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My warning is going to look really silly when I come back to read this post in five years from now.
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So let's talk about 'Mary Sue'. There have been people online who are claiming that the new heroine in the seventh Star Wars movie, Rey, is in some way far more of an unrealistic 'everything goes right and everyone loves her immediately' figure than, say, Luke Skywalker, or Anakin Skywalker in the prequels.
I contest this, and want to present a comparison of Luke Skywalker in the very first Star Wars movie to Rey of Star Wars 7 as proof.
- Luke started out as a sheltered farm boy, his uncle trying to keep him from all notions of adventure and struggle, hoping to make him want to stay on the farm forever.
- Rey started out scavenging for a subsistence living. She had to defend herself, she had to make her own living space, and she had to deal with a rough crowd. She protested at what little she got for the stuff she brought in, but she had no ability to negotiate, and her feeble attempt was easily rebuffed.
- When Luke found out that he was Force-sensitive and that the only parental figures he'd ever known were murdered and his home destroyed, he took a moment in grief and sadness and then chose to go with Kenobi and learn to be a Jedi.
- When Rey found out that she was Force-sensitive and was confronted with the knowledge that her family would never come back for her, she burst into tears and ran away.
- Luke got given a one-handed blaster - granted, we know he already knew how to use some sort of two-handed desert rifle thingy. He immediately got a near-perfect hit score with it from the start, and picked off stormtroopers and other targets with ease. He had no experience with a lightsaber or anything like it, yet he was passable with it from the start and, upon one iteration of Obi-Wan telling him to 'stretch out with his feelings', was able to pull a complex move out of nothingness (the Force) and could 'almost see the remote' despite fighting blind. He also picked up the Falcon ship guns remarkably quickly.
- Rey got given a blaster, had to be taught how to use it, forgot to take the safety off when she first tried, her first shots were laughably bad, and it took her several encounters of fighting for her life before she started managing some sort of accuracy with the thing. When she got the lightsaber, she tried to use it like a spear/staff, and was finally able to pull a complex move out of nothingness (the Force) when upon the very point of death. She managed, *barely*, to temporarily take down an already doubly-wounded foe once before they were separated by explodium.
- Luke was able, within hours of spending time with Kenobi, to utterly master the "hearing the voice of your mentor from beyond the grave" knack, which was something Yoda had given Kenobi to study and learn how to do over the eighteen or so years that he was going to spend in near-complete isolation on Tatooine. Never mind simply reaching to the Force; Luke was receiving instruction straight from his master. He was the one who took out the Death Star with one Force-placed shot.
- After a period of time of direct Force manipulation on her brain (not verbal instructions trying to describe a very subjective task), Rey was able to learn-while-doing how to pull back and catch Ren unawares. After that, she managed after something like *three or four* totally unsuccessful tries to turn a Stormtrooper - the very definition of the 'weak-minded' and basically the easiest possible prey - into doing her will for about half a minute. Look at her face when she's trying to escape and when she runs into her friends. She was terrified that her tenuous grasp on the situation would fail at any time. She had nothing to do with the destruction of the Starkiller. She didn't even know it was something to be destroyed.
- Luke was able to ferry Leia across a chasm with a fancy belt grapple.
- Rey couldn't even carry Finn back to the ship; she had to get Chewbacca to do it.
- Luke climbed into an X-Wing with nothing but planet-based bush pilot experience and Force sensitivity and mastered it immediately. He already knew how to clean and fix up droids, and was giving R2 instructions on the fly on how to keep the damaged X-Wing going.
- Rey ran into the Falcon, which she had obviously worked with and worked on in the past, with planet-based bush pilot experience and Force sensitivity, and made several very rough starts and mistakes before getting a handle on how to maneuver the darn thing, while complaining about the lack of copilot. Then, on Solo's ship, she shorted out the *wrong* group of circuits and set the xenomorph-like creatures all loose. Whoops.
- Luke's very first encounter with the Bad Guys resulted in him making a plan to rescue the Princess, coaxing a reluctant smuggler to help, and pulling it off more or less.
- Rey's very first encounter meant managing to temporarily successfully run away, nearly getting the ship destroyed in the process. Then she was instantly utterly helpless in the face of Kylo Ren, who held her in place and then dropped her *easily*. Finally, she barely managed to escape with the help of her friends.
And yet she's the Mary Sue.
(By the way, do you want to know where the inspiration for Rey's outfit came from? There was a time when Lucas considered making Luke into a girl. The concept sketches were reused for Rey, just as a set of rejected concept sketches for R2D2 were used for BB8.)
I'm tired of female characters constantly having to ride that line between Helpless Flower and Mary Sue. Padme wasn't a Mary Sue? What about Uhura? Zoe? Delenn? Susan Ivanova? Andromeda Ascendant? Cortana? For that matter, what about Galadriel? Amalthea? Kira?
I was watching the CinemaSins "Everything Wrong With" videos for a while, until I got sick and tired of a consistent theme. They 'sin' a movie for a coincidence that makes the movie possible, and then they 'sin' the movie again for making an attempt fail until it succeeds. Folks, there are a million alternate universes where She walks into any coffee shop but His... but the one in which She walked into His is the one in which the story exists. There were no doubt dozens of girls who tried to grow up as scavengers on a desert planet and died young; this is the story about the one who lived. No doubt many women joined the Resistance and died in their first firefight; this is about the one who didn't. There are plenty of Force-sensitive people who cannot adapt to danger quickly enough and are snuffed out early; this is about the one who made it.
That's what stories *are*!
