I think it helps that Superman spends most of his time as Clark Kent, being clumsy, accident prone and mild mannered.
What is a Mary Sue to you?
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Watch Log Horizon, Its one of the few that actually does things really right. Like its a similar setup as Sword Art but instead of starring the one op character, it stars someone who just knows the game that all these people ended up in but a lot of other people know the game also, hes just the kinda guy who comes up with raid strategies, hes not even a damage class, hes support. Plus it has game rules that it obeys and does interesting things with.
Is it 26 episodes? If it's that or little shorter I can make time for it, but make no promises.
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There are 2 seasons with a third that apparently recently entered production. (YAY) Each season is 24 episodes, you can check out the first one and see if you like it, it will give you a good feeling for the world. It is more character based then most iseki and the action isn't as flashy as something like Sword Art, but you can die in it and respawn unlike pretty much everything else it does cost you but you will find out what later. The dub is also pretty good, its got pimp cat so I would recommend the dub.
Alita is way more of a Mary Sue than Carol Danvers. Alita can master new skills within a few seconds. She is loved by everyone (good.) She escapes through the power of memory all the time. She has no personality development and all she upgrades is her armour
Conversely, Danvers is tricked multiple times. Like, she isn’t very savvy or smart. She gets tracked down easily by an earthling who has no powers she is so inept at spy craft. She always rushes in head first and doesn’t think things through. But by the end, she‘s tricking the villains, using her brains rather than just brawn and uses herself as a decoy. It doesn’t come from lost memories or power upgrade. It comes through character development. And nobody automatically falls in love with her. She has to prove her worth to them (except Maria and her kid.)
Don’t get me wrong, Captain Marvel isn’t well written. She just isn’t as much of a Mary Sue as Rey. Also, I’d note, Star Wars has always been bad at characterisation. The 4 leads of the original are incredibly bare bones and even more basic than Rey. Rey is probably too complex
I'm curious as to what you think of Re:Zero.
I'm largely not a fan of isekai mostly because most try to ape SA:O and that was a piece of trash at best with more cliched tropes, even for an anime, than you could shake a fist at. The only one I'm watching now is surprisingly sedate, while another from last season was just outright parody.
Power is a factor. I felt that while she was good at action, Alita was in danger. And her male interest... their relationship has something of an arc ending tragically. The Cap'n may have a few setbacks but she is O.P. She can blast away entire fleets of space ships looking like she's doing a coordinated swimming routine.
Confession: I don't much like Return of the Jedi. And I don't forgive a genocidal Darth Vader just because he could not just stand by and watch his son brutally murdered. The dialogue was painful, switching from natural to faux- Shakespeare garbage. It did have some fun scenes but I have to think the whole "I am your father" arc was tagged on b.s. That written, Luke goes through a fairly standard hero with a 1000 faces arc. Kid with some success to low point to triumph. Han goes from selfish mercenary to someone that can care about people other than himself. (Making Solo all the more curious. He is not supposed to be a decent guy yet. Why should we care about him for that movie?) Leia actually has to soften and become lovable as she starts out tough as nails. We can buy her choking out Jabba easily enough. But that she would tell Han she loved him? (Also a major change as fans preferred Han as a love interest to Luke).
Rey? Did she even know there was such a thing as the Force when she did a Jedi mind trick without a moment of training? She fixes Han's spaceship when he couldn't? She can swim like an Olympic champ having grown up on a desert planet, etc. I will write, I hear that by Episode 9, they walked the living stuffing about that stuff back (we see her train a ton).
@Trunkage Alita is not a Mary Sue. Especially if we're talking about the manga version. As for comparisons to Carol Danvers, I do not care. I never found Captain Marvel that interesting and it was just glorified filler. That said, she is way more overpowered compared to Alita. Otherwise, I'm not turning this into another Alita versus Carol debate. Never cared much for it then, and I definitely don't have the patience for it now. I know you're not trying to start anything, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
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I don't know the Manga, so I cant speak to that, I'm only talking about the movie
I didn't say Danvers faults was her powers. I said her faults were her brains.
I know, just throwing out my opinion. But regardless, both versions of Alita/Gally are not Mary Sues'.
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Haven't seen it. I have seen Re:creators (different series even though it has Re in the title) It was pretty good, kind of a reverse isekai that's more a long the lines of the Fate Stay series in setup with fantasy characters showing up in the real world, but instead of "historical characters" its characters from pop media.
I didn't like Sword Art, was way too much of a 'main character is the only competent one and is also over powered and pulls powers out of his butt' kinda thing. Really I would say my favorite isekai's are
- Log Horizon (since its just really damn good and establishes rules that it holds to and has a lot of competent characters)
- Konosuba (cause its hilarious and subverts a ton with really fun characters)
- Kemono Ichi (a masked wrestler transported to a fantasy would to beat the king of monsters only to pile drive the princess and decides to make friends with monsters since hes an animal lover, awesome)
- That time I got reincarnated as a Slime (this one comes closest to the standard isekai setup, but the main character doesn't start off powerful, it just answers the character creation questions right and ends up with a really powerful ability that creative use of leads to that and its more about world building which is pretty cool, it does have too many monsters that end up being the normal cute anime girls, if you are going to have monsters go weird with it.)
Mostly asked because it's a pretty interesting take on the isekai genre. It's premise is taking a random delinquent kid (the sort of loser sort of OK type) and making him the PC in a roleplaying RT/TB-T sort of game, with an auto-save and respawn mechanic. This being his new reality, however, he lives through his deaths and because of their regularity in one arc, it takes its toll, and he goes through quite a lot of deaths and in different ways. He has no special abilities beyond delusions of grandeur and the well-worn trope of determination (both of which annoy me in general terms, but actually tolerable here) so the character development is pretty good as he's forced to adapt to the local circumstances and gain the trust of those around him.
Whether that's enough for you to give it a go, well, that's up to you, but for a professed hater of isekai, I liked it well enough.
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Hmm, sounds kinda interesting. After I finish 'Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!' maybe I'll give it a shot.
That's the key right there. The moment the self-insert wish fulfillment is most glaringly obvious is when the character is horrible and the rest of the cast doesn't seem to notice. That's when you can pause and recognize "this character has inherited the flaws of the author, whether or not the author realizes it, but the flaws aren't noticed by anyone else because the author wants them to be beloved by all."
- Apr 1, 2009
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Oh yeah, I'm loving it so far. Unless it somehow really messes up the end, I think its going to end up on my top 5 or at least top 10 anime list.
Woo, Konosuba dance time.
They actually finally just announced a bluray release for the first season for Konosuba also.
Amazon link.
Rey is naïve to the world at large and very frequently makes stupid mistakes. I don’t know why so few people seem to notice this. She can also be kind of arrogant.
You are seriously going to sit there and postulate that Craig’s Bond is a Marty Stu? That’s a joke right? Craig’s Bond is the most human the man has ever been since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Licence to Kill.
Alita is not learning anything in the movie other than how to to skate. Everything else she is remembering: because she is an elite soldier with amnesia. See also; The Long Kiss Goodnight.
Can't James Bond still fit into that though? Flemming worked in naval intelligence, and writes stories about a super spy that gets all the girls. That's arguably a form of wish fulfillment. It doesn't even have to be concious wish fulfillment (least in my own experience).