Yes, but my point stands.  You said she was "less of a Mary Sue" than Luke.  Luke had one important talent.  Rey has many.

And Rey is better than Luke at flying.  Luke didn't really outfly anyone during the Death Star attack.  He's no Poe Dameron!  He was part of the group and took the last torpedo run, but it was not like he was portrayed as an ace out there.  And Luke has air-vehicle flying experience--he wasn't bullseyeing womprats back in Beggar's Canyon in a landspeeder!

Rey, on the otherhand, outflew TIE fighters with a FREIGHTER whilst having NO demonstrable flying experience, and no reason to believe from her backstory that she would have had any (I'm just a scavenger scraping by, but every so often the stingy gang-boss of my local settlement allows me to pilot stuff!  Or something.)
This message was last edited by the user at 20:47, Thu 14 Jan 2016.

The Force did it.

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More seriously, Rey's backstory is very important here, and we know none of it.  If it turns out she was trained as a child and had only some specific memories blocked, it's all within the realms of reasonable.  It's also possible they'll completely mess it up and she's the Mary Sue-est Mary Sue since Mary Sue herself.

If nothing else, I'll point you to the fact that Rey drives around that floating popsicle thing of hers while scaving, which is at least as much experience as Luke has.

And... a freighter?  Really?  Even if it looks like a hunk of junk (which is intentional, I believe, as it was used for smuggling a whole lot), it's one of the better ships of the era according to all of the lore.  There are some holes in the story there, as well, that the next movie should fill in.

Which is another thing.  That vehicle didn't set down when turned off.  It was "always" floating.  If they have "always floating" technology, then they have, well, they should be much more technologically advanced than they are.

That's nothing new.  Repulsorlift technology seems to be very low energy.  Even the crappy speeder Luke has in Episode 4 never seems to set down when it's off.  The tech only lifts, though, it doesn't propel.  You have to have a second motive system to propel a craft and it's entirely unsuitable for spacecraft due to its limited ceiling.

Star Wars universe is very much a hodgepodge of tech.  They are very advanced in some ways and very backwards in others.  There are in-universe reasons for it, but in reality, a lot of it's because it was designed back in the 70s and 80s so the "future" was all guess work.  Take a look at any sci-fi RPG published in that period and you'll see similar themes.

@ Swordchucks: I think you're giving Rey too much credit on flying, and Luke not enough. If your argument is that Luke is more of a Mary Sue because Rey's flying ability will be explained in future backstory and Luke's wasn't, then I'd offer this counterargument:

In "A New Hope" alone, Lucas & Co. establish Luke as a good pilot. Obi-Wan Kenobi says that Luke is the son of the greatest starpilot in the galaxy, so there's evidence for the nature side in the nature v. nurture debate. Luke says, and Biggs vouches in deleted scenes that are added back in the Special Edition, that he's a decent pilot in his own right, racing in Beggar's Canyon on Tatooine and managing to hit small moving targets. He had a T-16 Skyhopper---that model he plays with for a moment---in his "garage" that you can see while he's messing with the droids. Flying in normal space is different from making hyperspace jumps, and the Death Star battle is fought only in normal space. Finally, even Vader admits that The Force is strong in him.

There's other canon stuff. The radio play includes a bit with Luke getting put in a training simulator at the Rebel base and acing a scenario that pit him against the Imperial fleet. However, I don't think it's fair to include it if I'm just looking at the movie. I mean, there's a ~14 page pdf that explains away a lot of the plot holes in The Force Awakens, but I think its existence is more justification that the writers did a bad job at exposition.

That being said, just because you don't see Luke fly until the Death Star battle doesn't mean that it came out of nowhere. The writers did their best to establish it before final battle.

It did in the Ep 4 version that I saw.

At what point did it set down?  I'm not asking to be argumentative...but thinking about Ep4, the only times I remember seeing it not in motion were when the Sandpeople were rummaging through it, and when Luke jumped into it to race back to the farm when he realized the Empire had wiped out the Jawas that sold droids to his uncle.  We never saw it on the ground in either scene...and in the second scene, we actually see it dip just a little bit with Luke's added weight as he jumps in, which would imply that it's floating.

So, I'm forgetting a scene, somewhere, apparently.

It's all a bit hard to establish credit for anything without falling into an apples vs. oranges debate.  Star Wars space battle physics is terrible.  Star Wars atmospheric combat physics is also terrible.  It's like holding a debate on which wizard is better at their craft using only the bits and pieces we, from a world without such magic, can figure out.  Stuff that looks impressive on-screen might be super-easy in-world and stuff that looks easy might be super-hard.

Case-in-point, Rey outflies a couple of TIE fighters.  Is that amazing?  Is that easy?  I don't know.  It depends on how easy/hard it is to fly the Falcon, and it depends on how good TIE fighters are in atmosphere.  Figuring either out requires you to assume a whole lot about motive systems and in-world physics that we just don't know.  The fact that the Force could have guided her through it all just mucks it up more.

My opinion is firmly this:

Rey's backstory will determine whether or not Rey is a Mary Sue.

We've been given glimpses and hints that her parentage and youth are important.  There are theories that she was part of Luke's original Jedi training group (which means nothing she did with the Force or a lightsaber is a stretch).  There are theories that she's related to a main character from the last trilogy (and, more importantly, Han/Leia know it), which would explain a bunch of the other Mary Sue-like characteristics.

However... Disney could still mess it up entirely with no good explanations.

In reply to swordchucks (msg # 61):

My point was just that calling Luke more of a Mary Sue than Rey seemed unfair IMHO, especially since the first movie that introduced him did its best explain why he would be able to fly an X-Wing. It's not like that skill came out of nowhere, and that strength was contrasted by his flaws. Outside of general social awkwardness, Rey didn't seem to have any flaws to contrast her strengths. Delving into physics or what is and isn't easy isn't the point. I'm talking about the character construction.

There are still two movies to go, and I appreciate the difficulty that moviemakers have in this day and age to keep twists from being leaked and spoiled. That might be why Episode VII held back a lot of that story exposition. However, I'm not expecting much from the future given that they never explain in the movie who Max von Sydow's character was (apparently a member of something called the church of the Force), what's going on with the Republic, what the Knights of Ren are, and specifically say in the movie that it doesn't matter how they retrieved Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber. :-/

I didn't.  I simply said that, in some ways, she's less of a Mary Sue.  Luke, taken as a whole, progresses very quickly with relatively little training (compared to all of the dead Jedi who had a whole lot more training).  Anakin is some sort of Force-Jesus figure that's also the only human that can compete in pod racing.  Provided Rey's backstory is well put together, she's more of a Mary Sue in some ways and less in others.

As for comments about piloting an X-wing, the establishing shots are either not in the movie or painfully subtle.  They're also colored by my more hard-sci-fi understanding of how piloting a space fighter would be likely to actually work.  The fact that Star Wars is more sci-fantasy lets them break rules like that, but it's unfair to then apply reality in other places to other characters.  I mean, if we allow off-camera stuff as justification, who's to say that Rey doesn't spend all of her free time in an old TIE Fighter simulator they found on the Destroyer they're looting?  I mean, there were probably quite a few of them, and I can see that being fun.

If you want to poke at the biggest Mary Sue characteristic in the whole thing, it's when Rey gets immediately trusted with major missions by the Resistance.  Like going to find Luke.  This only makes any kind of sense if there's a backstory reason (like she's really Luke's kid and Leia knows it).  Having a character appear and be immediately liked/trusted by the main characters for no reason is the very epitome of Mary Sue.

If we want to be even more painfully honest about it, Hollywood is still struggling with how to portray a strong female lead.  If they beat her up too much, they get criticised.  If they don't beat her up enough, they get criticised.  I do know that sitting there, watching the movie, she never bothered me.  She screwed up at least twice (releasing the monsters by accident and getting captured), but that seems to get ignored when painting her as a Mary Sue.


Any of that stuff could be explained as part of the next movie, but I agree that at least some of it (specifically the Republic/Resistance stuff) should have been explained a lot better in this film.  Supposedly, the novelization of the movie does a better job explaining a few bits (like the map), but the fact that you have to consult a book to figure out things annoys me. There are EU explanations for some of it, too, and if any of those hold true, we'll see them in the next film since they're all closely tied to Luke.

OOOohhhh! Check out the trailer for Season 2.5 of Rebels...

Looks like some Force Awakens ties! What a glorious time to be a Star Wars fan!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJyxPDEvo9U

If that was it, I wouldn't have posted. I replied because of your second post:



Subtlety is a YMMV situation. I thought it was pretty obvious that Luke can fly because he keeps referring to it throughout the movie. As for why they had him in a fighter, well, his exchange with Han is pretty telling:



They needed everyone who could fly. It was like the final battle in Independence Day: they have the ships, but they don't have the pilots.

Sometimes editing also screws up with the story. Just found this while trying to look up info on the Rathtars:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fil...footage-concept-art/

Fair dues on writing strong female leads. I just wanted to see more contrast, as she doesn't even get the brunt of the Rathtar incident (that falls on Finn the Buttmonkey). They got the right person for it with J.J. Abrams, as he was behind Alias, Lost, and Fringe. I thought he did a great job with Uhura in Star Trek. However, he also was responsible for Gone Fishin', which is possibly the worst movie Joe Pesci and Danny Glover ever did, so there's a wide range that his stuff can fall into...

What is this Rebels?  Obviously Darth Vader is alive and kicking.  For some reason, all of the stormtroopers seem to be too short to be stormtroopers.  Is this a show about kids who are escaped stormtrooper cadets or something?

Star Wars Rebels. It's a Disney show, primarily aimed at kids from what I can tell (or at least lower teens), set just after the events of Episode III. If there's a Force Awakens link that'd be kinda weird.

I thought at first I was watching Kyle Kylo turn to the dark side, but then I noticed that Darth Vader was alive.  Maybe it's just the standard, "Anyone with dark hair, especially if it ever partially obscures their face,  is evil.  Or at least they're flirting with evil."

I think the Rebels' nod to TFA is the cross-guard lightsaber.

Personally, I really enjoy Rebels, more than Episode VII. The characters feel a little more fleshed out, and the voice acting cast led by Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Vannessa Marshall is really superb. Plus, it's awesome seeing CGI versions of 1970s hairstyles. It might seem cheesy, but I was kind of hoping that the new Star Wars movies would go back to them...

Ah, okay.

I have no problems with Rebels. My son loves them. He's a bit more into Star Wars than I am though.

This bugged me, too. I just watched it for the 3rd time and only just caught it...

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Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
He takes the jacket off immediately after getting into the TIE fighter.

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If you're not paying attention, it's an afterthought that's easy to miss.

Then again, why did they let him keep it?

There are some hard rules of Sci Fi, laid down in the days of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, that are still observed to this day.

Not just Sci-Fi, any story where the hero gets captured.  After he's searched for his weapons/whatever, he's usually always allowed to continue wearing whatever he was wearing before.  Unless you're reading Conan or something salacious like that, in which case nudity is pretty common.

In movies, it's a combination of budget and visual communication reasons...if you change the way a character looks, you can throw some viewers for a loop because he 'doesn't look right' anymore...in Poe's case, they only had a few minutes to introduce him to people.  If he looked drastically different the next time we saw him, some people would get lost...maybe not for long, but anytime you make someone break from the experience of the film to think about what they saw earlier, you run the risk of losing their focus, and it takes time to get it back...the more time they spend not focused on the film, the more likely they are to report it as an unenjoyable movie.

And, while there's not likely much of a budget justification for it, in some movies they just plain old can't afford that many more costumes for people.

But look at earlier Star Wars movies...how often do we see characters change outfits in the course of the story?  Leia was an Imperial prisoner for who-knows-how-long...same white dress, with no wear-and-tear in it whatsoever when she's rescued.  Luke runs around swampy Dagobah in a tan tanktop and pants...and then wears the same pants to Cloud City.  Han's outfit doesn't change much for the whole trilogy...

In the list of motion-picture sins, keeping a central character in the same outfit through capture and interrogation (or any other arduous experience that should have damaged, if not destroyed the outfit) ranks pretty low on the list...*grin*

Rey does get an outfit 'upgrade', but she does keep the same color scheme and style.

Chewbacca has been wearing the same outfit for every movie he's been in.  :)

Edit: And they span about fifty years... and at least one garbage compacter.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:55, Fri 22 Jan 2016.

Will somebody get this walking carpet out of my way?