-wing, but by that time he needs a victory, so it feels a little bit earned and the audience really wants to see him win. The audience needs him to win. We also hear Ben guide him with "Use the force, Luke." Remember, we don't know what the Force is capable of yet. He wins with help.
He also had something else going for him that Rey didn't: The audience didn't understand the Force. What they did for Rey was abuse the Force.

Episode 5
Luke is knocked out by the Abominable Snowman, saved by Han Solo, we see Luke recover.
Kisses his Princess sister (maybe that's the most Mary Sue thing he did, lol.)
Goes to Yoda and dismisses the most revered Jedi of his time due to his size and behavior, fails the first lesson.
Can't pull the X-wing out of the swamp, fails another lesson.
Defies Yoda, goes to save his friends, gets his ass kicked by Vader, gets his hand cutoff, and has to commit to a near suicidal jump and has to be saved by his friends instead of doing the saving.

Episode 6
He's now in black. He feels older. He looks older. The movie has come out 3 years after The Empire Strikes Back and his new powers and abilities feel appropriate.
His Jedi mind trick doesn't work on Jaba, he panics, goes for a gun, gets dropped into the Rancor pit and after a "are you fucking kidding me" look on his face, beats the Rancor by dropping a door on his head. Nothing fancy about that. It comes across as desperate and not a part of his original plan to save Han.
Beats Jaba, but with his friends, and in a strategically better location than Jaba's lair.
Goes back to his Jedi training, but Yoda dies right away. His training is incomplete. He's not a Jedi and the audience knows this, and Yoda tells him this.
Goes to help his friends bring down the Death Star's shield, but has to surrender to Vader since he is compromising the mission.
Won't fight Vader, can't turn him back to the Light, has to spend the majority of this battle running, hiding, and controlling his anger.
Loses control, as the Emperor wanted, and fights his father, almost killing him.
Gets his ass kicked by the Emperor, saved by his father, has to watch his father die.

Luke is far from the Mary Sue Rey was. The character of Rey took the shortest route to greatness possible after the fans had already watched 6 Star Wars movies. Whoever stepped into that role had to earn it without appearing to be greater than Luke from the get-go, and they screwed that up. Disney, the producers, and the writers dropped the ball and the fans let them know it.

Luke was far from a Mary Sue, but the bottom line is this: If your Mary Sue is likable, they get a pass. If they aren't, they don't.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

The opening establishes that Rey's been fending for herself on an inhospitable and lawless planet since childhood, making a living by climbing around inside wrecks, and presumably having to hold her own against the local scum and villains.

Not much risk of getting dismembered with a staff, no, but getting hit with your own weapon is still something to be avoided in just about any armed combat style. Both because of the possibility of injury, and because having your weapon trapped against your body is a bad situation to be in. While no two weapons are identical, it's not obvious why adapting from a staff to a light saber is more of a stretch than, say, adapting from firing an aircraft-mounted pneumatic cannon at rodents, to firing a vacuum-craft-mounted missile/torpedo system at a space station that's shooting back.

Plus the non-gunnery combat skills that Luke would've needed to learn - tactics, formation flying, etc. I knew a guy who'd been a WWII fighter pilot; at a time when pilots and planes were sorely needed following tremendous losses in the Battle of Britain, he took several months of training for general combat skills, a couple of weeks intensive gunnery training, and then another couple of weeks just to update from one model of Spitfire to another.

As far as I can tell from a quick look at the fan wiki, Vader had about 30 years of training over Luke when they faced off (plus cybernetic limbs for whatever that's worth), and Kylo had about 20 years over Rey, not counting any melee skills she might've learned on Jakku. In both cases the good guys win out not through having anywhere near their opponents' level of experience, but because they're the good guys, and maybe because their opponents don't have their heart in it, and perhaps because it's a law of that universe that the Dark Side is inherently self-destructive.

Bottom line, it's all highly cinematic and several vigintillion parsecs away from anything approximating realistic physics or combat. If we can buy Luke's training montage and "oh the controls are similar" as storytelling justification for the impossible, it's hard to see why "childhood spent fending for herself on Jakku" is less acceptable.

Arguing that "She knows how to use a quarterstaff so she can use a lightsaber" shows a real lack of knowledge about the completely different fighting styles involved. Even just different swords utilize vastly different techniques, let alone going from an impact weapon to a blade.
She had to fend for herself on a planet? So every street urchin in 1800s London or New York was a proficient warrior?

Vader had more training than Kylo, but at least Luke had a training period. Part of the problem is Luke was constantly getting some kind of training, and his whole story arc was LEARNING to be a Jedi, while Rey just magically knows everything.

 

[Demiurging]

Luke does not "make a lucky shot that destroys the Death Star", he only gets to the point where he can make the shot as part of a military squadron and then applies lessons that his mentor has been teaching him throughout about trusting The Force to aim true. If anything, it's just paying off a Chekhov's gun in the earliest stages of Jedi training.

If Luke hadn't been training with Obi-wan, he wouldn't have made the shot. Not a Mary Sue.

 

[Bramblethorn]

As I stated, the issue isn’t that Rey’s training wasn’t plausible, it was that the writing was lazy and didn’t even make an effort to establish it. Hence Mary Sue is earned.

But the only reason I'm able to tell you that Rey grew up on her own on Jakku, scavenging wrecked spaceships and surviving as a child on a rough planet, is because the writing literally did establish that information. Did the audience really need to be led by the nose to "maybe she learned some relevant skills in all that time"?

Is it really any lazier than "the controls are similar"? [For two very different vehicle operating in different environments with different weapons systems]

Don't get me wrong though. I thought Episode VII had some of the worst writing in the franchise overall. So much of the plot, including some of the Rey bits, depends on recycling material from Episode IV.

Resistance hero captured by stormtroopers, led by a fallen Jedi? Cute lil' droid escapes with crucial information on a desert planet, and gets found by a Force-sensitive orphan of mysterious origins? Millennium Falcon? (Everybody loves Han and Chewie.) Another Death Star, with another single-point vulnerability? Fallen Jedi kills father-figure? (This time around, literally his father). Fighter squadron storms the Death Star, flying through canyons to evade anti-aircraft fire, and manage to hit its weak spot and blow the whole thing up? New Jedi begins training with the guy who used to be the mentor to the fallen Jedi? (Though this time at a later point in the sequence.)

All that is lazy, and worse, timid writing. It feels like the writers were so cowed by reactions to stuff like "midichlorians" that they chose to play it safe with a Greatest Hits mixtape. Reprising Episode IV's Jedi 101 with Rey would only have exacerbated that problem.

Anybody who spends much time around Star Wars fan discussions will know that fans are happy to devote incredible amounts of energy to rationalising plot holes in the original trilogy, rather than just say "it's a movie, don't overthink it", even when they know the real answer is "because George Lucas was making it up as he went". Why didn't Obi-Wan say "hey before you two kiss, something you ought to know"? Why did Obi-Wan decide that the best way to hide Anakin Skywalker's son Luke Skywalker was by putting him with Anakin's stepbrother, under the name "Luke Skywalker", on the planet where Anakin spent his early years and where he first took a major fall towards the Dark Side? (That thread came up with a solid answer for the surname, only to then have it torpedoed by non-film canon.) I don't know if the responses have been preserved, but I saw a bunch of SW fans go to war with the laws of thermodynamics when a physicist mentioned that the physics of Coruscant don't work.

When the fandom goes to such immense efforts to rationalise accepting the things that they want to accept, but can't come up with a headcanon to accept something as straightforward as "Force-sensitive woman is unexpectedly good at a couple of things", one ends up wondering if maybe they just didn't want a reason to accept it.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

What better way to start a New Year than to argue about Star Wars

This discussion is starting to remind me of my discussions with some of my religious friends. No matter how much proof you present, no matter how many fallacies you point out, the other side just entrenches more. I always knew why that was so in my discussions, as fun and frustrating as they were, but I am starting to realize it is so in this case as well. Rey worship is a thing, apparently, and it can't be shaken by rational reasoning. Just as in the case of religion, Rey worship isn't based on logic and reason, it is based on emotion, and these discussions, as fun as they are, will never lead to anything.

To be fair, Luke worship is also a thing with many fans, but it is far easier to defend for obvious reasons. In Luke's case at least, I never saw anything political, just standard hero/superhero worship.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

But the only reason I'm able to tell you that Rey grew up on her own on Jakku, scavenging wrecked spaceships and surviving as a child on a rough planet, is because the writing literally did establish that information. Did the audience really need to be led by the nose to "maybe she learned some relevant skills in all that time"?

Is it really any lazier than "the controls are similar"? [For two very different vehicle operating in different environments with different weapons

When the fandom goes to such immense efforts to rationalise accepting the things that they want to accept, but can't come up with a headcanon to accept something as straightforward as "Force-sensitive woman is unexpectedly good at a couple of things", one ends up wondering if maybe they just didn't want a reason to accept it.

So, are all the kids who grew up on Jakku bad asses, cause, you know "they might have learned relevant skills"?
Learning to fly one plane is completely irrelevant to flying another plane, and "lazy writing", but "growing up in a bad neighborhood" apparently prepares you for anything life might throw at you. We should stop with all that training that SEALs and Green Berets get and just start picking up girls from.bad neighborhoods, I'm sure they know "relevant skills."

Then we get to the real crux of it, and the lazy writing, "they just don't like GIRLS!!!!".

 

[Kelliezgirl]

What better way to start a New Year than to argue about Star Wars

This discussion is starting to remind me of my discussions with some of my religious friends. No matter how much proof you present, no matter how many fallacies you point out, the other side just entrenches more. I always knew why that was so in my discussions, as fun and frustrating as they were, but I am starting to realize it is so in this case as well. Rey worship is a thing, apparently, and it can't be shaken by rational reasoning. Just as in the case of religion, Rey worship isn't based on logic and reason, it is based on emotion, and these discussions, as fun as they are, will never lead to anything.

To be fair, Luke worship is also a thing with many fans, but it is far easier to defend for obvious reasons. In Luke's case at least, I never saw anything political, just standard hero/superhero worship.

Unfortunately, this is exactly it. No one will try and create a list of Rey failing (and learning and growing) like MrHereWriting did for Luke, because they can't. She doesn't fail, and doesn't grow.

 

[Demiurging]

I'm not even a big fan of Star Wars, but the accusations against Luke/Anikin annoy me.

The extent of their abilities before explicitly training with the force: mild and unconscious use of short-term precognition for the purpose of aim and reaction speed. Anikin is a child of prophecy, a divine birth, and all of his accomplishments in the first prequel movie can be chalked up to this, even the understandably improbable attack on that command ship in the ending battle (I'll try spinning~ hurr~). Both are piloting prodigies and I'd add adaptability to new controls to the suite of abilities gained through precognition.

It only looks like luck because the audience can't feel what he does.

 

[onehitwanda]

https://media0.giphy.com/media/6pJNYBYSMFod2/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952eknjh5w2jobizg3jvl3aaphebeabrh6zvwltjwz0&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

 

[AlinaX]

See, if this discussion went, "Rey is a character with a lot of potential that the films failed to explore," I wouldn't have a problem with it, but dismissing her as a Mary Sue and arguing irrational worship (as opposed to superhero worship?) just feels aggressive.

I could write a story about Rey growing up and honing her instincts, but I'd be surprised if a dozen people haven't already done so.

Tired of this.