That will teach them...come on. We all can be better than this.
Is (guess who) a (insert something) Sue? (Spoilers)
- Thread starter Spot261
- Start date
Sorry, no.
I hope its worth it then.
Well, in making that observation, you were indeed being deliberately disingenuous, boiling down my entire post to literally just one tiny part of it. That was honest? Clearly I don't actually think that a character simply speaking droid makes someone a "mary sue." Ergo, what you said was not true.
Hey, I was LITERALLY called a liar by @Grendelsbayne even though 90% of my post was just literally list a series of facts.
I'm not one of "these people", whoever they are.
But I also find it interesting that no one has actually tried to engage with my post's actual content. I'd be delighted if someone actually had a counter argument or any kind of thought in their head to offer.
Instead, we've degenerated into sniping and name calling.
Wonder why?
Your post was destroyed and also ripped to shreds piece by piece. You just chose to ignore that.
Oh, no, I didn't ignore it. I read the post. It brought me a good laugh. And I refuted a couple of its dumber assertions already.
Care to try again?
Since I didn't say that was your whole argument I didn't misrepresent anything.
No, it was an interpretation of on screen events, not facts. Grendel happened to disagree.
I don't agree either but making the same points is a fruitless endeavor. No one's mind will be changed and no knew information gained.
More's the pity.
90% of my post was a list of facts. I listed things that happened in both movies and then I drew a conclusion.
You can't argue with the facts (they actually happened!) and the conclusion is a matter of opinion. Neither makes me a liar.
This
And I didn't say you were a liar. So, we can put that to rest.
...is not a fact. It is interpretation.
And I didn't say you were a liar. So, we can put that to rest.
It's objectively true that she flies the Falcon like a pro. How is the up for debate? She doesn't crash the ship, she doesn't run into anything, she doesn't make any mistakes. Yes, it's frantic and frenzied and she's flying by the seat of her pants a bit, but there's zip about how Rey handles the Falcon in that scene than in anything we've seen Han do previously.
Later, there is a problem with the ship. Han is flummoxed. Rey quickly fixes it. This is the ONE counter argument that I can kind of buy into, as Rey specifically has tinkered on the Falcon under Unkar Plutt and Han would be ignorant of those modifications.
What? During the Jakku fight Rey is running the Falcon into everything and is the furthest definition from "flying like a pro" possible. But, you know, continue whining about Rey because she's a woman. Who cares about facts?
Sure. You nailed it. That's me to a T.
Apparently, no one since no one is responding to the substance of my post.
She does crash in to things, she is constantly course correcting and she does have issues.
Same could be said about Lando in ROTJ. I don't see any objections there.
That doesn't make her "a pro" or better than Han. She flies the ship once, and survives. Han then proceeds to do crazier stunts later in the film.
You answered your own question. Han even notes it in dialog that "someone" put a compressor which "puts too much pressure on the hyperdrive." It is a modification he wasn't aware so, and so couldn't compensate for. Rey puts her salvaging knowledge to work by removing one part that Han had not put in there. So, no, she doesn't "fix the Falcon better than Han."
She didn't fix anything. She recognized a part that was causing a problem and pulled it out. No skill involved other than recognizing what was causing the problem.
When there's a deleted scene showing Rey slaving over the circuitry and inner workings of the Falcon with a hydrospanner and a pair of goggles then I'll say she repaired the ship as well as Han could.
When there's a deleted scene showing Rey slaving over the circuitry and inner workings of the Falcon with a hydrospanner and a pair of goggles then I'll say she repaired the ship as well as Han could.
So, she's not allowed to get irritated when people offer to help? Because I know a lot of people (myself included) who get irritated by that.
She has grown up around starships, pulling them apart and learning what the parts are valuable for scrap. She has to fight in order to survive, as demonstrated by fighting with Teedo over scrap and taking down Unkar's thugs. She speaks different languages because Nima Outpost is shown to be a hodge podge of species.
All of these skills make perfect sense in the contest of how she grew up.
Addressed. She knows one part. She doesn't do anything else and Han asks Chewie to fix it. Oh, and Chewie was shot when she addressed the problem.
So, what...? She should wait around to be rescued? That sounds weirdly like damsel in distress. Also, this presupposes she can know her friends are going to try to rescue her when Rey has no reason to expect anyone to come back for her.
So does Anakin. She knows the mindtrick is possible because Kylo is probing her mind. She is able to see things inside his mind as he looks in to hers.
The Force doesn't just require training. Both Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon state "uses your instincts" without any other context to their proteges. Works out for them.
She is not a lightsaber expert. She beats a wounded Kylo who is demonstrated to be conflicted and unable to access his full power. And, her combat ability has already been demonstrated. She is not proficient, and her form is reminiscent of using a staff. It isn't expert by any stretch of the imagination.
All of this is generalization of her skills and misses the context, both of why she would know many of these skills, and the fact that she demonstrates ability like Anakin and Luke did.
Did this persuade you? Probably not, but there you go.
ETA:
That's what I get for posting a long post. Well put.
It’s just because they can do more with the special effects than back during the original trilogy, but even then there was a gradual increase in what they could film as ILM got more experimental. You even see Han do more in Solo than in previous films. It’s less about Rey and more about showing the Falcon doing cool shit that we’ve never seen before.
Rey explicitly says in the Last Jedi she 'believed in that old legend of Luke Skywalker'.
Pure bs. Not everyone deigns to speak with droids but almost no one has ever demonstrated a clear inability to understand them.
I don't remember Han and Lando ever bouncing off walls over and over again. It is a *fact* that her skills are nowhere near expert. She couldn't even *lift off the ground* straight and level. She almost crashed in literally a few seconds. Calling that 'expert piloting' is idiotic.
Oh, 'other than the scene where she obviously uses bad judgement, she never uses bad judgement'. Sure, that argument's not dishonest. A scene doesn't cease to be part of her characterization just because you think it's shitty writing. Hell, you apparently think *all* of it's shitty writing, so that would seem to disqualify everything.
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Plus it gives Rey a cute scene the audience can laugh about so as to further endear her character to the people watching. It builds the trust between Han and Rey because her scavenging skills helped fix a problem with the Falcon and gives the audience a moment to smile after the sequence wherein Rey, Finn and BB-8 flee from Jakku and believe they're about to be captured by the First Order.
In short: it isn't a Mary Sue moment for her as much as it is a "now Han trusts her with his ship" moment that gives Harrison Ford some funny dialogue and shows that she's going to be more than just an annoyance and an unwanted passenger on the journey to Takodana.
In short: it isn't a Mary Sue moment for her as much as it is a "now Han trusts her with his ship" moment that gives Harrison Ford some funny dialogue and shows that she's going to be more than just an annoyance and an unwanted passenger on the journey to Takodana.
You're ignoring over half of my point. Rey has a laundry list of special skills, some of which are justified, some of which are objectively not.
But what she lacks is far more important and far more of the problem. It's not just that Rey acts "annoyed" when Finn tries to help her. It's that she never needs help. Ever. There is nothing she can't do, the movie throws a hundred problems at her and she succeeds at them every single time.
That's not what makes a hero. That's not what makes a compelling protagonist. Protagonists should fail, they should be tested. They should fuck up. Luke fucks up constantly in the first SW movie. He needs to be rescued constantly. He's in over his head. He comes up with bad ideas and barely gets away by the skin of his teeth. This doesn't make him weak. He's a small town kid thrust into a large galaxy and a massive war. This endears us to him and it makes his final triumph all the more impressive and satisfying.
He's far from the only movie character to have this issue. Look at a character like Indiana Jones. He's undeniably competent and possessing of special skills and knowledge. He's larger than life and heroic. But he also fails throughout the movie, gets beat up, suffers huge setbacks and ultimately only eeks out a pyrric victory in the end thanks to literal divine intervention.
Rey never has ANY moments like that which humanize her. You mention "damsel in distress." They were clearly so afraid of making Rey look "weak" and look like she needed to be rescued that they overcorrected and gave us a hypercompetent hero. This isn't actually good writing and it's not what makes "strong female characters" or strong characters. One dimensionalism isn't interesting. Flawlessness isn't interesting. There's actually nothing wrong with having your hero, male or female, need to be rescued once in a while.
Real characters should be fleshed out and allowed to show glimmers of humanity, even our larger than life heroes. But making someone who can waltz into any situation and kick ass all of the time -- that's the opposite of drama. It's just plain bad writing.