On the Mary Sue-ism of Rey (Split off by (several) requests)

[shinimasu]

There's the term "visual weight" which refers to the relative weight of two objects in the frame of the same image. If you have a picture containing one large brightly colored thing, and one smaller washed out thing, the large thing by default will have more "visual weight."

Occasionally an artist will fuck up their work, and the thing they wanted to have the most visual weight, the thing they wanted to be the focal point, will get lost in the overall design of the piece. Or they will make it so big, so weighty, that it overwhelms everything else.

I feel like there must be a corollary in writing and screenplay. Narrative weight, the elements of your story that hold the most sway or are the most noticeable. Protagonists tend to have the most narrative weight by default, but some have more or less than others.

Rey has more narrative weight in the new star wars series because she's the protagonist, however fans feel as though Luke should have had more weight because he used to be the protagonist. He was protagonist first, he gets legacy weight added to his role by virtue of seniority. Since Rey does not have seniority, having her immediately step into the protagonist slot feels somehow "unearned."

It's like if a painter made a picture of a horse, and then made another picture staring the same horse and then a slightly larger more impressive horse, and then people got upset about the new horse being in the picture. Who the fuck is that horse, why is it bigger and stronger than the old horse, why isn't the old horse enough to carry a painting anymore?

Which is not to say there are no problems with Rey or the new star wars, just that I would agree that her skills being marginally more impressive than most peoples is not really one of them.

[Mask_De_H]

Narrative weight is indeed a thing. It's usually considered a combination of on-screen/in-story presence, impact on the proceedings, and strength/memorability of the character.

Protagonists and antagonists tend to have the most of it by default, since they show up the most and (should) impact the proceedings the most. A character who lacks the first isn't a main character, a character lacking the second lacks agency, and a character lacking the third is boring or bland.

[MGuy]

@deadDM: Multiple people in this thread do not agree what constitutes a Mary Sue. You just weight some people's definitions over others. If I were the only one in this thread to not want to use some shitty fanfic definition of it you'd have more of a point. However, not only do different people other than me disagree with the fanfic definition, the public at large doesn't use it either because in every conversation with people about her Mary Sue-ness people both defending or attacking Rey aren't using the Mary Sue definition being pushed here and in fact THIS is the only place I've seen using it. Beyond that I have to ask are you actually reading the entirety of what I've written? Not only do you claim I am making Rey out to be somehow the problem with the movie (which I straight up said isn't the case and I find it weird that people are obsessing over her character) but I've granted multiple times that even if you get people to accept your fanfic definition of a Mary Sue it still doesn't matter because that's not the heart of the discussion you want to have so quibbling about it is a waste of time. So this is like the second time in recent memory you've put to print something about me that directly contradicts things I'm on record as saying and this time you did it in the very thread I made mention of it. Yea we can and do disagree on how implausible her talents are sure, but god damn, if you're going to bother trying to lecture 'me' on anything at least get a handle on things I've actually said.

@DSM: Gonna try to do this with a single sentence for each part because I might as well make a game out of reacting to your increasingly unhinged posts.

1) Can't make it one post without constructing a narrative. That's cool.

2) Continuation of 1 but with the hilarious addition that you are so dismissive of what 'I'm' saying that you can't unpack how my posts relate to other posts I've made.

3) I still don't care about what definition of Mary Sue you want to use so continuing to bring it up isn't going to move anything forward. Suck a snorble and keep earnestly refusing to actually argue anything that matters.

4 and 5) For this last part I have a list.

Stuff I didn't do:
Ever care about you not liking the use of Mary Sue in this or any context.

Make any comment about the disproportional hate that Rey gets when compared to other Mary Sues (or whatever your chosen description of her character happens to be for the offended).

Make any indication that I wanted to argue such a thing one way or the other.

Here's stuff I did do:
Open with a statement that said: People think Rey is a Mary Sue because of X reasons. Mostly because X reasons are the things people talk about when they call Rey a Mary Sue.

Openly state that I don't 'get' the obsession with Rey as she's just another in a the usual set of bad Star Wars protags and that her being a bad character isn't really something to get hung up over because the main line Star Wars protags have been bad from the beginning.

Point out that when people are talking about this character in the Star Wars line and making comparisons between her and other Star Wars protags that you can't come in and assume how that person feels about other media and make an argument based off of that thinking because that's making an argument in bad faith.

Now why you insist very pointedly in making bad faith arguments is beyond me. Since we're going to make wild guesses about why anyone does anything here I'm going to guess that it is because there are a certain set of arguments you want to angrily grill someone with but since no one is actually making those arguments you have to insist that they are so you can yell about them anyway.

[erik]

Multiple people in this thread do not agree what constitutes a Mary Sue. You just weight some people's definitions over others.

Cuz some of them are wrong.

[MGuy]

Multiple people in this thread do not agree what constitutes a Mary Sue. You just weight some people's definitions over others.

Cuz some of them are wrong.

At least two people are wanting to use an older definition of it, at least two people seem to be using a more updated version of the fanfiction version (though I'm not 100% sure what DSM's actual going definition of Mary Sue is), two people are using a definition that includes Rey's connection with the narrative over all in tandem with her over competence, I personally have decided to talk about Mary Sue in the way people who are not huddled together on message boards use the term because that's what people clearly mean when they use it in this context when not trying to score semantic points on a message board. I don't see that as a consensus.

[deaddmwalking]

Multiple people in this thread do not agree what constitutes a Mary Sue. You just weight some people's definitions over others.

Cuz some of them are wrong.

Like, you can literaly read 'Mary Sue' on wikipedia and recognize that the definotion you're using is wrong. Like 'bad faith'.

[MGuy]

Multiple people in this thread do not agree what constitutes a Mary Sue. You just weight some people's definitions over others.

Cuz some of them are wrong.

Like, you can literaly read 'Mary Sue' on wikipedia and recognize that the definotion you're using is wrong. Like 'bad faith'.

Yea Rey is literally talked about at the bottom of that Wiki page.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Can we move this "is Rey a Mary Sue" discussion to its own topic?

[DSMatticus]

Alright, sanity check. Can someone other than MGuy tell me if I'm making any fucking sense at all? Not whether or not you agree with me or give any fucks about this conversation, just whether or not the 2's and 2's add up to 4 and it's coherent? The stupid shit he keeps saying makes it very clear he has no idea what the fuck I'm saying, and I'm genuinely trying to get through. I have legitimately never had a discussion like this. Every explanation just Groundhog Days itself back to the exact same misunderstanding. The exact same fucking one. I feel like I'm losing my mind. This conversation is so fucking awful it's gaslighting me.

I find the idea that boys don't get called bossy weird as hell. I'm sure girls get it worse on that end--the "ball busting bitch" stereotype is alive and well--but I've never considered bossy or "too big for your britches" to be particularly gendered. I've been told both, a lot, because as a kid I was kind of a dick and a sore loser.

Children make for a weird comparison.

The principle that people are trying to touch on when they reference "men = assertive, women = bossy" is that the same behavior is described in men using words with neutral or positive connotations and described in women using words with negative connotations. Women aren't supposed to be assertive, and so when they are assertive you use a synonym which is negative. As such, boys being called bossy isn't really surprising. It just means people have the same perception of adult women as they do of young boys; undeserving of authority, one to be condescended to, and therefore 'bossy' instead of 'assertive.'

Shrill is another good example. If a man raises his voice to show emphasis and emotion, that's fine. If a woman raises her voice to show emphasis and emotion, she is being shrill.

[Neeeek]

Calling Rey a Mary Sue because she is implausibly competent is sexist.

The problem with calling Rey a Mary Sue because she's implausibly competent is being strong in the Force makes you implausibly competent. That's really what the Force does. Sure there are a few tricks you can do, but the main thing is it makes you implausibly competent.

That's the freaking universe Star Wars runs in. Strong in Force=Implausibly Competent. Luke is the best pilot in the Rebellion on his first time ever flying one of their fighters. Anakin jumps out of a transport several thousand feet in the air and lands in the only place that would end with him not dead, among many other examples.

The Force is the cheat code for life. If Rey is a Mary Sue, the concept of the Force is a Mary Sue generator.

Also, yes, there's a ton of sexism in there.

[MGuy]

Calling Rey a Mary Sue because she is implausibly competent is sexist.

The problem with calling Rey a Mary Sue because she's implausibly competent is being strong in the Force makes you implausibly competent. That's really what the Force does. Sure there are a few tricks you can do, but the main thing is it makes you implausibly competent.

That's the freaking universe Star Wars runs in. Strong in Force=Implausibly Competent. Luke is the best pilot in the Rebellion on his first time ever flying one of their fighters. Anakin jumps out of a transport several thousand feet in the air and lands in the only place that would end with him not dead, among many other examples.

The Force is the cheat code for life. If Rey is a Mary Sue, the concept of the Force is a Mary Sue generator.

Also, yes, there's a ton of sexism in there.

I actually like dead's defense better here and I don't know why you're quoting him when you essentially agree with him. All I see you are arguing here is that because Rey has access to something in universe that you would definitely need access to in order to be a Mary Sue at all, she shouldn't be considered a Mary Sue. dead's argument is that the definition of Mary Sue requires that she be a self insert/wish fulfillment character to qualify and that I am wrong because I'm just arguing about her competence which doesn't (alone) meet that requirement. It ignores the other things I've pointed out about her character or the context both in universe and the meta between the various trilogies next to other main line protagonists but that's a more defensible stance IMO.

Also sexism because of course.

[RobbyPants]

Alright, sanity check. Can someone other than MGuy tell me if I'm making any fucking sense at all?

You're fine, at least as of a few posts ago. I kind of started skimming any of the Mary Sue stuff as of yesterday. I felt about any salient point had already been made, and anything further was just rehashing old posts.

Shrill is another good example. If a man raises his voice to show emphasis and emotion, that's fine. If a woman raises her voice to show emphasis and emotion, she is being shrill.

Also hysterical, bitchy, and even emotional (as in, guys show strength by crying in public; women show weakness by doing so). The asymmetry of this, as well as the magnitude of it and how ingrained it is in our culture, is something I've only recently come to terms with. It's really quite staggering.

[Username17]

Alright, sanity check. Can someone other than MGuy tell me if I'm making any fucking sense at all?

The post with all the capslock was so deep into sarcasm that I was unsure what you meant. The other posts seem fairly straightforward. MGuy's claim that things are "bad faith" is never actually worth the 0s and 1s required to transmit it to other computers. I honestly have no idea what he thinks a bad faith argument is.

Anyway, I think the fact that people hate Finn's character and are right to do so is pretty interesting, so let's talk about that. It's much more interesting than people using the magic of sexism to claim that Rey's exploits are verisimilitude breaking because she is a girl.

Finn is a character of lesser combat competence. Such characters are all over the Star Wars universe, both as combatants and as non-combatants. You have main characters like C3P0 who abhors violence and can be captured by any rando with a gun, and you have all those rebel soldiers at the start of New Hope who get mowed down by storm troopers. Characters being "not great at combat" isn't really a strike against them. There are lots of good guys for whom combat isn't something they expect to do well at. And that's not especially a problem.

But it's also factually true that characters in Star Wars often have very exaggerated combat competence. And it's further true that fan expectation has raised the general assumed combat competence of most Star Wars protagonists even more. Like, I would expect the number of soldiers that Chewy or Lando would beat in a fight to be more than one, but I also think that there's a significant number of fans that would be annoyed if one of those characters lost a fight at 10:1 odds.

So that's the background. In D&D terms, Finn is like a 2nd level character, where it's routine for major characters in Star Wars films to be 10th level and it's sadly even more routine for fans to expect those characters to act as if they were 20th level. And while it's not unusual for Star Wars teams to have characters on them who are not great combatants, such characters are often divisive. I've come to accept the value of C3P0's addition to the movies as comic relief and as a martial competence foil for other characters, but I've never made peace with the existence of Jar Jar.

Anyway, Finn's actual contribution to the narrative is that he delivers crucial information about the Starkiller Base, which since the use and then destruction of the Starkiller Base is literally the only thing that actually happens in TFA, is actually a pretty big deal. It's not really given the narrative weight it deserves, because TFA is tonally disjunct and spends a surprising amount of time fucking around with a loose monster in a freighter. And his contributions to combat are about what you'd get from pre-Death Star Luke in ANH and better than what you get out of pre-switch reveal Padme in TPM.

So why the hate? I think it boils down to the fact that he is introduced as a warrior and a main character. That means he is expected by the fanbase to fight at the level of Obi-Wan in TPM or Luke or Luke in ANH. And not just "pre-Death Star Luke," like swinging on a rope and blowing up the Death Star Luke. His narrative and franchise position led people to expect that he'd be an action hero, and he just wasn't.

Like, if someone had been a noodle merchant or a barber or something and they had had important information about the plans of the bad guys and a chunk of the movie was about getting them safely to the war council of the good guys so that they could deliver it, no one would have been weirded out that the character was mostly window dressing or comic relief in major action scenes. That would have been fine. But having him be a character who had the expectation that they were a warrior meant that playing their combat prowess for realism and comic relief rather than Star Warsian over the top heroics felt badly out of place.

That the bizarrely out of place and narratively marginalized character happens to be black makes his lack of superheroic badassery feel like the movie is being structurally racist. Like Jar Jar's accent.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Alright, sanity check. Can someone other than MGuy tell me if I'm making any fucking sense at all? Not whether or not you agree with me or give any fucks about this conversation, just whether or not the 2's and 2's add up to 4 and it's coherent? The stupid shit he keeps saying makes it very clear he has no idea what the fuck I'm saying, and I'm genuinely trying to get through.

No worries. Refusing to acknowledge facts that are inconvenient to him is just what MGuy does. You're not at all ambiguous, MGuy is just a terrible person with a fundamentally adversarial relationship with the very concept of truth.

[deaddmwalking]

I don't think I had an issue with any character in The Force Awakens. For me, it was all about squandering the stakes that had been established in the original trilogy.

If the Empire and the Emperor are the Nazis and Hitler, the Rebel Alliance has liberated Europe and won a total victory. In the Force Awakens, it's like finding out that the Nazis in Argentina are plotting a terrorist strike...and they win. They're trying to make everything feel equally epic, and it just...isn't. Everything is reset to be the same, which completely invalidates the 'victory' in Return of the Jedi.

Everything in 'The Force Awakens' would have been objectively better if the Rebel Alliance surrendered at Yavin and let the Empire continue.

Of course, I also thought that Coruscant was destroyed and not the 'Hosnian System'. I'm going to blame the movie's narrative structure rather than my own poor recall for that.

The galaxy is a big place. The fall of the Empire and the existence of the Imperial Fleet would have created a 'dark ages Europe' vibe in the galaxy. There are a lot of places to tell meaningful stories that don't have the fate of the galaxy as the plot point. While they're 'smaller stories', they could have been made just as meaningful and the stakes would be PERSONAL.

Instead of the 'Resistance' resisting an organization that 'the lawful government' doesn't realize exists (terrorists fighting terrorists), it would have been fine if the Rebel Alliance government is still cleaning up the mess of a protracted war against individual Star Destroyer captains that enslaved planets for their own purposes. Leia could be a leader and effective commander. Han could be a hero rather than a loser that skips out on his wife to pretend that he's still 30 years old as a bum freighter captain. Luke could have restored the Jedi temple. All those 'good things' could happen, and we'd still have a place for an amazing tapestry. There's still room for 'dark actions' that happened between the two series that feed into the narrative. Luke could have made some terrible mistakes that resurface - he can still have flaws.

With that kind of setup, having a 'new Empire' forming in the hinterlands in secret, gathering up the power of the Empire could still pose a threat to the Rebel government that has been focused on rebuilding and isn't on a war-footing.

So basically, I was offended by the attempt to reset everything to be like 'A New Hope'. Watching the original trilogy and pretending the sequels don't exist is the way to go (just like with the prequels).

[hyzmarca]

Honestly, watching TFA, I assumed that Rey was going to be the villain of the trilogy, with Kylo becoming the hero. Because Rey's initial patch follows the beats of Anakin's path more than it does Luke's. Rey embraces her anger and takes the quick and easy path without fail. Meanwhile Kylo is emotionally conflicted throughout the movie. He wants to be Darth Vader, but doesn't really have the emotional capability to follow that path and the harder he pushes himself down it the more he falls apart.

Because of this, I really expected for The Last Jedi to have them basically switch roles, with Rey taking over as the lead villain and Kylo becoming the hero.

[Emerald]

The galaxy is a big place. The fall of the Empire and the existence of the Imperial Fleet would have created a 'dark ages Europe' vibe in the galaxy. There are a lot of places to tell meaningful stories that don't have the fate of the galaxy as the plot point. While they're 'smaller stories', they could have been made just as meaningful and the stakes would be PERSONAL.

Instead of the 'Resistance' resisting an organization that 'the lawful government' doesn't realize exists (terrorists fighting terrorists), it would have been fine if the Rebel Alliance government is still cleaning up the mess of a protracted war against individual Star Destroyer captains that enslaved planets for their own purposes. Leia could be a leader and effective commander. Han could be a hero rather than a loser that skips out on his wife to pretend that he's still 30 years old as a bum freighter captain. Luke could have restored the Jedi temple. All those 'good things' could happen, and we'd still have a place for an amazing tapestry. There's still room for 'dark actions' that happened between the two series that feed into the narrative. Luke could have made some terrible mistakes that resurface - he can still have flaws.

With that kind of setup, having a 'new Empire' forming in the hinterlands in secret, gathering up the power of the Empire could still pose a threat to the Rebel government that has been focused on rebuilding and isn't on a war-footing.

This, of course, is exactly what the situation was in the EU, and there were in fact so many meaningful-but-not-galaxy-scale stories being told that Disney was overwhelmed by the amount of material and nuked the whole thing.

Even if they felt constrained by the existing material--which is ridiculous; the prequel trilogy contradicted some existing material and the rest of the EU just adjusted to accommodate it because the movies took canonical precedence--they could at least have picked some post-RotJ starting point, kept everything up to that point, and overwritten everything thereafter. Setting it in 25 ABY would have kept all of the New Republic-era stuff (which has tons of good non-Skywalker-centric material) and wiped out the New Jedi Order and afterwards (which would seem very non-Star Wars to movies-only fans) and would have been a perfect choice.

[MGuy]

Alright, sanity check. Can someone other than MGuy tell me if I'm making any fucking sense at all? Not whether or not you agree with me or give any fucks about this conversation, just whether or not the 2's and 2's add up to 4 and it's coherent? The stupid shit he keeps saying makes it very clear he has no idea what the fuck I'm saying, and I'm genuinely trying to get through.

No worries. Refusing to acknowledge facts that are inconvenient to him is just what MGuy does. You're not at all ambiguous, MGuy is just a terrible person with a fundamentally adversarial relationship with the very concept of truth.

More like I dismiss arguments that don't have anything to do with mine and refuse to get dragged into making arguments I say that I'm not making and I hate people insisting that I take up arguments I don't want to.

[Dean]

I mean she literally Tokyo drifts on the sand, does a Lando style death run through the engines of a Star Destroyer and then does some kind of power cutting stall engine backflip trick within her first 3 minutes on a ship. None of that's hyperbole. It is inarguable that she's the most incredible pilot we've ever seen.

This is wrong.

Separate from everything, this I can't abide. Frank one of the pictures you just shared to show comparable awesome flying was of the Millenium Falcon being parked. Parked. The space worm scene shows Han perform the incredible feature of driving straight. It is completely inarguable that Rey flies Han's ship better than Han ever has. It is inarguable. If you cannot accept that then there's no conversation to be had because these are things you can look at with your eyes.

A complaint exists that Rey in TFA is implausibly talented. One argument against that is that she's not more talented than other protagonists, often male, of other series like James Bond for instance. The problem with that is that she is not in a movie called "Space Adventure!" its called Star Wars and Star Wars has rules and assumptions already shown in the films that she breaks. If a new Matrix movie came out that saw the protagonist realize they were in the matrix on their own, break themselves out, and start instantly time stopping and flying like Neo with no training that would be similar. We've been told how that world works and that's not it. You could just make a movie with a powerful space adventurer or a powerful computer simulation fighter but within their worlds they are expected to follow the rules of that world. No one here's complaining about Atomic Blonde because Atomic Blonde was pretty awesome (till the end). There is of course some additional complication because most incredibly awesome characters are trained either in the movie or in their backstories as opposed to explicitly being ill educated and untrained in the only backstory we're given for Rey.

The second argument you and one other person have made against accepting things Rey demonstrably does better than anyone is basically the Oberoni Fallacy. Where you say it is happening but it isn't because movies have changed so it isn't happening. If Rey does things on a level we've never seen before she's only doing it because films aren't made like they were in 1978 and no one would accept that pace of filmmaking. This is a perfectly fine discussion about the nature of film but saying that Rey doesn't pilot better than Han because she only pilots better than Han because that's how chase scenes are done now is cognitively dissonant. If you accept something is happening you can't simultaneously deny it.

Nothing about sues or filmmaking or anything else if you can't accept that there's no conversation to be had with that movie. One could just say the stories perfect and the characters are perfect and Harrison Ford's not sick of doing it and everything great. It's a blanket refusal to accept events.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Frank one of the pictures you just shared to show comparable awesome flying was of the Millenium Falcon being parked. Parked.

It's parked on another ship. Without the other ship noticing. It's not spectacular, but it is incredible. Far more incredible than any of the flashy shit that Rey pulls.

[MGuy]

Really can't highlight enough that no one thus far has called Rey the best anything in the universe. Not the best mechanic, pilot, fighter, shooter, force sensitive person in the universe or anything. She's implausibly good given the situation yes. That's it and again, if that were the only thing or even the second thing she was curiously good at in that first movie this conversation would not be taking place.

[Username17]

Really can't highlight enough that no one thus far has called Rey the best anything in the universe.

None of that's hyperbole. It is inarguable that she's the most incredible pilot we've ever seen.

MGuy, could you kindly shut up forever? Seriously, you add nothing to the conversation and everything you say is bullshit. Literally everything. And also the bullshit that comes out of your mouth is extremely easy to disprove.

Dean's position is that Rey is the best pilot in the entire series. He's wrong, but he did say that. You claiming that no one has claimed she's the best is laughably false. Please just walk away from this conversation.

-Username17

[Dean]

No. It's a moving space worm. Flying inside a stationary Star Destroyer hull is impressive, but significantly less of a feat than flying out of a moving space slug that's trying to eat you or attaching yourself to a star destroyer that is moving and actively trying to locate and attack you. Those are just more impressive things to do. Further, Han does that forcefield jump that Rey can't in the actual movie with Rey in it. Rey isn't the best pilot in every movie, she explicitly isn't even the best pilot in the movie where she is shown being a pilot.

Visual language is important in filmmaking. People spend their whole lives learning how to visually transmit meaning to viewers through film and the visual elements that comprise a film are important when talking about it. The worm escape features Han slowly accelerating down a straight featureless tube, angling himself 90 degrees through the slowly descending teeth and then simply speeding away on a straight path away from the worm. That "scene" lasts for about 11 seconds of flying and the ship making a single turn, that's the scene. The parking scene you reference as being so amazing to you occurs off screen and the point of the scene is that Han's clever and tricky not that he's a formula one pro racer as evidenced by the fact that you don't even see the thing you're talking about. If you want to say it was in fact very very hard and required amazing skills to do you can but nothing in the film indicates that and seems much more intent on delivering the feeling that Han comes up with "so crazy they might work" tricks and has brass ones. Watching that movie with human eyes and comparing a single 90 degree turn and one off-camera bit of chicanery to 4 minutes of continuous, incredible, dizzying and death defying stunts as being equally impressive to you is absurd. Rey's Millenium Falcon chase scene is the best piloting ever seen in the series before or since. That's inarguable. No human could watch that scene and then watch Han slowly rotate 90 degrees and think they're a match. Rey's sand drifting, her destroyer carcass run, and her cutting the power for an air stall within the first 3 minutes she's ever touched a spacecraft are incredible on a level the series has never seen and likely won't again because I can't imagine where you go up from there.

Now one could argue, and you have, that she's only flying better because of a change in filmmaking styles over the last 40 years but making that argument accepts that she is in fact flying better. If that's your position, as it has intermittently been, we can talk about the pro's and cons of that but claiming it exists for whatever reason accepts that it exists. I would then say the same thing about working within a franchises established material and new Matrix movies and whatnot but that's an argument of taste and much more subjective than the clearly absurd notion that Han rotating slowly down a tube is more impressive than Rey's extended dogfighting scene full of the most incredible flying we've ever seen in the series.

I said Rey being the most amazingly talented pilot we've seen is inarguable and, of course, it is.

[shinimasu]

Right but that's still not because Rey, in her own universe, is the best pilot. That's because of the doyalist reason that now that we have the budgets and the CGI for it, there's no reason not to animate cool intricate space flights as being cool and intricate.

If the script had for some reason called for Han to do the fancy space flying, he would have been the one doing the fancy space flying. Would he have been flying better than he was in previous movies? Yeah absolutely, because previous movies were done with models and puppets that made it hard to communicate maneuverability and you just kind of had to take characters at their word when they say that this thing was tricky or hard to do.

[Username17]

The parking scene you reference as being so amazing to you occurs off screen and the point of the scene is that Han's clever and tricky not that he's a formula one pro racer as evidenced by the fact that you don't even see the thing you're talking about.
…
Now one could argue, and you have, that she's only flying better because of a change in filmmaking styles over the last 40 years but making that argument accepts that she is in fact flying better.

Eleven Million Dollars and Two Hundred and Forty Five Million Dollars.

But regardless, I don't actually find the frenetic zipping around at low altitude to be particularly impressive. It's something that Storm Troopers were shown doing in Return of the Jedi. It's something that all the X-Wing pilots were expected to do at the Death Star trench run. Zooming around at speed at low altitude in cramped spaces is just apparently something that people in Star Wars do. I didn't find Rey's low altitude cramped space flying to be especially notable in light of all the other times that basically everyone on every side seems to be able to do in virtually every movie.

Piloting is only in-world impressive if something marks it as impressive in-world. Han repeatedly does things that people call out as being extremely difficult or nigh impossible. Navigating the asteroid belt. Attaching to a hostile Star Destroyer. Jumping inside the Starkiller's forcefield. All of those things are things that characters tell the audience are virtually impossible feats of piloting skill and he does them. Rey doesn't do a single fucking thing that anyone in-world seems particularly impressed with from a piloting standpoint. She really doesn't.

I'm glad you found the special effects of the 245 million dollar production budget special effects show case to be impressive. Personally, I found it fairly banal because my expectations of what the special effects should look like given the production budget had been pushed up. But I don't find Rey zipping around in the Falcon on a desert world to be more inherently impressive than Leia zipping around on a grav bike in a goddam forest.

-Username17