He comes up with the plan to act like prison guards, but do you remember what happens after they rescue the Princess? If you answered, he didn’t really think that far ahead, you win a cookie (that’s why they end up in the trash compactor when Leia improvises). Leia bails out Luke and Han. In said trash compactor, Luke has to be reminded that he can call C3PO to try to hack into the computer to prevent them from getting crushed.
While he’s good at shooting and flying (which was set up a slight bit on a much smaller level by talking about how good he was shooting things on Tatooine), he’s obviously not good at everything - at least not in that first movie and makes quite a number of mistakes.
I think the concept of a Mary Sue is a bit sexist because of its uneven application. However, I think there is a concept that’s salvageable from it, and that’s the “Sir Galahad” type of character. That is, the “Walking Plot Tumor.”
Mary Sue has been corrupted to just be “a (usually female) character who is more competent than I think they should be.” The walking plot tumor is someone who just walks in and consumes the entire plot. No character acts like themselves when they’re around, their very existence metastasizes and makes everyone else look incompetent, and no matter what they do everyone berates themselves for not being like them.
This is your Sir Galahad, your Wesley Crusher, and yes, your self-insert fanfiction written by 14 year olds. But Rey is not this character at all. Yeah, she doesn’t strictly have many flaws, but “character flaws” is a really simplistic way to view good character writing. Rey is, in my opinion, compelling and well-written. She grows, but doesn’t have an explicit enumerable set of flaws, but neither does Luke unless you count “mildly whiny” as a character flaw. Which, if you do, you kind of have to concede that Bella “I’m so clumsy tee hee” Swan also has a character flaw.
I like the Palpatine daughter theory better… would explain why Luke would abandon her on Jakku (I’m assuming he’s the one that did the abandoning), especially after Ben Solo went oh, so wrong.
How about this: Luke gets some female student of his pregnant, but runs off before he finds out about it; the woman, chased by First Order baddies, leaves the kid on that planet while she races off to lead the pursuit away from her kid (meaning to double back for her when the heat was off); woman is killed in the ensuing fight.
So Rey is Luke’s daughter but neither of them know it.
Nonsense. James Bond may be an unrealistically competent renaissance man, but he is also a man who has spent at least fifteen years in his profession after having been hand-picked for his suitability for this role, which makes his competence easier for the audience to buy as being credible. Star Wars has a similar niche in its own setting: the Jedi Master. That is what is wrong with Rey’s breadth and depth of skills - that she should be this good by the time she becomes a Jedi Master, not right out of the gate.
I, for one, am hoping that Rey is of absolutely no significant parentage whatsoever. Seems to me that it makes for a much better story, and a much more interesting counterpoint to Luke’s tale, if Rey is just an orphan scavenger who is guided by the Force to greatness, than if she’s only who she is because her parents/grandparents were special.
I think this would be extremely unlikely. The movie spends a lot of time setting up her abandonment as significant. It would be a big surprise, to say the least, if she was abandoned merely because her nobody-special parents decided it would be more amusing to tour the universe child-free.
I’ll give you Ripley, in exchange for you giving me Bond. On the other hand, it didn’t take a lot of searching to find discussions about whether or not Katniss is a Mary Sue–there are advocates of both sides of the question. It’s actually not that easy to Google, because there is a website about women in geekdom called “The Mary Sue,” which tends to show up as a result any time you search a female character’s name together with the words Mary Sue.
Jragon has some good thoughts on the matter, with which I largely agree.
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
Shooting womp rats.
[/QUOTE]
I’m betting those womp rats weren’t shooting back, and they probably didn’t have fighter cover.
Except most of the skills that earn Rey the label of “Mary Sue” are things that she explicitly knew how to do before the movie started. Piloting, repair, and fighting are all things she already knows how to do before we first meet her in the movie. If Bond isn’t a Mary Sue because he’s got a backstory to explain how he has those skills (and that doesn’t actually disqualify him from “Mary Sue” status, but whatever) then Rey should be granted the same license.
Which leaves us with her Force powers. And what are those powers? She mind tricks a Stormtrooper - who are famously weak-willed - and she levitates a foot long piece of metal. Neither of these are exceptional feats of Force ability, and most importantly, she does both immediately after Ren uses those powers against her. Is that “too fast” for her to pick up those powers? Who can say? It doesn’t seem that much faster than Luke picked up his. He was blocking blaster bolts blindfolded after about three minutes of conversation with Ben, and that was the whole sum of his training before he blew up the Death Star.
Here is the fundamental problem with Rey: She only works as a character if you’re wiling to engage in some epic-level making-stuff-up-in-your-head. If you don’t, then she basically turns into a massive plot device. It’s even worse because all her character bits are front-loaded, so she becomes remarkably dull in the second half of the movie, exactly when she suddenly gains multiple superpowers.
This movie simply does not stand on its own. I honestly don’t think it can stand on its own as a film. This is fanservice with a half-billion in marketing behind it. IN the end, the movie is entertaining, but not fulfilling. It’s a solid popcorn film, but that’s also not some amazing feat of daring. The current metacritic use score of 7.4 feels about right to me: good, but it’s not going to leave any lasting impression.
On the other hand, it didn’t take a lot of searching to find discussions about whether or not Katniss is a Mary Sue–there are advocates of both sides of the question. It’s actually not that easy to Google, because there is a website about women in geekdom called “The Mary Sue,” which tends to show up as a result any time you search a female character’s name together with the words Mary Sue.