I've no interest in rehashing the discourse of a film franchise I could best be described as apathetic about but I respectfully disagree with the assessment of TLJ.
It is, for my money, easily the best of the franchise.
I've no interest in rehashing the discourse of a film franchise I could best be described as apathetic about but I respectfully disagree with the assessment of TLJ.
It is, for my money, easily the best of the franchise.
Abrams original plan was to set up a bunch of mysteries, and then let other people figure out how to answer them.
No, he didn't. Everything TFA set up was followed up on in TLJ, it was simply followed up on in a manner that didn't match the common expectation. Instead of Rey having a special backstory, she was the child of no one important. Instead of Snoke being the big bad, he gets ganked so that someone else can take the spot.
Both of which were better ideas than the common expectation.
A lot of the things TLJ gets criticized for (Such as Luke's deal at the start, or Finn not getting Jedi training) were things that are just Rian following off from where TFA left him.
As for the Lightspeed Ram scene: It was amazing, visually stunning scene, and only toxic fanboys care that it "breaks established lore" or whatever. Darth Vader being Luke's father broke Established Lore to a much greater extent, and that wasn't a problem.
And Mary Sue is an entirely worthless term that exists primarily due to sexism, as it's predominantly applied to female characters who do the same things that male characters get away with without comment
Then you get into the weird stuff like Darth Nihilus, essentially the personification of the Dark Side. A Sith that didn't give a damn about anything but feeding on Force Sensitives, to the point where he was arguably the strongest Force User in canon and kinda just turned himself into a haunted suit of armor for the lols. Just kinda... on a timer, because he was ultimately going to starve to death.
Yeah, but if you... man, we're getting into weird analogy territory, like if you disintegrated Superman's arms he wouldn't be able to go "fool! Little did you know that my arms and I are one and can be remade from me!" and will his arms back into being from pure nothingness. - Pendaran
Arx Inosaan
The thing about Mary Sue as a term is that it doesn't have a definition. It's just a nebulous term that people have been trained to view as a bad thing.
People have tried to define it, but they've failed because any definition people came up with either excludes characters everyone agrees are Mary Sues, or includes characters no one is willing to call a Mary Sue.
And then THAT entire fetch quest and all of its ridiculousness is rendered a moot when the villain shows up and immediately destroys the McGuffin they spent the entire runtime up to that point trying to find, meaning they wasted not only their time, but yours by watching it. So Rey just steals the villain's (along with his ship) and leaves to basically take up Luke's old lifestyle of a lonely hermit drinking green milk squeezed fresh from the gross alien udder. But fortunately for her, before she starts milking the alien monster, Luke comes back as a force ghost to try and salvage his character after Rian subverted expectations and made him a weird, angry hobo who spent his entire time with Rey yelling at her and gulping down green alien milk.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
- C.S. Lewis
It does have a (admittedly loose) definition, the main issue is that it's a term born from fanfiction that's much more difficult to apply to characters from original IPs which is why it often makes no sense when people use it as a shortened "I don't like this character".
i've written stus and sues before and i know what one looks like and i will call it out if i see it. (someone already mentioned alice from the RE movies). and if rey wasn't a sue, she had sue-ish tendencies.
honestly, it would've been better if they made thrawn the main bad guy for the ST, instead of a poor man's palpatine which was followed by a poor palpatine. the ST had some interesting ideas. shame there was no real vision or planning behind it.
I actually liked the part near the end of RoTS with all the Jedi coming together for a bit.
But then I realized it was just basically cramming in elements from Avatar TLA and wasn't foreshadowed well at all in anything else.
“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
-Stephen McCranie
Yeah, I'll definitely chalk it down to there are some things in the sequels I do like but it's being weighed down by a lot of rather dumb stuff, RoS being a considerable bulk cause it really could had tried.
...But the damn knife thing keeps getting into my head and I'm just going how in the hell does that work? And no Palpatine's usual "I foreseen this cause dark side" spiel because even that can't explain the freaking knife quest.
Looking at my draft notes of my prequel work, I'm surprisingly going a little too deep on something that's akin "and that's how I married your mother."
I'll make it work...
what irked me is how they got ashoka's VA to be in that last scene but the CC called her just "female jedi". almost like they didn't wanna acknowledge another, better female jedi before rey. or maybe just not remind people they could be watching "clone wars" over the ST.
The classic definition of a Mary Sue/Gary Stu is a character who is either an author avatar or an idealized version of the author/ideals/etc inserted into an already established piece of fiction who acts as a sort of wish-fulfillment, often at the cost of the original characters/setting.
Although I rather not go on another rant about her, Alice from the Resident Evil movie franchise is the best example I can think of off the top of my head. As admitted by the director, Alice is an idealized person for him of sorts (considering the actress is his wife) and thus is allowed to be badass at the cost of the effectiveness of the other, original game canon characters (while not true initially, by the second or third movie this become prominent once they begin using the game's lore as plot).