On the Mary Sue-ism of Rey (Split off by (several) requests)

[K]

Honestly, it almost like toxic masculinity makes it hard for people to see that she's wildly competent.

Did you really expect this to fly? Everyone here - including the people claiming to be arguing in Rey's defense in good faith - knows what the actual ulterior motive is, and it's basically the opposite of this. The alt-right dislikes Rey because they hate women, and therefore any argument against Rey takes on pro-fascist undertones in the minds of many readers regardless of whether that has anything at all to do with the content of the argument. That's dumb, because "Rey is a Mary Sue because JJ Abrams doesn't believe in long term planning" has almost nothing in common with "Rey is a Mary Sue because the feminist propaganda machine is trying to brainwash America into believing that women can be competent," but it's still true that the ultimate motivation here is pretty obvious and has nothing to do with sexism.

Although in fairness I guess it's fair play to make a strained, obviously false accusation of sexism one way when the same is frequently leveled in reverse.

Not giving women credit for their accomplishments is a form of sexism, as is requiring them to be dramatically better than men to be considered the equal of men.

I agree that most of the anti-Rey crowd are ravenous misogynists, but that doesn't mean that Rey is not a sexist representation of a female character. It's pretty sexist that Rey has to be good at everything and get herself out of every situation, and it would be just as sexist if a male character had the same conditions on him (and yes, I think that most action movies are sexist).

In a New Hope, Luke is allowed to be shitty. He gets dragged along the adventure while Obi-wan and Han and even R-2 do all the plot-relevant things, and his moment of glory is at the very end. Honestly, if you swapped the final bombing run with Han doing the drop, no one would notice.

Compare that to Rey. You could literally cut the film where Rey and BB-8 are only protagonists. It'd be a little disjointed, but only a little, and that's bad.

[Username17]

Compare that to Rey. You could literally cut the film where Rey and BB-8 are only protagonists. It'd be a little disjointed, but only a little, and that's bad.

Movies are allowed to have singular protagonists. However, the only event that actually matters in that film is blowing up the Starkiller Base, which is done by Chewbacca. Everything else in that movie is basically people fucking around.

Much of the movie centers around Rey learning to use her powers and trying to find Luke and fighting indecisive battles with Kylo Ren. But none of that shit actually matters. The only actual events of the movie are that the Starkiller Base blows up Coruscant off screen, and the Starkiller Base gets blown up by explosives planted by Chewbacca. Everything, and I do mean everything else in that movie is ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

I really don't get why people are so down on Rey. Rey's narrative arc such that it exists is the good part of the sequel trilogy. It's the parts of the narrative that aren't about space wizards where the ST shits the bed.

[Dean]

So I was gonna wait till the train your dragon thing was over to not have crosstalk but its taking too long so...

Basically it's really inarguable that Rey is absolutely a mary sue, and she was always going to be one because JJ Abrams directing a movie means a new incredible ability is going to be introduced every scene or two and most of the movie is on her so most of the incredible powers and discoveries will be hers cause that's how that dude thinks a story is told.

Except that's not what words mean. Rey is badly characterized and her progression is poorly realized, but that doesn't actually make her a Sue. She explicitly and repeatedly does not do anything better or specialer than established characters. She doesn't fly ships better than Han, she doesn't mind trick better than Obi-Wan, she doesn't fight better than Anakin. She just doesn't do any of those "surpassing the boundaries of the world" thing that Sues do. She also doesn't have a striking visual appearance or multiple inexplicably besotted love interests. She is less of a Mary Sue than Bella Swan.

The core issue is that bad, fanfiction-like storytelling does not in itself mean that all the bad fanfiction boxes are automatically ticked. Just because the presented Hero's Journey is disjointed doesn't mean we automatically get Moral Dissonance or Genre Shift or Bad Sex or any of the other bad fanfiction tropes. Rey is a middling competent Star Wars protagonist and the storytelling is extremely telegraphic. But she isn't a Mary Sue because she isn't the bestest at anything. She has exactly 3 out of 5 stars on every skill set exhibited by protagonists of previous Star Wars movies and stories. She is scientifically created in a lab to do things Star Wars protagonists do, but that's a different kind of bad storytelling from the Mary Sue critique.

Mary Sues by definition have special powers that make them stand out. Rey does not have any of those.

-Username17

So this is really interesting. Your argument is that Rey isn't a Mary Sue because she doesn't have unique special powers or other tvtropes of huge mary sues but ironically that's not what words mean.

First things first to be arguing on any reasonable ground you have to accept that no Rey doesn't have 3 out of 5 stars she has 4.7 to 5 out of 5 stars in everything. For instance yes, unquestionably she flies better than Han.

I mean she literally Tokyo drifts on the sand, does a Lando style death run through the engines of a Star Destroyer and then does some kind of power cutting stall engine backflip trick within her first 3 minutes on a ship. None of that's hyperbole. It is inarguable that she's the most incredible pilot we've ever seen.

I'll agree she doesn't surpass Obi-Wan or Anakin in their chosen fields but she equals their abilities often in the space of 24 hours since learning that things like the force or lightsabers even exist. So while she's only matching the best people we see with no training that is exactly what counts as a Mary Sue. In fact that's what the definitional Mary Sue was.

The trope origin is a short satirical Trek fanfiction about Lieutenant Mary Sue a 16 year old who's already graduated and become bridge crew and who rivals Kirk and Spok and Bones' abilities by a surprisingly young age. Characters that are poorly developed and unreasonably perfect and talented in seemingly every area. In fact the third line of the wikipedia entry on Mary Sues notes their predominant trait is that they "perform better at tasks than should be possible given the amount of training or experience".

Rey is a Mary Sue exactly because she has top level abilities in all areas instantly with no training. She is a definitional Mary Sue. Your assertion that she can't be a Mary Sue because she isn't named Jaja Abrooms and doesn't have a love triangle with Vader, Luke, and the Millenium Falcon is TvTropes in-community wanking. The idea that every Mary Sue has to have pink hair and be a centaur is wrong. It is possible to be MORE of a Mary Sue than Rey is and someone who spent a lot of time on TvTropes could absolutely tell you about characters that were comical Mary Sue's but the fact is that the common person saw in Force Awakens a character who was amazing at everything instantly with no training or experience often in ways that defied common sense and reached for the word in the common lexicon that means that thing: Mary Sue. And they were correct.

Rey is a Mary Sue. So while it would be possible to make the claim that she is just badly written and clunkily rushed through the hero's journey and given abilities that don't make sense to get to modern style frantic action scenes why do that? Why get into apologetics that her fighting half a dozen people at once and tokyo drifting with a millenium falcon is because of the infiltration of Marvel style action on modern cinema, or that her nonsensical force powers are a mix of a poor story director and powerful force genes (which apparently turns out to be wrong). At the end of the day Rey possesses the definitional marks of a Mary Sue and people using that word as a description for why they didn't like the character that had no difficulties and did everything perfectly were doing so correctly.

[Mask_De_H]

Like I said, the dumbest shit.

E: You too, Dean. Mary Sues, by the old definition, warp the narrative romantically and technically. You are completely fucking wrong about Rey's lack of romance failing to disqualify her and dropping the romance part is how Mary Sue morphed into "female character I don't like." Trust me, I've been in the fanfic salt mines. All the fancy shit you use for your case can also be explained as advances in special effects plus the natural oneupsmanship for decades of blockbusters.

E2: Is this thread entertainment? Because it's lost me.

[MGuy]

I mean sure if you refuse to engage with what normal people mean when they say Mary Sue and stick to a niche understanding of the word like those found in the TV tropes argument boards sure. It really doesn't help Rey's case as she is still exactly the kind of bad character people point out that she is but if you want to instead argue semantics I'm sure that'll teach those darned haters. I'm still going to call her a Mary Sue because I don't talk to those kind of people really.

[Wiseman]

The thing is that it doesn't help solve things. If your going to hate it, hate it for the right reasons. There are plenty of other things wrong with the writing. Making false claims doesn't help those problems get fixed (in fact, it tends to do the opposite).

[MGuy]

Three things:
1) I've said in this very thread that I find the obsession with Rey as far as the quality of the movie to be strange in the first place because none of the Star Wars protagonists have been good.
2) It is no one's place to police why people like or dislike a piece of media and implying you have the 'right' reasons someone should like or dislike something is when stranger to me than the obsession people have with Rey.
3) You don't need to make false claims about Rey. The purpose of language is to communicate an idea. You can argue that Rey isn't super competent. You can try and argue that that the plot doesn't revolve around Rey because you have some dumb notion that only setting changing things in a narrative really matter in the story. You can argue that you don't like using any version of Mary Sue that's not specifically found in some obscure message board. None of those make it false to point out that Rey is a shitty character or that she is a Mary Sue in exactly the ways most people using the term mean by it.

[Wiseman]

Except that using the "common definition" is super misleading, since it tends to boil down to "female character I don't like" for the people espousing it, and confuses other people.

There ARE actual problems with Rey, but those problems have actual terms that get the message across more clearly.

[MGuy]

Alright so even if you wanted to believe that people are using it commonly as 'female character I don't like' then when it happens that people actually clarify what they mean by it and give support for it then it should be easy to deconstruct what those people say. If people refuse to do so then you don't engage with them. There is no real consequence for some nobody saying that they don't like Rey because she's a badly written girl and leaving it at that.

Instead what you have in this thread is people pointing out how she's a Mary Sue, what values of Mary Sue she clearly exhibits, and examples of how prior make protags were portrayed just to show how different she clearly is. In response you have people pointing out that it's ok that she can do anything the plot needs because prior protags did one thing or a number of things over the course of three movies and other people whinging about how they like to use a very specific version of Mary Sue and don't like it when it's used in any way outside of some regimented set of qualities agreed upon by some niche group somewhere on the internet.

[DSMatticus]

People who use "Mary Sue" to mean "bad, boring character" are dumbbad. We're trying to have a language that is more functional than "X GOOD, Y BAD, ME SMASH," and that requires a certain level of conceptual specificity be attached to some of our words. If you do not acknowledge that kind of specifity, then you get shitty arguments like "the people who use Mary Sue to mean bad, boring character are nazis, because they're dumbbad, and nazis are dumbbad, and we don't need different words to describe the different kinds of people who are dumbbad." It's absurd.

I actually have not given the new Star Wars entries the time or fucks to know if Rey is a Mary Sue. I will, however, dryly note that the original Star Wars is about a turnip farmer who ends up a professional-grade fighter pilot by driving around civilian junkers and shooting at farm varmints, who inherits mysterious powers (that he has the decency to not be immediatetely great at, at least) from a big bad evil guy who is secretly his father. Also somewhere along the line a princess briefly falls in love with him before they turn out to be siblings. Soo... yeah.

But my point here is that this is not a semantical difference. This is a conceptual difference. People are arguing about whether or not Rey fulfills a certain set of criteria, and perhaps whether or not those criteria are fair for categorizing her in this way. I don't particularly want to weigh in on that. I'm not familiar enough with the source material to speak about Rey and providing rigorous definitions of literary constructs is a fool's errand. Adversarial conservation about such things is nearly impossible; if someone wants to weaponize the loopholes, they will. A certain minimum amount of good faith is simply required for the discussion to work at all.

Trying to resolve that debate by arguing that Mary Sue should just be a synonym for "bad, boring character" and wagging your finger at everyone who disagrees with you because they are "arguing semantics" is just... being annoying. I mean, you'll probably win in the long run - so many idiots use Mary Sue as a synonym for "bad, boring character" that the cultural shift in meaning seems inevitable, and then we'll have to invent a new word for egregiously idealized wish-fullfillment characters and start over. And then a bunch of idiots will start using that as a synonym for "bad, boring character" (because it'll have a stronger negative connotation, and you have to be as negative as possible when talking about characters you don't like, you see), and it'll happen again. But the conceptual difference between a shitty character and the specific kind of shitty character that is egregiously idealized won't go away. Setting fire to the terminology people use to distinguish between things doesn't erase the conceptual difference, it just makes it harder to talk about.

But right now we are early in that cycle, and people are using Mary Sue wrong not out of any genuine misunderstanding, but because it has a stronger negative connotation than "bad, boring character" and they don't have a good enough grasp of their own thoughts or how to articulate them to express themselves in any other way than "say mean word that pops into head." Mainstream discussions of pop culture are not exactly dominated by the best and brightest. And I, again, have no idea if this applies to the discussion about Rey or not. Dean and Frank, for example, have both referenced the exceptionalism of the character, which is not semantic at all, it is conceptual and pertinent. Just a consider it a reminder that words having different meanings is actually super fucking useful, and we should try to... you know... keep it that way. Because the alternative is snarf snarf snarf snarf snarf snarf snarf.

[MGuy]

So this is a problem. If you keep insisting that all people ever calling her a Mary Sue just mean bad female protagonist you cause at least two problems. You color yourself as arguing in bad faith when the people you're talking to isn't making that argument. If you have no intention of changing the mind of the person you're talking to (which seems to be the default here since clearly no minds can be changed ever) and you're speaking to the crowd you hamper your chances of speaking to change their minds because they know what they think a Mary Sue is and aren't then making an argument about what you think a Mary Sue should be. Second you spend so much time arguing semantics when the crux of the issue is that she is a bad character. Even if you want to concern troll that people are fucking up the nomenclature most movie goers do not give a shit. So you leave all the negative points about the character on the table so even if you get some edge case people to not say she's a Mary Sue the menanists still win that argument because all you end up lookingb like someone who can't defend the character and so people keep thinking the same way.

Instead if your worry is that they have mischaracterized the character then you argue against the points that people bring up. Anyone who has read any thing I've posted so far about Rey will know I don't particularly feel strongly about herc portrayal so when you argue in bad faith and claim that bad character should be smashed even the fencev sitting audience can tell you're full of shit and you shoot yourself in the foot.

[Longes]

If Luke circa episode 4 is supposed to be some kind of your big gotcha, then you really need a better brand of gotchas. Luke spends most of the movie being a sidekick to Han until the very end where he contributes to victory through combination of prior skill (piloting) and advancement during the movie (the Force).

[DSMatticus]

If Luke circa episode 4 is supposed to be some kind of your big gotcha, then you really need a better brand of gotchas. Luke spends most of the movie being a sidekick to Han until the very end where he contributes to victory through combination of prior skill (piloting) and advancement during the movie (the Force).

He is not, in fact, supposed to be a gotcha. He has an implausibly developed, plot critical skill that lets him feel confident briefly talking smack to professionally trained soldiers and he has significant entanglements with a bunch of important characters. And despite all that, nobody calls Luke a Gary Stu. Because implausibly talented young man from a humble background with a heretofore unknown past isn't Sue material, it's just normal protagonist bullshit. Luke is an example of a boring character who can jump in the cockpit of a space fighter jet because lolwhynot that nobody even blinks at because that's not worth blinking at. Welcome to action stories; this is how they work.

The bar for being a Mary Sue is actually quite goddamn high. There is very little a male action flick protagonist could do to earn the label, and I suspect no one here can think of a film of which that criticism was widespread, and yet I'm positive people can think of characters that make Rey look positively tame. Like, say, James Bond, who is just one-dimensionally awesome and sleeps with all the women who should be trying to kill him and only ever gets captured by badguys to show off how cool he is. It's obvious that the broader discussion about Rey as a Mary Sue is driven by people who have no consistent standards on this topic (with a touch of sexism from the darker corners of the internet) because singling out Rey is stupid as shit and you'd never do it unless you had an axe to grind or you were just following the crowd. She simply is not an egregious example of anything in the broader context of action or sci-fi or action sci-fi. Some people find the new Star Wars disappointing, and have trouble articulating that. Some other people are sexist asshats. Other people who feel kind-of-sort-of similarly hear opinionated blowhards blow hard, repeat what they heard. And so consensus is born from the loudest idiots.

So this is a problem. If you keep insisting that all people ever calling her a Mary Sue just mean bad female protagonist you cause at least two problems.

I'm not going to insist that all people ever calling her a Mary Sue are being dumbbad. You will note that I specifically called out Dean as substantively engaging with the argument by bringing up Rey's exceptionalism. If I wanted to argue with Dean about that I wouldn't start an argument about the definition of Mary Sue, I would have to look at the source material and compare a bunch of characters and see if she really is on the cusp of perfection, or I would pose the question of whether or not exceptionalism is sufficient to be a Mary Sue or if there's other additional criteria or whatever. Which I guess is an argument about the definition Mary Sue, but it's not just pissing on him and calling him dumbbad. It's a substantial question.

I am insisting, however, that your handwringing about whether or not this a semantical debate is a waste of everyone's goddamn time in a conversation that is already a boring trainwreck (the worst kind of trainwreck). If we agree with you that Rey is a Mary Sue because she is too competent to justify in-universe (or whatever), then we stop arguing about whether or not Rey is an ordinary kind of bad character or a Mary Sue and start arguing about whether or not Rey is an ordinary kind of bad character, a Mary Sue, or a snorble - except we've defined Mary Sue to be a character who is implausibly competent, and snorble to be a character who is egregiously idealized and quickly becomes the center of the narrative universe in every way possible. Mary Sue's and snorbles's are still two different things, you can talk about which Rey is, and so the discussion continues. It's just even more annoying.

But yes, the absolute core of this is that even if Rey is implausibly content that doesn't make her a Mary Sue. Because the etymology of Mary Sue is shitty wish fulfillment fanfiction and there are two elements to that; exceptionalism and centrality. They are the bestest at everything ever and if they ever lose it's only so senpai can pat their head and tell them how well they did or because tee-hee some irrelevant flaws can be endearing. They are central to everything and everyone because they come from authors' whose idea of a story was "cool shit that I would like to happen to me." So everybody wants to suck the Sue's dick and the bad guy is super-concerned about her by name and the good guys are like "oh no, if only Sue were here to save the day!" and then she shows up and they fight and then there's the post-save-the-day party where everyone lines up to kiss her ass and blah blah blah.

Obviously, it doesn't have to literally be that egregious. There's flexibility here. Most stories are generally about their protagonist, which means we expect a certain amount of centrality in all stories. But nonetheless, it is quantitatively and qualitatively different from "a character who is more competent at things than I am willing to believe given the context," and if you make us reserve Mary Sue for that then we just have to start saying stupid shit like snorble to make you happy and the conversation doesn't end because the underlying difference is conceptual, not a linguistic artifact we've accidentally created and trapped ourselves in like a cat with its head in a paper bag.

[MGuy]

Well as I said if you want to have a petty semantic debate about whether or not this specific character fits some definition of Mary Sue from some obscure website instead of challenging the definition of Mary Sue that other people are using and that most people understand it to be then have at it. I'm not interested in that argument for the reasons I already mentioned. It's a pointless argument to have because unless your definition is somehow more functional for getting across the point to the general public then you're not really going to win any hearts and minds. The definition any layperson is going to use for Rey is that she's hyper competent, central character, who's only perceivable flaw might be naivete. She's otherwise flawless. That's a Mary Sue to most people (even if you accept that being only as naive as she is to be a flaw since it doesn't exactly impede her). If you wished people used more precise language I'm sorry to say that doesn't really happen when regular people discuss movies. Arguing semantics instead of against whatever real gripe they hav is a waste of time even if I were to grant some obscure definition of Mary Sue.

Also the Luke thing fails as a counter or even as a point as a point against the arguments about Rey. You think it's a good counter because he's a farm boy who is mysteriously good at flying. No one questions this much because it is the only thing he knows how to do. In the movie He has to be saved and carried through the plot. It shows that he knows nothing and is easily swayed by what he is being told. His naive nature is put on full display with the characters around him being clearly more experienced, knowledgeable, and composed then he is. They go to save Leia and even she's more competent than he is. The only thing he does is 'fly good' and even then he's aided by the setting's magic that he is strongly tied to thanks to bloodline, being taught and practiced with the force at all, and having ghost mentor pushing him in his head.

[DSMatticus]

Let me put it this way; why don't you stop bitching that people think you're wrong for using Mary Sue the way you're using it and start saying snorble. This would solve the problem equally as well as saying everyone who disagrees with you should say snorble. The rhetorical trick you are trying to play here is symmetric. There is no objective connection between words and concepts, it's all just shit we made up to represent the ideas in our head and we maintain an evolving consensus on this shit because being able to put the shit in our heads in other people's heads is useful. We have two concepts here. We need two different words or phrases for those two different concepts. You want us to do it your way. I think your way is dumb, yes, but much more importantly, it doesn't solve the underlying debate at all.

It doesn't solve the underlying debate because "that character is implausibly competent" is a significantly different criticism than "that character is egregiously idealized wish-fulfillment." Juggling Mary Sue and snorble around between the two doesn't change that. A lot of the people who want to use Mary Sue with the least restrictive definition 1) don't want to do so consistently, and 2) want it to retain the damning weight of the most restrictive definition. The truth is "that character is implausibly competent" isn't a particularly damning flaw. Depending on how exactly you define it, it includes characters like John Wick and John McClane and James Bond and Batman and Harry Potter and nearly every single "chosen one" ever. Anyone who do thing good when you have trouble believing they should be able do thing good is Mary Sueing it up, and that describes nearly every single action (fantasy/scifi) protagonist ever. They are walking, talking incarnations of implausible competence.

And I think your way is dumb because the etymology of Mary Sue is about wish-fulfillment and that connotation has absolutely 110% survived into the modern usage of the term. Obviously, it is impossible to measure shit like degree of wish-fulfillment objectively. It doesn't help when you remember that protagonists in general are cool people who have cool shit happen to them because who wants a story about Bob going to the grocery store. We are just expected to accept a certain amount of "fuck yeah that's awesome" in lots of stories. But you certainly can measure it relatively by holding characters up to the yardstick that is broader cultural criticism, and the notion that Rey is noteworthy in any way is rather goddamn laughable. Really? Rey is the besterest ever who sucks everyone in to her awesomeness? Are you sure she's not just a generic boring action sci-fi protag? Unless there are significant escalations of power level I missed, I'm definitely going with generic boring action sci-fi protag.

If there are characters on both sides of Rey that aren't widely considered to be Mary Sue's, and there are are, that's a real big fuckin' clue that something weird is going on that has nothing to do with Mary Sue-ism. Which is clearly what's happened to Star Wars. And you'll note that that has nothing to do with whether or not Rey actually is or is not a Mary Sue, it's just an observation that this debate (in the broad sense, who knows what the fuck is going on here) isn't really happening because people don't agree on the definition of Mary Sue. It's happening because some people didn't like the new Star Wars and Mary Sue is a sick burn that's plausible enough if you don't think about how much bullshit we tolerate in general from actiony genres.

[MGuy]

Let me put it this way. No one cares whether you like their use of the word Mary Sue so why don't you suck a snorble? Yea you get people who staunchly refuse to engage in what actual people arguing mean when they say Mary Sue instead of the definition you want them to use as it was crafted for fanfic but no one in the conversation cares and people like you get stuck in a dumb semantic debate instead of playing ball and actually getting into the real meat which is actually the cultural debate over Rey and what she represents.

Beyond that your reframing the argument, comparing Rey to other common boring protagonists? That's not what Star Wars fans are on about. Hell there was a ton of dislike for fucking Star Killer but he was just some no note in a Star Wars game. I personally don't care that Rey is a shitty female protagonist no matter what dumb word you want to make up to describe her as but you can't get to the real meat of the conversation as long as you want to argue about semantics or whataboutisms about other franchises that have other rules and set ups. You compare Rey a Star Wars protagonist to other Star Wars protagonists because that's what fucking Star Wars fans are interested in. There's clearly an argument you WANT to have here about how she fits in with other protagonists but that is simply not the conversation anyone is having. Trying to use that as evidence of anything and basing your argument off of some assumption is just you justifying arguing in bad faith (again).

[Username17]

I mean she literally Tokyo drifts on the sand, does a Lando style death run through the engines of a Star Destroyer and then does some kind of power cutting stall engine backflip trick within her first 3 minutes on a ship. None of that's hyperbole. It is inarguable that she's the most incredible pilot we've ever seen.

This is wrong.







All the shit you talked about is literally just rehashed scenes from other Star Wars films. And Rey doesn't do them "better," she does them worse. She actually runs into stuff and shit. She makes mistakes that Han and Anakin don't make when doing literally the exact same things. And unlike Anakin, she's at least a grown ass woman who appears to know how to drive rather than an autistic 8 year old.

Now The Force Awakens is bad storytelling. But it's not bad storytelling in the sense of having Mary Sue characters. It's bad storytelling in that it's a shallow retread of visual and narrative elements from previous movies with no coherent vision or path to tie them together into a story; let alone having a coherent vision of tying it all back to the stories it is ripping off.

Mary Sues are defined in the way they interact with the established fiction and the way other characters interact with them. Major characters (especially established characters) love, laud, or envy the Mary Sue. Mary Sues have flaws like "doesn't realize how awesome they are" which get overcome by having established major characters take time out of their day to repeatedly tell them how awesome they are. They are the best at the things other characters do. They have special characteristics that other characters in the setting can't have.

So like, Harry Potter is a Mary Sue. A lot of official Harry Potter material written by the original author reads like bad fanfiction because Harry Potter is a Mary Sue. Eragon is even more of a Mary Sue. And holy fuck do those books read like bad fanfiction. But it's totally possible for bad fanfiction to be bad without having Mary Sues. And The Force Awakens is an example of that.

Rey is the procedurally generated protagonist who has procedurally generated exploits. Watching her adventures is like hearing someone describe the events of their D&D campaign where they spent a lot of fighting monsters off the wandering monster tables. "Yes, you were 5th level. You had some CR 5 encounters. How surprising." But that's not being a Mary Sue. It's almost literally the opposite of being a Mary Sue. Where a Mary Sue is constantly praised by the characters from the original work, Rey is largely ignored. Where a Mary Sue pulls new abilities out of their ass to violate established rules of the setting, Rey just repeats a series of actions explicitly performed already in the established canon by using abilities that had all already been demonstrated by previously written characters.

-Username17

[MGuy]

Mind that Lando and Han were experienced pilots with the Millennium, the ship in question had fallen into disrepair, it was Rey's first time piloting it, and even though she didn't mimic the maneuvers they did 'flawlessly' it's a helluva lot better than one could suspect anyone at all to be able to pull off given the situation. Also this is not the only thing she was capable of doing (which is the real problem here) so I suspect that this was what Frank thought he could make an actual argument with.

Rey shows more skills in general than any of the prior Star Wars protags during her first outing. Anakin can fly good (and is stupidly lucky), Luke can fly good (and has any training with the force and ghost magic mentor guiding him).

She is a bit central to anything getting done which earlier Star Wars Protags can only claim in the final scene. She helps Finn/BB8 even survive at first, helps Han, helps Finn and is probably the only reason Finn helped with the plan to blow up the big ship. Luke could've been taken completely out of the first movie and you'd only have to slightly switch focus to Han. Anakin's scenes should've been taken out of his movie because they are all dumb and a waste of time. He was only necessary because they were contractually obligated to tell the story of Anakin into Vader.

Most of the main characters she meets are super interested in her on their first meeting. Luke is just a farmboy and is treated as such. Han/Leia think of him as just a kid. Vader only kind of senses he might be something special but gets taken out by Han. The ONLY one interested in Anakin is Qui Gon. Everyone else thinks dealing with the kid is a waste of time/dangerous. Also he is literally a kid and has basically no agency in his first film.

The argument I know people want to have is that the menanists are sexist. Getting tripped up over nomenclature doesn't get you to that argument. If you want to argue that Rey is normal compared to other current super competent female protags then have that argument. If you want to (for whatever reason) argue she's not actually good at things even though that is obviously the author's intent then have that argument. Arguing semantics gets you literally nowhere because even if someone acquiesces to the change in terminology you still have 100% of the argument still ahead of you but you've spent a bunch of social capital enforcing a change in wording that only 'you' care about.

[MGuy]

Oh boy because I made a statement bout Harry Potter didn't I? Oh wait... I didn't? So you don't know my views on Harry? So you're assuming that my views on Harry make my views on Rey somehow inconsistent? I mean I just responded to Frank and notably didn't talk about Harry Potter so one would assume I don't disagree with his take on Harry, but that would be someone who intended to argue in good faith.

[OgreBattle]

I thought Luke Skywalker was a lazy Mary Sue having mastered the force in a few weeks and effortlessly flyinga bout, but the new trilogy went even further. A large part of it is how shitty and bumbling the villains were too.

Here's something I wrote 'bout it a while ago...

Remember when Luke Skywalker kicked Vader’s ass and saved Obi Wan? Wait a minute…


So the Force Awakens is seen as a beat for beat remake of A New Hope, with very similar characters playing the similar role, sometimes the same character playing said role.

Which also means that we can compare how various characters from the original trilogy compared to the Disney sequels:


-Luke is pretty callow and always being taught lessons

-Luke starts off rather whiny with complaining about how peaceful his life is, a simple farm kid who wishes for big adventures, until it comes to him in a very big way and the most important people in his life are left smouldering skeletons

-Luke’s constantly the butt of jokes from friend and foe alike, but he’s good natured enough to not dwell on it. When Luke cries though, he really just lets out a gut rumbling “BAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!”

-Luke’s constantly in need of mentoring and saving (but takes to it well), like when that nasty adult at the bar was gonna molest him but old Ben was there to hack off bad touching hands

-When the big bad Vader comes in Luke is nowhere near ready to face him, his precious mentor Obi Wan who’s the only person that can make sense of this crazy world Luke has fallen into dies before the kid’s eyes

-Kinda sorta attracted to that sailor mouthed princess who turns out to be his sister



Now compare Luke to…

Rey the "Loner, hothead, gear-head, badass… the ultimate outsider and the ultimate disenfranchised person" (actual words used by TFA writers to describe her)


-Rey is an ultra competent, completely self sufficient desert hermit with no family, she just gets in on the action because she believes she is part of a great destiny

-Rey’s cool and stoic while others do the comedic relief routine, even kills some (played by highly respected in their home country) mercenaries in a “kids will love it” joke scene

-Doesn’t “BAAAAAAWWWWW” but does the “I am sad for the suffering of my comrades who I will avenge in the next minute!” dignified tears face

-Rey is an ass kicker who never loses a fight and saves the butts of those around her

-Rey confronts the ‘big bad’ masked man in black who’s been training for years in the ways of space muhajadeen combat and wipes the floor with him.

So comparing the protagonists, Rey is just way, way more powerful than Luke starting off, has a more detached motivation (no revenge for her family), kicking ass in one hand and saving her friend’s butt sin the other. Her opposition she totally schooled was also a lot less ‘dignified’ than…

Vader, the almighty, unstoppable, mysterious force of darkness


-Wreckin’ dudes left and right

-If somebody sass mouths him they get the choke

-Doesn’t lose for two whole movies in man to man combat and when he does in the third it’s the highlight of the entire series, in the first one cuts down Obi Wan and makes hero Luke “BAAAAAAAAAAWWWWW” hard

-Stays mysterious, creating that space for fans imaginations to run wild with love

A far cry from…

Kylo, the emotionally broken failure crawling in his skin



-Started off badass lookin'

-Then he started talking

-Really eager to please his master

-We get to see his room and he’s got some beyond Hot Topic stuff going on in there

-Sure he does kill some fools but one of them was an old man with his guard down. Sure he does get to sass mouth Fin while he puts lashes on Finn’s back for running away, but right after that Kylo is getting his ass booted through the snow by some bumpkin seeing snow for the first time

-When he cries he goes “BAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW” and breaks things

-We know a lot about his story, who his parents are, and how his emotional wounds will not heal

Now about that runaway…
Finn is constantly getting his ass kicked and being told what to do



-This stormtrooper was raised all his life to be a storm trooper but a captured government agent (but the movie kinda acts like they’re the rebels because the 1st movie was about rebel heroes) gives a really great elevator pitch and in the next scene the ex-trooper is gunning down all those dudes he lived/ate/bunked alongside

-This stormtrooper is immediately accused by the hero Rey of being a thief but he doesn’t take offense and spends the rest of the movie happily following her orders
This stormtrooper is immediately accused by great hero Solo of stealing, but he is a gushing fanboy to old man Solo and also spends the rest of the movie ever so happily taking orders from him
When this stormtrooper meets up with the rebel agent he’s ever so grateful to get named by him like a stray pupper

-Finn isn’t genre savvy enough to know he’s not the hero and gets lashed on the back by angry ex-master Kylo. But the hero Rey is there to immediately avenge him and Finn does his job in a tube to make Rey look really stoic and dignified with motivation to avenge.

To anwer the question of Mary Suedom… I won’t say yes or no but I will argue that the traits people often associate with Mary Sues are much stronger in Rey than Luke or anyone else in the original trilogy. In addition to that the not-Rey characters are much less competent and it’s Rey bailing them out.

But I figure the biggest clincher is that The Force Awakens has no villains that win their fights or even preserve their dignity.

Luke is battling against the darkside crusader Vader who cut down wise man Obi Wan. Rey is beating the crap out of this sad little boy who was sent far far away by parents afraid of him. Heck even Brienne of Tarth gets Boba Fett’d down a hole before she can do anything worth building a legendary spinoff novel series off of. Nor is there any Grand Moff Tarkin who can hold a polite conversation with Vader.

*The most ironic part is I generally consider Luke a mary sue, what with him going into space for the first time and flying space fighters better than lifetime war aces. Then by the final film he’s been in space crusader training for about as long as it takes an American child to earn a green belt in after school karate, but goes on to whoop his dad in a fight. If anything his initial whining and continued emotional outbursts helped round him out as he really does put his heart and soul into everything he does. But I really have to give it to Disney for being able to outdo this character.

Like... Fury Road is a way better movie than these Star Wars films, I like Furiosa more than Luke, Rey, Han, Indiana Jones and whoever else. I'm already critical of the previous Star Wars films and the new movies are bad too.

Adding on to that... a buddy of mine also came to a similar conclusion on "Fin the runway slave boy" Black stereotype:

Soooooooo, I saw Creed and Star Wars again yesterday with my friend and his son...

While Creed is a damn near perfect film that struck up so many emotions and I actually cared about the characters...

Star Wars was and Finn was literally a letdown on so many aspects. Yeah they got the energy and the feel of the earlier films down, BUT they DROPPED THE BALL on Finn. On my first viewing, my brother had me thinking I was reading too much into it, but, I KNEW I WASN'T CRAZY.

For starters, Dude was SWEATING and RUNNING the WHOLE MOVIE.

What was up with Poe naming that dude... it was like some master naming the slave type stuff, then dude worked in SANITATION on the starkiller planet/death star... a friggin space janitor?!!!!

C'MON MAN!!!!!! Finn was getting his TAIL KICKED 90% of the movie and then Kylo Ren slashes his back like... once again... SOME OL' SLAVE and dude is OUT COLD for THE REST OF THE MOVIE... USELESS

JJ and DISNEY pulled a FAST ONE on US… but in the end, you know what, ITS ALL WELL because I get to still create AWESOME BLACK IMAGES and CHARACTERS and there are A TON OF OTHER BROTHERS AND SISTERS busting their butts independently that are on the same mission as I… a brother still can't get a break in a galaxy far, far, far away...

[MGuy]

At least I'm not the only one who sees Finn as a problem character. I feel like I'm the only one who complains about his portrayal.

[deaddmwalking]

Calling Rey a Mary Sue because she is implausibly competent is sexist.

The term is not used for other characters who are also implausibly competent. This is like the term 'bossy'. When a man tells you what to do, he's showing 'leadership'. When a woman tells you what to do, she's being bossy. Since you never apply that term to a man, it becomes a sexist term.

Implausibly Competent is a standard for action movie protagonists, and that includes prior Star Wars movies. Debating whether or not Rey is similarly 'special' or 'more special' could be worth discussing, but using the term 'Mary Sue' doesn't promote that discussion.

The term 'Mary Sue' is not defined by a small corner of the internet. The accepted definition is 'author self-insert character for the purpose of wish-fulfillment'. While 'implausibly competent' is often a feature of a Mary Sue, it is not the definition.

Mguy, you sound stupid. You sound stupid because you're calling a rectangle a square even though the sides aren't equal. You're saying that someone else called it a square first and the fact that it has four sides and four right angles is 'close enough'. And it's not, even if it is easier to say. If you take all rectangles, only a sub-set (those with equal sides) are squares.

You have not argued that she is a Mary Sue, you have argued that she is an implausibly competent character. You have tried to redefine Mary Sue as an implausibly competent character. That has not helped you.

Rather than using a word that doesn't mean what you insist it does, you should use the correct word. The word you're using is getting in the way of the idea you're trying to convey.

It's not just one or two people telling you this.

Remember, you're the one that argued that common definitions are established by society as a whole. When numerous people say you're using the wrong word and you sound stupid for doing so, clearly society has not come around to your version of the definition.

You appear to think that Rey made the Star Wars movies worse in part because she was implausibly competent, and that appears to have broken your suspense of disbelief. If you explained it that way, people would agree with you - at least, to a degree. When you establish that as your position, whether her competence is implausible becomes the subject of discussion.

My personal belief is that she is not implausibly talented. She is adult, she has had a difficult upbringing, she has fought extensively and she is technologically savvy. The things that we see her do are in line with the norms established by other movies and the extended universe about what a 'force sensitive' character can do. If she is 'unconsciously' guided by the force, she can accomplish a lot. CHIRRUT ÎMWE from Rogue One is canonically not force-sensitive and look at what he can do. Since Rey has 'magic', she can do magical things. Your claim appears to be that she has 'too much magic relative to her training'. I disagree with that. Leia was never trained in the force (that we know of) and was able to fly through space and survive.

It turns out that not only is Rey not a Mary Sue (self-insert wish-fulfillment character), she's not even 'implausibly competent'. It turns out that they weren't rectangles at all. They were trapezoids. Now, wouldn't you feel stupid if you called a trapezoid a square as if you didn't know the differences?

But don't worry. This is the internet. All you have to do is start using the term properly and move on.

In any case, you and I can agree to disagree about the 'implausibly competent' thing. Even though I have in-universe justifications for why she isn't, it's simply a matter of taste. I mean, Han says, 'It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. I've outrun Imperial starships, not the local bulk-cruisers, mind you. I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now'. A New Hope doesn't define a Corellian ship (but we know that the Millenium Falcon IS ITSELF a Corellian ship), so we could expect that he hasn't had to outrun Star Destroyers or avoid an Imperial Fleet or fly straight at the bridge of a Star Destroyer before. I take 'implausible competence' to be a standard feature of the setting, so outside of Storm Troopers (who are themselves noted for being pretty awesome), it wouldn't surprise or bother me that others are that way. For me, they establish Rey's general competence sufficiently that I'm not surprised that she's able to fight or fly as well as she is. It turns out that 'plucky determination' is all you need to take on impossible odds and win.

[DSMatticus]

Oh boy because I made a statement bout Harry Potter didn't I? Oh wait... I didn't? So you don't know my views on Harry so you're assuming that my views make my views on Rey somehow inconsistent? I mean I just responded to Frank and notably didn't talk about Harry Potter so one would assume I don't disagree with his take on Harry, but that would be someone who intended to argue in good faith.

You have to be doing this on purpose. I know I said I was done, but this has to be a joke. I've long had doubts that anyone could be quite as thick as you manage to be, but I absolutely refuse to believe that you are simultaneously that thick and yet able to craft the most perfectly infuriating non-response you possibly could have. Stupidity is not perfectly calibrated failure; it is poorly calibrated success. Stupidity does not produce surgically precise misunderstandings. Stupidity is not fractally difficult to unpack. Stupidity doesn't produce conversation-melting deadlock states that force you to explain A before you can explain B and B before you can explain A.

I think you have a goddamn trick to this. This is the exact thing that happened in our last conversation when I brought up the ACA. Oh. Actually, nevermind. That explains it. You're bad at contextualizing examples, so you always think they mean something they don't and cry bad faith/words being put in your mouth. That's... boring. Frustrating, but boring. You genuinely don't understand what bringing up Harry Potter was supposed to illustrate, so you think it's supposed to be evidence of your personal inconsistency (because inconsistency seems like the thrust of the conversation), but you didn't say anything about Harry Potter, so how can it be evidence of your personal inconsistency? Ergo, DSM is being mean to me. How many posts back do I have to go to unpack that shit? Where the fuck did you get lost? Do I care enough to bother? Who am I kidding?

I think your definition of Mary Sue is dumb. Because Rey is perfectly in line with the protagonists of other commercially and critically successful properties, lowering the threshold enough to catch Rey means it's no longer a damning criticism, and keeping the threshold high enough to make it a damning criticism means it no longer catches Rey. She is simply not exceptional on this metric relative to other action fantasy/sci-fi protagonists, which means you cannot use that metric to explain the backlash against her character. The metric fails to isolate her as an outlier, and such an explanation would predict backlash against a fuckton of other characters - backlash which never materialized, making the explanation shit. People dislike her because she is a not great character in totally ordinary ways, and they heard the Sue thing somewhere and when they think about it confirmation bias kicks in because hey she's implausibly competent and nobody ever turns their thoughts around and processes them in the negative to see that the media they consume is fucking supersatured with implausible competence that they never notice because nobody pointed it out to them. I don't give a single fuck about explaining why you personally dislike her. I don't give a single fuck if you think Harry Potter is a member of parliament and not a fictional boy-wizard. It's about how fucking useless you make the word Mary Sue when you dilute the fuck out of it to catch relatively normal protagonists because you don't like them and they broke your suspension of disbelief. It stops being a fair criticism and becomes a meaningless insult you can throw at virtually any action fantasy/sci-fi protagonist, destroying the word's meaning in its entirety while piggybacking off the negative connotation (it no longer deserves) to fling your shit. A trait that a bad character shares with a good character is not the trait that made the bad character a bad character.

When I expressed this argument to you (contrast Rey with similar characters who don't get shit flung at them and maybe stop and consider what that means about the word), you cried foul. Not foul as in "I disagree that those characters are similar." Foul as in "you can't do that!" Verbatim, it was "you can't get to the real meat of the conversation as long as you want to argue [...] whataboutisims about other franchises that have other rules and set ups." You were seriously arguing that we couldn't compare similar things unless they were set in the same universe because different universes have different rules! That is absurd. That is bizarre. That is definitely stupid. And it's also hilariously ironic, because it does in fact make the discussion of tropes impossible. Tropes are by definition patterns that span multiple works, phenomena that occur in lots of stories and not just one. If you're not allowed to compare similar things across universes, you can't talk about tropes period and therefore can't fucking talk about how Rey's a Mary Sue because Mary Sue is just another goddamn trope! It's a pattern originating in a Star Trek fanfiction as a parody of different Star Trek fanfiction that was broadened beyond the scope of Star Trek before Star Wars even existed. Calling Rey a Mary Sue is an act of comparison to other characters outside of the Star Wars franchise!

At that point, the conversation is a dumpster fire, except the dumpster is full of bombs and nails and you are dancing around it pouring gasoline. That... makes me sound stupid for sticking around to see it through. I suppose I am. Whatever. The obvious path forward is to explain to you how comparisons work and how useful they can be. Like a caveman. Because you are an idiot. I'm very clever, you see. I may have been tired enough to think it was funny, and maybe I'm stubborn enough to stick by that now. HARRY POTTER CAVE SPEAK is not about how you must think Potter is a fine character and therefore you personally are inconsistent because I've never heard you complain about him. It is an illustration of hey, look, I described two very similar situations with two very different outcomes vis a vis the discourse surrounding them, and then asked why the outcomes were different, and it turned out not to be forbidden black magic! It's actually super useful! Yay!

I'm sure you're remarkably inconsistent on this front, of course. Or you're a bitter old curmudgeon who screams "Mary Sue" at everything. Or you've been living under a rock for the entire history of television, crawling out only to see The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. But I don't really give a fuck. Adversarial arguments about the exact definition of literary tropes don't work. It's goddamn impossible. But it's very easy to observe that the backlash against Rey came out of nowhere once you actually stop and look around and see the sorts of characters she's in the company of. Ready Player One has a fucking 79% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Avatar, for reference, has an 82%. That means that Ready Player One having a main character who could have actually been named Marty Stu (and it would have been the funniest reference in the entire movie) cost them a whole 3ppt over another technically impressive but ultimately uninspired CGI-fest. Where's the other 33ppt Last Jedi lost?

[infected slut princess]

Rey is a fucking stupid character and Finn is just about the worst black character you could hope for. He is a bumbling moron and mainly exists to make other people look good by comparison.