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!
Exhibit 948374858383 demonstrating that a woman has to work twice as hard for half the credit. Even fictional women.
I love how that dudebro said “sith knight” also
Random Dude Bro No.9828718738371: Rey is a Mary Su-
Anonymous asked: picture this: an underestimated finn rescuing rey and poe. people in the resistance would focus more on how nice and helpful and head over heels for rey and poe he is, not on how deadly he actually this. so when the last jedi and the commander of black squadron are kidnapped, no one thinks about finn until he's vanished. and he returns a few days later going "yeah i saved them. btw, here's all the data on their networks. i killed all the soldiers, so i hope this is enough."
Leia is so proud. Everyone else in the Resistance is half-terrified and half in shock (aside from Rey and Poe who are both just like “yup this is pretty SOP for being in enemy hands when Finn does not want us in enemy hands, not new territory here”), but Leia is just SO PROUD.
Somewhere Phasma is surveying the carnage and is S U F F E R I N G. She could’ve had that soldier. Did she really just have to keep that idiot Slip alive and encourage Nines and Zeroes to fraternize a bit and she could’ve kept that soldier? REALLY, WAS THAT ALL IT WOULD’VE TAKEN TO GET RESULTS LIKE THESE ON THEIR SIDE?? BECAUSE SHE WOULD’VE DONE THAT, FOR RESULTS LIKE THESE.
Hux shows up all baffled and pissed off like “wtf happened HERE” and Phasma is just like “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT”.
C-3PO to Han Solo in Empire: Sir, I don’t know where your ship learned to communicate, but it has the most peculiar dialect.
this isn’t gone into at all but I like the idea that the Falcon, bashed together from illegal aftermarket parts, familiar with all corners of the galaxy but with no real home, speaks her own patois that works reasonably well everywhere rather than learning several formal machine languages (I imagine there are relatively few of those compared to the range of lifeforms’ languages, but still)
3PO is fluent in over six million forms of communication, so he’s surely familiar with various pidgins, creoles, and so on, but if the Falcon’s sort of created one for herself then obviously translating it will be a more involved job
protocol droids probably have algorithms for parsing pidgins and creoles by identifying the parent languages and predicting how the language will behave based on the parents’ vocabulary/grammar and the general processes of creole formation
I like the idea of the Falcon getting impatient with 3PO because he keeps asking her to repeat herself and she’s like who the hell are you and why can’t you understand plain talk when you hear it
revisiting this thought: imagine Rey, who has met about a thousand different droids and computers and learned to speak whatever language they speak
she starts talking to the Falcon’s computer because something is broken, again, and it takes her all of five minutes to pick up the peculiar dialect because it’s similar to one common among smugglers’ ships she’s repaired, though it has a few idiosyncracies that are new to her (in part because it’s honestly just older than most things she’s run into)
soon enough instead of plugging in a droid to find out what’s wrong she’s just yelling at the Falcon from upside down in a compartment full of sparks and the Falcon is insulting her repair skills and insinuating some really unpleasant things about her parentage and Rey’s like JUST TELL ME WHERE THE SHORT IS ALREADY YOU CAN TRASH-TALK ME WHEN YOUR CIRCUITRY’S NOT SETTING ME ON FIRE
inspired by @suzukiblu‘s lovely head canon about the trio getting babies
It starts with Finn. They’re on a mission, finn and poe going to an abandoned first order barracks to hunt down some information and the retreating first order left behind this baby, this tiny soft little girl, and she’s crying out of hunger and cold and fear and finn acts on instinct and bundles her under his shirt
finn has never actually seen a baby because troopers are kept isolated from baby troopers, kept in age appropriate barracks, and he is absolutely hypnotised by how tiny and fragile it is. it is so soft. look at its little soft softness.
can we keep it? can we keep it poe, please, look how beautiful and tiny she is she’s never going to be a trooper, never ever ever.
they keep it. what do you call it? you name babies after things you love right–
Rey takes one look at the little thing and says. “We’re going to call her Luke.”
That’s the first. After that, Finn comes back from a mission holding the hands of two little boys, twins. Both are wearing mini versions of Stormtrooper armour. “Say hello to Millennium and Falcon.”
After that Rey comes back with no fewer than five Force-sensitive kids who had almost become troopers. “They’re not going to the Academy,” she says, “because we’re not going to start when they’re little, not anymore. Kids get to be kids.”
They make the mistake of letting these kids name themselves (after things you love, Finn suggests, after people you admire) . Thus, the Resistance ends up with: Finn I, Finn II, Finn III, Dameron’s X Wing, and ReytheJedi.
When Rey is ten, another scavenger tries to steal her haul. It isn’t much: a twist of some old engine, a carbonator; but it’s enough to feed her for the rest of the day, maybe the next, and pickings have been slim lately. The clutch of metal bits (barely enough to swell the lining of her bag) represents the first meal she’ll have had in two days (she is so hungry). And this man – this boy, she’ll think when she looks back; he can’t have been more than fifteen – grabs it from her. There’s no civilisation on Jakku, no sense of protect the small and weak – there’s no mercy for a girl alone. And the boy just takes it, snatches it from her grasping hands, holds it aloft, grinning wide and wild and mocking. “Finders keep –” he starts to say, quoting the oldest (and only) law of the desert. The rest of the words snag on his loose teeth and split-open lips: Rey smacks him in the jaw with her staff and every bit of strength she has. He stumbles, makes for the blaster at his side, and she panics: she hits him in the legs to bring him down, hits him in the skull until his hand falls slack and he is very, very still. Rey snatches her haul up and runs and does not look back. (She’ll think of him sprawled in the sand, skull open and red and wet, when she prowls through the frozen forest towards Kylo Ren. She’s older. She knows better. She’ll hesitate. She will not deliver that final blow.)
Jessika Pava snatches a chip from her plate in the canteen. It’s all in good humour; Rey is hanging out with the pilots in one of the rare moments she isn’t training with Luke, enjoying the noise and hubbub – oh there are so many people. It gives her a headache, light and sharp behind her eyes, but it is a good pain, a clean pain; a growing pain. Anyway. Pava snatches the chip – a misguided attempt at flirting, maybe? – and Rey reacts without thinking and stabs her in the back of the hand with a fork. There’s silence for a moment, an aching and desperate silence, and Rey can only hear the roar of blood in her ears. She stares down. Pava’s hand has slackened; the chip is on the table. The tines of the fork haven’t sunk in that far, but there is red pooling on Pava’s skin and Rey feels a great rush of nausea. Her stomach cramps, hard, and she leaps to her feet, gabbling apologies. Pava holds up her hands, says, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, it really is,” and Poe scrapes a good chunk of his dinner onto Rey’s plate and says, “We won’t ever let you go hungry,” and it’s all too much: Rey bursts into tears. (No one tries to steal her food again. Later, she leaves a basket full of apples and potatoes on Pava’s bed. It is an apology. It is a very well guided attempt at flirting.)
“What’s wrong with this water?” she gasps, holding her cupped hands out to Luke. “It’s awful!”
Luke bursts out laughing. “It’s full of salt, Rey. You can’t drink it.”
“All that water,” she says, scornful, “and not a drop to drink – are you sure that the Force is benevolent?”
“Hey, when I first saw an ocean I did the exact same thing. Only difference was that Han pretended that that was what water was meant to taste like. Pretended to drink it and then got offended when I didn’t. I didn’t want to seem like the odd one out so I drank a whole mug of it and vomited everywhere – he wasn’t laughing so hard when he was trying to air the smell of vomit out of the Falcon.”
Rey bursts out laughing, wading back towards shore. “Tell me more about him,” she says.
Anonymous asked: on jakku giving people food freely (i.e. as a gift with no expectation of return) and saying its a gift is how they propose marriage. Giving different food back is how you accept. Rey in the resistance is SO CONFUSED. Why are you all into polygamy resistance people. Everyone is proposing to me. Im flattered general but really jfc where did this come from. I don't even know you random mechanic #6! Oh.... poe/finn... thank you for the apple. Would you like a space potato?
I’M PRETTY SURE WE ALL KNEW TO EXPECT A READ-MORE FROM ME ON THIS ONE. DID ANYONE NOT EXPECT A READ-MORE FROM ME ON THIS ONE? GOOD ‘CUZ WE’RE IN FOR THE LONG HAUL, KIDS.
I’ve got to believe that the Resistance’s intelligence officers are just. constantly Done. With everyone.
Rey’s understanding of aurebesh is more functional than formal, which isn’t a problem until the Resistance starts asking her to submit mission reports—she rarely spells anything the same way twice (”even her name!” the intelligence officer moans) and her sentence structure is….not so much a structure as “a loose grouping of things that might be parts of speech”
“…..I don’t understand, what’s the problem?” Finn asks because Finn’s grammar is impeccable, once you decipher the dense nest of abbreviations, First Order codes, and trooper slang that fill his reports. (This does not save any more time.)
“If you could maybe…..not? wax lyrical about the TIE fighter?” the intelligence officer tells Poe, when he finally gets around to submitting his report on the escape from the Finalizer. “Not that understanding enemy technology isn’t a vital contribution to intelligence, but we don’t need 500 polysyllabic words about how the sun glinted off the casing.”
General Organa still submits reports like they used to in the Rebellion (her battle damage assessment style is about thirty years out of date, and she calculates galactic coordinates like it’s the late republic) but everyone in intel is fucking terrified of bringing this up to her. Instead, they have a designated officer who deals exclusively with translating General Organa’s reports into more modern New Republic standards,so they can be processed.
(At least yours actually submits reports, their counterparts in the First Order would say, if they all got together in a bar somewhere to commiserate about how hard soldiers make military intelligence. Kylo Ren has submitted exactly one misrep in the last 15 years. Thirty-two people died and it just said ‘it was the Force’.)
