I'm slightly amused to see that the big controversy around the release of the new Star Wars: Force Awakens movie is that the central heroine turns out to be somewhat of a Mary-Sue. Having now seen the movie, I have to admit there is a Mary-Sue problem with the script. However, I think that this problem needs very careful contextualization.
Though I should have known, I was not aware that the term "Mary-Sue" seems to come with all sorts of gender related problems. As might well be typical, the term is applied to female characters where the same behavior in male characters is overlooked. It's very likely this is the case, and many people have pointed out that in all likeliness, Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker are Marty-Stu's.
It's senseless to argue discuss Anakin Skywalker. An awful and unlikable character from the start, talking about a particular character flaw would be like talking about engine design flaws on the Titanic.
Luke Skywalker is more interesting. For virtually all intents and purposes, Luke Skywalker is indeed as much a Marty-Stu as Rey is a Mary-Sue, except in certain specific dimensions. It is that specific dimension that bothers me about the Rey character, and in truth, all the other Mary-Sue like properties are not very significant and detract from a given Star Wars episode. As the Luke comparisons point out, they are part and parcel of Star Wars nostalgia, which is more or less the central mechanism driving Force Awakens.
It's a bit far fetched that Rey is all the things she ends up being in the film, with only a few really standing out. I can accept that she is a good pilot, as piloting, like driving in the modern day US, is an essential skill. She's smart, tenacious and obviously has more than a touch of Force, so ok, she's a fabulous pilot, just like Luke the wamp-rat shooting hick was. Less likely given that she had never left her planet, is that she could fix the same hyperdrive that flummoxed Han and Chewy in Empire Strikes Back. In all these are minor plot devices, and I don't care about them very much.
The main problem with Rey's character in Force Awakens is that she did in fact demonstrate the tell-tale instant skill knowledge that Mary-Sue's are renowned for. These bothered me I suppose the most:
- Jedi Mind Trick: How did she even know about the Jedi Mind Trick? I think that's ok, the Jedi legend is established as well known, so she probably knows how it's supposed to work, just like we know from having watched older movies. But presumably it's not something you get on the first try.
- Force pull: It's not so much of a problem that she knew how to do the force pull, because Luke pulled it off the first time out of nowhere when under stress by an impending Wampa attack. However, Luke was not competing for that saber against the force pull of another well trained Jedi.
- Light saber fighting: This was the hardest to believe. In fact, Rey's performance was not the only performance that was unbelievable. Finn also fought against a real-live Jedi and lasted more than just a few seconds. This in many ways is even less believable than Rey's fight, because Finn is an actual storm trooper! The entire Star Wars franchise is predicated on Jedi's wending their way through throngs of storm troopers. Under normal circumstances the Internet should be all abustle if a Jedi had even given a storm trooper their full undivided attention.
Jedi Mind Trick/Force Pull
One of the things I liked about the first Star Wars (episode 4) was that the force was not fully established, even in the minds of the viewers, as a real thing with crackling blue glows and talking ghosts. This wasn't established until Empire Strikes Back. Until then, all the interaction we see around the force really doesn't seem much more than magician tricks. In other words they are all clearly meant to be real but still dismissible by skeptics.
I like the expression "incidental magic". It comes from my D&D days, where some settings required magic to look like they were not supernatural. These days the use of magic in fantasy settings usually involves a lot of pyrotechnica. Fire shoots from finger tips, eyes glow and animated skeletons rise from graveyards. In a world of incidental magic, you cause a black cat to walk out in front of somebody and then 20 minutes later a tree falls on them. It looks like an unrelated coincidence which remains uncovered until you do a large scale statistical negatively correlating life expectancy with cat-path-crossing.
Obviously, Rey is some big Force Honcho. Not a problem. In fact, she's probably Luke Skywalker's daughter, or part of some other high-force relation that will be contrived and revealed to use later on. Maybe she's as powerful as Luke Skywalker. Maybe she's even more powerful! Fine and good. But she still has no training. Yes, demonstrate more quick learning than Skywalker. Maybe even do an isolated, unobserved force pull. However, in every situation she deploys the force she does so at apparent full strength.
Believable is a Jedi master insinuating to someone that these specific droids, among all the shrillions of droids seen today, are not the droids you're looking for. Less believable is a captive newbie convincing her gaoler to not only release her but relinquish his weapon to her.
The light saber fight
The plausibility of the light saber fight was meant to be given credibility by the fact that Han Solo Jr. was injured by a laser blast before the fight. Far be it from me to know what kind of trauma comes from a laster blast, and I assure you, if I ever suffered one I would indeed be out of the action for the duration of the film. But in movies, wounds are almost never enough to keep a big badass down. People get shot all the time and all they do is grimace. It happens in Return of the Jedi, when Leia is shot in the arm. This doesn't prevent her from deftly quick drawing and gunning down trained military personnel.
Besides Han Solo Jr. is a trained dark Jedi. If he feels like he can stand and fight, he feels confident enough that he can use the force to slice up his (nearly) entirely untrained opponents. I know that if it were me against a wounded Green Beret I would not like those odds very much, no matter how much force juice I was born with.
But when it comes to Rey, not only does she have Han Solo Jr.'s full attention, not only does she stand against him for minutes (minutes!) she defeats him in single combat.
Having Rey stand up against Han Solo Jr. in a lightsaber fight is certainly not unbelievable unto itself. We already know that Rey knows how to fight with a stick. The fact of the saber fight is not problematic. The fact that he defeats him, wounded or no it was bothers. It bothers because it's not realistic (as much as one can make arguments toward realism in a movie about space magicians). But more importantly it bothers on a narrative level.
The stand off between Kenobi and Vadar was narratively satisfying because it was student vs. the master, and the bad guy was denied resolution by Kenobi deliberately losing.
The stand off between Luke and Vadar was narratively satisfying because Luke was defeated. It gave us something to look forward to in the next episode, mainly Luke making a come-back.
Here, in the first episode of the new series, the bad guy was defeated. What do we have to look forward to? A brooding Rey coming back and kicking his ass again if he doesn't stay down? A much better narrative would have been if Rey had merely escaped from Han Solo Jr. In this narrative, she demonstrates her forceness, which we accept as being even stronger than Skywalker, by even going toe-to-toe with an albeit wounded dark Jedi. She is neither killed nor captured. And saves poor old Finns butt. Even though she is defeated by Han Solo Jr. she really wins by not being captured. She loses the battle but wins the war. Yay, much more satisfying.
The term Mary-Sue is not helpful
Even though Rey is a Mary-Sue, the term is really not helpful. For one, it is, whether those who are using it want it to be or not, covered in all sorts of gender issues which in my view are valid ones. The criticisms about Rey's characters are not about her sex. It is about lame narrative in the Star Wars story telling universe. So, don't make it about gender. Avoid this term, whether you knew it's implications, or like me did not, so that it doesn't have to become about gender. This is especially true because given previous Star Wars narratives that the collective we did like, we really want our hero(in)es to be a little bit M-S. Let's try to keep that in mind.
In all honesty, Rey is a perfectly good character in light of the horrors visited upon us by the age of prequel madness. She's tough and a little brooding and heroic. Hopefully she will be less perfect in future episodes. It also looks like they went out of their way to avoid the usual female character tropes. I like the character of Rey as much as I can in this imperfect new generation of Star Wars movies. Comparisons between Rey and midi-chlorians are a false. Rey's character model has flaws. Actions assigned to her sometimes violate good narrative and many of our expectations about the Star Wars universe. But it does not introduce fundamental ideas in to canon that ruin ALL the narratives.
Move on to the next Star Wars
I recently saw an interview where George Lucas complained that the new Star Wars was too retro. I know precisely what he means by that. It should have been expected that a Disney movie would trade on too many of the old devices and sentiments of the original series. His complaint was accompanied by a reminder that he is the father of the Star Wars universe. Unfortunately, his complaint seems more like ones coming from an abusive parent aimed at their child's foster parents. Better would have been good narrative coupled with originality that still meshed well with the original series. However, we'll take this bland spiritual repetition that Disney is handing out over the what we had to endure during the prequels.
So, nice one Daisy, and we'll see you and Rey next episode.
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