dragoongfa wrote:I was talking about Rey and her ability to do fucking everything.
spoilered as a last warning:
I mean come on, she is so Mary Sue that it actually hurts.
She is an innocent, naive and good looking young woman who is thrown into the midst of war
She is great combatant
She is a mechanic that can fix a ship
She is a pilot that flies said ship that she just fixed
She is force sensitive that is capable of using mind tricks without ANY force training
She is a capable light saber user the first time she picks one up, actually managing to beat a trained light saber opponent the first time she fights with a light saber*
*Who was admittedly wounded but Kylo Ren was trained in the force from child hood by Skywalker himself and both Sith and Jedi have demonstrated repeatedly how dangerous opponents they are until their last breath. Someone who hasn't touched a light saber before should NEVER hope to win against a fully fledged Sith with his arms and legs still attached.
I'm confused: when does Kylo Ren display any major talent beyond freezing blaster bolts? Even that was just fallout of his Force-Freeze on Poe. It's mentioned in the movie that he isn't fully trained, he implies himself that Rey is much more powerful than him (so powerful that she not only blocked his mind-reading, but once she'd had some time to contemplate it, turned it back on him), and his ability to detect is fuzzy at best, as demonstrated by the fact that unlike Vader, he had to use stormtroopers to do his searching for him.
Quite simply, the Midichlorian thing has been retained, and Kylo Ren doesn't have impressive numbers, nor enough skill to compensate. Also, he probably isn't a Sith. Chances are that this is coming from the Inquisitor lineage, and you never give the minions the really good stuff. On top of that, his physical skills doesn't seem spectacular either: I dare say that Finn and the stormtrooper he fought against showed about as much skill in sword fighting as Ren did.
sunphoenix wrote:Much as I'd like to disagree... I have to give credit to dragoongfa's point... that IS a bit much for one 'supposedly' starting untrained character.
sunphoenix wrote:As for her light saber skills... I took her momentary pause while her and Kylo were saber locked.. as if she were calling on the force letting it flow through her. In the RPG's doing that temporarily boosts one's abilities ALL of them to a phenomenal level..for about 10 to 15 seconds. That is usually enough for a jedi to pull off superhuman feats that defy logic as the universe basically bends to their will.
My impression from the movies is that proper Jedi try to do that constantly, and meditation is more for added focus than anything else.
sunphoenix wrote:The dark side gives them access to force abilites based on rage , and fear
Another point against Kylo Ren: he relied on inflicting physical pain on himself during the fight. Did Vader ever need to go off on some monologue about his losses, or pain, or the state of the galaxy to fuel his power? Ren is a fly-weight as far as force users are concerned.
sunphoenix wrote:I took Kylo's faltering in that fight because his driving rage was spent killing his father.. his anger and fear were unfocused. The dark side does not deal with capture without harming very well.. it is all about crush and destroy.. so Kylo was sort of at a loss of how to deal with Rey when he clearly wanted to 'take' her alive. If she had not ended that fight soon or that ground would not have split open.. the wound she gave him would have certainly empowered the Rage and fear in him to kill her .. had he had the opportunity.
I suspect that she still would have won. Comparing Vader and Ren is pretty clear: Kylo Ren lacks the discipline needed to be a truely dangerous dark-sider, and probably never faced Luke in serious combat.
sunphoenix wrote:Plus, kylo was indeed trained in the lightsaber... but consider who his teacher was and what likely Luke's focus was in his training? Mastery of the force not combat.
However, he is also a commander with sufficient authority to give orders to storm troopers, some of whom have demonstrated training in physical combat, possibly even for the explicit purpose of defeating Jedi: he should have enough opportunity to counter his failings.
sunphoenix wrote:With the Emperor dead and likly the last Sith lord also dead.. Luke probably trained his student to become closer to the force to let it guide their actions rather than teaching them to be combat Jedi. You see some evidence in how Kylo did things.. he used the force quite a bit and his mastery of energy even to 'freeze' blaster bolts int he very air was clear evidence. Not to mention.. Finn even struck him once with luke's saber in the fight before he was defeated. Vader Never even once nicked Luke in the saber battle in the Second Death Star's throne room! So I'm thinking that Kylo is definitely skilled with the lightsaber.. but he's no young Anikin or even Luke... he seemed to focus more on use of force powers.
I agree, but obviously, I think his weakness in the force is more significant.
Siber wrote:But how much of that established lore is still canon after the great EU purge?
Actually, the EU was always of variable canon. EU writers were supposed to make at least a token effort at maintaining consistency, but I believe that basically all of the games were really only canon with themselves, and not even always each other.
This isn't restricted to just the RPG games, either.
Siber wrote:She does tick a lot of boxes on a Mary Sue check list, but misses some important ones imo. Her refusing the call and running into the woods and subsequently getting wrecked and captured by KR does a lot to help her avoid that categorization for me.
Really, until the interogation scene, Finn would make for better Jedi material than Rey.
Siber wrote:And back on the subject of the final fight, I feel as though KR was trying to recruit her, not kill her, and that Han's death did not give him the clarity he sought either.
Agreed. More than that, I suspect that his death was never really
supposed to, either.
Siber wrote:And please, please don't let her be a skywalker. if her parentage has to be significant and tied to a character we've already seen, make it Hux or Phasma. Ugh.
I would guess that she's the last remaining youngling from Luke's Temple.
dragoongfa wrote:The prequels, although rightfully hated, do repeatedly point out the fact that one need training in order to harness the force. Anakin for all his faults in the Phantom Menace was a monstrous force sensitive but he still couldn't use it like a Jedi. The pod racing and space fight aside, his interview by the Masters clearly shows that what can be expected even from a monster in the force is clairvoyance and maybe sensing disturbances.
Furthermore he had the open mind of a child, able to grasp the whole concept early; the Masters objected to him because they thought that he was too old and as thus his mind would be both contaminated by 'darkness' and quite possibly somewhat closed to the force. A young adult like Luke who had his mind closed off to it had to be taken by hand by Obi Wan in order to just deflect the laser blast from a training droid and then had to fully open his mind to the force in order to get the shot that destroyed the first Death Star.
And yet, it's quite easy to take that as evidence of Luke being a Mary-Sue himself. Vader himself was in that trench, Luke's success is simply unreasonable. Similarly, in the Phantom Menace, Anakin doesn't have a minor bout of clairvoyance, but seems to almost be at one with the force at all times, even taking it so far as to almost destroy a capital ship with no assistance. Rey is just one in a long line.
Siber wrote:Rey doing what she did is actually undoing the established need for training of the prequels and belittles to the point of ridicule the growth of Luke Skywalker in a New Hope. This is the epitome of what makes her a Mary Sue in my eyes, she completely overshadows Luke Skywalker who had an arguably better start in force training. A character doesn't need to tic all of the boxes to be a Mary Sue; hell making sure to avoid the boxes is itself a trope. The fact is that this newly introduced character is better than Luke Skywalker in the force by such a ridiculous margin that isn't even funny.
No, I think she's just had an easier learning curve. Luke was up against Vader, a force user more powerful than even Yoda, with copious experience, and fully trained in both the Dark and the Light. Those Jedi that survived Order 66 he hunted down and destroyed.
Kylo Ren is not on the same playing field as Vader, and he knows and fears it himself.
None of this is to say that Rey isn't a Mary-Sue, but quite frankly she's a minor one, not major. She seems to have been going through her entire life as an untrained force sensitive, the greatest limitation of her lack of training at this point is the risk that she will stray onto the dark side.