Is Star Trek supposed to be about dudes?
ETA: and five bucks says [Piper] still wasn't as hypercompetent as Kirk. ETA2: who very much seems like a Roddenberry self-insert.
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anyone else bored/frustrated by all the "Mary Sue" debates?
- Thread starter Phil123
- Start date
Is Star Trek supposed to be about dudes?
ETA: and five bucks says [Piper] still wasn't as hypercompetent as Kirk. ETA2: who very much seems like a Roddenberry self-insert.
I am for one. As I watched a couple of Youtube videos on the subject just to find out what it even meant, and now every time I load the app up the first thing I see is my recommendations, half of which are geeks in their bedrooms moaning their faces off, with crazy OTT titles like "THIS is why Star Trek Discovery sucks!" "Michael Burnham pisses all over Star Trek fanchise!" etc etc
And I'm pretty meh about DIS, but good god calm down.
And I'm pretty meh about DIS, but good god calm down.
Then how about we settle on Wesley being an idealised version of GRs' younger self, either the person his teenage counterpart wanted to be, or the person he wished his teenage counterpart had been?
I'll happily dodge the thirteen page squabble over whether that fits the definition
M
marlboro
Guest
What are you talking about? Of course I'm... umm...I mean HE is way more hypercompetent than Kirk. Better looking, too.
Or maybe you could use your big boy words and expand on which part of your comment below supposedly went over my head (and apparently the heads of several other people who had a similar take on it).
"Female characters/protagonists are not a new thing, and this conversation never came up until recently when 'females' in fiction mean less actual characters and merely pandering (see: "representation") or pushing a very obvious agenda. And in these cases, it needs to be discussed and openly criticized."
Oh right, I was talking about Piper. Didn't make that clear.
Seems like this is more general fandom navel-gazing than anything Trek-specific. That said, I'm at a loss as to which other forum it would go in.
People seem to really generalize the characters to make them seem comparable. But Luke got his hand chopped off, still struggled despite training, nearly turned to the dark side flying into a rage against vader, and Han Solo / Obi Wan both upstaged him in the first movie. Meanwhile Rey is like a checklist of every cool thing that could happen to a person in the star wars universe. If a fan fiction author wrote themselves into the fantasy of being in star wars and then having all the cool stuff unlock, that would be it right there.
^ That's one vote for SF&F.
Well, that's all kinds of wrong.
A) We're still debating whether Wesley is even technically a Gary Stu, right here in this thread, in case you hadn't noticed.
B) While people might not share the opinion, basically nobody has a "problem" with anybody not liking either Wesley, Michael, Rey, etc.
C) People do tend to disagree with the label Mary Sue being applied to Michael or Rey, when they believe that the labels don't apply, and in that case that will spark debate.
When Burnham turns into a literal god-being who can travel across the galaxy without a ship and freeze time instead of just being pretty good at stuff in a way that's not at all unusual for many Trek characters I'll take your comparison to Wesley more seriously.
Condescension does not promote a good faith discussion. If there is an honest "sinister agenda" at work (thus far the evidence is open to interpretation) then please present it. Otherwise, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Yes, obviously I would write my character who was abandoned by my parents and forced to scrape to survive. Give me Luke's journey over Rey for my idealized self.
Not even close to accurate.
I don't agree. Luke was a sheltered farmboy who drove the equivalent of a tractor and then, two days later, saves the galaxy in a fighter jet. If that is plausible, so is Rey, who actually crashes the Falcon into another building and basically hands the First Order to Kylo.
Also, SW is a fantasy saga about space wizards. You're really gonna apply realism to one idealised and super-powered character but not the other? Seems illogical to me.
That pretty much sums up every new term that has come about in the last handful of years on the Internet. Anything can mean anything these days because nobody knows where someone is coming from in any particular argument. One persons view of a Mary Sue is different than the other. It's kind of hard to keep track of millions of individual definitions people are working with these days on almost any subject. We truly are living in a bubble of one in the modern age instead of having many universal truths that we all agree with and then argue from that point onward anymore.
Jason
I mean Luke had his own issues with his uncle being killed and his father helping to blow up planets... Either way I'd take the journey where I'm awesome at everything.
So you're saying these characters are just as plausible and even if we admit there's a difference it doesn't matter because it's space wizards anything goes. That's a fine viewpoint I can see it that way but I can also look another perspective where we consider the differences and get where that's coming from. It seems like people dislike the term itself so they take a stand on this character. Why not take a stand when it's used on a character with flaws that can't be described as a self insert
All I'm saying is that if you defend one implausible, super-powered character and not the other, it's not because one is a Sue. It's because you (not you personally; a hypothetical "you") like one of them. If we were to approach this objectively, we could find pros and cons for both of them. All things being equal, it makes no sense to call Rey a Sue but not Luke, as you can justify both characters' skills and levels of power equally well. What works for one works for the other, and main characters in SW have not ever been plausible when it came to what they managed to accomplish - not Luke, not Anakin (Space Jesus), not Rey. Seeing as the farmboy who shouldn't be able to save the galaxy like he did does not get the treatment, but the woman who spent her whole life surviving under rough conditions and making a living by knowing how ships work does...well, it becomes obvious that this isn't about character flaws at all. It's about dismissing one with a term that has lost all meaning - for one specific reason. It happens way too often, and the over-the-top derision is almost always directed at female characters who - I repeat - are seldom better qualified than their male counterparts. Why do you think that is?
If it were being used in equal measure, that would be okay. That, however, is not the case.
I just used SW as an example because, well, it's a thing that's been happening ever since TFA. Burnham is the same. She isn't perfect. She doesn't know everything. She isn't always the POV character. She even screwed up on a cosmic level once. But she gets the treatment. Spock, who basically knows everything, doesn't. Kirk, who was super young when he became a captain, who keeps saving the galaxy and who scores with all the alien babes, doesn't. The term applies to none of them, but she gets it thrown at her anyway. It has nothing to do with her character being a self-insert or perfect or whatever. She is none of those things. None of them are. They are protagonists, super competent, sympathetic, but not perfect. That's the entire point, and I'm just so tired of this happening all the time. People can like a character or not, but they should reflect on their reasons for doing so. In the end, they may not like what they find.
If it were being used in equal measure, that would be okay. That, however, is not the case.
I just used SW as an example because, well, it's a thing that's been happening ever since TFA. Burnham is the same. She isn't perfect. She doesn't know everything. She isn't always the POV character. She even screwed up on a cosmic level once. But she gets the treatment. Spock, who basically knows everything, doesn't. Kirk, who was super young when he became a captain, who keeps saving the galaxy and who scores with all the alien babes, doesn't. The term applies to none of them, but she gets it thrown at her anyway. It has nothing to do with her character being a self-insert or perfect or whatever. She is none of those things. None of them are. They are protagonists, super competent, sympathetic, but not perfect. That's the entire point, and I'm just so tired of this happening all the time. People can like a character or not, but they should reflect on their reasons for doing so. In the end, they may not like what they find.
No. "Upstaged" does not mean what you seem to think it means.
How did Rey get off of Starkiller Base? All by herself, right? Oh, no, wait, she didn't! Rey needed Finn to be thinking of her, to get a ship there to get her out. That's not her getting "upstaged," either, by the way.
That's exactly how DSC feels to me. I know I didn't use your whole quote but that is perfect.
C'mon. Everyone knows that Lucy was not nearly as cool as Hannah Solo . . ..
But even she pales in comparison to the seductive charm of Linda Calrissian.
Don't forget the brilliant fatherly leadership of Don Mothma and the wisdom of Jen Kenobi.
But perhaps we can all agree that Zsa Zsa Binks was a mistake.
Also, I'm still a little hazy on how Steve Skywalker gave birth to Anita.