crying males: “disney is destroying star wars with female leads”
“rogue one also has a female lead? ugh”
“great another mary sue”
me:
I don’t mind if Star Wars has a female lead, as the Star Wars franchise has always been home to strong female characters, I do care if she is another giant Mary Sue like Rey was. Rey was so Mary Sue that it became distracting to the movie. A character with no force training takes down a trained Sith Knight, she flies a freighter designed for two pilots with no help despite the fact she had never left the planet before, and she can also repair said ship with no problem because she had spent years salvaging parts off of a broken star destroyer? The only thing she didn’t do was have all of the male characters try to romance her at once and I thank the force for that small concession.
The only good new character in episode 7 was Finn. The rest of the characterization fell flat or was just used to make Rey ascend to Mary Suedom.
anakin built the worlds fastest pod racer and c3po when he was nine
the first time luke flew a spaceship he destroyed the fucking death star.
Kylo Ren: Not a Sith. Not fully trained. Also? Injured by a bowcaster that we’d seen could take out several stormtroopers at a time.
Rey: Literally spent all of her downtime flying a flight simulator to the point that it could no longer throw anything at her she couldn’t handle. For all kinds of ships. Nor did she solely scavenge star destroyers. She spent her entire life scavenging every imaginable wreck on Jakku, and her survival depended on her learning what ships had what parts and what was valuable. This, while competing with other scavengers, most of them working in teams.
Which meant she had to learn how to fight, or else she wouldn’t have gotten out of childhood.
Basically, Rey had way more in-canon reasoning to be as good as she was than Luke Skywalker did–who basically went from never flying much out of atmo to piloting an X-wing under combat conditions and rocking it… apparently just because of genetics and the Force. Who then went on, only half-trained, into a fight that even YODA thought he was going to die in, and survived, against a man literally birthed by the Force, trained as both a Jedi AND a Sith, with about 25 years of combat experience under his belt, whereas Luke had had a lightsaber for about 3 years. What a Mary Sue he was, huh?
Rey had more reason to be what she was than Anakin Skywalker, who accidentally wound up in a fighter and accidentally destroyed a droid ship. Anakin who was such a Mary Sue he was LITERALLY A VIRGIN BIRTH. How Mary Sue is THAT?
The creators, in short, HAD TO GIVE REASONS for every single thing Rey knew how to do, because of assholes like this person, who would take any special skill she had as proof that she was a “Mary Sue” just because she was a female character. No one bothered to give those reasons to Luke or Anakin. Because they’re the hero. OF COURSE they can do the impossible. But Rey? Jesus, what a Mary Sue.
Reblogged for excellent commentary.
(I’d thought the Rey-hating twerp up there was like sixteen, in which case I’d cut them some slack, but nope turns out they’re in their 40s.)
On top of all that, with a single exception, all of Rey’s extraordinary feats are stuff we explicitly see folks with no Force training do in the original trilogy.
Pulling a lightsabre to her hand? Luke did it before he ever met Yoda. Granted, Luke had a visibly harder time of it, but as he was concussed and suffering from mild hypothermia at the time, he jolly well should have.
Firing ranged weapons with uncanny accuracy? Luke again, in his famous trench run – and again, he was untrained at the time.
Resisting mental manipulation? Freaking Jabba the Hutt pulled that one off, and not only is he not trained as a Force-user, as far as we know he’s not even Force sensitive.
(Yes, the EU tries to wave that last one away by asserting that all members of Jabba’s species are naturally immune to mind control, but come on – that’s the same EU lore that insists that Rodians are literally a culture of bounty hunters because the single Rodian we see on-screen is a bounty hunter.)
Of course, there is one exception – one feat of Force manipulation that we’ve never seen an untrained wielder pull off before: Jedi mind tricking the First Order storm trooper. You know, a brainwashed child soldier conditioned nearly from birth to display reflexive and unthinking obedience to authority – the writers could scarcely have given her an easier target.
In sum, the stunts Rey pulls off are entirely within the demonstrable capabilities of an untrained Force user. You’d think these jokers had never seen the original films!
