In Favor of the Mary Sue

More importantly, Starbuck was changed to be a character instead of a cutout.
Not everything in the reboot was better IMO, but Starbuck was. YMMV.

 

Yes, I had my doubts about many aspects of the reboot myself, mainly having to do with plot holes and mistakes made by the writers in terms of where the story went. But in terms of presentation and character development, it was pretty much perfect.

 

Let's put it this way, the Star Wars universe is going to feel smaller to some people every time a pivotal protagonist comes from a desert planet that resembles the last.

I was not a huge fan of Star Wars because fantasy was always more my jam, so I can be a little biased. However, when too many of the same checkboxes come up with characters in the same franchise, the feeling I get is comparable to seeing a magic trick long after I already know the secret. The whole thing feels duller and the new spice might not be enough because I've already switched off.

AI isn't the same as an organic intelligence. It does not cope with situations outside its purpose, and is incapable of learning without introduction of new data and sometimes code, which can be a labour intensive process.

Look at C3PO for example, his mobility is clunky and he's useless both in terms of action and even vocal ability when those around him are drawing weapons. However, that is fine, because his purpose is to provide interpretation, and to do this effectively, he needs to understand concepts of language and culture. He will not be able to change his purpose without a complete body and programming overhaul which could effectively serve to rob him of his identity.

Baymax from Big Hero 6 is a good example of what comes out when trying to put conflicting programs against each other. One point of contention between him and Hiro (at least for Hiro, since Baymax is, by his own admission, incapable of emotion so he just stands there and takes the anger) is that he refuses to do harm to a person. This is likely due to some manner of medical oath being installed into his programming (be it the Hippocratic oath another one).

 

Today, yes.
Tomorrow, or long ago in a galaxy far far away, who can say?
Only the author.

 

Well, organic intelligence requires new data to learn, too. And we’re not talking about our itty bitty limited AI and our itty bitty computers.

 

I'm afraid the problem isn't one that can be solved in processing power.

The reason for this is, aside from an inability to process new data beyond predetermined parameters, is because CPUs operate in absolutes. If you wanted to truly emulate the organic brain, the starting point would be creating a CPU capable of processing in analogue.

Could the Star Wars create such a CPU? Possibly, but given that neither of the droids I mention show a depth of learning that humans have, I do not think they have them.

 

In the Terminator series they kinda do, and in the
film Ex Machina they create a mechanical type brain.

But in Star Wars, the droids don't show any kind of 'learning'.

 

We could discuss this at length, and it would be interesting in another thread, but I’m belatedly realizing it’s not relevant to my point. Rey treats the droid like it’s alive. She clearly seems to regard it as alive. It followed her, begged for help—it presented like a lost frightened creature. And she treated it like that. She parented it. The question of whether it was sentient, or just preprogrammed with a save-the-valuable-object “pity me” program, doesn’t really matter.

Rey, a lost lonely creature, adopted and cared for a lost lonely creature.

This is something very different from Luke.

 

I can see your point to some degree, but with piloting in particular, I'm not entirely sold. His uncle ran a moisture farm and the planet was a desert known for bandits and thugs, and he is an able bodied young man. Teaching him to protect the farm young wouldn't be unreasonable in that scenario.

 

What, like a Neural Network does, today? Do you understand how modern AI works? How the hardware accelerators built for NNs work?

There's nothing magical about analog: it has range limitations due to noise that make it perfectly emulate-able in digital hardware. 32 bit precision at each node in a multi-tier NN provides better dynamic range as the analog neural interconnects in biological tissue does, which is why, for efficiency, people have started dropping it to 16 or even 8 bits.

Saying a SciFi robot can't match a biological brain is just shows a lack of imagination.

 

If we define Mary / Marty Stu as a protagonist who gets things a little too easy, (such as Luke or Rey), we get into territory where any powerful protagonist falls into that category, which just avoids a deeper explanation of what the specific problems are.

Luke and Rey’s characters both include a few shortcuts, which are understandable given the limited time to tell the story. Pilots need to qualify for particular aircraft in the real world to be able to use them. Though this is an example of sci-fi magic being used to simplify the story. And for the most part it works. The Star Wars universe seems to have either gravity negation (look at how the land speeders and stuff like that just float there effortlessly), or powerful and cheap enough drives to let a backwater have them working very well. Such craft might actually be super easy to fly. It’s like space, but the same rules apply near the ground. The craft just floats there using its antigravityrhing, and if you want it to go forward, it goes forward. If you want it to turn, it turns. Gravity is negated and you don’t have to worry about which way the wind is going because the thing isn’t floating on the wind, it’s floating with its futuretech.

So it’s possible that in this universe, aircraft are easy to fly and all fly about the same. Jedi also have superreflexes too, so that hand-waving also justifies any feat of coordination that a Jedi can pull off.

If all that is a storytelling sin, then basically all action + adventure fiction is guilty of it to some extent or another. So I’m skeptical that characters like that are treading into the Mary / Marty Sue realm, though as I’ve said I’m not sure I think the term is that useful due to its difficulty to define.

 

The closest I can think of is perhaps 3PO and R2 exchanging observations of humans, but they never amount to anything

A persistent thought I have been having is the speech that Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin have the paralysed Spiderman in the first from of the Sam Raimi trilogy. He said that the only thing people love more than a hero is to see them "fail, fall, die trying."

I think he is half right, we want to feel like a victory is earned and we prefer victories that feel close as they have us on the edge of our seats. It is the passive media equivalent of beating a tricky boss and feeling a sense of satisfaction wash over you.

But a Mary Sue doesn't give us that feeling, they leave us feeling hollow.

I'm not sure what the antagonist equivalent would be, but they would be the ones that you know are being portrayed as menacing but come off as annoying.

 

Luke piloted more than a landspeeder, and the film took pains to let us know it before he ever got behind the controls of an X Wing:

"I hear you've become quite a good pilot yourself."
"I'm not such a bad pilot myself."
"Luke is the best bush pilot in the Outer Rim territories!"
"I used to bulls-eye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than two meters."
He said the Death Star trench would be "Just like Beggar's Canyon back home."

He was a good enough pilot to seriously consider joining the academy, and although overly braggy, was clearly considered competent by wiser heads. Sure, it's a case of tell rather than show, but his abilities are clearly laid out in advance.

This is very different from Rey being an amazing engineer, close combat fighter, force user and a decent swimmer(!) with no attempt at explanation or justification by the films.

I think that's a good analogy. Watching Mary Sues feels like watching somebody playing a video game with all of the cheats enabled. It's not impressive or exciting, and there's no doubt as to how it will end once god mode is enabled.

 

You remind me of Firefly. The women in Firely were diverse and defy stereotypes. Love them all. To some extent it does feel like someone mashed up a bunch of traits not normally put together into each character, but I still love them.

 

Antagonists can be Sues too, even though the bar is higher. The author enjoys writing the villain just a bit too much. They work a bit too hard to gloos over or justify any evil things they do ("he just had an unhappy childhood") or give them an unconvincing and unearned redemption. Or they revel in being eeeevil, any setbacks they suffer are either ambiguous or somehow advance their real plans, and the story actually forgets that villains need to be stopped or at least meaningfully opposed.

I think you see that sort of character pop up quite a bit in fanfics where the author has a crush on the villain and / or really dislikes the heroes. Also in RPG settings, where the authors write the NPC antagonists, but don't have any investment in the heroes (the player characters) who will be opposing them. White Wolf and Pinnacle were pretty infamous for the latter--

Spoiler

Sam Haight, who started off as a mortal but turned himself into a werewolf, then got vampire powers and True Magick, while being able to ignore the downsides of both. He had several appearances in published adventures that could be summed up as "a cutscene triggers where Haight does something awesome, the PC's watch in awe, he escapes, adventure's done" until someone at WW finally twigged, dedicated an adventure to killing him off, then he got turned into an ashtray in the Underworld.

Divis Mal in Aberrant, the first superhuman and with powers that can be literally summed up as "you lose times infinity". By word of the author, his pseudo-Objectivist philosophy on the role of a superhuman is objectively right, and you know Taint, that corruption that comes from pushing your powers too hard? Yeah, he can control that so it just makes him prettier. Absolute master of the supervillain faction and if he doesn't like you, the metaplot says you're gonna die. His highlight was an adventure where he shows up to brawl with the setting's Jackass Superman, and the PC's are just there to sit and watch--anyone who tries to intervene, regardless of their power level, gets autmatically thrown out of the fight.

Darius Hellestromme. He made a pact with the Deadlands incarnations of evil and helped to bring about the end of the world, but he did it all to bring his dead wife back, so you can't really be mad at him, guys! Decided he didn't want to be a servant of evil, so he just kind of quit and plotted revenge. Turned up later, got hailed as the Chosen One by a big faction in the setting, and trivialised a big epic battle that looked to be all about the PC's.

 

Wrong, Luke had a ship of his own. You can see it in the background in deleted scenes in Star Wars and he mentions it at the end of the movie. "It's not impossible. I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than two meters."

 

1) Because an old man and two droids won't fit in a single-seat spaceship?
2) Because Luke's ship doesn't have a hyper-drive?
3) Because they need to avoid Imperial entanglements?

 

I assume it's the difference between a rowboat and a ship suited to cross an ocean, only even more so, because there's issues of leaving the surface, going into orbit, and going into space. Googling calls a T16 an "airspeeder"--that doesn't sound like an outer-space-worthy vehicle.

 

What are some of the other things that he is suspiciously good at aside flying in New Hope? He definitely has the Jedi mojo, though we did see him get zapped by a practice drone, be unable to save Ben from Vader, and mostly follow the lead of Ben and Han until about the point that they save Leia.

My issue with Luke is more that he is a blank slate. I see that impatience becomes one of his main vices in Empire Strikes Back, but his personality just doesn’t jump off the screen in the same way that Han’s, Leia’s, and Lando’s does to me. He is a reasonably competent protagonist but not overpowered. Piloting seems to be his only area of mastery.