Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Bryan See on April 07, 2016, 10:57:46 pm
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Oh, gorgeous this Star Wars film is since The Force Awakens... :D
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Well it is certainly gorgeous. I'm excited for Star Wars again! Also: nostalgia russsshhhhh.
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Too bad it's a prequel so you already know more or less what's going to happen. Kind of takes half the excitement away.
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I don't think it does. I mean, in every Star Wars movie you know the baddies are going to lose. Is your experience wronged because of this knowledge? No. We know that the Bothans will get the plans of the Death Star into Leia's hands.
What we don't know is what, hopefully, the writers of this movie will focus on, meaning, the path and fate of the characters they are creating for the movie. Will the protagonist die? "Many bothans died ...." Who is going to survive or not? Who is going to grow through the movie and who is not? What kind of growth will it be? What kind of arc will the characters go through? All we know is that a piece of info gets to Leia. We know nothing about these new characters's future.
Unlike the other prequels, where we knew pretty much where Obi Wan, Anakin, Luke, Leia, Palpatine, Yoda, etc., etc. would all end up. They could still have written a good trilogy out of it, even with all that handicap. But here, there's no such handicap. It's all in the dark! I love it.
Also, the title clearly suggests there's the possibility of being a "Rogue Two" movie if this one succeeds. I'm way more interested in this movie than the "young Solo" or the "Bobba Fett" movies (are those even going to be made?), which have no actual sense of mystery to them, do they? We know the characters. Do we really need those movies? I think this movie is going in the interesting direction: it's a vast galaxy, it must have far more interesting stories than just "the central one".
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Small correction: Bothans only died getting the plans of the second DS. Presumably, no Bothans were killed here.
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the bothans only died the second time round because by then people had figured out that they were all spies (http://everything2.com/title/Many+Bothans+died+to+bring+us+this+information)
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I don't think it does. I mean, in every Star Wars movie you know the baddies are going to lose. Is your experience wronged because of this knowledge? No. We know that the Bothans will get the plans of the Death Star into Leia's hands.
What we don't know is what, hopefully, the writers of this movie will focus on, meaning, the path and fate of the characters they are creating for the movie. Will the protagonist die? "Many bothans died ...." Who is going to survive or not? Who is going to grow through the movie and who is not? What kind of growth will it be? What kind of arc will the characters go through? All we know is that a piece of info gets to Leia. We know nothing about these new characters's future.
Sure, that's the other half. I just like it much more when I don't know what the ending of a movie (plot-wise) is going to be, and that's something that a tie-in prequel can never offer.
Of course, it doesn't affect how good the movie is, especially on subsequent viewings, but it does make it less exciting for me. Enjoyable character arcs and all that are great, but the possibility that a movie might have those is something that never factors in to how excited I am about seeing it.
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Too bad it's a prequel so you already know more or less what's going to happen. Kind of takes half the excitement away.
Well, not really? You knwo that Leia eventually gets her hands on the Death Star plans, but all the stuff leading up to it is unknown.
For all you know they might die!
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New Order is best Order. :P
While its a little sad Kyle Katarn is probably getting redacted by this, the premise has a lot of potential and I dig seeing the Imperial hardware even the earlier iterations of the AT AT and such. Hopefully they make the best out of having Donnie Yen and don't fall prey to the typical western shaky**** camera work for filming martial arts. Seriously the first idiot that implemented that filming method in a fight scene needs to get bludgeoned with a kali stick. It also warms the cockles of my heart to see insecure dweebs whingeing about two Star Wars films in a row having female leads.
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New Order is best Order. :P
While its a little sad Kyle Katarn is probably getting redacted by this, the premise has a lot of potential and I dig seeing the Imperial hardware even the earlier iterations of the AT AT and such. Hopefully they make the best out of having Donnie Yen and don't fall prey to the typical western shaky**** camera work for filming martial arts. Seriously the first idiot that implemented that filming method in a fight scene needs to get bludgeoned with a kali stick. It also warms the cockles of my heart to see insecure dweebs whingeing about two Star Wars films in a row having female leads.
Well, Katarn was widely ignored to begin with, there was another game made later where the spy that got the rebel plans was a Twi'lek and before him the plans were stolen byt hijacking a secret imperial satellite network (X-wing).
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Sure, that's the other half. I just like it much more when I don't know what the ending of a movie (plot-wise) is going to be, and that's something that a tie-in prequel can never offer.
But when does that seriously happens? A trailer comes up with a movie like The Avengers and you get to see the villain and his plans to conquer Earth, while the heroes are stuck on some kind of problem to deal with. Well, gosh, are you really suggesting you don't know how that movie will end? For reals, 95% of the movies' ending out there are totally predictable. Take any heist movie. You obviously know the heist is going to be made successfully. But the ramifications, you don't. The characters and what happens to them and what they choose to do you definitely don't. But the heist itself? Come on, that's a given.
And that's the perfect analogy. This is a heist movie. We know therefore that the heist is going to be made, and that would be true even if we didn't know anything else but it being a "heist movie". But we know nothing more about it. Because the only thing we know is that a piece of info passes to another person. As far as "spoliers" go, that's nothing. You don't know **** about what happens to the real important things in the movie, which are their characters and the underlying themes that they try to express (things like contradictory elements such as how to deal with trust and rebellion at the same time, for instance. How to trust a spy, and a million other such kinds of themes, etc).
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Sure, that's the other half. I just like it much more when I don't know what the ending of a movie (plot-wise) is going to be, and that's something that a tie-in prequel can never offer.
But when does that seriously happens? A trailer comes up with a movie like The Avengers and you get to see the villain and his plans to conquer Earth, while the heroes are stuck on some kind of problem to deal with. Well, gosh, are you really suggesting you don't know how that movie will end? For reals, 95% of the movies' ending out there are totally predictable. Take any heist movie. You obviously know the heist is going to be made successfully. But the ramifications, you don't. The characters and what happens to them and what they choose to do you definitely don't. But the heist itself? Come on, that's a given.
Sure, in many if not most movies the broad strokes of the ending are predictable, but to my excitement it makes a big some difference whether I know them or not (or think I know, if you prefer). I can see myself being excited about a heist movie even if it's predictable that the heist succeeds, because I know I don't really know it, leaving some room for imagination and uncertainty. But I'd always be less excited about a heist movie prequel which tells the origin story of the heist movie character(s).
And that's the perfect analogy. This is a heist movie. We know therefore that the heist is going to be made, and that would be true even if we didn't know anything else but it being a "heist movie". But we know nothing more about it. Because the only thing we know is that a piece of info passes to another person. As far as "spoliers" go, that's nothing. You don't know **** about what happens to the real important things in the movie, which are their characters and the underlying themes that they try to express (things like contradictory elements such as how to deal with trust and rebellion at the same time, for instance. How to trust a spy, and a million other such kinds of themes, etc).
Well, I don't expect to be able to analyze myself comprehensively enough to explain the exact psychological mechanics of why I don't get very excited about stories where I already know the endpoint (more or less). It just feels more pointless overall, more like connecting the dots instead of having potential to go anywhere, and perhaps mainly it feels like the story is subservient to whatever it ties into in a way that sequels don't.
If I'm excited about seeing a movie, my imagination is focused on speculating about the plot, what's going to happen and where things will go. If I know where it will go, then there's less room for my imagination, and thus less excitement.
P.S. And, again, this is just about excitement. Nothing to do with how good the movie is when/after you actually see it.
P.P.S. I haven't seen nor want to see The Avengers, and I do think trailers often give away way too much plot. :D I find that movie experiences are always elevated by knowing less beforehand.
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I don't think it does. I mean, in every Star Wars movie you know the baddies are going to lose.
Guess ESB doesn't count as a Star Wars movie, then. :) Sure, they do lose eventually, but the movie itself ends on a fairly grim note.
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Guess ESB doesn't count as a Star Wars movie, then. :) Sure, they do lose eventually, but the movie itself ends on a fairly grim note.
Not...really? It's actually quite hopeful. I mean, let's be honest, ESB was the Empire trying to sink the Rebellion. They failed. Miserably. They didn't get a majority of its troops, or its major leadership figures, or its greatest hero. They got Han, who is personally important to the characters but not a pivotal Rebellion figure by any means.
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It also warms the cockles of my heart to see insecure dweebs whingeing about two Star Wars films in a row having female leads.
AMEN.
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Well I'm not one fond of having fun out of insecure brats... I just hope the protagonist is better written than Rey though. Neither a Mary Sue nor a comeback to millennial emo obnoxious entitled heroes is all I ask.
I do long for old time silly well meaning and naive but strong heroes... Supergirl is a good recent example of this. Luke was another.
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Not...really? It's actually quite hopeful. I mean, let's be honest, ESB was the Empire trying to sink the Rebellion. They failed. Miserably. They didn't get a majority of its troops, or its major leadership figures, or its greatest hero. They got Han, who is personally important to the characters but not a pivotal Rebellion figure by any means.
Sure, looking at the bigger picture, it works out that way, but SW isn't really about the bigger picture. As far as the main characters are concerned, they lost Han (pretty much the "soul" of the team at that point), Luke lost his hand and got his ass kicked by Vader, their base was destroyed and another friend of theirs turned out to be a traitor. Empire did win in ESB, but the fact that it's not as total a victory as they'd like keeps it form being a complete downer.
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And it fell in ROTJ, and re-emerged as the First Order in TFA, where Han Solo is brutally murdered by their son, Kylo Ren. Then it's Leia to fall.
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Well I'm not one fond of having fun out of insecure brats...
When it comes to people whining about things as idiotic as the gender of the protagonists, they're fair game. See also the recent idiocy over the new Baldur's Gate expansion.
I just hope the protagonist is better written than Rey though. Neither a Mary Sue nor a comeback to millennial emo obnoxious entitled heroes is all I ask.
:wtf: Have you watched a Star Wars film? Rey is the best-written primary protagonist to date. Luke might as well be Gary Stu. Anakin's an obnoxious brat and much the same. Rey at least has a little freakin' depth and maturity.
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MP-Ryan before we continue the discussion I'm going to need to hear your definition of "Gary Stu". Luke is cocksure, impatient, and quick to anger (much like Anakin, which I'm sure is a coincidence given Lucas's quality of writing in the prequels), and disappoints Yoda multiple times with his failures. He's handily defeated by Vader in ESB. His accessory to the Rebels' victory at Endor is tangential at best.
We agree on Rey being the best-written protagonist in Star Wars to date, but give audiences around the world for over forty years some credit. Luke is genuinely likable (as opposed to that being an informed characteristic), has several character flaws, and makes significant mistakes but learns from them.
EDIT: For comparison, take a look at a proper Mary Sue: Honor Harrington, main protagonist of the series of the same name by David Weber.
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Many forget that Rey is stubbornly clinging to a false hope, when she had a vision she was scared out of her wits and that at least once she goofed a bit (like when she forgot her blaster's safety on), I had the unfortunate experience of reading a real Mary Sue character once (when my little brother showed me a RPG session on a Harry potter forum he moderated just to show me what he had to deal with), these kinds of characters aren't just unexpectedly good at things, they are literally perfect and omnipotent, a real Mary sue would have probably made a force jump through the chasm and finished Kylo Ren or have been able to use force lightning without falling to the Dark Side first or something like it.
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Yeah, Luke is a very archetypical "hero" character (no thanks to countless characters based on him, though the archetype itself is much older), but by no means a "Gary Stu". He did manage some pretty amazing stuff, the Force was with him and all that, but when going against another Force user such as Vader, he was pretty much failing miserably until the very end of RoTJ. Indeed, his journey from "farmboy with a lightsaber and favor of The Force" to "Jedi Knight" was a major point of the OT. We don't know where the new trilogy will take things, but it seems that Rey will undergo a similar journey. SW characters do have a lot of luck (or are guided by The Force, take your pick), but it usually only gets them through their first movie. Both Luke and Anakin got their asses kicked in their second movies, and I expect the same to happen to Rey.
BTW, similarities between Luke and Anakin are unlikely to be a coincidence. They share many of the same flaws. I got the feeling that Anakin fell to the exact same character flaws Luke eventually managed to overcome. One heck of a coincidence, if you ask me, I'd be surprised if it wasn't intentional. In fact, considering the role Vader plays in the OT, basing Anakin directly on Luke, but having him fail at the crucial moment seems almost like a no-brainer.
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Right, I forgot to tag the sarcasm.
I was mocking the quality of the prequels' writing, Dragon.
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That was meant to point out that if Rey is a Mary Sue, Luke is a Gary Stu. One cannot be without the other fitting as well. I don't think either fit as archetypical author-insertion-but-magically-perfect characters, which the label ordinarily conveys. Rey is better written than Luke mostly because we get a sense of who she is and what she's feeling throughout the film, versus Luke's almost complete lack of mourning for the people who raise him and subsequent charge across the galaxy.
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Oh come on. We get that you have issues with the original films but in TFA awakens we see Rey manage to fly the falcon perfectly first time we see her at the controls, fix the drives when even Han Solo didn't know what to do, and beat Kylo Ren the first time she handles a lightsabre.
You want to explain what Luke does which is even remotely comparable?
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It's bene a while since I watched ANH, but didn't he fly a fighter spacecraft flawlessly the first time he was sat in it? so he's got that
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I have no idea where he learned but he does say to Han that he's a pretty good pilot. So it's not the first time he's flown, perhaps not even the first time he's flown something small enough to learn fighter skills.
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Luke was a Skyhopper jockey back on Tatooine, along with Biggs.
I used to bull's-eye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters.
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And as we all know, flying a crop duster biplane does qualify you to hop into an F-16 and do precision bombing.
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Luke manages to do Force Mind tricks at the beginning of his 3rd film and after seeing someone else do it. Rey does it after 40 minutes without even knowing what the Force was. Totally not Mary Sue.
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Luke didn't really try until his 3rd film (seems like he was doing well enough without it, too). He does use the Force to aim his torpedoes at the end, also with little training (though more than Rey, admittedly).
And as we all know, flying a crop duster biplane does qualify you to hop into an F-16 and do precision bombing.
In SW universe, it seems that it actually does. :) Or almost does. Old EU was full of similar examples. In general, it would seems that flying in SW is about as hard as driving a car with an automatic transmission.
Right, I forgot to tag the sarcasm.
Yeah, you forgot it. Prequels had their problems, but they were not that badly written. The general idea behind the plot was actually pretty good, it's the execution that fell flat.
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The whole Mary/Gary Sue tangent was rather thoroughly processed in the actual FTA thread, you know. There's nothing left to say about it.
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Oh come on. We get that you have issues with the original films but in TFA awakens we see Rey manage to fly the falcon perfectly first time we see her at the controls, fix the drives when even Han Solo didn't know what to do, and beat Kylo Ren the first time she handles a lightsabre.
You want to explain what Luke does which is even remotely comparable?
Kylo Ren is not Darth Vader. He is not as skilled as Darth Vader, he is not as strong as Darth Vader. This is explicitly stated in the movie. The beats of the story are pretty obviously set up to make Rey's fight with Ren the same realization that the Force is the answer as Luke turning off his targeting computer. EDIT: Oh yeah, and he'd just been ****ing shot a few minutes ago.
I'd call that "remotely similar".
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First time she uses a lightsabre!
I don't care that Kylo Ren isn't a strong as Vader, the fact that she does that having done all the other stuff she is surprisingly good at is what pushes her into Mary Sue territory.
Luke does one thing very well in A New Hope. Something we've already established in the movie that he can do well. If some extended universe bull**** makes that seem unlikely by giving Luke a backstory inconsistent with him being a good pilot, that's a problem with the EU bull****, not the film.
Luke is a good pilot who acts like hitting a 2m port while flying a space fighter is no big thing. So it's not incongruous that he actually manages to do it.
That is nowhere close to a complete novice winning a lightsabre fight against someone strong enough in the force to stop laser blasts. Even if Kylo Ren's training is incomplete, he should have done a lot better!
If that was the only time Rey had done that though, I'd forgive it. But we also have the 3 other issues brought up.
She flys like an ace!
She repairs like an ace!
She learns the jedi mind trick out of nowhere!
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Someone who had just been ****ing shot! Not regular shot, because Chewie's bowcaster doesn't "merely" shoot people.
And this, in a setting where a universal force, one might say, is wielded by those who can instinctually grasp it. A force which has been demonstrated to lend itself improbably well to the task of flying literally anything, and which has also been explicitly stated to be strong in Rey.
You act like she has no character flaws and makes no mistakes. She does. That's disqualification from Sue status immediately. Her abilities are not inexplicable.
EDIT: Once again, contrast with a real Sue. If you're not familiar with Honor Harrington you should look her up to get an idea.
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Harrington makes mistakes too. Her bad temper is specifically stated as a character flaw (one which has on two occasions made her enemies who then tried to kill her!) And most of her abilities are explained by her genetic alterations. So I guess no one is a Mary Sue then.
But the issue isn't whether Rey is a Mary Sue or not, but whether she's significantly overpowered for the universe. And she is.
Shot or not, Kylo Ren attempts a force pull on Luke's lightsabre and loses to someone who not only has no training in the force, who not only was just smacked 40 foot through the air and knocked out, but who IIRC has never even seen a force pull before!
I mean, if we're going to include Kylo Ren's wound in the equation, why are we ignoring Rey's probable concussion and/or internal injuries? Hell, we never even see her shake her head or look groggy!
Rey manages to pull a lightsabre a good 20m, with enough force to make another force user who is focused on the same object have to duck.
Luke on the other hand, in similar conditions struggles to grab a lightsabre barely out of his reach with no opposition, whatever training he did in the force on Hoth, and a monster coming to eat him.
EDIT: While we're at it, what hell character flaw does Rey have anyway? Cause the only one I can see is her desire to wait on Jakku. That might count if it wasn't fixed halfway through the film by having one conversation with someone she met 5 minutes earlier.
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Honor Harrington's "bad temper" is an excellent example of an informed characteristic. I defy you to name one instance where she becomes angry beyond reason or out of proportion toward (which is, one might say, the defining attribute of a bad temper, otherwise it's just a normal temper) any protagonist character. The only times she's ever angry, the objects of her scorn have been deliberately set up in the narrative to be human ****stains that deserve everything coming to them. Seriously, if you can name one counter example I will be genuinely impressed. I think I know which ones you're thinking about, and after one of them she was knighted, given a stack of medals, and made a noble in two different space nations not even ten minutes after her reprimand.
I did not set the bar high when I mentioned Honor Harrington. :P Shall we inventory the character, for those who might not be familiar following the thread?
And I'll quote from TV Tropes on the general consensus definition of "Mary Sue" so following along is easier. Obviously, the quoted text is centered on fan fiction uses, but I'm sure we can ignore the concept of 'canon' characters for the moment.
The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.
She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story. The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal. She has some sort of especially close relationship to the author's favorite canon character — their love interest, illegitimate child, never-before-mentioned sister, etc. Other than that, the canon characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series. (See Common Mary Sue Traits for more detail on any of these cliches.)
Exotically beautiful? Check. (The phrase 'almond-shaped eyes' is practically a trademark for David Weber; she is extraordinarily tall)
Similarly cool and exotic name? Her name is literally Honor.
She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas? This one deserves a list.
- Starship command/Tactics. This one is pretty necessary, so it gets a pass by itself.
- Fleet command/Strategy. Likewise pretty necessary, but I feel like special attention should be given to her repeated descriptions as one of the best to ever live on the subject.
- Martial arts. Still believable, but once more noteworthy for being one of the universe's foremost expert on her chosen style.
- Sword fighting. O....kay? Not just good at it, either, but truly exceptional. Once defeated a grand master as a novice in a deathmatch in one stroke. No, I'm not joking.
- Hang gliding. Okay, it's a hobby. She's damn good at it, but hobbies are allowed.
- Piloting. She set the academy record for... I forget exactly which record she set, but she did it in a "sailplane". Honorable mention for being one of the (if not the actual) top of her class at the academy, because of course she is. She was also roomates with the Queen's sister, because of course she was.
- Teaching. Speaking of the academy, she becomes one of its finest instructors.
- Governance. Still believable, but definitely starting to edge into "what can't she do?" territory. She's a Duchess in her state of birth, a Steadholder (basically a fancy name for a Duchess) in her adoptive state, before that she was a Count in her state of birth awarded for an entirely different act of valor and heroism.
- Politics. Mentioned here after Governance because they're definitely distinct, and also because it's the start of the descent into ridiculousness. For someone who really hated it to start the series, she ends up being one of the cleverest and most politically astute individuals in an entire empire of billions!
- Dueling. Edging into the "why is she so good at this?" category, Honor is also the best duelist ever to take the field, at one point killing a notorious and infamous dueling assassin before he was able to raise his gun because she shot perfectly from the hip. Which leads into...
- Ancient firearms. Honor is potentially the best (and fastest) sharpshooter in the setting with literally 2,000 year old gunpowder handguns because why the hell not?
- Treecats. Edging back into "this is understandable" territory for a bit, Honor is the setting's foremost expert on Treecats. Given her upbringing, this is not surprising, but it leads into...
- Telempathy. Honor is the first human telempath in a setting where they previously did not exist. She can determine without fail when someone is lying, and sense their emotions even without her also telempathic Treecat companion. Speaking of which...
- Treecat colonization. Honor is the catalyst and enabler of Treecats spreading to other planets, because why the hell not? Again.
- Instinctive navigation. Back away from the realm of the barely understood, Honor hates math and is bad at it. Except for the part where she can determine the optimal course for a hundred thousand ton warship threading between busy travel lanes, while disabling a potential threat with her ship's propulsion system all at the same time. Oh, and did I mention she does this faster than her ship's computer? Because she does.
Well, that's a hell of a list, isn't it? Perhaps I shouldn't mention her cybernetic arm and eye, which are of course better than normal people's body parts. Or maybe her polygamous marriage to her birth country's most senior admiral and also to its most famous entertainment star? No, certainly not necessary to the point. But maybe the part where she's a genetically engineered superhuman who can eat whatever she wants and never gain weight? Or that her homeworld was extra high gravity so she grew up stronger than everyone else just because.
Now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at Rey.
Exotically beautiful? She's a fairly attractive woman, but otherwise not noteworthy for her looks alone.
Similarly cool and exotic name? This is Star Wars, Rey is practically on the boring side of mundane.
Exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas? For helpful comparison, the list again.
- Starship piloting. We don't know a lot about Rey's early life, but she flew the Falcon well the first time behind the controls. Then again, we've seen force-sensitive pilots kick-ass in the pilot seat literally without exception in Star Wars. The closest you can come to a counter-example is Obi-Wan, who merely dislikes flying but is still good at it. We even get to hear her, when talking about the flight afterward, say that she has no idea she could do that. At least she's older than 10.
- Lightsaber combat. Possibly the only one I'm willing to concede is improbable on the face of it, her opponent was wounded not once but twice before she even picked it up, and her opponent was not trying to defeat her in earnest. Then again, The Force. She showed some skill in combat with her staff thing on Jakku.
- Repair and maintenance. Her entire lot in life is literally scavenging and repairing equipment. Of all the things she's good at, this is the one I damn well hope she's good at, since it's all she does. :P
- Force usage. Rey resists Kylo Ren's attempt to enter her mind and instinctively turns the tables. I wonder where I've seen that before. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crsPkSsRyCk) Admittedly not the same setting, but it lays the foundation for what comes next, like her use of a mind trick or her telekinesis (obligatory reminder that Ren was seriously wounded).
- Shooting blasters. She does this like four times, and is only half-way good at it, but I feel like it should be on the list anyway. It at least makes it look more like she could compare to Honor's massive List of Bull**** above.
What else is significant and interesting about Rey that doesn't fit into her list of skills? That's... pretty much it, no? She's force sensitive, obviously, but that's par for the course in a Star Wars movie. She's an otherwise normal human girl who up until the movie started had an uninteresting life and a skill set that is not even merely normal but expected for her occupation.
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Force sensitive people being preternaturally capable at a range of skills ordinary sapients take ages to master is a feature of the setting, not a flaw of the character.
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I can absolutely understand not liking Rey; not liking something does not make it bad.
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I don't know why people are defending Rey's Mary Sueness. It managed to wreck my suspension of disbelief for a few seconds where I just went "Really". And it's not like I'm not used to incredible overpowered surprises in characters (hell I'm a fan of DragonBall for ****'s sake). But if I were to compare and contrast with something "like" DragonBall, every time Goku or another character does something unexpectedly amazing and unbelievable (like mastering the Kamehameha in a minute while master Roshi took 50 years to do so), the characters themselves acknowledge it and make it part of the story ("How the hell did this guy do this, it should have been impossible!"), but never in TFA we get to see this acknowledgment, Rey seems to be somewhat surprised at what she can do, but we never see the "That is impossible" reaction from others, which would have saved it.
But even then, master pilot? Master engineer? Master swordfighter? WITH NO TRAINING?
Luke knew one thing that was established at the beggining of ANH. He had some training in the Force by a real master of it, they took the time to play all of those scenes of training. Even still, only in the second movie we see him start mastering force pulls and so on, and harsher training by Yoda. In the entirety of ANH except that last sequence, nothing that Luke does is out of the ordinary.
Rey, otoh, just knows too much.
Doesn't mean I didn't like her. I did! I liked her a lot, I completely agree that she's a better played character than Luke, and that's why this Mary Sueness bugs me. If I didn't like her, I wouldn't give a damn. But "written"? No. Too many things she knows. She pulls it off by being a great actress that constantly shows bewilderment in a believable way regarding her abilities, but even still I did utter "Really?".
And the way Solo passed the torch to her was so badly written. They could have saved it. Solo could have said something like "Well, it's yours" "No ... way, why?" "Well... you seem to know her well... and after all you did find her." A scene not unlike his giving the MF to Lando, where's he's all like "HAVE her, it's the best ship in the fleet", Lando is all "OK" and you see Solo battling himself with his own decision, "not one scratch"... still with doubts. This was a guy he knew for years! And who proved himself loyal by his decisions in V and VI. But here in TFA, no biggie. Just have her. I was looking for someone to take the mantle, and you seem ok. ****s sake. Terrible writing. Despite that in the beggining we saw for how long Solo was trying to find his ship and putting himself at risk by doing so!
And then at the end we figure out she's way more important to Leia than Chewbacca. Ok, what the flying ****.
Oh and why not end it with she getting the mission to find Luke and hand him his Light Saber. Where the **** was her SISTER? Doing more important things than finding her own brother, who apparently is a really VIP in the galaxy for the subsequent struggle against the New Order and the new Siths in town? "Oh that's fine we'll send this rookie here, she's the best we got for this job of climbing a hill to find my brother and convince him that he's got better things to do than just standing there like an idiot to the oceans."
She didn't even need rescue! She even rescued herself. What. Were the writers afraid of the "Saving the Princess" Trope? Even though they did it so well in ANH? God damn. At this moment she can do anything! I won't be surprised if she manages to destroy a whole fleet by just thinking really hard! In ESB, there's this subtle scene where we see Luke and his copilot, and the copilot is all "I feel like I can destroy the whole empire by myself!" Luke jokes "I know that feeling", but it's a setup for a following scene where his copilot dies. It's really well written. It makes Luke fall to reality before he falls to the ground. What Lacan would have called "A cut to the Real", where one actually discovers they are mere mortals and death is just a second or a meter away, and you see it in their eyes.
Nothing like that ever happens in TFA. Solo dies but in a different theme (a well written one, alas), about Ren's ultimate decision to the Dark Side.
I could ramble for years on this, and I blame a terrible headache for the lack of structure of my comment. I will stop now.
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But even then, master pilot?
Da fack are you talking about? Rey's one pilot outing showed no masterful use of stick and throttle, but the power of desperation and ignorance. She did what she did not in certainty she could do it, but in certainty she would die if she did not and in ignorance of how suicidal it was. Rey attempted what she did with the Falcon because she was not a master pilot.
I dunno, maybe you watched some other movie where she magically outflew the First Order TIEs so bad they all crashed following the Falcon but that's explicitly not what happened. It wasn't following her that killed them, as it was with some of the TIEs that followed Lando into the Death Star. It was a rookie move that put the Falcon more at risk than its pursuers, redeemed only by her maneuver at the end to give Finn a shot.
Master engineer?
Dunno man she's been doing mechanical salvage since she was like seven and ****, that's clearly not at all related to working on damaged machinery. (One mention of sorting out a problem on the Falcon doesn't make her a master engineer even if she's never touched a machine before either.)
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Not bragging, but watched Ep VII again yesterday. After reading through the relevant topic here, and this one, I watched the final lightsaber duel in earnest, and found that it actually holds up:
At the start of Rey's duel with Kylo Ren, he's been shot with a bowcaster and taken a good slicing by Finn. Rey was nicely rested after a brief unconsciousness (it's a well established movie trope, don't worry about it).
Rey attacks with all the skill of a flailing gundark, stabbing and slapping with the lightsaber, and is easily driven back by Ren. Ren is wounded, and wielding his own lightsaber one-handed instead of with both, because of the wounds.
Rey is driven back to the edge of the cliff, and their sabers lock. She now draws on the force with purpose and will, where previously she's mostly just done so instinctively. She pushes Ren back with new strength, and attacks again. This is the key part: She's still using the same shabby lightsaber techniques, lunges and weak slices, but she's doing so with the force guiding her strikes where Ren isn't defending, and with much more strength than before.
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I buy that explanation. I don't buy the "not a master pilot at all, she was just lucky not to crash and then make this amazing turn giving Finn the shot". Yeah. Luck. Must I pull a well known Kenobi quote about "Luck" here?
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Well, it is luck... from a certain point of view. :D
EDIT: That said, nothing Rey does is really excellent flying until the maneuver where she enters a stall (in a ****ing spaceship) to give the locked gun a clear firing line. I don't blame the TIE pilot for not seeing that really dumb maneuver coming. The first TIE didn't go down to Rey's flying, it went down to Finn's gunnery.
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"Dumb" is when Anakin just shoots everything in his newfound spaceship and manages to destroy a whole station by himself. As a kid. Punching buttons. That's dumb! And yes, that scene is way worse than anything TFA has to offer. Then again, you'll never catch me saying that this new movie is "as bad as the prequels". Now that would be dumb :D!
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Actually, that particular scene made plenty of sense. Remember that he ended up in a hangar bay. Try the same in a hangar of a modern aircraft carrier and you're likely to sink it, too. Randomly firing your guns (and especially missiles, which was what he did, going by the visuals) in a place full of fuel, munitions and other explodey things is gonna do that. What might raise an eyebrow is him surviving the resulting fireworks, or for that matter getting in there in first place, as opposed to being shot down on the way. Not to mention landing on the very ship that controlled the whole droid army (itself a blunder on the Federation's parts, but at least a plausible blunder), which, IIRC, was indistinguishable from other Lucrehulks in the blockade. But hey, the Force (and R2D2) was with him. :)
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That scene was terrible, Dragon. Anakin Skywalker, accidental savior of Naboo was stupid.
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I haven't read Honor Harrington, but just because Honor Harrington is a Mary Sue doesn't mean Rey isn't. There are too many places in the film where Rey knows exactly how to do whatever it is that needs to be done to move the story forward.
Luke's piloting can be excused because he flew a lot in his T-16 back home. Fine. But he still is completely unfamiliar and unskilled with the Force, and has to be trained in its use, even though it's clear he has raw talent.
Rey's mechanical know-how can be excused because she scavenges in the desert. Fine. But there are a half-dozen other things she can do perfectly without any background or justification; and she is not merely talented in the Force, she is skilled in how to use it, and in which Force technique is needed for which situation.
John C. Wright, in his typically loquacious way, wrote (http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/12/the-force-awakens-and-hits-the-snooze-button/) at length about his thoughts on Episode VII. This part does a good job of summing up the Mary Sue aspects of Rey:
Then she turns out to be:
1. an ace pilot who can outfly trained fighter pilots.
2. And she knows more about the engineering details of the Millennium Falcon than Han Solo.
3. And she is a crack shot even though she seems not to know where the safety on a handgun is.
4. And she saves [Finn] one more time, using her knowledge of the mechanisms of an unfamiliar ship.
5. Then it turns out she has force powers like a Jedi, including visions of the future and past. She can resist mind-to-mind combat with Big Bad Sith, and even read his mind in the process. But, unlike Luke, she needs no training: she can do advanced mind-control techniques without a single lesson or even being told that such things are possible.
6. Hence, she can escape from the innermost dungeon of a Sith Lord fortress unaided.
7. And she can lightsaber fight without training against a man taller and stronger and trained in the art.
This last is after [Finn] yet one more time again fails at acting the man and is *****slapped and curbstomped by the Big Bad, so she picks up his dropped lasersword and finishes the duel. Then there is an earthquake, and the planet blows up, so that part was pretty cool.
Now, each of these improbable little acts of Li’l Miss Too-Cool-for-School might have been believable if the lazy writer had done his darned job and given the paying customers in the audience even the slightest reason to believe it:
1. Maybe her ace piloting was because of her familiarity with the wrecks through which she had climbed and scavenged for years, and she knew where every strut and spar was like the back of her hand.
2. Maybe her years of scavenging had given her such familiarity with machines that, uh, she had worked on Han Solo’s ship previously, as a grease monkey, and read all the engineering manuals.
3. Maybe she was always a crack shot, because she used to bullseye wamp-rats back home in Beggar’s Canyon, and she was merely unfamiliar with this model of blaster, not with all blasters.
4. Maybe she is a technopath, and has the same affinity for any starship circuitry as Speed Racer has for the Mach 5. She was using the Force. Maybe she is a cyborg, and could plug her brain directly into the ship core, and understand immediately where everything is.
5. Maybe the Force is desperate to grant her extra powers to stop the evil Sith Lords or something. Or she has a higher mitochlorian count than Darth Vader. Or she has been practicing in the backyard on her own for years. Or she had years of training but forgot them due to a blow to the head. Or something.
6. Maybe she was being allowed to escape, in the hopes that she would unwittingly lead the Sith Lords to the McGuffin.
7. I myself, with only one lousy year of fencing training, could stand with my back to the wall and parry every attack made by a more athletic, younger and stronger man, and he had a foil and I had a broomstick. The idea that an untrained girl could hold her own against a trained opponent is absurd. Maybe the Big Bad was gutshot, wounded by [Finn], under orders not to kill her, or had some ulterior reason for making her think she can fence.
I can play the fansave game as well as any fanboy. But why the heck am I doing the writer’s work for him?
Time for a Writer’s 101 lesson: In any ensemble piece, each character needs a skill or a quirk or something that makes him memorable, and in the plot, and you need each character to do his one shtick at least once in the plot. R2D2 has to hack into the computer system via the electrical plug at least once, because he is the hacker, and Han Solo has to outrace pursuing battleships at least once, because he is the hotshot pilot, and Obi-Wan must sense a disturbance in the force at least once, and say something mystical and cryptic, because he is the Old Wizard and this is his shtick. But if Mary Sue can outhack, outpilot, and outwiz the robot, the rogue, and the wizard, she is a boring character because she can do everything, and they are all boring characters because they can do nothing. See? Simple.
But all this is a minor complaint. After all, James Bond both can outfight, outshoot, outdrive, outscubadive and outparachute any foe he comes across, and seduce any woman, and identify the year of the bubbly and which side of which field in France the grapes were grown. Heroines as well as Heroes get to be good at everything: fine. But James Bond is not part of a team. He is a loner.
My major complaint is that there was no chemistry, no camaraderie, no affection between Junkyard Girl and any other character. She was good at everything and so there was no need for [Finn] to be there. There was no need for Han Solo to be there.
Oh, and after Han Solo died, Chewbacca should have inherited the Falcon. He earned it. Rey had no business leapfrogging over him.
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She isn't an ace pilot, she did a maneuver that no trained pilot would actually do and it worked because it was unpredictable. Unless nearly dragging the Falcon through the dunes is ace piloting?
She knows more about the converter that was installed without Han's knowledge than Han does. The other issue that arises and is fixed is presumably non-unique to the Falcon, and one that we don't hear whether Han could fix or not. My money is on him being able to.
She misses outright on her first shot (it's not even close) and corrects. This isn't difficult to do on a weapon with no recoil.
Her lack of knowledge of an unfamiliar ship is why anyone is in danger from those beasts at all in the first place.
Five and six are the only entries on that list that remotely approach genuine gripes, and I'm willing to bet they're integral to the plot. Though I notice five is addressed in the next list with something that would have assuaged Mr. Wright's complaint and could still be present with little difficulty in the next movie.
Seven has been discussed ad nauseum. Shot, stabbed, exhausted, not-trying-to-kill-her Kylo Ren got beat by a Force inspired Rey.
I highly, highly doubt that Rey 'leapfrogged' Chewie for the Falcon. Do you think she'd be able (or want) to stop him from flying off with it?
EDIT: I'm not even really digging deep into inferences here. This is all stuff plainly visible in the movie.
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Rey was exposed to the force directly first by the lightsaber vision and then via the mindmelding that Ren tried on her.
The latter is visibly responsible for her controlling the guard, if we can assume that when she was probed with the force she could somewhat "see" what Kylo Ren was doing (I imagine Jedi masters didn't use such a thing because they didn't like torturing their students, it would explain why Sith get stronger earlier) and tried to imitate it and not even succeding immediately.
After that simply channeling the force like she does later was only slightly different.
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1) Flying the Falcon through the bowels of a Star Destroyer without crashing into anything is ace piloting.
2) I might be able to give the converter thing a pass, as it falls under the general junkyard/mechanical skill category.
3) So, one missed shot is enough to teach her all she needs to know about marksmanship?
4) Which does not at all imply that she knows exactly what to do to fix it.
5,6,7) Plausible, but all of these are, again, fan-saving the writers.
Rey leapfrogged Chewie because the end of the movie clearly shows her in Han's seat in the Falcon. Chewie should have been in that seat.
And even if one conceded every one of the above points, there's still the issue that the ensemble doesn't work because Rey is able to do everything herself.
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You mean the Star Destroyer she's been scavenging for literally her entire life? I bet she knows that layout better than anyone alive. Even a rudimentary knowledge of how to pilot something, to say nothing of her force sensitivity, should put that to rest. And really, the force sensitivity is the key here, because force sensitives are excellent pilots without exception in Star Wars. My points above are that her piloting isn't nearly as perfect as everyone seems to want to declare.
How many shots did you see her take? I count five, including the one she misses at the start. 60% is a pretty good number in terms of accuracy, but the sample size is abysmal. And then there's the whole, you know, force sensitivity.
It doesn't imply she knows exactly what to do to fix it, but have you seen that scene again lately? She ****s up and unleashes the Rathtars (I hate that name), the beasts go rampaging, everybody runs everywhere, Finn get snatched up and dragged off. Rey runs in an all but random direction, and ends up next to the video panel. She watches carefully, punches some numbers (there are numerals on the display, perhaps those ones?), and hits the door. She didn't go running around looking for it, she didn't know to go straight for the blast doors. It's a coincidence, and far lower on the list of suspicious coincidences than a number of other things in the movie.
Until we actually get Episode VIII in theaters, and we see whether the writers do anything with it, it's a bit early to be declaring that. I highly, highly doubt that anything about Episode VIII has changed, especially something that significant, because of some internet complaints that everything wasn't tied up in a neat bow in the first movie of a designated triology.
Chewie sat in the Falcon's co-pilot seat for literally the entire time they owned the Falcon. Clearly, Lando leapfrogged Chewie during the Battle of Endor, too. Can't be the seat Chewie's most used to, no siree. :doubt:
Rey is a serviceable pilot (Poe is better, significantly, explicitly the best), Finn is better with a blaster (he hits with significantly more than 60% of his shots, go ahead and count. I looked, and couldn't find one where he missed :P), Neither Finn nor Rey nor Poe can do the hacking thing that droids do. What's this 'everything' you're saying she can do? Unless you mean "technically capable of at a moderately proficient level", in which case Finn demonstrated most of those things, too. Good with a blaster, has the exact same capacity for hacking that Rey does, and held his own in a lightsaber fight with a trained user.
The Force Awakens is not a perfect film. Rey is not a perfectly written character. That's not in question, nor was it ever claimed. She is, however, not nearly as 'overpowered for the setting' (what the hell does that even mean, in a series that contains over the course of its history Palpatine flinging multi-ton senate seats at Yoda like they're made of papier mache (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DI8kkR9G0Q), Mace Windu literally causing an earthquake with his fists (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj07qh51zPI), and Darth Vader's secret apprentice dragging a Star Destroyer out of goddamn orbit with the Force (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edK6XE4PE1I)?) as the complaints in this thread make it sound like - which is to say she isn't at all.
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I recall that Rey's piloting ability happened to be from a scavenged Flight Simulator. But yeah, they could've atleast put it in the background.
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Threads like these give me an intense desire to break out the spray bottle and yell "NO! BAD nerds!"
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Nobody saw her wearing the rebel flight helmet playing make believe "Pew Pew?" Seems like good training to me :D
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I love how every is ignoring the clearest, most unambiguous example. She can force pull better than Luke. Even though he actually had some training from a jedi knight and time to practice.
Why the hell is anyone still defending this?
Also, Scotty, what the hell are you on about? Chewie was on the surface for the entire battle of Endor!
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She was also roomates with the Queen's sister
Cousin; Elizabeth doesn't have any sisters.
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Whoops. Return of the Jedi is the one I've seen least recently, so I blame that for the slip. :P
The force pull is covered under Goober's points 4/5/6 that we've been lumping together to avoid massive quote chains on the same topic. Namely, that it's alluded to pretty heavily in the film itself (and the sub-title to the entire film :P), in character, that Rey is the subject/object of some considerable potential. It is an unresolved plot thread, because resolving all the plot threads in the first film of a trilogy results in a single movie and not said trilogy.
If, for whatever reason, the explanation for that in Episode VIII (or IX) ends up being utter horse****, I'll gladly jump on the wagon with you.
She was also roomates with the Queen's sister
Cousin; Elizabeth doesn't have any sisters.
Right. Massive difference, that.
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I have no idea why people are still defending it, it's purely irrational analysis without any hint of perspective. I can totally understand that one can make excuses and justifications for all the things we see her do, but when there's just too many of them, that's just Mary Sueness. It's not the *worst* Mary Sue I've ever seen (my cringe trophy goes to captain Janeway first few episodes of Voyager), but it *is* a Mary Sue. And I totally agree with the analysis that an ensemble only works if the protag cannot do everything. Only in RotJ we see Luke slaying the **** out of Jabba's people almost by himself, but even then he needs his friends' help and it's also a period wherein he's almost basically a Jedi Knight (the deleted scene before he goes to the Jabba palace is one where he builds his own light saber, which is supposedly a very "Jedi Knight" thing to do, as Vader implies later on, and as been "confirmed" in the cartoons and so on (yeah I know)).
Lastly, it's obvious why Chewbacca was "leapfrogged". He's a walking dog. Dogs are cool to have. To cuddle. They give company and might even help you do ****. But they are just pets in the end. And Chewbacca always was and apparently always will be... a big pet.
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Lastly, it's obvious why Chewbacca was "leapfrogged". He's a walking dog. Dogs are cool to have. To cuddle. They give company and might even help you do ****. But they are just pets in the end. And Chewbacca always was and apparently always will be... a big pet.
OR: Rey is Han's and/or Leia's daughter. Chewbacca's life-debt (and Han's property) passed to her after Han's own son killed him. Actually, this also explains why Kylo Ren freaks out that there was a girl on Jakku that helped Finn and BB-8.
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Now that I have time and a good net connection, it's time to deal with the Harrington issue. Firstly, I'm not going to argue whether or not she's a Mary Sue. The phrase has multiple meanings and since this isn't fan fiction, the original one can't be used for either her or Rey. As I said before, the issue is whether she is more powerful than someone with her backstory has a right to be. The issue is whether she eclipses other characters in the ensemble. Which is a rather silly argument for a universe known as the Honorverse.
Secondly, as Goober has pointed out, even if Honor is a Mary Sue (or whatever), that doesn't mean Rey isn't.
Honor Harrington's "bad temper" is an excellent example of an informed characteristic. I defy you to name one instance where she becomes angry beyond reason or out of proportion toward (which is, one might say, the defining attribute of a bad temper, otherwise it's just a normal temper) any protagonist character. The only times she's ever angry, the objects of her scorn have been deliberately set up in the narrative to be human ****stains that deserve everything coming to them. Seriously, if you can name one counter example I will be genuinely impressed.
Klaus Hauptman is actually later revealed to be a pretty decent human being himself. Sure, in the first book he seems to be a bad guy but the book is told from Honor's point of view. Honor actually threatens to kill him as he is leaving her ship despite McKeon having already resolved the issue that brought them into conflict.
That action causes significant problems for her later and she didn't have to do it.
I did not set the bar high when I mentioned Honor Harrington. :P Shall we inventory the character, for those who might not be familiar following the thread?
Exotically beautiful? Check. (The phrase 'almond-shaped eyes' is practically a trademark for David Weber; she is extraordinarily tall)
Similarly cool and exotic name? Her name is literally Honor.
She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas? This one deserves a list.
- Starship command/Tactics. This one is pretty necessary, so it gets a pass by itself.
- Fleet command/Strategy. Likewise pretty necessary, but I feel like special attention should be given to her repeated descriptions as one of the best to ever live on the subject.
- Martial arts. Still believable, but once more noteworthy for being one of the universe's foremost expert on her chosen style.
- Sword fighting. O....kay? Not just good at it, either, but truly exceptional. Once defeated a grand master as a novice in a deathmatch in one stroke. No, I'm not joking.
- Hang gliding. Okay, it's a hobby. She's damn good at it, but hobbies are allowed.
- Piloting. She set the academy record for... I forget exactly which record she set, but she did it in a "sailplane". Honorable mention for being one of the (if not the actual) top of her class at the academy, because of course she is. She was also roomates with the Queen's sister, because of course she was.
- Teaching. Speaking of the academy, she becomes one of its finest instructors.
- Governance. Still believable, but definitely starting to edge into "what can't she do?" territory. She's a Duchess in her state of birth, a Steadholder (basically a fancy name for a Duchess) in her adoptive state, before that she was a Count in her state of birth awarded for an entirely different act of valor and heroism.
- Politics. Mentioned here after Governance because they're definitely distinct, and also because it's the start of the descent into ridiculousness. For someone who really hated it to start the series, she ends up being one of the cleverest and most politically astute individuals in an entire empire of billions!
- Dueling. Edging into the "why is she so good at this?" category, Honor is also the best duelist ever to take the field, at one point killing a notorious and infamous dueling assassin before he was able to raise his gun because she shot perfectly from the hip. Which leads into...
- Ancient firearms. Honor is potentially the best (and fastest) sharpshooter in the setting with literally 2,000 year old gunpowder handguns because why the hell not?
- Treecats. Edging back into "this is understandable" territory for a bit, Honor is the setting's foremost expert on Treecats. Given her upbringing, this is not surprising, but it leads into...
- Telempathy. Honor is the first human telempath in a setting where they previously did not exist. She can determine without fail when someone is lying, and sense their emotions even without her also telempathic Treecat companion. Speaking of which...
- Treecat colonization. Honor is the catalyst and enabler of Treecats spreading to other planets, because why the hell not? Again.
- Instinctive navigation. Back away from the realm of the barely understood, Honor hates math and is bad at it. Except for the part where she can determine the optimal course for a hundred thousand ton warship threading between busy travel lanes, while disabling a potential threat with her ship's propulsion system all at the same time. Oh, and did I mention she does this faster than her ship's computer? Because she does.
Well, that's a hell of a list, isn't it? Perhaps I shouldn't mention her cybernetic arm and eye, which are of course better than normal people's body parts. Or maybe her polygamous marriage to her birth country's most senior admiral and also to its most famous entertainment star? No, certainly not necessary to the point.But maybe the part where she's a genetically engineered superhumanwho can eat whatever she wants and never gain weight? Or that her homeworld was extra high gravity so she grew up stronger than everyone else just because.
I'm actually rather surprised you would attempt to argue the issue in this way. Your list is incredibly biased and could be done for a large number of characters.
For instance, if you did Superman that way, you'd go on and on about he unreasonable number of superpowers and then at the end mention that "But maybe the part where he's an alien from another planet..." as if that were yet another example of the author giving him favours.
Superman's origin is the reason for his powers just as much as Honor's genetic engineering is the reason for why she's better than most people in the same universe. If you ignore that Superman is an alien, he instantly becomes a Gary Stu.
Once you consider the fact that she is genetically engineered in a universe where most people are not, most of your list becomes points that are easily explained away. Worse though, the list is flat out wrong about a great many things. For instance,
* Sword fighting. O....kay? Not just good at it, either, but truly exceptional. Once defeated a grand master as a novice in a deathmatch in one stroke. No, I'm not joking.
is incredibly disingenuous.
1) Honor is a highly skilled martial artist and a lot of the skills transfer.
2) She is not a novice. She has been training for months before that duel. To the point where she can challenge (but not beat) her instructor.
3) She has been training with the best swordsman on the entire planet.
4) Honor is genetically engineered to have superior reactions.
5) The style the Graysons fight with is entirely descended from an old copy of The Seven Samurai (Those of you who haven't read the books, I kid you not). Honor has access to books on actual real life samurai fighting styles, an instructor who has been reading them and used them to come up with new moves and techniques which are unknown on Grayson, and time to learn those moves herself.
6) The book explicitly states that duels using the swords are almost always a single stroke. So Honor winning in a single stroke doesn't mean anything more than that she won. The list has deliberately twisted that so it sounds like she did something uncommon by fighting a duel that ends with a single stroke.
In fact the entire list is full of examples of that sort of deliberate misrepresentation. It claims that she is one of the universe's foremost experts in a martial art but fails to mention that on her ships alone there are at least two marines better than her. Presumably then there are hundreds, if not thousands of similarly well trained marines across the fleet.
But here's the biggest reason I have a problem with your Honor Harrington vs Rey comparison. You've compared Honor as a fully trained officer across 10 or so books against a completely untrained Rey from one film.
Do you honestly believe she won't get better?
Finn is a well trained soldier. He's probably going to improve some, but given how quickly Luke was trained, and how much he improved, Finn is going to be standing still compared to Rey. If people are already calling her a Mary Sue as an untrained force user, what would she be as a Jedi Knight? Why would there be any point in having other members on her team?
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I once saw a game trailer where a Sith would bring down a whole Star Destroyer to the ground. Perhaps we're about to see Rey doing that kind of Marvel **** too. I mean, why not? Turn Star Wars into Superman vs Galactus or whatever. Man, I'm sarcastic today.
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Superman, as a character, is actually one of the few examples of an overpowered character done right, so he's a bad example to bring up here. He can easily be a Gary Stu if written improperly, that he isn't is mostly thanks to equally overpowered rogue gallery and his secret identity. Remember that it's not only the character's own behavior that makes them a Gary Stu/Mary Sue, but how the others react to him/her. I think that you have missed that part of the definition, which is vital. In case of Superman, his secret identity makes it clear that people only admire him because of his actual deeds, not because some magical force makes him immediately loveable.
I don't know about Honor Harrington (she seems very highly regarded, but I didn't read the books), but Rey is certainly not instantly admired by everyone. She manages to impress a few people, sure, but she doesn't really get any sort of special treatment from anyone except Finn.
I once saw a game trailer where a Sith would bring down a whole Star Destroyer to the ground. Perhaps we're about to see Rey doing that kind of Marvel **** too. I mean, why not? Turn Star Wars into Superman vs Galactus or whatever. Man, I'm sarcastic today.
Well, considering how they upped the scale with Starkiller base in TFA, it's pretty likely that they'll want to show some absurd feats of The Force. So be careful with that sarcasm, you might turn out to be right... If it keeps escalating at this rate, the 3rd movie will have characters fight be Force-throwing planets at each other. :)
BTW, the game was The Force Unleashed and IIRC, you get to pull that ISD out of orbit in the actual gameplay. Probably one of the more awesome moments in the SW games.
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Snipped because quote chains are awful.
I said I'd be impressed if you found one; I am suitably impressed. That said, after re-reading that chapter (the book is free online; On Basilisk Station. I consider it a good read, whatever else I may think of the series as it progressed) Hauptman had decided Honor was an enemy of his long before she made her threat. I'll concede it's a point where her anger gets the better of her, but I still think given the clear narrative decision that Hauptman had to be the Bad Guy for this scene that it wasn't out of proportion or reason after he'd threatened her family over it. :P
You're using "Mary Sue" in a hugely different way than I am, if the only criteria is "better than her backstory suggests". You can justify anything with a little bit of background, and I find that criteria wanting. I think a far better criteria for such judgement is to treat the character as if a fanfic main character. That is to say, what if the author hadn't written this character, and the character was instead fan fiction? Would it be justified, or would it be patently stupid?
Lady Dame Honor Stephanie Alexander-Hamilton, Steadholder Harrington, Duchess Harrington, Countess White Haven. Brilliant strategist, tactician, politician, teacher, martial artists, swordswoman, marksman, record setting sailplane pilot, telempath. Began her career by being so good she got the home fleet admiral pissed off at her for killing him in an exercise (this is literally on the back cover of the first book). Banished to the boonies, where she uncovered and stopped a secret evil Haven attempt to subvert the system. Next, she uncovered and stopped another secret evil Haven plot to subvert another system. Then, she decisively crushed the first evil Haven attack against her home country. After that, the best duelist in the kingdom killed her lover, so she out-dueled him and got revenge. Disgraced, she was given command of a squadron of armed freighters and uncovered and stopped a secret evil Haven plot to subvert a series of systems. She ended up next in her adoptive country, where she is also a major political figure, and uncovered and stopped a secret evil domestic plot to subvert the system, and then decisively crushed the evil Haven attack against her adoptive country. Then she gets captured, oh no! But it's okay, she engineers the largest prison break ever and decisively crushes the evil Haven counter-attack, then escapes back to her home country where she gets more medals and titles. She was injured, but that doesn't matter because she got awesome new cybernetic parts that are better than the old ones. Along the way she discovers she can read emotions, so no one can ever lie to her again without her knowing.
The quality of the prose might be there, book to book, but the quality of the character is not. She is the best at whatever she chooses to do, reinforced by how everyone who could even be arguably better than her dies when it's her turn to come up (with the singular exception of SGM Babcock). Her setbacks are never her fault (there might be a few, scattered across 14+ books), and when they're more than merely inconvenient they end up being blessings in disguise that further catapult her career and skills to preposterous heights.
Contrast to Rey. No titles, no medals. Grew up on a desert planet abandoned by her parent(s), scavenged parts and machinery in order to survive. Encounters Finn and BB-8, hops into the Falcon's pilot seat, and proceeds to scrape it across the desert floor for five minutes (:P) before she pulls a maneuver that would have gotten them all killed if Finn hadn't been Johnny-on-the-Spot with the turret. They escape and Rey fixes a mechanical problem on the Falcon, but are picked up by Han Solo, who is immediately confronted by hostile gangs. Rey immediately ****s everything up and nearly gets them all killed. Fifteen minutes later, she wanders where she's not supposed to, and is frightened by spectral visions after touching Luke's lightsaber. She flees the premises, and is captured with contemptuous ease by Kylo Ren when the First Order arrives. She manages to resist Ren's force assisted interrogation, and we learn she's strong in the force (no one is surprised). She mind-tricks one Stromtrooper (and nearly fails that, too) and escapes. Later, after Ren has already been shot and stabbed on separate occasions in the last ten minutes, she picks up the lightsaber and fights him. She sucks at it. When he pushes her up against a cliff she calls on the force and dispatches Ren.
Granted, the exact source of Rey's strength in the force has not been explained, but neither do I think it needed to be in this movie. Rey gets by in the entire movie by being just lucky enough and just skilled enough to not die. It's not like she's pulling off impossible maneuvers in the Falcon, then landing to waltz down the ramp and gun down a dozen stormtroopers and beat Ren's ass in a lightsaber duel.
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I don't know this Harrington Sue, and I think it's meaningless to the point at hand. So what if there are countless other characters that we can say are a lot more of a Mary Sue than Rey? It's like saying the Sun isn't big because there are bigger stars. Come on.
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I think having a good example of an actual Mary Sue is a helpful comparison considering the considerable disparity in personally accepted definitions of "Mary Sue", as evidenced by Kara's criteria above.
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I don't know this Harrington Sue, and I think it's meaningless to the point at hand. So what if there are countless other characters that we can say are a lot more of a Mary Sue than Rey? It's like saying the Sun isn't big because there are bigger stars. Come on.
The worst part about Harrington imho is that Weber planned to let her die tragically in a completely nonheroic way that you didn't see coming... and then caved in to fans and didn't do it. lol.
No wait ... that doesn't top the barely half a page casual genocide of a planets native population through carpet bombing in order to move the plot forward. (You see the bad guys gave them (rather primitive) weapons and riled them up with lies, which made wiping them all out "ok", kaboom, done, problem ... "solved", on to the multiple page space battle lol.)
Those Primitives just shoulda known better than to wave rifles at the Royal Space Navy with it's assault gunships I guess ... they totally deserved it! (DUH!).
Be that as it may ... I would say overall Honor Harrington definitely does have it's Mary Sue "moments", but she's not a complete Sue all the time. Definitely huge author projection however down to specific quirks she shares with Weber like that love for hot chocolate etc.
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I think having a good example of an actual Mary Sue is a helpful comparison considering the considerable disparity in personally accepted definitions of "Mary Sue", as evidenced by Kara's criteria above.
I disagree with your characterization and the value of the comparison itself. There's no "actual" Mary Sue, a Mary Sue is something we call to an overpowered character that does too many right things. I don't care that you can bring about some character from some novel and say "See, that one is a *real* Mary Sue, she does all these amazing things!", when what is being discussed is if this one counts as one of them or not.
IOW, the discussion is whether if Rey is a Mary Sue, *not* if she's the biggest one. No one ever did that latter assertion. So, no, the comparison is not apt. It's like saying that a guy from a regional league in soccer doesn't play football, because you just look at Lionel Messi and how much more of a player he is! I don't care. That wasn't the point. The point is that the way she's written is over the top in this manner in this context in these particular ways in the Star Wars universe.
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IOW, the discussion is whether if Rey is a Mary Sue, *not* if she's the biggest one. No one ever did that latter assertion. So, no, the comparison is not apt. It's like saying that a guy from a regional league in soccer doesn't play football, because you just look at Lionel Messi and how much more of a player he is! I don't care. That wasn't the point. The point is that the way she's written is over the top in this manner in this context in these particular ways in the Star Wars universe.
While the flow of the thread may not have gone the way I intended with that particular example, I still think the example and comparison are apt. I really doubt Honor Harrington is the biggest Sue, either. The point, as it pertains to this thread, is to give an example of a Sue and explain the ways in which Rey does not fit that definition. It's a material point against Kara's usage, which I emphatically disagree with (especially since Rey's relative power compared to her background is not apparent given how much we still don't know about her).
When the discussion started, I was fully prepared to explain how Rey knowing how to do X, Y, and Z suspiciously well wasn't being a Sue. Having watched the movie five or six times in the last week (the blu ray came out last week :P), I quickly found my opinion of Rey changing from "She is justified in being good at X, Y, and Z" to "She's not really that great at X and Y, just good enough to not get killed."
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As I said, that's the incorrect approach. It's like saying Messi does hat tricks and runs 10km per game, etc., and then demand any other player meets that demand for us to call them "soccer players". It's not how it works in logical terms. IOW, by positing this example you're making a strawman and then use it to dethrone Rey from the definition.
I completely disagree with this argumentative approach.
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If someone tries to tell me a motorcycle is a car, I'm going to provide them with an example of a car and point out the differences and characteristics, not try to construct for them a correct picture of either a motorcycle or a car from the ground up. Both of them fit the definition "internal combustion engine driven wheeled vehicle" but there's a significant difference between them. Similarly, both Honor and Rey are certainly science fiction characters, but there's a significant difference involved.
It's also not the only thing I've been doing. I haven't been putting all my argumentative eggs in one basket. :P
Edited to add clarity.
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No, that doesn't cut it, because you didn't do this. You picked a particular car, like say a McLaren and then used it to contrast with my Opel Corsa to prove that what I have is not a car. What if I have a Tesla? Is Tesla not a car? Well, according to your own made up definition, apparently it is not. See what I mean?
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Well, technically "internal combustion engine driven wheeled vehicle" does qualify as a valid descriptor for both of the things I mentioned, which was not intended to be 'car' at all. :P But I do see your point.
Fortunately, it's still tangential to Rey. She's an expert at fixing things, which is not extraordinary. She managed to fly the Falcon while either crashing into buildings or dragging the fuselage against the ground no fewer than three times. She demonstrated the worst blaster accuracy of any of the main characters (yes, seriously). She has successfully mind tricked one (1) stormtrooper (and nearly failed), resisted Ren's force interrogation once, and she has successfully influenced the path of one (1) small cylindrical object with telekinesis (the direction of travel to both Rey and Ren was the same, so it's not particularly fair to call that a contested attempt). She managed to defeat Ren with a lightsaber after he had been shot and stabbed, and while he was not trying to kill her. While clearly a quick learner, this is still not a particularly impressive Jedi resume. It's also something that has been deliberately set up to be explained in following movies. Obviously so. None of this adds up to "Mary Sue".
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Well I beg to differ, and let's agree to disagree.
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I think I'll be content as long as there is no more hilariously stupid and impractical tech like buzz droids.
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I think having a good example of an actual Mary Sue is a helpful comparison considering the considerable disparity in personally accepted definitions of "Mary Sue", as evidenced by Kara's criteria above.
I have repeatedly said I'm not discussing whether or not Rey is a Mary Sue. What I am interested in discussing is whether she is overpowered.
I really don't know how to explain it more clearly than that.
Superman, as a character, is actually one of the few examples of an overpowered character done right, so he's a bad example to bring up here. He can easily be a Gary Stu if written improperly, that he isn't is mostly thanks to equally overpowered rogue gallery and his secret identity.
You've completely missed the point I was making Dragon. I didn't say that Superman was a Gary Stu. I said if you do a hatchet job of listing his powers (as was done with Harrington) you can also make him look like one.
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And as we all know, flying a crop duster biplane does qualify you to hop into an F-16 and do precision bombing.
For what it's worth, it's explained somewhere or other in the massive tome of Star Wars fluff that the Skyhopper is far faster and more maneuverable than an atmospheric craft has any business being, and that Luke did in fact crash his which is why by ANH he can only sit around in the garage making pew-pew noises with a scale model. It works out though, since it's repeatedly if vaguely referenced in-film (It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home!)
TFA screwed up by not including any hints to Rey's flight simulator experience. Though that begs the question of how someone little better than a slave got her hands on a flight simulator sufficient to teach her to fly the Falcon. Maybe that Star Destroyer was carrying seized copies of Rogue Squadron?
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And as we all know, flying a crop duster biplane does qualify you to hop into an F-16 and do precision bombing.
For what it's worth, it's explained somewhere or other in the massive tome of Star Wars fluff that the Skyhopper is far faster and more maneuverable than an atmospheric craft has any business being, and that Luke did in fact crash his which is why by ANH he can only sit around in the garage making pew-pew noises with a scale model. It works out though, since it's repeatedly if vaguely referenced in-film (It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home!)
TFA screwed up by not including any hints to Rey's flight simulator experience. Though that begs the question of how someone little better than a slave got her hands on a flight simulator sufficient to teach her to fly the Falcon. Maybe that Star Destroyer was carrying seized copies of Rogue Squadron?
Imperials had flight simulators too, she probably scavenged one from the destroyer and kept it for herself.
And besides that, Rogue Squadron isn't a simulator, X-wing vs Tie Fighter is more plausible. :P
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And as we all know, flying a crop duster biplane does qualify you to hop into an F-16 and do precision bombing.
For what it's worth, it's explained somewhere or other in the massive tome of Star Wars fluff that the Skyhopper is far faster and more maneuverable than an atmospheric craft has any business being, and that Luke did in fact crash his which is why by ANH he can only sit around in the garage making pew-pew noises with a scale model. It works out though, since it's repeatedly if vaguely referenced in-film (It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home!)
TFA screwed up by not including any hints to Rey's flight simulator experience. Though that begs the question of how someone little better than a slave got her hands on a flight simulator sufficient to teach her to fly the Falcon. Maybe that Star Destroyer was carrying seized copies of Rogue Squadron?
Also, we do have the knowledge of a deleted scene where Luke was discussing his piloting career with one of his friends at the start of the movie. He then finds his pilot friend at the rebel base and compliments him (that scene wasn't deleted, and a few people found it strange for the setup for it was deleted).
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I mentioned this in another thread on the topic, but to reiterate: IMHO, when it comes to establishing how good a pilot both Rey and Luke are, there is very little difference between the films (yes, I know the EU existed. I don't care, this is only about what's actually in the released versions of the films). In the entirety of ANH, there are 2 scenes establishing that Luke has an interest in piloting (him playing with that model, and a line of dialogue he has in the Falcon), and exactly one scene where a non-Luke character confirms that Luke actually has experience (IIRC, there's a scene with Darklighter to that effect shortly before they launch from Yavin).
I don't know. That's not a lot of establishing for what should be a fairly important plot point; it's actually only necessary in order to head off plausibility questions later (i.e. "Why exactly did they give that guy a starfighter?"). In TFA, yes, we do not have any exposition to that effect; what we do have is Rey making a beeline toward the Falcon and firing it up. In other words, we are shown, not told, that Rey knows how starships work. For me, that's enough; I do not require a detailed backstory for why Rey has "Starship Piloting" on her character sheet when she's clearly a Level 4 Scavenger.
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I don't think anyone is complaining that Rey knows how to fly a ship (even fly a ship well). The problem is when you add it to all the other things she is inexplicably good at and which also have no exposition.
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I've spent the last three pages reminding people that she's not "inexplicably good" at more than half the things mentioned.
She's an excellent technician, which surprises no one at all.
She flies 'well enough' to evade the TIEs... while also crashing repeatedly into the ground and inconveniently placed buildings.
She misses more often with her blaster than literally any other main character.
She takes a level in Jedi and casts a first level spell (charm person) and a couple cantrips. The subtitle for the movie is "The Force Awakens" and we're told repeatedly that she's strong in the Force. How inexplicable can this possibly be when it's been explained several times?
She picks up a lightsaber and is in the process of being beaten by a guy who was shot and stabbed a few minutes ago and who is not actually trying to kill her, and then calls on the Force to beat the guy who was shot and stabbed and isn't actually trying to kill her.
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It's fascinating the different viewpoints that humans can reach by watching the exact same piece of material. The charm force attack was the one who threw me off the most. Why is she calmly telling the guard Kenobi-like chanting mantras? How the hell did she reach the conclusion that this was a good idea in the first place, why was this approach in her mind in the first place? There's never any setup for this scene. (It's akin for Son Goku learning the Kamehameha without any hint that it was possible in the first place - even that overpowered protag needs a mentor to show him how it's done before he does it himself)
It reeks of lazy writing. I could totally buy it if she saw Kylo Ren doing it beforehand to other people. And then you would see her use the exact same words, like a newbie trying to copy everything she saw that seemed to work. Or if it was previously established that she had something like this power back at her place (like for instance, establishing that she used charm to get the trader to accept her deal in the beggining of the movie).
But no, she just goes all Kenobi on the guards like she always knew how to use it. Wrong. Badly written. If they were going to do this this way, they should at least have given Rey the line being said in desperate frustration, in a rage, only to have the guard inexplicably follow suit. Then she realises something's happening, "what the hell...", and tries again more calmly. That I would have bought. I could find hundreds of ways that I could have bought it. But the movie is FAST PACED and so just accept **** and MOVE ALONG COME ON WE GOT A PLOT TO FOLLOW GET ON WITH IT.
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But no, she just goes all Kenobi on the guards like she always knew how to use it. Wrong. Badly written.
I might have agreed with you, if not for the scene five minutes earlier in which Rey gets a glimpse into Ren's mind while rebuffing the interrogation.
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I might have agreed with you, if not for the scene five minutes earlier in which Rey gets a glimpse into Ren's mind while rebuffing the interrogation.
I had no problem with that scene, although one could make the case she is overpowered. But it made a lot more sense. He was screening her and in the process she found out she could do the same. She saw what he did and copied it. That is how it's supposed to be written. Now, your idea that she knows every Jedi trick because she read his mind just doesn't cut it with me. That's never established, nor seen. It's merely an excuse.
That's probably my biggest gripe with JJ. He treats movies like magic tricks: if he does the **** sufficiently fast, he feels he can cheat all he wants, because you're on a rollacoaster and have no time to process what is happening, so it really doesn't matter if the plot isn't coherent or consistent or falls apart under scrutiny, because you have no time, we are already on another scene and now something different really fast is happening.
I loved how Spielberg was able to do those kinds of rollercoaster movies and still you never felt he cheated: you never felt he was speeding through the scenes deliberately to fool you into thinking that the movie makes more sense than it should. On the contrary, the more you see his movies, the more consistent and precise they appear to you. Which reeks of care. Of work. Of respect towards all aspects of the movie.
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I didn't say that she knows every Jedi trick, not even close. She used one mind trick, used telekinesis once, and... that's all she did. Luke could do telekinesis without training, and Rey had Ren's help in dislodging it from the snow and starting it on the trajectory to her hand. We see her calling on the Force to beat Ren, but this is obviously meant to allude to Luke's drawing on the Force during the Death Star trench run, modified for their obviously different career paths.
I get the distinct feeling that people remember Rey doing a lot more than she did, a lot better than she did it.
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"that's all she did". Well I never said the movie was riddled with problems. I said that Rey had *some* problems. And I have explained where those problems were. "That's all she did".
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But no, she just goes all Kenobi on the guards like she always knew how to use it. Wrong. Badly written.
I might have agreed with you, if not for the scene five minutes earlier in which Rey gets a glimpse into Ren's mind while rebuffing the interrogation.
Nevermind that it's a horrible scene in and of itself. Why didn't Vader use it on Leia at the beginning of the original trilogy?
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Hate to derail the thread, but the Rogue One trailer: Is that guy with the voiceover a Mandalorian? Did I see Dark Troopers, or were just pilots? Think We'll get to see a Z95 on the big screen?
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Hate to derail the thread, but the Rogue One trailer: Is that guy with the voiceover a Mandalorian? Did I see Dark Troopers, or were just pilots? Think We'll get to see a Z95 on the big screen?
To the 1st question: Maybe. The 2nd: They were Death Troopers. The 3rd: Hopefully.
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Nevermind that it's a horrible scene in and of itself. Why didn't Vader use it on Leia at the beginning of the original trilogy?
We only saw Vader stop a blaster bolt with his bare hand, but that would have been very useful for others. Clearly this too was a terrible scene.
I suspect it's the same reason why we didn't see it used several times in the prequels: certain abilities with the Force are not common.
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We see Jedi deflect bolts using their lightsabres all the time. Vader just did the same thing in a different way.
I've never been a fan of the explanation that certain abilities are uncommon. It's too videogamey. Kylo Ren stopping the bolt in mid-air isn't actually him having a power Vader doesn't. He's just showing off. Vader could have done that any time he wanted but Vader isn't a emo kid trying to prove he's cool. Vader doesn't need to show off.
When the emperor shoots lightning out of his hand it's not cause he's a 78th level sith lord and has been putting all his points in Lightning (Evil, Red). It's that he could have killed Luke by just stopping his heart or stimulating all his pain nerves or whatever. But lightning looked cool so he did that. Yoda could have done that any time he wanted to.
This is something the prequels simply didn't get. They decided to make it a moral choice system where good guys get to put points in force ghost instead. Unfortunately it looks like it's something the new films aren't going to get either.
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I have to admit, I think the whole mind reading thing kinda suits Kylo Ren's character. He's not the ball of power that Vader is, he just wants to dominate and has found other ways around the handicap of his lacking physical prowess.
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We see Jedi deflect bolts using their lightsabres all the time. Vader just did the same thing in a different way.
I've never been a fan of the explanation that certain abilities are uncommon. It's too videogamey. Kylo Ren stopping the bolt in mid-air isn't actually him having a power Vader doesn't. He's just showing off. Vader could have done that any time he wanted but Vader isn't a emo kid trying to prove he's cool. Vader doesn't need to show off.
When the emperor shoots lightning out of his hand it's not cause he's a 78th level sith lord and has been putting all his points in Lightning (Evil, Red). It's that he could have killed Luke by just stopping his heart or stimulating all his pain nerves or whatever. But lightning looked cool so he did that. Yoda could have done that any time he wanted to.
This is something the prequels simply didn't get. They decided to make it a moral choice system where good guys get to put points in force ghost instead. Unfortunately it looks like it's something the new films aren't going to get either.
More than videogames those are fantasy tropes that videogames ate up and reused.
In the Wheel of Time saga Aes Sedai (the "mages") regardless of their power level had special talents that could be rare or unique, like a very low level magic user that could however open bigger teleportation portals than the most powerful or some very powerful one that has problems in using healing abilities, other possibilities were either forbidden/secret or continually lost and rediscovered, etc.
Also note that Rey, being a force user, kicked back, I wouldn't be surprised if Vader while of course not aware she was his daughter may have had an inkling she could be force sensitive and having more experience than Kylo Ren he knew about the risk of using similar techniques on potential force users and avoided it preferring the use of torture and less direct uses of the force.
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This thread misses a big chunk of the point, I think. The question should never be "Is Rey a Mary Sue?" for some specific definition of the term. It should be "Does the movie do a good job of justifying her abilities?", and the fact is, given that a large percentage of the audience (myself included) walked out of the theatre thinking that she was overpowered, that her abilities did seem to come from nowhere reflects a failure of storytelling on the part of the filmmakers. Not a massive failure - there were other events in the movie that pulled me out more, and other movies that are far, far more flawed. It didn't prevent me enjoying the movie for what it was (a solid, super nostalgic, fun film that I enjoyed), but it is a flaw.
You can make comparisons to other movies, even other Star Wars movies. People have mentioned that Luke seems to be too good of a pilot out of nowhere, but the first SW movie makes the effort to establish that Luke has decent piloting abilities - first he's playing with his model airspeeder, then Obi Wan explicitly says that he's a good pilot, then Luke mentions it to Han, then Luke mentions an example of his skills during the briefing, then immediately before the battle, Biggs confirms it to a Rebel officer, and even during the battle, Luke makes mentions of runs through "Beggars canyon back home". Now, you can argue that Luke's experience shouldn't be enough to qualify him to fly in combat, and maybe that makes sense if you think about it, but that's irrelevant to the experience of the film - it sets up that Luke is a good pilot, then it pays it off. His piliting abilities are effectively a Checkov's gun - it would have been worse to have all those mentions of his piloting ability, and then end the movie with them planting a bomb on the Death Star or something instead of a space battle, because all that setup makes no sense without a payoff.
It's the same with the Force. Luke uses the force successfully twice in the film - once to stop the remote bolts, under Obi-Wan's tutelage, which sets up that Luke is capable of doing things with the force, and then once at the end, again under Obi Wan's (posthumous) tutelage, in the climax of an entire film where Luke's learning to use the force has been a major subplot, arguably even the driving force (pardon the pun) behind the plot as a whole. And that ignores all the other indications throughout the film that the force is incredibly powerful, and capable of doing amazing things. Again, it spends time during the film explaining a concept, then that setup makes a climactic action scene make sense. Forget the EU, or the rules of the SW universe, or any of that. This is filmmaking 101 - hell, this is storytelling 101. Set it up, then pay it off.
Compare that with Rey. She gets into and flies the Millennium Falcon without any set up that she's capable of piloting any kind of ship at all, let alone that specific type of ship or whatever. Yeah, she drags it across the sand, implying that she's not a very good pilot - which is fine. No set up, no real pay off. But then, pretty much out of nowhere, she flies it through the hulk of the Star Destroyer and pirouettes it into a perfect position for Finn to eliminate the pursuing TIE. Now, you can come up with after the fact justifications for her ability to go from dragging the Falcon through the sand to incredible precision flying in a minute or two (and people have in this thread), but the film itself never delivers them, and it certainly didn't deliver them in advance. Sure, maybe it'll be explained in Episode 8, but as a standalone film - and that's all we can judge it as right now (at least, as far as Rey as a character goes), it fails in this regard.
It's the same for the repairs on the Falcon - we never see her repairing anything, or hear anyone say she's good at it. Maybe as a scavenger she has some aptitude, but we never see it on screen until she can suddenly do it at a clutch moment. Same story with the force. Yes, at a meta level we knew she would turn out to be strong with the force, and yes there was the scene with the sabre and some vague set up from Maz Kanata, but within the film itself, the set up was minimal, and the payoff was huge - she mind tricks a stormtrooper with no onscreen evidence that that was even possible, beats Kylo Ren (the film's big bad, and someone we have on screen evidence for being very strong with the force) at telekinesis - again, something she'd never been introduced to - then beats him in a lightsabre fight with no training.
Again, yes, you can justify these after the fact f you want to, but it remains that Rey demonstrated advanced competence in three specific skills at precisely the right, critical moment to save the day with no or very little foreshadowing. 1 is maybe forgivable, depending on the specific ability (fixing the falcon for example, would be more forgivable than being an unexplained force savant), two is bad storytelling, but three is fanfic-author-insert levels of unexplained awesomeness and bad storytelling, even if she maybe doesn't fit the textbook definition of a Mary Sue.
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Actually, I did see bits in the film that alluded to her being introduced to the force long before the film starts. There are a few hints of Rey being a known quantity. Kylo Ren, when first meeting her, specifically says "So this is the girl I have heard so much about" implying that there is a lot of history behind her. Rey seems unaware of this history: She does not actually remember anything from before she was dropped off as a child, just that she liked it there and wanting to go back there as it was nice. The movie does not explicitly explain things, but it does drop subtle hints.
A lot less subtle to me is that the force itself is a lot more powerful. People talk about Rey finding mind controlling a storm trooper easy, but have we ever dived into Kylo Ren being able to stop bolts in mid air? Not even Darth Vader had this kind of power, and he's the most powerfull force user to have ever existed, yet the first thing we see from Kylo Ren is stopping a high powered bolt (and later almost stopping the Star Wars equivalent of a .50 only hurting him because he was distracted and that bow normally catapults people). Despite that, Kylo Ren has hardly had any training - Snoke specifically mentions that his training needs to be completed. Those are things that allude to the title of the movie itself: The Force itself has become stronger, and anyone who wields it is a lot more powerfull then their counterparts decades ago.
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A lot less subtle to me is that the force itself is a lot more powerful. People talk about Rey finding mind controlling a storm trooper easy, but have we ever dived into Kylo Ren being able to stop bolts in mid air? Not even Darth Vader had this kind of power, and he's the most powerfull force user to have ever existed, yet the first thing we see from Kylo Ren is stopping a high powered bolt (and later almost stopping the Star Wars equivalent of a .50 only hurting him because he was distracted and that bow normally catapults people). Despite that, Kylo Ren has hardly had any training - Snoke specifically mentions that his training needs to be completed. Those are things that allude to the title of the movie itself: The Force itself has become stronger, and anyone who wields it is a lot more powerfull then their counterparts decades ago.
It's possible, but frankly I have a hard time putting much faith in it being more than just upping the power level so flashier stuff can happen. If that's what is supposed to be going on, then I'd think someone would have said something to support it. Leia mentioning that she's getting more Force vibes recently, Luke having talked about a disturbance in the Force before his disappearance, or something... anything.
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I think that the Force being "more powerful" is just a thing for spectacle and "2016". As I said earlier, a star wars game has already shown us someone Force moving an entire Star Destroyer to the ground. Stopping a bolt is nothing compared to that. The "Force" is as powerful as the plot dictates or the spectacle desires, there is no standard or a metric that we should even try to measure. And that's the whole point of the Force in the first place: metrics are nothing. As Vader had put it in ANH, the Death Star is nothing compared to the Force. That sounded ludicrous, but it very much wasn't. It's as if technology and "the Force" live in different world laws, and the metric of one is irrelevant to measure the other.
Also to say that Black Wolf makes excellent points overall. I agree with 100% he says.
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nonsense that hasn't read Scotty's posts
...do you even know what precision flying looks like? Serious question. You're falling into the same trap Scotty has been disproving the entire thread; that Rey's feats are exceptional demonstrations of skill. You're using a lot of words here but you're not actually attempting to prove your point, much like Luis has avoided making a specific argument for why each of these supposed things demonstrates particularly exceptional skill in its area. You just baldly assert it, maybe offer a minimal thing about "she flew it through a Star Destroyer!" ignoring that the TIEs also pulled that without a hint of effort so there's no reason to think it was particularly difficult for anyone in the movie. Honestly if you watch it, it even looks slower than the Death Star runs.
You're offering us your feelings, not justified by evidence. Criticism requires more. Whereas Scotty and I have made specific reference to multiple points from the movie of why they do not show exceptional skill.
So why on Earth should we take you seriously?
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I made specific points why they did. You avoided or didn't even mentioned them at all. If I am to follow your criteria of being "taken seriously", well then take a guess where in the circus I plant you on. Fortunately, I never demand that others meet some invisible criteria for being "taken seriously" because I'm not egocentric enough to do so. I have no idea how it is to live every day as a NGTM, but I'm guessing it must be located more or less in the ****ing center of the entire universe.
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nonsense that hasn't read Scotty's posts
...do you even know what precision flying looks like? Serious question. You're falling into the same trap Scotty has been disproving the entire thread; that Rey's feats are exceptional demonstrations of skill. You're using a lot of words here but you're not actually attempting to prove your point, much like Luis has avoided making a specific argument for why each of these supposed things demonstrates particularly exceptional skill in its area. You just baldly assert it, maybe offer a minimal thing about "she flew it through a Star Destroyer!" ignoring that the TIEs also pulled that without a hint of effort so there's no reason to think it was particularly difficult for anyone in the movie. Honestly if you watch it, it even looks slower than the Death Star runs.
You're offering us your feelings, not justified by evidence. Criticism requires more. Whereas Scotty and I have made specific reference to multiple points from the movie of why they do not show exceptional skill.
So why on Earth should we take you seriously?
Sigh. You're completly missing the point.
The issue is not whether or not Rey's actions are or are not particularly difficult. We, as viewers, can never know (in isolation) whether they would actually be difficult in the real world, because the SW Universe is a subset of the All-Movies-Ever Universe, where easy things are presented as hard, and hard things are presented as easy, and we accept that because we, as audience members, understand the narrative conventions that govern these things. If the movie makes a big deal about something being difficult, then it's difficult. If it doesn't, or makes an effort to point out the opposite, then the opposite is true and those actionsa re easy.
Again, we'll use A New Hope as an example of this done right. Hitting the exhaust port is set up as being very difficult to do. We're told that it's "...impossible, even for a computer" and it's overtly stated that "The approach will not be easy". We also see a non main character try and fail to make the shot. This is all part of the buildup of the action scene, making Luke's ability to make the shot all the more impressive, because, by that point, we know that it was a very difficult thing to do.
By contrast, take the death star escape in the Falcon. Luke displays competence with the guns without any training (which would normally be a problem), but the in the very next scene, Leia tells us that it was all too easy and the Empire let them escape, making Luke's unexplained ability to shoot much more explicable - it is put in a context where it's much less impressive, because the movie goes out of its way to tell us that it was easy.
Contrast those example with Rey's achievements. Flying through the Star Destroyer the movie shows us is difficult by having some of the TIEs fail to complete it (and the universe had previously established that it was difficult when Lando did almost the exact same thing in Jedi and outflew his pursuing TIEs (costing him a sensor dish in the process)). Telekinesis and mind tricks have been established as difficult, because they were used to demonstrate Ben's high level of skill with the force in ANH, and Luke's gradually growing abilities in ESB and RotJ. And fighting Kylo Ren with a lightsabre was established as difficult because he all but killed one of our main characters seconds before Rey picked up the sabre. These are the ways in which movies tell us, the audience, what is hard and what is easy.
Stop trying to think of these as discrete events in the real world and start thinking in the language of film and storytelling, and you'll see why Rey is a problematic character. And that, incidentally, is why you should take this line of argument seriously - because we're discussing a character in a movie, and you're choosing to forget or ignore that fact, and, in turn, all the narrative conventions that go along with it.
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...do you even know what precision flying looks like? Serious question. You're falling into the same trap Scotty has been disproving the entire thread; that Rey's feats are exceptional demonstrations of skill. You're using a lot of words here but you're not actually attempting to prove your point, much like Luis has avoided making a specific argument for why each of these supposed things demonstrates particularly exceptional skill in its area. You just baldly assert it, maybe offer a minimal thing about "she flew it through a Star Destroyer!" ignoring that the TIEs also pulled that without a hint of effort so there's no reason to think it was particularly difficult for anyone in the movie. Honestly if you watch it, it even looks slower than the Death Star runs.
You're offering us your feelings, not justified by evidence. Criticism requires more. Whereas Scotty and I have made specific reference to multiple points from the movie of why they do not show exceptional skill.
So why on Earth should we take you seriously?
Nice rhetorical slight-of-hand there. You made a series of either dishonest or disingenuous misrepresentations of Black Wolf's points:
1) Black Wolf specifically said that the question should be "Does the movie do a good job of justifying her abilities?" This is independent of whether the abilities themselves are unremarkable or exceptional.
2) Dismissing the entire post as "nonsense" and "a lot of words" which allows you to avoid addressing any of the arguments that BW actually made
3) Dismissing Black Wolf's factual evidence as "feelings"
4) Ignoring Black Wolf's multiple specific references to multiple movies, including six examples of Luke's piloting ability, two examples of Luke's force ability, and three examples where Rey's abilities are insufficiently justified by the film.
It's one thing to argue a point passionately, but it's quite another to be either ignorantly or maliciously deceptive. Since I know you're smarter than the average troll, I am forced to conclude you're up to the latter. Stop it.
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Black Wolf is doing an incredible job of explaining himself in the face of the bull**** that is being spewed by NGTM. I'm impressed by this ability to be rational and precise to the point as he has been, unfazed and unmoved by the sort of rethoric that achieved the point where I'm no longer interested in porsuing a conversation. The "a lot of words" specific clause that Goober talks about reminds me of Donald Trump. Beware of Trumps, is my conclusion. They're everywhere. Sad!
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I want to know if that Grand Admiral guy is infact Tarkin or some sort of Thrawn replacement. But I think its probably going to be neither.
p.s The characters in this seem really dull is it just me?
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And we all know who mustache man is.
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Garm Bel Iblis?
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Git Hype Nrds
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Hype gitted.
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Garm Bel Iblis?
Well in terms of magnificent mustaches, there are only Talon Karrde, Garm Bel Iblis, or Gilad Pellaeon.
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Mixed feelings about Rogue One.
On one hand, it seems like an original story. Which is something that is amazing on itself give how it's Star Wars. Last movie was a total hack copypasta shenanigan.
On the other, I'm skeptical about its tone. The trailer is well edited, but I can see through the seams, and the movie that is trying to hype doesn't seem that exciting.
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It seems like it'll be good, with the main downside being that I'll pretty much already know what's going to happen plot-wise. Also I hope it's not too much of a disposable rollercoaster of constant action and pretty scenery.
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It seems like it'll be good, with the main downside being that I'll pretty much already know what's going to happen plot-wise. Also I hope it's not too much of a disposable rollercoaster of constant action and pretty scenery.
What generates more revenue, good plotlines, or rollercoasters of action and pretty scenery?