BloatedGuppy said:
Areloch said:
I saw the movie last night, and while I don't think she's a 'real' Mary Sue, she did come off as too perfect for my tastes.
Can't debate your tastes, but I'll address a couple things.
Areloch said:
I find the implication that she'd been in the falcon before pretty weak, because if it was owned by the scrapyard owner guy
That's Unkar Plutt, the guy we see her being left with as a child in her force vision/flashback. He's basically her boss/caretaker. She knows the inside of the Falcon (directs Finn right to the gunwell, knows about the compressor being installed and "argued against it". She doesn't just have incidental knowledge by virtue of being a scrapper. She's worked on the ship.
Man, was that the same guy? I know she was handed off to someone and you see the ship flying away, but if it showed it was actually him, I'm clearly having a MAJOR brainfart. If that is the case though, then yeah, its more likely she's dicked around on the ship before.
Areloch said:
She knew how to bypass the compressor
She "bypassed" it by ripping it physically out. Han, rather than being impressed, looks less than impressed and walks away, leaving her crestfallen.
Oh, I liked Han's reaction because it was a really stupid thing to do, but as per the pattern, it happens to work out perfectly fine. I wouldn't imagine ripping out a problematic component of my computer while running would pan out for the best, but it just so happens to work out great for the component gimping the hyperdrive as they're using it.
Areloch said:
For the flying part, in the originals, we were informed that Luke had flown ships before
You're informed in TFA as well. When Finn expresses incredulity that she is a pilot, she says she's flown before but never off planet. As to how well she flies, it's already an established canonical fact in Star Wars that Force sensitives fly well due to their "precognition". If you're prepared to accept the novelization as additional context, she's also spent time with a simulator (the novel is canon, but it's hard to credit the film with exposition that occurred in a supplementary product).
Mm, true. I'd read that as her talking about her hovercar...bike...whatever you'd call it, but I suppose that could be pretty easily read as having flown more substantial ships too. We'd only seen her driving the bike thing, so that's what my brain interpreted it in reference to.
Areloch said:
Then there's the force parts.
Go do some Google searching on "Rey is Luke's daughter". Read the very, very long list of inferences that suggest she's not only part of an unusually powerful Force legacy, but that she was both most likely trained and almost certainly present at the massacre when the Knights of Ren are murdering Luke's students. Recall that memory suppression is part of Star Wars as well (featured most prominently in KOTOR) and a picture starts to form around the girl with a deliberately obfuscated past. TLDR - You're on act one of a three act piece, your protagonist is mysterious and scripted at least in half by a director who absolutely adores misdirects and "mystery boxes". What are the odds she's "just a scavenger"?
If your response to this is "not explaining everything in Act I is bad writing", then...well...I'm sorry. I disagree. Rather vehemently.
What I mean when I talk about 'selling' or 'affording' isn't "Please feed everything to be in an obvious way, including flashing text on the screen", because I agree, that's lazy and stupid. But you have to actually work at convincing the viewers that what they're seeing works with the setting provided. ESPECIALLY if none of it really gets explained until an entirely different movie.
I mean, suppose we have a story that does everything in it's power to establish that the world is just like real life and thus we intuit the natural order of how it all works from what we know. And then halfway through, without any explanation or justification, someone has superpowers throwing our understanding of the setting into total dissarray. Then the story doesn't do ANYTHING to explain or justify superpower-guy other than the vague hope that it may get explained in the sequel. Superpower-guy just IS, and he exists in the face of the entire rest of our understanding of the story's setting and world.
That's sloppy writing because it detaches the person taking in the story from the setting and characters because there's an element that looks like it is completely out of place. Sure, it may get a wonderful explanation in the sequel that makes everything make sense, but you're gunna have a lot of readers look at that part and go "no, that's stupid" and walk out.
That's basically what's happening with TFA. You have people who have had decades of getting a general feel of the Star Wars universe, that Jedi can intuit stuff, but getting GOOD at it takes time and practice, and then suddenly poof, a character gets a grasp of the force that took all prior force-sensitive characters we see months or years to get good at down in a couple of days tops and then basically told "They'll explain that later in a different movie".
That clearly doesn't jive with a lot of people's understanding of the setting, and that's why people(including myself) feel it's not well written.
Heck, even subtle cues like the force "drum" that they play when someone uses force powers could have been utilized to imply in prior scenes that she was actually using the force, even if she - as a character on screen - doesn't seem aware of it. Subtle cues can be used to great effect to tie such sudden upheavals back into the setting the story's working in, but I didn't really get the impression that they did that for TFA. Which I think is part of the problem.
We're not *shown* why she has the best grasp of any jedi we've ever seen, we're not *told* why she has the best grasp of any jedi we've ever seen. Which means we're left to assume, and that's usually a pretty bad play.
I mean, if you don't really mind that approach to storytelling, then hey, no problems. Obviously that approach clicked with you and I'm legitimately happy it didn't bother you. But it pretty much goes against everything I've ever learned about storytelling and narrative, so it bugs me, and apparently bugs quite a few other people as well.