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

[maglag]

the protagonist always, ALWAYS, possesses a snowflake quality that's an exception to every rule (formula that's all too popular, starting with all shounen anime).

Gundam Wing/Turn A/Iron Blood Orphans/0080: War in the Pocket/0083: Stardust Memory/The 08th MS Team would like a word with you.

[MGuy]

the protagonist always, ALWAYS, possesses a snowflake quality that's an exception to every rule (formula that's all too popular, starting with all shounen anime).

Gundam Wing/Turn A/Iron Blood Orphans/0080: War in the Pocket/0083: Stardust Memory/The 08th MS Team would like a word with you.

The bulk of the conversation would like a word.

[Chamomile]

No. I am not playing this game.

So your argument at this point is literally "I cannot argue against your assertion that nothing outside the movies is reasonable to demand as background information for the movies, therefore assume I am correct despite a total vacuum of evidence." Which, uh, no. I'm not going to do that. I am going to demand that you provide evidence from the same canon as TFA that supports your frequently repeated assertion that mind trick as an entry level Force power is canon - and then, yes, I am also going to demand you justify your opposition to the consensus position that "it makes sense if you read the books!" is a concession that the media you are trying to defend is actually insufficient on its own merits. Note that those demands are first "supply any evidence at all for your claims" and second "explain why you believe a long-held consensus position is invalid." If you refuse to play "that game," then you're just flat-out refusing to actually defend your assertions at all. Which is exactly what you've been doing for several posts in a row now, constantly restating that you are correct without even trying to argue for it.

If we accept your claims that all the media that shows you are wrong doesn't count for whatever reason,

Specifically, for the reason that you yourself established in your last post - the people who control the IP have officially declared that exactly zero of the media you have cited still counts, and did so over four years ago.

then re-establishing the nature of Mind Trick as an entry level Force power becomes important world building, and you're still fucking wrong.

Your implicit assertion here is that Luke's scene from Return of the Jedi doesn't establish any precedent, despite the fact that establishing that Luke Skywalker is a Jedi knight because he now has powers he previously didn't is pretty clearly the entire point of that scene. And once again you have just breezed past without actually making the argument, just asserting that it's definitely rock solid for sure. Actually, at this point you have implicitly conceded that you have no argument against a "significant number" of the audience having gotten exactly that from that scene since you leave open that possibility in the paragraph in which you pretty much conceded the entire argument to me, which means that your position pretty much has to be either:

1) When creators fail to adequately communicate the rules of their setting to their audience such that it causes confusion, that's secretly the audience's fault for not figuring it out for themselves. Which would certainly fit in with your weird "Disney is all-powerful" reverence from earlier, but is also a violation of basic storytelling principles that will get you laughed at by pretty much any storytelling medium.

2) It's okay to change the established rules of the setting without explanation in the third act in order to allow the protagonist to solve an otherwise intractable problem. Which will also get you laughed at.

It's theoretically possible that there's some third argument I haven't thought of that you could fall back on, but seeing as how articulating that would require you to actually make an argument instead of just declaring yourself correct while slowly ceding everything to me piece by piece, I'm pretty confident that's not going to happen. I wouldn't be surprised if you claimed to have made an actual argument, but I would be surprised if you actually did that instead of just restating your conclusion again, and again without any basis in evidence or argument or anything else but efforts at intimidation. Let me let you in on a secret: I have actually laughed out loud at some of your assertions in this thread. There's no version of this where the ferocity of the French taunting takes me completely off guard. By all means, feel free to continue entertaining me, but if you actually want me to ever concede defeat, you are at some point going to have make an actual argument. It's also going to have to actually be good, but right now let's focus on rebuilding you back up to the point where you make arguments at all.

Still waiting for you to clarify whether you stand by your assertions of goal post shifting, and additionally whether you stand by your assertion that Anakin's use of mind trick was in a script rather than appearing exclusively in a decanonized novel written by someone who did not work on the film. That's five and three requests for you to clarify your position we're on now, for those keeping track at home, and still no response to either.

Even then it doesn't because there's any number of reasons the non-knight may have failed other than the ability being gated exclusively to trained Jedi knights.

If the Last Jedi had ended with Rose spontaneously manifesting the Force power to wipe out the entire Imperial fleet with her mind, I presume you would find that objectionable. You would find that objectionable despite the fact that "nobody ever wipes out entire fleets with their first manifestation of the Force (or at all)" has not been established by direct lecture, by demonstration, or indeed through any other means. Your assertion (and Omegon's related assertion), then, that the only way to establish anything in media is through explicit declaration aloud is trivially reduced to the absurd - it is clearly possible for things to be established as not within the scope of Star Wars' space magic even without an in-universe expert giving an explicit statement to that effect (or someone trying to do something and failing).

[deaddmwalking]

If the Last Jedi had ended with Rose spontaneously manifesting the Force power to wipe out the entire Imperial fleet with her mind, I presume you would find that objectionable.

I would not necessarily find this objectionable.

In 'The Force Awakens', it establishes that people who are new to the Force can, in fact, use Mind Trick. There is no consensus that only experienced force users can use Mind Trick. There is no consensus that this scene violated or contradicted any canon. For it to be a break with established canon, you have to prove that canon established that it was impossible. When Frank mentions that no quantity of white swans proves that all swans are white, the single observation of a black swan proves that black swans exist. The single use of Mind Trick by Rey proves that people who are new to the force CAN use mind trick. To claim that it violates the setting is, frankly, bizarre.

What evidence do you have that ONLY trained Jedi can use Mind Trick? Besides your appeal to popularity (the audience believes this) you've already been called on claiming absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It isn't.

As an audience member who has not read any books or scripts, I believed that Mind Trick was a relatively minor power. When Obi-Wan uses the force to make a drug dealer rethink his life, my take was Jedi are badass because he is using a minor power casually. If that's his cantrip, then that establishes he's a badass. The fact that it is EASY TO USE is what establishes he is powerful. You know, because of narrative structure.

[Longes]

I think the closest possible to an "objective" value we can get is KotOR, where "Affect Mind" is a level 8 force power, followed by "Dominate Mind" that is a level 12 force power.

[Chamomile]

DeadDM, I'm really not sure what part of this whole "I'm not talking to you until you prove you are capable of understanding the words that I say" is confusing you. If your next post in this thread does not include an explanation of what my position actually is that is at least mostly accurate, I am putting you on ignore.

EDIT: Re:KotOR, the canonicity of the Old Republic era is in a weird place. The Old Republic MMORPG released before the Scourging of the EU and was not on the whitelist of media to be spared from it. However, everything after that date is assumed to be canon by default, and TOR has continued to receive updates since then. Does that mean TOR is canon? Are only the expansions that released after the date canon? Is all of TOR a Legends rump state? If TOR is canon, does that make KotOR canon, since its characters and events receive fairly frequent mention? Or are only the elements that specifically show up in TOR canon? What about KotOR 2, which, so far as I know, never received overt reference in TOR the way KotOR did? Probably the most likely answer is that, being so distant in time as to have little chance of interfering with the NT, the whole Old Republic era is probably being imported into the new canon piece by piece as it becomes relevant, but Disney doesn't seem to have an official stance one way or another beyond a promise not to demand that BioWare conform to the new canon (probably because they don't care what happens 3,000 years in the past of their new trilogy).

In any case, most people who watch TFA have not played KotOR.

[deaddmwalking]

DeadDM, I'm really not sure what part of this whole "I'm not talking to you until you prove you are capable of understanding the words that I say" is confusing you.

Mostly it is that every single post since you said it (including the one I'm quoting) is you talking to me. Since you said you wouldn't, but you kept doing it anyway, I took it to be indicative of your general inability to say what you mean.

[EightWave]

Chamomile, people have been restating your argument to you ad nausium. The reason you don't see that is because your argument is stupid and bad and wrong and every time it gets restated you self-delusion blinds you to it. Your argument is so bad that you only think it's correct when it's coming out of your own mouth, and then only because you've pot-committed your sense of self-worth to being right on this issue.

Your argument relies on people being capable of mind-caulking midichlorians, Jedi Jesus, General Grievous using lightsabers, Han Solo not believing in Jedi despite being a child during the clone wars, the obvious fraternal retcon of Luke and Leia, or an entire society of precognative space wizards being unable to foresee Order 66 to the point where all of that seems like a self-consistent world, but Rey using Mind Trick being a bridge too far.

It also relies on the setting having fundamentally established that it's impossible for force-sensitives to develop superpowers just by trying really hard. Or the Force being a semi-sentient magical energy that does whatever it wants whenever it wants. Or the ranks of Padawan, Jedi, Jedi Knight, and Jedi Master being actual gym badges that gate or are gated by force abilities. All of which would be required to prevent trivial explanations of how Rey manifests force powers without training.

Finally, you require people to care about all of this shit without having any extended universe knowledge.

Your argument is a wrongness fractal.

[Omegonthesane]

then re-establishing the nature of Mind Trick as an entry level Force power becomes important world building, and you're still fucking wrong.

Your implicit assertion here is that Luke's scene from Return of the Jedi doesn't establish any precedent, despite the fact that establishing that Luke Skywalker is a Jedi knight because he now has powers he previously didn't is pretty clearly the entire point of that scene.

All that the scene shows is that Luke has grown in power. It says nothing about his having achieved a particular rank, it doesn't establish that the Force has a specific order of events that all users must follow like a fucking Vampire the Masquerade discipline, only that Luke Skywalker is more powerful at that point than he was at the end of the previous film.

At most, you could say it demonstrates that having all of Luke's powers is sufficient to call yourself a Knight. It does nothing to establish that specific powers are level gated, only to show that having the whole suite is.

Even then it doesn't because there's any number of reasons the non-knight may have failed other than the ability being gated exclusively to trained Jedi knights.

If the Last Jedi had ended with Rose spontaneously manifesting the Force power to wipe out the entire Imperial fleet with her mind, I presume you would find that objectionable. You would find that objectionable despite the fact that "nobody ever wipes out entire fleets with their first manifestation of the Force (or at all)" has not been established by direct lecture, by demonstration, or indeed through any other means. Your assertion (and Omegon's related assertion), then, that the only way to establish anything in media is through explicit declaration aloud is trivially reduced to the absurd - it is clearly possible for things to be established as not within the scope of Star Wars' space magic even without an in-universe expert giving an explicit statement to that effect (or someone trying to do something and failing).

Rey is the protagonist of a Star Wars film who came from a desert backwater and has no real reason to be drawn into events other than having been chosen by the Force, so is very obviously meant to be read as having the potential to develop force powers.

The problem that Rey solves by spontaneously manifesting Mind Trick, she could have also solved by spontaneously manifesting Telekinesis to push the quick release button on her restraints. They weren't writing their way out of a dead end, they were establishing that not all Force users manifest powers in the same order.

And trust me, all the usual suspects would be complaining that Rey was OP if she manifested Force TK under similar circumstances to Luke manifesting Force TK. Vecuase it was never about Rey actually being overpowered.

[Username17]

Yeah, fractal wrongness is pretty much the only way to describe Chamomile's position at this point. I mean, for fuck's sake, if we accepted his argument that there was some reason to believe that Mind Trick was some gym badge gated power using whatever set of allowable fiction bits when TFA came out, then that scene would be better than it actually is. Because telling the audience unambiguously that Mind Trick was not gated by gym badges would be a positive and necessary piece of world building that TFA needed to get done.

I mean, as far as I can tell the only narrative purpose was for Rey to move on to the next scene and establish that she had force powers and that they were slightly different from Luke's. But if you actually needed to establish Mind Trick's position as a potential entry level Force power, that scene does actually do that.

Which means that all of Chamomile's contrived reasoning still ends up with Chamomile being wrong. Even on his own terms. Even if you accept all of his specious reasoning and bizarre extrapolations from extremely tiny data sets. If you accepted he was right about all of his premises, his conclusion is still wrong. Because at the end of the day Mind Trick is genuinely a power that a Force sensitive character can spontaneously manifest in times of stress. And if that was in any way unclear, showing it on screen has value that it otherwise wouldn't have.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Chamomile, people have been restating your argument to you ad nausium.

Quote one time DeadDM has ever accurately stated my argument. Go ahead and try, and I'll explain to you with quotes from my own posts pre-dating his that demonstrate critical differences between his and mine. Of course, all you say here is "people," but I never claimed that people in general have problems recognizing what my argument is. I claimed that was an issue with DeadDM, specifically.

Your argument relies on people being capable of mind-caulking midichlorians, Jedi Jesus, General Grievous using lightsabers, Han Solo not believing in Jedi despite being a child during the clone wars, the obvious fraternal retcon of Luke and Leia, or an entire society of precognative space wizards being unable to foresee Order 66 to the point where all of that seems like a self-consistent world, but Rey using Mind Trick being a bridge too far.

Are you claiming that people didn't notice midichlorians? Like, you are literally just listing things that people noticed and complained about, but that one in particular is famous for having so thoroughly not been mind caulked that audiences cried foul on it, to the point where it became a memetic representation of everything wrong with the prequel trilogy. It's not surprising that with only one exception, everything you're bringing up here is something from the prequels (including Han's reaction to the Jedi, which only makes no sense given how openly and overtly affiliated with the Republic they are in the prequels and how obviously and frequently they use their Force powers). No, my argument doesn't require that people be able to mind caulk all of this, because they didn't.

It also relies on the setting having fundamentally established that it's impossible for force-sensitives to develop superpowers just by trying really hard.

No. That's just not at all relevant to my argument.

Or the Force being a semi-sentient magical energy that does whatever it wants whenever it wants.

Again, redirecting you to the idea of someone manifesting a Force storm to wipe out an entire fleet and thus solve the entire movie's conflict out of nowhere. If you agree that this wouldn't be a good way to resolve a movie's conflict, then you necessarily concede that there is more than just the exact words of what qualified experts in-universe have said on the subject limiting the scope and capabilities of a setting's magic system. I presume you wouldn't be okay with such an ending, but if I have to explain to you what a deus ex machina is, I will, but you should know that trying to die on this hill is basically making you the same as this guy, but for writing instead of TTRPGs. It's not just that you're wrong at all, it's that you're ignorant of some of the most basic principles of the craft, to the point where competent people tend to get aggravated when people show up making the kind of mistake you are right now and trying to assert it like their bucking of extremely well entrenched storytelling guidelines means that the world doesn't understand their genius, rather than that they're lazy hacks who don't want to learn how to write properly. That thing where people show up on this forum to defend 4e or whatever? The equivalent to that on writing forums is people showing up to post their work, and when criticized for having un-foreshadowed sudden power-ups they cry about "well I never said it was impossible!" That's not good enough. Powers that resolve conflicts in the third act must be established in the first. That's how fiction works, and trying to examine the Star Wars universe as a real thing that can be studied and not a work of fiction is very obviously lunacy.

Or the ranks of Padawan, Jedi, Jedi Knight, and Jedi Master being actual gym badges that gate or are gated by force abilities.

So your argument now is...that more advanced ranks of Jedi don't have a greater mastery of the Force?

Finally, you require people to care about all of this shit without having any extended universe knowledge.

You have helpfully provided me with a list of stuff that people care about without having any expanded universe knowledge. So, again, are you going to argue that people didn't complain about midichlorians?

At most, you could say it demonstrates that having all of Luke's powers is sufficient to call yourself a Knight. It does nothing to establish that specific powers are level gated, only to show that having the whole suite is.

Hey, look, someone's actually doing the smart thing! It's amazing that it took us this long to get here, because while there is in fact an answer for this, it's actually an answer I haven't already given and which isn't immediately obvious. Gold star for having an argument whose basis isn't "Anakin with ten years of Jedi training is totally the same as Rey who's never used the Force before in her life because they're the same age" or "let's all pretend the most elementary concepts of good writing cease to apply whenever they are inconvenient to my argument."

But, no, because Luke has a clear progression of powers, that scene shows Luke using powers previously only seen in the hands of knights, and there's not explanation that fits Luke's progression while leaving others open except that it is completely random. Frank earlier tried to assert the idea of specializations, but Luke isn't specialized into anything. He uses some kind of sensory power to sense a probe droid's location without being able to see it, then learns telekinesis, then learns more precise telekinesis and mental domination. He's not a sensory specialist. He isn't defined by sensory powers. In fact, Anakin has a similar sensory power (or maybe telepathy) as his first conscious use of the Force, and his signature move is telekinetic, which is also what he relied on most in ESB. Not only is the idea of Force specialization never communicated the way that Luke's growth in power is signposted by having mind trick and Force choke, a careful examination of the source material actually suggests the exact opposite. It's a good idea, because that allows you to differentiate padawans from one another, but it's not an idea that exists in the universe, it contradicts the progression we've already seen, and the time to overturn that kind of thing is not in act three.

Which leaves only the possibility that the Force follows no patterns whatsoever, that people get powers in a totally random order completely disconnected from any kind of natural predilection or hierarchy of difficulty. That the Force has no rules, no restraints, that it does whatever the plot needs it to do right now or whatever would look cool. This is obviously the worst of all possibilities, and it's the possibility that JJ Abrams is going with, and the scene in which he establishes that is bad for establishing that.

Rey is the protagonist of a Star Wars film who came from a desert backwater and has no real reason to be drawn into events other than having been chosen by the Force, so is very obviously meant to be read as having the potential to develop force powers.

And etc., because you have a bunch of other qualifiers. And they are all true! Although I will note that Rose's sister was able to channel the Force to drop a bunch of bombs, and while the point the movie was making with that appears to be "regular people can use the Force, too, just less," if they wanted to say "Rose and her sister are Force sensitive" that is also something they could've been setting up with that scene.

But all of that misses the point. The point is that it is very easy to come up with uses of the Force that have never been explicitly declared to be impossible but which are nevertheless obviously outside the bounds of the Force's established capabilities. Unlike DeadDM, you appear to have a functioning grasp of what a deus ex machina is, so you understand that the Force can't suddenly have this new and previously unseen level of power apropos of nothing. The fact that it has never been explicitly forbidden by the setting does not mean it isn't bad storytelling - Star Wars is fiction, it operates on precedent, and you need to set up your precedents before resolving problems with them. The example given obviously overturns way more precedents than Rey's scene, and way more egregiously, but that's the point: It's an extreme example used to demonstrate that your assertion that it is categorically impossible for the Force to be reasonably expected to obey the rules of good narrative is obviously wrong, because it is very easy to come up with extremely egregious violations of narrative that we would not accept from the Force regardless of whether it has ever been explicitly stated that the Force cannot do that.

Because at the end of the day Mind Trick is genuinely a power that a Force sensitive character can spontaneously manifest in times of stress.

You keep saying things like this, Frank, as though Star Wars were real and that there is a matter of fact to discuss. And the only two reasons I can think of is that either you think Star Wars is real and that any demonstration of a Force power is automatically self-justifying because it is an actual, real world phenomenon that can be observed and studied, or else that you think the Disney canon should be judged by how well it conforms to itself, i.e. that it is basically incapable of doing anything wrong because rules of storytelling do not apply to it and scenes can be used as precedent/foreshadowing for themselves. So, which one of those bugfuck insane stances are you taking here? It seems like it's probably the "Star Wars is real" one, because you're talking about "tiny data sets" despite the fact that it is uncontroversially true that it is possible to establish things in fictional universes without getting a statistically significant sample of anything or having a character dump exposition at the camera. Indeed, that is the preferred means of establishing things. If you have to rely on the exposition dump, that's worse than if you just establish it onscreen, which requires only one example. Audiences understand that fluke outliers do not appear onscreen except when explicitly called out as fluke outliers, because that is how movies work.

There comes a point where the limits of good faith are reached and it becomes obvious that if you refuse to clarify your stance on something, it's because that clarification would be embarrassing. So I'm not going to keep asking you if you still stand by your accusations of goalpost shifting, nor am I going to ask you if Anakin's use of mind trick appeared in an actual script, as you originally claimed, or only in a decanonized novel written by the Drizz't guy. I'm just going to go ahead and add the both of those to a running tally of things you claimed were true and have since backpedaled away from.

So now let's talk about a third thing: Do you maintain that Jedi Academy, the New Jedi Order books, and the Attack of the Clones novelizations are valid sources for canon, or do you concede that by your own words the IP holder having decanonized them invalidates them as relevant to a conversation about that IP holder's work?

[phlapjackage]

As the (accidental) starter of this thread, all I can say is:

https://i.imgur.com/0hQyd5L.gif

I've been on vacation, so I haven't chimed in, and now it seems kind of weird to chime in as it's winding down, but here goes...

1. I think I've come to see Frank's view, that instead of Mary Sue-ism, it's probably just really bad writing/characterization, a possibly fine distinction but still one I'm ok with
2. Everybody saying that Rey=MarySue=>misogyny...my first reaction is to say fuck off, my second reaction is to self-reflect to see if there's a tiny nugget of truth to my thinking...hope not...the gripping hand is to combine self-reflection and telling people to fuck off
3. I agree (mostly) with Chamomile's stance and arguments...if I understand them correctly...

[EightWave]

Are you claiming that people didn't notice midichlorians?

See, this is how wrong you are. You don't even understand that you're the one claiming people didn't notice midichlorians. It's your argument that requires people to be familiar enough with the prequels and original trilogy that they know what midichlorians are but find Rey's use of mind trick to be a bridge too far that ruins their sense of the natural order of things. That's your argument. The fact that you don't even recognize it just further demonstrates how wrong you are.

Probably 90% of the people who watched The Force Awakens don't even understand that there's a functional difference between "force sensitive individual" and "Jedi". For these people once someone has force powers they have them all (but only evil jedi use force lightning). For that other 10% literally every single one of them understands that the Star Wars movies are run by unrepentant narcissists who will invent midichlorians, nuke the EU, blow up Coruscant in the first act, ignobly kill Boba Fet in a hissy fit over people thinking he's cooler than Vader, and then clone Boba Fet literally millions of times so that he can be killed over and over again just to drive the point home.

Maybe somewhere out there there's one dude who thinks the Star Wars movies are being run by people who give a rats ass about continuity, and that one dude is honestly genuinely put off by Rey spontaneously manifesting Mind Trick. If that guy exists he's probably in the basement of ILM being subjected to the Ludovico Technique with the prequels and special edition as punishment for telling George Lucas that people want a HD release of the unedited original series.

Your entire argument hinges on 90% of the populace being that one guy.

Everybody saying that Rey=MarySue=misogyny...my first reaction is to say fuck off, my second reaction is to self-reflect to see if there's a tiny nugget of truth to my thinking...hope not...the gripping hand is to combine self-reflection and telling people to fuck off

It's misogyny, but just the classic unconscious double bind lots of people apply to women where the floor to be taken seriously is higher than the ceiling for being unlikeable. Self-reflection is good.

A problem is that the term "Mary Sue" is not well defined. But what it definitely does not mean is just "female protagonist I don't like", or "female protagonist who is unreasonably competent". The TVTropes page on the subject doesn't help because it specifically calls out the term as being nebulous. Despite this no matter how you swing it both Luke and Annakin fit the definition far better than Rey does. And the insistence that Rey is a Mary Sue because she is a protagonist who accomplishes things is wrong on the face of it.

K has explained why Rey did too damn much in TFA and why it's good that her role was dialed back a bit in TLJ. Frank has explained why TFA is bad storytelling because it's just cargo cult retelling of ANH. Both of those are fair criticisms. This thing Cham keeps hounding on in which Rey using mind trick to make James Bond unlock her restraints is a fundamental violation of the Star Wars cannon just isn't.

[Pariah Dog]

Can't comment on Anakin as I find much of him in the prequels annoying so most of my stuff holds a heavy bias of "Fuck that guy"

Luke I disagree on being a Gary Stu (male term for Mary Sue) and fuck you and fuck your cries of Misogyny. Most of what Luke tries to do that isn't piloting related does not go anywhere close to planned. He can't even get his own X-wing out of the swamp, he loses a hand trying to fight Vader. Most of his plan to rescue his friends from Jabba backfires but still ultimately succeeds, mostly due to Leia, Han and the droid's interventions (Han apparently defeats the "most badass merc in the galaxy" while still blind.) When he runs off to confront the Emperor, he starts getting force lightninged until he cries to his father for help.

Also in TFA doesn't freshly discovered force user Rey manage to turn

Darth Tantrum

Kylo Ren's own Jedi Mind Trick against him to pull infromation out of it. While not a full fledged Jedi/Sith, Kylo was originally apprenticed to Luke before go face turn heel and serving Andy Serkis.

[Chamomile]

Are you claiming that people didn't notice midichlorians?

See, this is how wrong you are. You don't even understand that you're the one claiming people didn't notice midichlorians. It's your argument that requires people to be familiar enough with the prequels and original trilogy that they know what midichlorians are but find Rey's use of mind trick to be a bridge too far that ruins their sense of the natural order of things. That's your argument.

No. It isn't. I don't know why you think you can tell me what my argument is, but, uh, obviously you do not get to do that.

If you're claiming to have reduced my argument to the absurd, then you need to explain how "people don't care about midichlorians" is somehow an inevitable consequence of my argument being true, and it's not at all clear why you would even think that. Honestly, I don't have a very high opinion of your ability to follow the conversation well enough to actually have noticed the gaps in your logic, because so far as I can tell you're mostly just here as a hanger-on to Frank, despite the fact that he has shot himself in the foot four or five times. Same basic deal as Wiseman, except you don't even have the presence of mind to run off with tail between your legs when you realize that what you have said is obviously and inarguably wrong.

[EightWave]

Luke is a random farmboy who turns out to be the most important person in the galaxy, saves the rebellion (twice), suddenly turns out to be related to two major characters, saves his father's soul through the power of love (tm), and is named after the author.

Annakin has the most specialists tragicalist backstory in the history of ever, is explicitly the most powerful space wizard ever to exist, is a prophecized virgin birth, is personally responsible for 90% of the setting's history, including building C-3PO for no adequately explained reason, blows up the droid control ship essentially on accident, forgets his mother exists until the moment she's required to die so he can have another round of being the most specialist tragicalist, and is secretly married to the queen (who is Natalie Portman).

My point isn't that Luke and Annakin are Mary Sues, but that Luke and Annakin (especially Annakin) are the bar you must surmount before you can call anyone else in the Star Wars universe a Mary Sue.

[EightWave]

I don't know why you think you can tell me what my argument is, but, uh, obviously you do not get to do that.

I'm not playing this game of "I won't listen to you until you tell me what my argument is, no that's not my argument don't tell me what my argument is". Go fuck yourself in the ear with your giant imaginary Star Wars lore knowledge cock.

If you're claiming to have reduced my argument to the absurd

I don't need to, you've done that well enough yourself.

people don't care about midichlorians" is somehow an inevitable consequence of my argument being true.

I have explained this to you at least twice. Here's number three:

In order for Rey's use of the force to be a violation of established precedent that alienates the audience and turns her into a Mary Sue that audience must have accepted that the prior movies represent any kind of solid precedent whatsoever. Ergo: midichlorians. In order for Rey's use of Mind Trick before she's accumulated enough gym badges and put on a black cloak to be a damning violation of established precedent that turns her into a Mary Sue it has to be a worse violation than midichlorians. That's an absurd argument, and it's your argument.

you don't even have the presence of mind to run off with tail between your legs when you realize that what you have said is obviously and inarguably wrong.

Do any of us even need to be here? Or are you just going to keep talking to yourself?

[MGuy]

8wave how do you think his argument relates to Midichlorians? It's established in two former trilogies that old man do the mind trick which sets a precedent for the movie going public that only either old people or well trained force users can use it. You can believe that that's a bad assumption to make but human brains are pattern seeking and the Force isn't very well explained so when the only incidences of someone using the mind trick are trained and practiced jedi it isn't unreasonable to believe that only trained people can pull it off.

Midichlorians on the other hand is just a powerlevel thing that offhandedly suggests that there's some scientific way to know someone's force potential. There's no precedent set that suggests that this shouldn't be expected and is not then a counterpoint to what Cham is arguing. Also I'm really sure a bunch of people flipped their shit about Midichlorians so hard that they pretty much ignore it in the sequels so... Even if you don't agree with Cham and think he's extra special wrong this isn't a gotcha.

[Dean]

Luke is a random farmboy who turns out to be the most important person in the galaxy, saves the rebellion (twice), suddenly turns out to be related to two major characters, saves his father's soul through the power of love (tm), and is named after the author.

With all that being true what if there was a character shown to do the things that mary sue-ish Luke does better and faster in every area? If you posit that the character you're describing borders on the ridiculous, how would you judge a character shown in every moment of the single film they're in to be even better than that character? What if, from fighting to flying to force-using, this other character was shown to be better in every way to the thing you're decrying as absurd? How do you think people might (and in fact did) respond to that?

[Kaelik]

It relates to midichlorins in the sense that there are 3 versions of this:

1) The audience has never watched the prequels and doesn't know about them, and there is no precedent for fucking anything because there's literally one guy.

2) The audience has watched the prequels, and therefore has already watched the spiritual Force that binds and connects us turn out to be entirely just a creation of space bacteria, and their expectations for what is or isn't precedential regarding the force has been set on fire and they don't give a shit when Rey Mind Tricks at all because nothing could ever break precedent after Midichlorins.

3) The audience has watched the prequels, and they didn't have any precedent break from midichlorins, so when they see Rey do the mind trick on Kylo Ren they smile, nod sagely, and say "ah yes, she must have more midichlorins than him, this makes perfect sense."

And in none of those versions is anyone's precedent broken by Rey doing mindtrick.

[MGuy]

Alright so I don't really wanna get too caught up defending Cham considering he didn't give my argument the same consideration but I disagree with the connection.

1 doesn't matter. If you haven't watched the prequels you don't know and the hypothetical person who is looking at Rey in the context of the Star Wars films then will judge Rey based on literally the new movies being all they know. That person is useless for Cham's chosen topic.

2 Say you watched the prequels and believe in Midichlorians. Nothing about the space bacteria directly contradicts the Force that binds stuff because the bacteria is just the means by which it happens and that's if you care for the Midichlorians which most people just want to disregard. Nothingb is said about the bacteria other than it being an indicator for potential connection with the force. Anakin is strong in the Force because he has a lot. You can also extrapolate that high counts of it are hereditary for some reason. This doesn't mean people can spontaneously use advanced techniques just because they have high potential.

Therefore 3: people who accept it wouldn't tie it into Midichlorians except that she must have a lot of them which also doesn't break Cham's argument because having a bunch of potential doesn't equate to it manifesting into overpowering someone who is already high in midi count (he introduced a use of force tk that speaks to his extreme skill and is very confident in the use of his mind probe). For example I'm a person who accepted the use of the mind trick and I in no way related that to Midichlorians. I figured that there was a bunch of transference between the two characters which led to her accidentally picking it up because plot contrivance why not?

Now I don't see the value in arguing over this but if you're going to argue with him then you're making it easy for him just to say you're not contradicting him by trying to fit this into the argument. I'm not sure that I agree with Cham because aforementioned blaster shot stoppage is something I've never seen or heard done ever in Star Wars and it seems kinda bullshit but whatever. I think he's right in dismissing this particular nugget.

[phlapjackage]

It's misogyny, but just the classic unconscious double bind lots of people apply to women where the floor to be taken seriously is higher than the ceiling for being unlikeable.

Fuck you and your "just the classic blah blah" bullshit. You're waaayyyyy too quick to play the "misogyny" card here, with no other data about how other women in other movies are viewed. Apparently just in any situation where you don't agree with the opinion about a female character, you try to play the misogyny card. Here, I'll do the same - what you're showing is just classic displacement, where YOU are the misogynist, so you see that trait in everyone else's actions. See how easy that was?

Luke isn't good at anything in the first movie, except whining and bullseyeing womp rats. Maybe flying an Xwing, but it's given as dialog that he has SOME kind of piloting experience. As flimsy as it might be, it's there in the movie. He's shown learning about and practicing with the Force in IV, so when V starts after an obvious time skip, it's not so surprising he has a few tricks (which he's bad at, his force pull is shit). Same with the end of V, he's been practicing with Yoda and so when VI rolls around again after a time skip, it's again not surprising that Luke has learned a few more tricks.

Anakin....let's not start on Anakin. I'm ok with him being a Gary Stu, sure. That wasn't the discussion tho, it seems that line of arguing devolves down to whataboutism...

Rey can do many things without ANY pretense of there being a reason given in-movie. It all requires leaps of intuition from the audience: either it's because "the Force is aroused" or "she grew up a junker and is used to fending for herself" or something or other. We're never given actual concrete movie details as to why she can do the things she does so well (maybe not strictly BETTER than other characters, but still way better than someone who's untrained should be).

So Mary Sue or bad characterization? #porquenolosdos

[Chamomile]

I don't know why you think you can tell me what my argument is, but, uh, obviously you do not get to do that.

I'm not playing this game of "I won't listen to you until you tell me what my argument is, no that's not my argument don't tell me what my argument is".

This whole thing where you take the fundamentals of rational discussion and call them a "game" is not any more persuasive when you do it as compared to when Frank does it. The strawman fallacy isn't some obscure thing. Attributing an argument that is not actually your opponent's to them is not a good thing to do. Also, I already told you once that this is a thing I reserved specifically for DeadDM because of his persistent incapability to absorb information I tried to transmit to him, but if you keep attributing weird bullshit to me all the time without being able to cite any evidence to back it up, then yeah, eventually I'm going to do the same thing to you. Because demanding that an opponent engage with my actual arguments and not a strawman is in fact perfectly reasonable. If I were actually pulling some kind of con here, you'd be able to demonstrate it by quoting contradictions between different quotes of mine. You gonna try and do that? Or are you going to quietly ignore this challenge the same way you ignored my challenge to find a single post from DeadDM in which he accurately summarized my position?

Related: You appear to have mine and Frank's position on Star Wars lore exactly backwards. My position is that it's trivia irrelevant to the discussion. Frank's position is that it is a body of knowledge that can be treated as though it were scientific fact and used to win debates. It is kind of hilarious that, given that Frank's position is that the current state of the canon is actually important, he has cited exclusively sources which are decanonized, however that doesn't change the fact that my position is and continues to be that knowing a bunch of obscure Star Wars lore is useless trivia that isn't relevant to discussions about the films, because only the films matter to the films, because they are fiction and all that matters is what the audience actually does know, not what they could theoretically know if they read the right books. The fact that I do know a bunch of Star Wars lore is hardly a boast when it's also explicitly my position that it doesn't matter, and came up only because the other side has regularly insisted that it's important (without ever explaining why audiences should be expected to know lore outside the movies or why it's reasonable to expect audiences' reaction to a scene to be affected by trivia known in advance to be uncommon among them). Indeed, people have previously (and repeatedly) made the assumption that I don't know Star Wars lore, because I consider it irrelevant to the conversation, and it was assumed this was a self-serving effort to devalue knowledge I don't have, rather than just being a thing I believe.

I don't need to, you've done that well enough yourself.

Okay, three options here:

1) You're taking a phrase that refers to a specific class of argument, interpreting it completely literally, and think this makes you seem witty instead of stupid. Pro-tip: Literal interpretation humor is self-deprecating, because it indicates obliviousness to context.
2) You actually don't know what reduction to the absurd is.
3) You're claiming that I've actually presented a reduction of the absurd of my own argument, in which case I will again call upon you to demonstrate that this actually happened, with quotes, and you will again fail to do so, because it did not.

I have explained this to you at least twice.

Quote the previous explanations. No, just declaring a conclusion by itself does not count as an explanation.

In order for Rey's use of the force to be a violation of established precedent that alienates the audience and turns her into a Mary Sue

Quote any of my posts where I ever called Rey a Mary Sue. I'll give you a hint: You can't, because they don't exist, although you can find a post earlier in this thread where I already explicitly declared that this was not part of my position.

that audience must have accepted that the prior movies represent any kind of solid precedent whatsoever. Ergo: midichlorians. In order for Rey's use of Mind Trick before she's accumulated enough gym badges and put on a black cloak to be a damning violation of established precedent that turns her into a Mary Sue it has to be a worse violation than midichlorians.

You skipped over the part where you actually explained why this is the case. Again. You just declared that since this series has ever had precedent overturned anywhere in the past, that means that now all audience expectations are forever obliterated, begging the question of whether or not audience expectations immediately and irrevocably explode upon contact with a single bad retcon. They do not. Indeed, you have already conceded this. Your own list of things that people noticed were bad about the prequels includes things that happened in Revenge of the Sith, after the midichlorians debacle, and which certainly did not receive as much attention as the midichlorians line, and yet people still noticed them and did not like them. You have personally conceded that precedent being violated has not prevented audiences from noticing further violations of precedent. People continue to notice and care about this kind of thing even after it becomes predictable.

[EightWave]

It's misogyny, but just the classic unconscious double bind lots of people apply to women where the floor to be taken seriously is higher than the ceiling for being unlikeable.

Fuck you and your "just the classic blah blah" bullshit. You're waaayyyyy too quick to play the "misogyny" card here, with no other data about how other women in other movies are viewed.

Stop pretending you're immune to implicit bias. Implicit bias doesn't make you a bad person, but pretending like you don't and your bullshit arguments are completely logical does.

Luke isn't good at anything in the first movie, except whining and bullseyeing womp rats.

Rey can do many things without ANY pretense of there being a reason given in-movie.

This is the classic double bind I'm talking about. You're mad about Rey being better than Luke but also Luke was useless for the majority of ANH. The floor of Rey being a not-useless protagonist is doing stuff and the ceiling of her being a Mary Sue is doing more stuff than Luke who didn't do stuff for the majority of the movie. You also require that Rey be given explicit authorization for everything she does before it becomes appropriate. Protagonists don't have to get their card punched before they're allowed to be competent. That's not a thing. You've made that up.

So Mary Sue or bad characterization?

You ask this like you've caught me in a sticky situation. But I've already said Rey in TFA is a bad characterization. Not because she's a Mary Sue but because the writers snipped out a bunch of awesome stuff from the prior movies and stitched them together into a new pseudo narrative, then forgot that Rey was the only person available to actually do those things.

For example: Rey isn't actually a fantastic pilot. Her sand skimmer riding and Millenium Falcon piloting both look awesome, but that's just because "awesome things happen on screen" is a given for a fantasy movie about space wizards. Contrast this to when Poe basically just flies an X-wing in the open sky while shooting stuff and Finn raves about "Now THAT'S a pilot." Which means that even though we, objectively, can see that Rey's piloting is much better than Poe's, Poe is still the better in-universe pilot.

[EightWave]

You skipped over the part where you actually explained why this is the case. Again.

No I didn't. As others have said, "Mary Sue" has to mean something more than just "is poorly characterized" this is true because words have meaning. Rey definitely does a lot of stuff in TFA, but all of that stuff has perfectly valid Doylist explanations that don't require Rey to be a Mary Sue, you've even conceded to some of them.

So at this point you've entirely hitched your Mary Sue argument to the one moment in which Rey spontaneously manifests Mind Trick without first wearing Yoda like a backpack. I'm not making that up. That's your hill you've chosen to die on. You've reduced your own "Rey is a Mary Sue" argument to absurdity. I could even concede that Rey shouldn't be able to Mind Trick without training and your argument still would be absurd because that one single precious moment does not a Mary Sue make.

Kaelik has covered why "midichloridans = Chamomile is an idiot" extremely well. The three possible situations are:

1) people aren't familiar enough with the material for precedent to exist.
2) people are already familiar enough with the material that they have whiplash from all the massive retcons, in which case Rey spontaneously manifesting mind trick is an extremely minor violation that doesn't matter.
3) people are familiar with the material and have already accumulated such a massive katamari of mind-caulk that it's physically not possible to violate precedent anymore.

In all three cases your argument that Rey mind tricking James Bond to get out of her restraints is a gross violation of the fantasy story of space wizards is absurd and you've done it to yourself.