INCOMING STAR WARS RANT. If you have no interest in such things, just keep on scrolling. Spoilers below, obviously.
So there’s been plenty of folk calling out Rey of The Force Awakens as a ‘Mary Sue’ character, having skills and abilities far exceeding what she should be capable of. Others coming out trying to defend her abilities as using the force. The common answer being:
Originally posted by fourlights
AND the rebuttal to that usually along the lines of citing how Luke and Annakin did incredible things on their first try as well. WELP, I cannot let such things being said go uncontested so I’m about to lay shit down. Put on your nerd pants, kids. It’s about to get nit-picky.
Luke Skywalker blocks lasers:
People are quick to say that Luke’s exceptional use of the force allowed him to block the lasers from the training droid on his first try. You know… except he didn’t. Remember that part in the film? Luke had been training directly under Obi Wan to learn to do that. Moreover, he had failed so many times that he was getting incredibly frustrated with the process. He wasn’t just instantly good at it. He was training and had an epiphany moment, capturing the force in a brief moment that solidified his belief that he could one day be a great jedi.
Luke destroys the Death Star:
So, how was Luke able to stage an assault on the Death Star on a ship he has never flown and shoot such a tiny target? Well, if you listened closely it was pretty clearly explained. Luke WAS an experienced pilot. In fact, he and his friend Biggs would shoot Womp Rats in Beggars Canyon in their T-16s. What is a T-16, you ask? Well, if you look into the expanded text, you find that the T-16 is a high-speed, high-maneuverability ship which was often used as a training ship by the Rebel Alliance due to it’s similar controls and handling to the, you guessed it, X-Wing. Luke wasn’t an inexperienced pilot. He was an EXCEPTIONAL pilot who was preparing to take the Imperial Exams and he practiced by flying through a canyon (not unlike a trench, but windier) and shooting womp rats (which are no bigger than the target they’re already trying to hit). With his extensive talent, he could have made that shot even without the force- but the force certainly helped.
Anakin wins the Boonta Eve Classic:
So how did Anakin win the Pod Race despite never actually completing the race? Well, do you remember that race? The one that Anakin won? 14 racers entered into that race, all professional drivers and do you remember how many of THEM crossed the finish line? Oh yeah, NONE OF THEM! Pod racing isn’t like Nascar where not finishing the race means you’re a bad driver. Not finishing the race is possibly the NORM. In some cases, not finishing just means you didn’t win because the majority of racers are destroyed in the process. The fact that Anakin didn’t DIE from one of his attempts to race is already a great tribute to his skills and developing talent in the force, something he’d been working on for some time.
Anakin destroys the Trade Federation Battleship:
Well, if the force didn’t give you automatic talents, then how did Anakin destroy the Trade Federation Lucrehulk-class Battleship? Well, do you remember that sequence? Because I sure do. If you recall, for the first large portion of that fight, Anakin wasn’t even FLYING the ship. It was on autopilot. That’s how he got up into space and in the battle in the first place. When Anakin finally got control of the ship, he wasn’t an exceptional pilot. He was just flipping around the controls and doing wild spins and dips. His crash into the landing bay of the Battleship wasn’t even intentional. He basically just happened upon everything by CHANCE, crashing inside the bowels of the ship which then disabled his Naboo fighter. He did use some of his established technical knowledge to get the ship back up and running but used no exceptional skill to to just hover his ship, fire at the conveniently placed generators and then escape (possibly even with the use of the autopilot again).
So, in the defense of the original character’s abilities, does that mean that Rey is a Mary Sue that is automatically good at everything she tries? NO! Not at all! Lets break things down with Rey so we can understand how she is equally as justified in most everything she does. To begin, you must understand what Rey is. She’s a scavenger living on a hostile planet. She’s no stranger to having to defend herself and she’s expert at identifying and removing valuable starship parts. Furthermore, working with a trader’s outpost, it makes perfect sense that she would be fluent in various interstellar languages and understanding astromech droids.
So how does that match up with what Rey does? It matches up rather well, actually. Rey doesn’t just hold that staff for decorative purposes, she knows how to fight so her being able to beat up a former storm trooper (who’s primary training is with blasters) holds up. Furthermore, her knowledge of the internal mechanisms of ships would hold to reason that she would be more than capable of identifying mechanical problems with a ship and repairing them. Even more, the way she speaks so familiarly of the Millennium Falcon, it sounds like she’s worked on the thing before. When given a blaster, she says she knows how to use it but if you recall, she wasn’t particularly good with it either. She missed a lot of shots. Again, this all holds up since she’s probably familiar with blasters but her primary weapon was always the staff so she wasn’t really that great with it.
When Rey gets to using the force, her progress is phenomenal but at the same time, it doesn’t just automatically come to her all at once. She has to test her powers, figure things out, even her first few attempts at the mind trick are unsuccessful but, as we recall from Luke pulling the lightsaber to himself in the Wompa cave, when the chips are down and you really focus, the force answers the call. This manifests again when Rey pulls the lightsaber to herself in the final fight. Some would cry foul that she suddenly became better than Kylo Ren but you have to remember that Kylo had just taken a Bowcaster blast to the chest. He wasn’t exactly 100%. From the way he was thumping his chest, it was entirely possible that his heart was actually STOPPING during that fight but he was too badass to let something like a mortal wound stop him. Still, Rey was able to use her combat skills from staff fighting and translate them, if a little unsuccessfully at first, into lightsabre combat. So everything there holds up too.
So that brings us to the final thing. The final thing that actually really bugs me. The thing that makes me have to begrudgingly admit that, in some small context, they made Rey unrealistically good (I like that a lot more than saying ‘Mary Sue’ which is pretty sexist).
How is Rey such a good pilot? She clearly didn’t have a ship before. She wasn’t training to be a pilot or a racer or anything like that. How is Rey such a good pilot? HOW THE FUCK IS SHE SUCH A GOOD PILOT?