Rey also accidentally lets the rathtars out. A pretty big mistake that nearly got everyone killed. Mary Sues don't make such big screw ups. They don't get captured either. It's pretty obvious people have been telling stories about the Jedi and what they could do. In that situation, it makes sense to try things you've heard about after learning you can tap into the same power they had. There's no reason she shouldn't have known about the existence of mind tricks. Despite being an untrained farmboy, Luke 1) mows down professional soldiers, 2) out flys some of the Empire's best pilots, 3) pulls off a very impressive display of the Force (pushing and pulling torpedoes to the perfect attack angle) despite having maybe a few hours of training, 4) is put in command of rebel pilots who've been with the Alliance for years, even though it's his first ever battle and first time flying in space. Anakin 1) wins the equivalent of the Daytona 500 at 10, 2) in a sport that no other human is physically capable of competing in, 3) survives a space battle when his piloting tactics consist of "spinning is a good trick!", and 4) blows up the control ship, basically winning the battle on his own. You can make some counterpoints about the Force and such, but the point is you can do the same thing for Rey. Can't do that with an actual Mary Sue. They never make mistakes, they always win, everybody adores them, and they have absolutely zero flaws. Very few characters in original fiction meet that bar. True Mary Sues are almost exclusively found in fanfic or really awful self-published work (which isn't always far removed from fanfic).
Anakin was "The Chosen One" and was still more flawed and interesting than Rey. Skip to 5:11 and then to 6:00 and then to 7:59. "Not a true Mary Sue" sounds a lot like "not true Communism." Another point about the rathtars: she accidentally lets them out because she doesn't know the door controls. They instantly kill everybody, except only drag Finn through several corridors so that Rey can accidentally(?) close the right door at the right time and save him. Another point is that just being aware of something doesn't make one proficient in it. I'm aware that there are human mind-tricks (magic tricks) and I can't do any of them. Is that because I'm not farce sensitive? To be fair, I think the overall level of writing for the new Star Wars films is absolutely, hilariously horrific, and so Rey has no other option but to be Mah-Rey Sue, or else the script - quite literally - doesn't work. And in her defense she's not the only bad character. Practically all of them are poorly written. --- If one wants to avoid making a Mary Sue, leave less up to deus ex machina coincidence, and offer explanation as to why a character has abilities, and give those abilities drawbacks. That isn't to say they can't sometimes do things the first time that they didn't know how to do, or that they can't be a prodigy at one thing. Also, write it correctly the first time. Don't write a shit script, make it into a movie, and then publish a paperback, retcon version afterward that "fixes" your mistakes. Additionally, to expound on my earlier post about "don't have a can-you-fly-this-thing scene", the reason I say that is because otherwise you are literally writing your story in such a way that it can only be advanced by somebody pulling a Mary Sue. That's poor writing. It sinks your plot and takes a character down with the ship. If you're going to have something of extreme convenience happen to your characters (i.e. there's one old airplane left and a giant tsunami is about to take out the characters), hopefully it's been explained that one of your characters took pilot lessons as a kid, or is a retired commercial airlines pilot, or something to make it more believable and not smack people in the face and wake them from their suspension-of-disbelief. And don't have them fly it perfectly.
Anakin's flaws only really come out in III (and a little in II). If we only judge by the first two installments of a trilogy, he and Rey are close to the same level. And of course Anakin would always have more flaws in the end, since he undergoes a negative change arc until the very end. Concepts have definitions. Just as a society may have a command economy but not be communist, a character can be shoddily written but not a Mary Sue. Being aware of something may not make anyone able to do it, but if you have the raw ability and know about the technique, it becomes an option within your arsenal. Star Wars has always had...questionable writing, often in key places. There's a franchise-busting plot hole in the first few minutes of the original movie, for example. I love the movies and all, but they definitely unravel when examined with a fine toothed comb. I'll point out the novelizations came out before the movie release, which is kinda maddening. Scenes that would've covered a lot of problems were right there, but didn't make the cut.
There's nothing to convince me that she would know the technique. Luke and Anakin were actually given training; it was a primary focus of Anakin for *two movies* despite being "The Chosen One". They established Rey doesn't need it and so a 1/3 of the most recent film is completely pointless lol. Wikipedia says that Mary Sues "perform better at tasks than should be possible given the amount of training or experience." In this case with Rey, zero training or experience, but she can fly the Falcon at least as well as Han and Chewie, fix the Falcon before Han, defeat a Sith (trained by Luke when he was a child and now an apprentice to an extremely powerful Sith Lord) not only in lightsaber combat but also in Force wielding ability, knows how to use Force techniques with no prior knowledge (especially powers like mind-tricks, which to me seem arguably more advanced), can easily defeat Stormtroopers in combat with a laser pistol she's never used. Fan-fiction may have been the first mention and context for a Mary Sue, but it isn't the definition anymore. A Mary Sue is a character who is perfect due to being poorly written, and thus uninteresting. You're right. Star Wars was never really known for exceptional writing. I just think it's disingenuous to say that Anakin and Luke are anywhere near as bad when they were given training in most of the things that they are proficient in. Rey was given "training" after the fact which completely defeats the purpose. A big theme of Old Ben's teachings was to "use the Force", or "trust the Force" or whatever his exact words were. You get my point. That's why the ridiculous part to me isn't that Luke lands the killing blow on the Death Star, but the fact that the Death Star's weakness was a pipe that led straight to the core. That's why it was completely retconned in Rogue Juan. Luke also literally says, "I used to shoot womp rats in my T-16 back home." He's talking about a ship. I mean, are you telling me they couldn't have dedicated three minutes of screen time for something like this? Or five minutes for something like this? The film was already a rip-off of the old trilogy so they might as well have just gone all the way.
Rey gets lucky; she probably heard about it in old stories about the Jedi, and tried to copy them. I mean, it was only one stormtrooper. Not necessarily a super strong mind she overrode or anything. As for the rest, let's break it down: 1) Rey mentions that she's flown before (after dispatching the TIEs pursuing them; her and Finn are talking at the same time, so it's hard to catch). Force sensitivity helps everybody who has it with piloting. And the novelizations established something about her using a scavenged flight simulator. That's one element I really wished had been touched on in the movie. 2) She's a person who has been working with machines, taking them apart or putting them back together, almost all her life. Further, she's a little more familiar with the recent modification to the ship than Han is. 3) Kylo isn't a Sith. The Sith are far more than just people who use the dark side, but they're dead and gone. He wasn't a full Jedi when he turned, and he hasn't finished his dark side instruction at the time he and Rey first fight. Then we turn to his wounds. He got shot by a weapon that regularly sends people flying. That he's still standing at all is a miracle. Then he suffers a wound on his sword arm fighting Finn, because he toyed around instead of ending it earlier. Anyone would be in bad shape at that point. Then we look at emotional state. After killing Han, the pull of the light he sought to crush grows stronger. This is heavily implied in the movie, and outright stated in the novelization. He's clearly having trouble focusing, which also means he's having trouble connecting with the Force. Basic abilities become progressively harder for him during the fight. And if you look across the franchise, you find that whoever is unfocused loses in lightsaber combat. Lastly, Kylo is trying to capture her alive. This further complicates matters, given the previous points. Turning to Rey's side of things, recall the old saying about the world's best swordsman not fearing the second best, but an amateur, because he has no idea what the idiot will do. This is true for many things, like all sorts of games and competitions, since beginners aren't locked in set patterns of "good moves". And it applies here. Rey translates her staff techniques to the lightsaber; they don't work well at first, but that changes after Kylo accidentally prompts her into tapping into the Force. By that point, he's spent, and can't the aggressive staff-like style she employs. 4) She kills a couple troopers, one of whom she got the drop on, and in terrain that funnels them to her. Nothing compared to what Luke does on the Death Star. And perfect characters don't make significant screw ups, get captured, or have flaws like a fixation on the past. Not really. Anakin was already subconsciously using the Force in pod racing. A few force sensitive children pop up in The Clone Wars, and one of them is levitating objects in infancy. Ezra from Rebels also tapped into the Force without any prior training, purely by accident. You need training to hit your full potential and be able to consistently, consciously use it. Same way you might hit a target with limited firearms experience, but you'll hit it a lot more often after practice and instruction. So I don't see it as defeating the purpose. Yeah, the T-16 was a civilian airspeeder. Flying a Cesna doesn't mean you'd be capable of flying a space shuttle. And hitting an animal doesn't mean you could pull off that feat in a combat situation, or win a dogfight against an Imperial pilot who graduated from a prestigious academy. What exactly are we talking about here? Force training? Rey's untrained flirtations with the Force don't bother me, since they're not without precedent. Something like her piloting skills could've been better foreshadowed though. To tie this all back to the OP, it's perfectly possible to create characters whose abilities could be better fleshed out or foreshadowed, but who still fall shy of the Mary Sue label. That doesn't mean the character couldn't be handled better, though. As someone (jannert?) mentioned, just being aware of the concept greatly increases the odds of avoiding it. Most of the truly Sueish characters out there were written by people who'd never heard of the term, were new to writing fiction for the consumption of others, or both.
X-Wings and the T-16 were both made by Incom and have similar controls. Some airspeeders in the Star Wars universe (including the T-16) were capable of short periods of low orbit, so the Cessna to spaceplane comparison doesn't fly. "Probably" doesn't cut it for me. Don't recall her saying that but I assume you're right. But flown what? She clearly states she's never flown the Falcon before. Was she in Jakku's annual Redbull air race? You know, like the ones where they fly under bridges and crazy shit like that? When I go to the movie theaters to see Star Wars, am I really expected to have read the ebook that came out on the same day? Because I didn't, and it is my subjective observation that most people don't. One could also make the argument that Han hasn't flown it in a considerable amount of time, which means it might take him a little time to readjust, especially with the modification you mention. Fair enough. Is this another "novelization" thing? I understand she's a scrapper, and has been one for her whole life on Jakku, but I don't think it translates well enough to her having the ability to repair the Falcon with ease. True, but the way Rey handles herself in that scene does not indicate to me that she is an amateur. Pretty sure the terrain of the Death Star is much more "funnel"-like. Rey is already able to use it consistently, and consciously. You're right that this is off topic, although I think at the same time the discussion is interesting in terms of being a pseudo case study for anybody who wants to write a good character. These are the kinds of questions readers are going to be asking.
OP, if you've not given up on this thread, I'd like to suggest you take a crucial lesson from this horrific derail: No matter what you write, if someone doesn't like it, your MC will be a Mary Sue to them.
Or maybe they just really don't like it. Or, maybe the character's actually a Mary Sue, or at least a terribly written character. Believe it or not, someone can dislike what you write without thinking your MC is a Mary Sue. I just happen to think Rey is a Mary Sue, and that the new Star Wars movies are so pathetically written that this covers for the fact. How can we make Rey fallible, Jar Jar Abrams? Contrivances! If you're incapable of taking anything else away from discussing whether a popular character is a Mary Sue, or just exceptionally poorly written, then I feel sorry for you.
Maybe Mary Sue-ness isn't just a character trait. Perhaps it's also a plot trait. I remember getting fed up with certain popular TV shows because it seemed that problems which seemed really insurmountable when they were first presented, seemed to just 'vanish' without much effort. One recent TV show I stopped watching because of this was the acclaimed Downton Abbey. Mary Sue-ness wasn't a part of any particular character ...it was the whole story. Miracles happened all the time. Unlikely alliances got formed just in the nick of time. Solutions to problems just 'appeared,' right when they were needed (just after the audience had JUST enough anxiety to get them worked up.) Cliffhangers turned out to be very small, negotiable cliffs. I enjoyed the series at first, but lost faith in it. Lesson for writers should be: if you set up a very difficult problem, make it VERY difficult to solve! Don't just wave your hand over the whole thing, like a benevolent god, and say ...oh, but it's all okay, really.
Mary ex Suemachina. A terrible disease with no cure. This is something I was getting at earlier. If you write the plot in such a way where its advancement is entirely dependent on a character pulling a Mary Sue, you need to rewrite. The example I used is the classic "do you know how to fly this thing?!" If the last hope for your trio of characters is a plane or a helicopter to get away from some impending threat, make sure one of the characters actually knows enough to operate it. Foreshadow this.
Ignore Mary Sues. Mostly, it's a lazy label applied in lieu of actual critique. Most of the time, people can't even agree what a Mary Sue is. The original definition is a character who is a surrogate of the author, for the author to vicariously fulfill a personal fantasy. An example is Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, created by Eugene Wesley Roddenberry. Of course, ANY critique item can lead to an insight for improving your writing, even if the critiquer's thought processes were murky.
I don't think a Mary Sue (or Harry Stu or whatever they call them these days) character is hard to spot or very ambiguous. It's a character who is boring and annoying because she/he is two-dimensional, picture perfect. Kinda like a character who is TSTL (too stupid to live). You know it when you read it.
Indeed. The self-insertion angle of the term faded over time, presumably because a self-insert isn't an awful character by default. It was the conflict killing perfection that caused problems, and that's the definition that broke out of the Trek fandom and into common use. I think the term is far more useful if you're discussing fan fiction, since the author has to abide by someone else's rules.
Let's see: No character flaws... no real effort put into anything she could do... plot is practically non existent... She doesn't have that many more things to go before she hits the bottom of the character barrel.
Rey does have flaws. Namely her fixation on the past and a family that won't be coming back. She does put in real effort. And I'm not sure what movie you were watching, but I saw plenty of plot. With these very loose standards you have, Luke's on the same level. Compare film one to film one of the respective trilogies, and they have equal amounts of flaws and effort. Hell, Luke even meets the original definition of Mary Sue, since he originated as Lucas' self-insert.
The easiest way to avoid writing a Mary Sue is abstinence. The reasonable way is to have conflict. Your character can be an all-powerful, all-knowing God, but as long as your story has conflict, you're golden. A good example of an all-powerful character that isn't a Mary Sue is One Punch Man. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the topic.
Really? Pretty much first thing she does when she meets Poe Finn is attack him based on a false assumption and then falls for an incredibly obvious lie.
Yes, I'm beginning to think you're right. Too much focus on this issue. In the end, does it really matter? As long as readers engage with, believe in, and enjoy reading about (or watching) a certain character, then what's the big deal? For myself, I never minded Wesley Crusher at all. He seemed as believable to me as any of the other crew members. However, I've run across a few characters in other stories that do drive me mental, because they just are NOT believable. They can quickly begin to irritate me. Kvothe, the main character in Patrick Rothfuss's fantasy novels is a case in point. Jumping Juniper. A shame, too, as many other elements of Rothfuss's stories are excellently conceived and written, in my opinion. But I finally stopped reading, because I got fed up with the easy solution to every problem Kvothe faced, and how supremely TALENTED he was at every single thing he did. Aaargh. I guess the best idea is to worry less about Mary Sue-ness, and, instead, strive to concoct a believable story, which will include believable characters?
For me, the difference between Luke and Rey, at least in the original Star Wars movie, is the tongue-in-cheek attitude of the filmmaker. Star Wars (for me, the ONLY Star Wars) was a humorous and delightful movie that came out of the blue. It was shamelessly meant to entertain. The contrast between naieve Luke, tart-tongued Leia and grouchy Han made for effortless movie gold. This wasn't 'serious' sci-fi. (A galaxy far far away. Nope, that's not supposed to be taken seriously, is it?) Ever since that first movie, however, the tone changed—dare I say it, as soon as Spielberg got involved—and suddenly we're supposed to take Star Wars seriously. And that's why Rey doesn't seem believable to many viewers (including me.) Transporting a more or less flawless Luke-alike into this supposedly serious sci-fi is just not quite believable. At least not for me. I was quite disappointed in Rey's first appearance, and doubt whether I'll stick with the franchise. It's more than just Rey, by the way. The whole thing is flawed. The pace is far too hectic, resolutions are far too easy and coincidences abound—and it contains no real humour. It doesn't work, at least not for me.
After all this debate about The Last Jedi I've decided to make a thread for it in the debate room. I want to put my thoughts in, but I don't want this thread to drift too far off topic, so I'll put my thoughts over there
I think there's also a generational gap in audience expectations here. Not just with Star Wars; you see it with the new Bond films versus the old ones, new superhero stories vs. old ones, etc. More deeply flawed and complicated characters, more morally gray conflicts, faster pacing, and more have come into style, so characters and stories that tend toward the older, more mythologized, less grounded style are more divisive than they might've been in decades past. The shift seems far less pronounced in children's media as opposed to that targeted at adults, though.
I think this is on option, but not the only one. You can have unbelievable, outrageous, characters but the book has to set up a world where we expect them. The problem with Mary Sue's is generally when the setting of the book is 'realistic' but a character breaks the expectation of realism, and the setting, and the reader either feels betrayed or bored.
Don't forget the obvious wish fulfillment self insertionism. Stephen King's obvious self insertion is honestly what broke some of his books for me.
I'm not so sure. Don't people call Rey from Star Wars a Mary Sue? It's done pretty well. I think it depends on the genre you're writing and reader expectations. However, if you wanna avoid writing a Mary Sue, the best is simply be conscious about it and actively write against it. Think of how real people would really think and behave and write that. In my case, I'm aware of how women are often portrayed as just love interests or these shy, demure creatures who cry a lot. My rough drafts often contain these. And then I actively try to give them opportunities to be different - perhaps where two different reactions like crying or punching a wall would be realistic, I let my girl punch the wall. She might cry too, but I'll often make conscious choices of letting them do something else. As a result, I currently have two female characters I'm rather proud of - and one started off as a character with no purpose other than be my MC's love interest, and the other was never even supposed to have been in the book and I've tried to kill her off three times...
