Yeah, and I'm saying that my criteria for "good" is that they produce a wanted emotional reaction in their target audience, and they are hard to reproduce. That's how I'm defining good for commercial art.
Are you now looking for an absolute quality of "goodness"? The aforementioned works have a following. Ask them they will emphatically assert those works are good. None of them will win a Pulitzer, or any other highly respected literary award I can think of. Would I model my writing after them? I would not. But neither would I emulate Stephen King, or Robert Heinlein, or many others. So we come down to, Is the (nebulously-defined) Mary Sue character incompatible with another imprecise concept, "goodness"? Granted, the latter is less slippery than the former, but isn't it more useful to focus on what specific characteristics will impact your writing in either a positive or negative sense?
I think that a character with the qualities of a Mary Sue, such that people on internet forums will at least consider that said character is a Sue, if not outright agree that he or she is a Sue, does not in any way detract from the nebulous quality of goodness as I defined above, and may in fact add to the quality of goodness as there are reasonable consumers of commercial art who seem to enjoy reading and watching stories about such characters.
Those are, honestly, some really good points that I hadn't thought about before. I wish I could have seen that in the movie. Actually, if exactly what you just said was more obvious in the film, it might change my entire perspective on the character. For me, personally, even if those were the intended interpretations, I don't feel like it came across very obviously in the films. There didn't seem to me any moment of genuine consideration, or reflection, or understanding by touching the lightsaber before deciding that she didn't want to accept that task. There was no weight behind it, or at least it didn't feel to me like there was. She didn't have any reason to reject it--or at least, the movie didn't make it clear that she had any reason to reject it. Rey claims she doesn't want any part of this, but the movie needs her to have a part in this, and that disjoint seems really glaring. Similarly, her getting thrashed by Snoke didn't have any long term effects that she now has to deal with. I almost wish she'd tried to fight him, and gotten an arm lopped off, and had to beg Kylo to side with her, and then he kills Snoke, and then team up--that would feel like progression! That would have been so cool! Then she could spend a scene reflecting on how she wasn't strong enough to beat Snoke, OR Kylo, and she could think really hard about how bad she is, and then dedicate herself to becoming stronger and making up for her failures. But she doesn't do any of that. And that's not her fault, it's the writers. They shoved in too many characters, tried to go in too many directions, and as a result, left everyone underdeveloped. Holy crap, maybe Rey isn't a Sue, maybe she's just underdeveloped.
Forgive me if some of what I am about to state is obvious. This is more a list of general observations than a response per se. All main characters has some element of escapism, some more so than others. They lie on a spectrum between wish fulfillment and utility for the sake of the plot. Mary Sues are simply main characters so far on the wish-fulfillment end that they lower the quality of their stories. I think we tend to ignore that most popular genre fiction have protagonists lie far closer to the Sue end of the spectrum than we want to admit. Giving a character any kind of exceptional quality moves them toward that end. Batman, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, and even Walter White can be well-written. In the hands of a self-indulgent writer, however, they would provide a simpler foundation for a Mary Sue than, say, the protagonist of a Black Mirror episode. Wish-fulfillment can open up possibilities for story, but they also necessarily impose limits. Spiderman stories are always going to include him swinging around and crawling on walls at some point, James Bond will inevitably get the girl and have a shootout with the bad guys, Walter White will cook some tight tight tight meth while managing a multimillion-dollar enterprise. That takes up time you could use to flesh out other parts of a story. That does not mean anything about their quality. It simply means that genre fiction has its limitations.
Nazism has a clear definition, but that hasn't stopped people throwing it at anyone they don't like. Likewise, Mary Sue had a clear definition before people started throwing it at every character who doesn't work for them. Those people have muddied the waters, but that doesn't make their definitions worthy of consideration. Neither of those is a definition; they're descriptions of how the word ends up being used. As definitions, they're so subjective they're useless. An accomplished civilian pilot; dogfighting and dodging point defenses involve rather different skills. And though he may've been armed, let's not forget he almost got bushwhacked with ease. Fighting professional soldiers is something else. Merely being qualified to attend a military academy doesn't endow one with the skills a graduate of one of those academies would have, and those are the people he ends up fighting. It certainly doesn't qualify somebody to be put in charge instead of the pilot with three years of combat experience. Now, I don't think Luke's a Sue, although some aspects of his character (especially in IV) are stretching it a little. I'm merely saying that if Rey's going to be called a Sue, Luke can easily be argued to be one too. And the version of Anakin shown in I would definitely qualify.
I think half the problem with discussing Mary Sues is that the definition varies from person to person. To my mind, a lot of it comes down to them having abilities that don't make sense, or having the world revolve around them. Take Luke and Rey: 1L) Luke has some skills, such as ability to fly fighters. This is explained in the films in terms of him having flown around Tatooine. 1R) From the beginning, Rey can outfight multiple thugs who have just taken down somebody trained as a soldier from early childhood. I don't buy the whole "she's had a tough upbringing" explanation for that. She can fly the Millenium Falcon, despite having no obvious training. Oh, and despite having grown up a scavenger on a desert planet, she's a capable swimmer. 2L) Luke has great potential in the Force, because it appears to follow genetics. Even so, he needs a lot of training before he can face Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, but gets beaten and his hand cut off. So it's more training before he can face Vader again, but he's still outclassed. 2R) The Force literally chooses Rey as its champion. Rey can master Force abilities without even knowing they exist. She beats Kylo Ren in her first attempt at using a lightsaber. 3L) Luke isn't well liked. Han and Leia make fun of him in the first film. 3R) Han practically adopts Rey at sight and asks her to join him (after she's figured out how to improve his spaceship having been on it five minutes). When Han dies, Leia ignores Chewie and hugs Rey instead. Chewie becomes her sidekick by default. I could go on. But to really sum up the problem: before I saw Return of the Jedi, I wondered whether Luke would turn to the Dark Side, and if not how he could possibly beat Vader. Rey clearly won't turn to the Dark Side, and Ren hasn't managed to beat her in two attempts, so she's far from the underdog in the next fight.
According to who, you? I'm going to require some of evidence in order to believe that claim. But even if that were so, Mary Sue definitely doesn't have a clear definition as of today, which is all that matters. That's a distinction without a difference. Seeing as how people do use those definitions for Mary Sue, and seeing as how many of them will continue to do so, they clearly are useful to those people.
Mary Sue, even if you can agree there is an actual definition, isn't a description at all. It's a pejorative epithet, used solely to demean a characterization. It has no value whatsoever.
This is adventure fiction, but I'll play the game: Luke's piloting experience involved flying armed T-16 fighter craft. He is bushwacked because of the extreme behavior of his missing droid. Luke doesn't directly fight anyone with military academy experience. He accidentally gets inside the Death Star - a facility that isn't really expecting an internal invasion - and audaciously avoids getting killed by conscripts that aren't necessarily better shots while backed up by a droid hacking the system. Han, Chewy, Leia and Ben also manage to take advantage of the confusion, size of the Death Star and the lack of a clear motivation for their movements. This wasn't a regular military battle or even a practiced security scenario - which is similar to how the Death Star was susceptible to attack by fighter craft - they didn't expect either tactic to be useful. In the space battle, Luke doesn't do anything particularly fancy. He follows his wing leader and eventually makes a good shot that he feels is similar to shots he's taken at home. His wingmen and Han protect him. He is not a leader - Red Leader is in charge, he's Red Five. Luke is very good - but I don't know if he is necessarily any better in SW than Han, Biggs or Wedge. His shot at the Death Star wasn't a trick he got from the Force but a skill he already had that the Force made a better bet than a targeting computer. This is a whole world of very capable people - especially the volunteers opposing the tyranny.
The TV Tropes article previously linked gave a good history of the term. I go by the definition at the time it emerged into general use instead of a Star Trek fandom term. Continuing an earlier analogy, if twenty years from now lots of people used "Nazi" to mean "person I disagree with", that wouldn't make the definition of it unclear, it would just make those people wrong. No, there's a difference. Look at the history of "factoid". It had a crystal clear definition. People used it opposite of what it meant. Whether it's useful to them is meaningless and beside the point; I'm talking about it being useless in discussing the term with anyone else.
Yeah, but womp rats don't shoot back. Which is my point. Dogfighting Vader's personal fighter squadron qualifies as directly fighting someone with academy experience. As for the stormtroopers on the Death Star, those are professional soldiers. No, he is a leader near the end of the Death Star attack; Red Leader puts him in command of Wedge and Biggs before embarking on his trench run, even though Wedge has significantly more experience. My point about the Death Star shot is that it's long distance pushing and pulling using the Force to put the torpedo on the perfect heading it needs. A feat more impressive than anything Rey does in VII, but it never gets blinked at. And I'll agree it's a world full of very capable people. That's why I find the double standard here perplexing.
I don't think he does anything more than fire with the perfect line up. Nothing in the way he acts as the torpedos head down the trench suggest he is still controlling them. Vents, like womp rats, don't shoot back. But I'm sure Luke's fellow T-16 pilots did. I also don't think there is much to suggest that Storm Troopers, as individuals, are anything more than unhappy conscripts doing their best to just not get killed. There are elite soldiers and officers around, but they have different uniforms. Maybe part of the issue is that we put our real world ideas about dog fighting and soldiering into a place and technology where those ideas really don't apply. The "dog fighting" around the Death Star doesn't much resemble what today's jet pilots do fighting in air and gravity, and we also don't know how difficult or easy a blaster is to fire accurately. Maybe there is just so much refinement either of those skills can have with those weapons. Also, we don't know what Red Leader is actually assigning Luke to do. Act as a true leader, or be the lead craft next into the trench if he fails, and backed up by the more experienced pilots? By that point the mission was dead simple - survive to shoot the vent. In my military aviation experience, leading isn't always about being the hottest stick.
Considering he turns off the targeting computer, so the torpedoes themselves have no targeting info, and he listens to Ben tell him to "use the Force", it seems safe to say he launched them unguided and used the Force to guide them in. They're not gonna go down by themselves, after all. They need programming from the computer or an external nudge to do that. I could believe that if Ben hadn't talked up their prowess, and we hadn't seen them in action on the Tantive IV. Luke gives orders, so it would seem he was put in an actual command position.
Yes, I understand that's the definition you accept. It's not the one I accept. It's exactly the point. Whether or not it's useful to you is meaningless. People use the term Mary Sue in discussions everyday. Which is proof it isn't useless.
But that's not the question I'm asking. Anything that makes money isn't automatically good. It might be commercially successful, that doesn't mean it's a quality production. They keep making those stupid Sharknado movies because they're cheap to make and they know people will watch them. Does that make Sharknado a "good" movie? I'm talking about the quality of the writing, not the gullibility of the audience. Funny how nobody wants to talk about that.
I’m talking about exactly that. I didn’t say it is good because it makes money. I’m saying it’s good because it gives its target audience a wanted emotional experience. If a given work gives such an experience to a huge number of people, even if “you” think the work is beneath you or easy to write, it’s still good work. I’d call it good work if it gives an emotional experience to a person. If we aren’t judging the quality of art on its ability to create emotional experiences, what are we judging it on? Some people work themselves into a state of requiring very specific stimulus to experience emotional involvement in art through constant over exposure to media while down talking common tropes, but that doesn’t make them the true keepers of quality.
Whether you accept it means nothing: you asked for evidence of an original meaning, I pointed you to it and gave the original general use meaning. No, it's not, because "the point" is something I had defined in the first place. Namely that everybody making up their own definition of the term made it impossible to have a discussion involving it and that it was useless in that context. That people use it everyday means nothing. If I use the word "Nazi" in its traditional, political meaning and someone else used it to mean "person I disagree with", we're going to talk past each other and our discussion will achieve nothing. Same with "Mary Sue". Just look at this thread. Many different views of what "Mary Sue" means and what has this discussion accomplished? Nothing.
A basic torpedo or rocket is designed to go in a straight line, and is only self guiding from the standpoint of staying on the course they were fired. The "targeting computer" seemed to be long range targeting reticule for aiming the torpedo ports built into the fuselage.
Yeah, but Star Wars torpedoes are more accurately described as missiles. Look at the trench run: the torpedoes have to make a perfect 90 degree turn and go down a miles long shaft in order to trigger the chain reaction needed to destroy the Death Star. Just shooting it in a straight line won't accomplish that.
I don't see why it's so hard to "define" a Mary Sue. There are some characters who are overpowered, yes, but they're not underdeveloped or poorly written and the universe doesn't revolve around them and bend to their will--e.g, Superman is INSANELY overpowered but he's one character, and even in his own comics other characters exist and have plot arcs and characterization separate from him, and the story doesn't revolve around him. The DC universe can exist, and every character in it have their own life and their own story, if Superman died and yet at the same time he's the de facto head hero of their universe. BUT it dosn't revolve round him. He's also a good person, a self-sacrificing person, and while he's still just a boring and stale Captain Goodguy archetype superhero, he's one who demonstrates qualities that are obviously noble and good and he genuinely cares about people around him and sees them as something other than pawns in his game. By that same token, another character I mentioned, Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim, is not powerful at all...however she's considered to be "beautiful" to the point men kill each other over her, the entire plot and every aspect of it is based on her, every character talks about her for no reason and her motivations aren't just ill-defined or poorly written but literally non-existent beyond the fact she's there for other characters to lust over. The entire story and every character revolves around her and no one questions or even attempts to question her and her "logic". She's vain, petty, shrewish, stupid, selfish and completely lacking in remorse or guilt. In any other series, or rather any series written by someone with an IQ that has more than two digits, Ramona Flowers would be a villain AT BEST and basically be King Joffrey with a vagina at worst...no actually I take that back, Joffrey was more developed and had logical goals in life, no matter how psychopathic he was. That is the difference between a Mary Sue. Both Superman and Ramona are basically identical in concept--impeccable, unstoppable, unquestionable forces of nature who can do anything they want and say anything they want and no one ever even attempts to question them--but one has noble characteristics, isn't a vain bitch, and actually advances the plot while the other is just a cunt who manipulates men into killing each other for her amusement and IS VIEWED AS RIGHT FOR DOING SO. Superman is just as boring and annoying, more so even in terms of boring, but he doesn't exploit other people and then pat himself on the back for it and then get COMPLIMENTED for it, and he doesn't have women killing each other in the streets (literally!) for a chance to fuck him. Ramona literally is not only manipulating people but this is viewed as a virtue, and men are willing to die just for the chance to kiss her and kill for the chance to date her. And literally the ONE character who questions this, Knives Chau, is viewed as "immature" and "jealous" because she dared to do so. That. That's a Mary sue. It's not a nebulous concept, and it's not hard to define. A Mary Sue, or Gary Stu or what have you, is a character who not only is OP but is so overpowered and so untouchable they cannot be stopped, the entire story revolves around her, everyone loves her though she offers no reason to and if anyone questions them they're either evil or they die. Male, female, gay, straight, etc it doesn't matter--race, gender, sexuality becomes irrelevant because the character exists just to stroke the (literal or figurative) dick of the author. And whatever I think of Superman, no matter how boring and how stupid he is, that's never been leveled against him, and rightly so. There is a whole other aspect where the OVERWHELMING majority of these characters are SJWs and self-inserts especially in modern times (see: Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers, RiRi Williams, etc) but I will reserve my opinion unless pressed.
It means as much as whatever definition of Mary Sue you accept. If that's nothing, so be it. You absolutely did not point me to evidence that confirms the following was Mary Sue's "general use meaning." It's not impossible or useless, it's merely difficult. Just like it's difficult to discuss purple prose. Just like it's difficult to discuss underdeveloped characters. Just like it's difficult to discuss what qualifies as a strong opening hook. Should I continue? It would be more productive if folks like yourself didn't try and claim that only their /your accepted definition of Mary Sue was worthy of consideration. By the way, I would argue more than a few of the posts in this thread we're both insightful and productive. I bet even you liked my Alfred post... Be honest.
I'm going to bow out of this conversation now. It's gotten really complicated and intense and I'm no good in situations like this. Good luck, y'all!
