Mary Sue (and to a similar extent, Woke) has literally become the epitome of the quote: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Complaining about a girl’s ability to realistically fight pirates that exist in a magical realm within the stars where children don’t age and can fucking fly with the aid of fairy dust and happy thoughts is fucking wild.
It's even more stupid because in Neverland playing pretend becomes real, so if there is a place in fiction where play fight ACTUALLY transfer into fighting skills is that island 🤦🏻♀️
I haven't watched Peter and Wendy so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think this is one of the examples which does hold more water than the others. Reading the original "Mary Sue" fanfic, it seems to me the main issue is that "Mary Sue" is a random inserted character who overshadows the actual main characters like Kirk and Spock. This is more relevant than her overall ability. If Spock picked a lock to escape and Kirk got the Order of Gallantry for running his ship; it wouldn't be such a big deal. The issue is it was done by a random interloper. While Wendy was in the original story, ultimately the story is meant to be about Peter Pan first and foremost. While Wendy is important in a lot of the emotional/character moments in Peter Pan, Neverland is Peter's world and Wendy is just visiting. If Wendy overshadows Peter Pan in what is meant to be his own story; that's somewhat Mary Sue-ish, regardless of whether fighting pirates is realistic or not (it's realistic for people to pick locks, after all).
Having now seen the clip of the actual fight scene, I take it back. Peter fights Hook while Wendy *and the others* fight the pirates. It's a pretty standard trope (and a good one), where the main character fights the big bad while the secondary characters fight the fodder. I can't really see it as vastly different from the cartoon. John, Michael, and the Lost Boys fight the other pirates there too, the only difference is Wendy joins in.
I think it used to be pretty clearly defined as a self-insert power fantasy character, but nowadays, people just use it to describe any character that the plot clearly wants us to like but isn't quite doing it for me personally.
It was originally made to mock a fanfiction trope of self -insert fanfics. It was never a term made to critic professionally/originally produced media, which is so upsetting.
@@mr_yoru5834 Not just that but a Mary Sue is also heavily serviced by the plot, the plot exists to give that character lots of fun stuff. Basically Isekai smartphone.
@@timymaxlanguage use does not know hierarchies. That's why dictionaries were forced to expand the definition of literally to include the opposite meaning of the traditionsl understanding. Or why one day Alannys Morisette will have a similar impact on ironic...
Well the Bechdel Test did have some merit. But I do agree that the test itself is limited. Like for example Fire Island a LGBTQ Hulu film was despised by Hanna Rosin for not having a prominent female character. Even though the film was starring male LGBTQ representation which was never represented as much. As a result female characters being prominent is important. But the bechdel test deserves more criticism. But the Mary Sue Term was just a Star Trek joke. As a result the bechdel test does kind of have some credit because female characters were never seen. But the mary sue trope is so bad. Which is why it's frustrating people think its an actual writing advice.
@@IAmBored347 The Bechdel Test is just a tool to point out how many pieces of media can't even reach the incredibly low bar of having two named women talking to each other about something that isn't a man. Something passing the Bechdel Test was never meant to give it a seal of approval.
@IAmBored347 The comic where the term was created was a joke. It was about a lesbian having 3 rules about seeing a movie. The joke is if the movie has two women in it who didn't mention men, the lesbian could imagine the two women were lesbians. It was a joke commeting on the lack of wlw rep in media in the 80s. Sorry for explaining the joke but your reply is proving my point. By dicussing "well it has merit" you are taking it too seriously.
@@lastflunky in my experience, 99% of people who are vaguely aware of the Bechdel test don’t even realize it came from that DTWOF comic strip and assume that Alison Bechdel is some joyless misandrist media critic rather than a butch lesbian cartoonist whose autobiographical comic book was turned into a Tony Award winning musical. 🤷 Their loss. I’m gonna go listen to “Ring of Keys” again and pretend I have something in my eye when the actor who plays young Bechdel sings “In this whole luncheonette, why am I the only one who sees you’re beautiful? No… I mean… handsome!” 🥹🥰
I really liked the video as a whole but I'm just SHOCKED when the guy dropped Wendy as a Mary Sue, its fucking NEVERLAND, if there is a place where play fight would actually translate to fight skills would be Neverland, like, it's a cannon thing in the books, why would you think ten year olds can fight against pirates with sticks and stones?! THATS THE WHOLE POINT
And what's even better in the stream was jar was basically saying that Captain Hook is an expert fighter or something? Captain Hook! One of the most well-known ineffectual villains even in its source material!
I think unironically trying to gas up Captain Hook as a skilled fighter should be cause for alarm when it comes to these “critics” and how they interpret media, but hey, whatever it takes to be right I guess
The Anti-Woke grifters will call every female character a Mary Sue. Imagine if Alien was released today, they would call Ripley a Mary Sue. If The Terminator was released today, they would call Sarah Connor a Mary Sue. Not only they call every woman a Mary Sue, but then they love Sword Art Online (awesome anime that got me into MMORPGs) and cannot even realize that Kirito is a Gary Stu.
They like to use those two movies as a basis for "how to make a believable female character." To them, wokeism didn't exist in the 80s and 90s up until 2015, apparently. By the way, don't forget that Vasquez would make their brains explode Edit: I haven't watched SAO in decades, but I've seen at least a couple people criticizing Kirito's Gary Stu-ness. Besides, he gets memed by Guts from Berserk because of "Black Swordsmen" Editx2: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Kill Bill. If that movie were to come out today, 9 out of 10, they'd say Beatrix is a Mary Sue
Sword Art Online is easily one of the most hated animes in anime circles, with Kirito widely considered a Gary Stue of the worst kind. So I don't get this point at all. Literally no-one thinks SAO is well written or that Kirito isn't a Gary Stue.
@@RedSunUnderParadise I mean, he's entitled to that opinion. I don't see anything wrong in liking SAO. I just didn't get what point he was trying to make, because it isn't like most anime fans are in denial about Kirito being a Gary Stue. More like vast amounts of people consider SAO and Kirito the primary culprits behind the terrible wave of generic mmo/Isekai shows that followed, and the tropes they employ. He literally couldn't have picked a worse example.
What I love about Steven Universe is Pink never explained why she made Steven. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what Steven does with his life. Just like Megamind. The protagonist’s parents told his purpose but it got cut out. It never mattered what were the parents intentions.
I think they did technically explain why she made steven but not in a "this is his purpose" kind of way, it just seemed to be the epitome of her fascination with humanity
That is why she made him though: To create an entity that could do whatever it wanted with its life. She herself couldn't do that because she was a war fugitive wanted for assassinating royalty. For the sake of the planet's peace, she had to go away.
Pink admired humanities ability to grow and change and despaired that she herself couldn't. even as rose she was still just a template with a singular purpose. a gem is ageless and basically immortal and cannot do anything beyond what purpose it was grown to fulfill. A human lifespan is so small compared to a gem but the human grows and fundamentally changes many times in such a short amount of time and pink wanted to experience that for herself so she became Steven, something completely unique in the universe with the potential to grow. TLDR gems can't grow past a single purpose, humans can, so pink became a human to grow beyond her original purpose.
I mean... there are a couple scenes in The Empire Strikes Back that could be cherry picked to play up Han Solo to be fairly bad... But like... you'd have to ignore a lot of other stuff in order to accomplish this
@@NimhLabs He flew through an asteroid field without getting hit and successfully evaded and hid from an Imperial fleet. He looked like an awesome pilot in EMPIRE!
@@Mokkari77 Again... the amount of cherry picking you would need to do, is just so off the hook, that it would qualify for purchasing a record from that Guiness Book which turns out to not be as trust worthy of a resource as previous thought
@@NimhLabs If it was Han or any experienced pilot flying the Falcon on Jakku they would have gone into space immediately. The point was Rey and Finn didn't know what they were doing.
@ Again... I was mostly just highlighting how bad of an argument the "Rey could fly the Falcon" actually was by pointing out how much effort would need to done to have the other people to pilot it be shown at a similar skill level It would require a Crack Edit video to rival those JAndrew Star Trek edits. Which... while _possible_ ... the amount of effort would mostly show it as being completely incorrect via what is needed to succeed at it Think of it like one of those Jedi Controller toy devices (the ones that attach to your head) being used to play Dark Souls. It _IS_ possible... but... yeah...
The term mary sue has literally ruined how we crituque character and gender bias. But even if a female character isn't a mary sue they are despise. People dislike Amethsyt's rowdiness and immaturity even though she matured into a good responsible gem that didn't burden Steven People dislike Frieren for overtaking the number one spot anime Fullmetal Alchemist even though she is a well written character and her show deserves more appreciation. People dislike Chloe for being a rude friend to Max Caufield but she is literally more than a "bad friend". People dislike Princess Bubblegum for her true personality as a "manipulator" but that makes her actions and character interesting. People dislike Mabel Pines for being selfish when she is a kid trying her best to help people and Dipper isn't called out for his behavior on wanting Wendy. People dislike Gabi even though she is a well developed character and foil to Eren People dislike Sailor Moon for being a brat even though she is supposed to act like an ACTUAL teenager. People dislike Lae'zel for being a jerk to others when she literally stop acting like one and actually matured. People dislike Sayaka Miki for making a dumb wish over some guy when her story is more complex than that and she ACTS like a reasonable teenager. People dislike Spider Gwen for not telling Miles the truth when she is trying to preserve her friendship as well as dealing with the burden of being a superhero. And people despise Katara for being annoying when once AGAIN she acts like an actual teenager and is a well developed character And etcetera. I feel so sorry for new creators because even if they're female characters are not deemed "mary sue" they're still mocked. At this point I wished people will learn mary sue is a fanfic term that shouldn't exist for actual writing. Edit: Also it is fine disliking these chatacters. I am not even a big fan of Chloe from LIS. But please do not misunderstand the character.
I think disliking a character is fine? Don't think there's anything wrong with people disliking characters. I dislike kiwi from cyberpunk due to her betrayal setting all up for the finale and how if she didn't betray them things would have turned out differently. Did people really dislike frieren just for that? I'm sure it was simply the Fullmetal diehard that want Fullmetal as no.1 always. People will always dislike or like characters. Male characters are disliked and so are females. Edit- I'll give you that females might be disliked most. But things you mentioned can be applied to male characters as well. People don't like Asta cause he screams for example. They forget about everything else. People don't like deku cause of him crying at the beginning. Same applies to tanjiro. These are small things people dislike characters for
I think disliking Chloe could be fine and I think there are a good amount of LiS fans that aren't bias and don't like her as well. All about someone's reasoning. Chloe can be a bad friend and Max was a bad one as well. But a lot of the things that are a bad part of Chloe is something the game calls her out on or something Chloe apologizes for.
@channel45853 interestingly enough her absence in the recent game disappointed me. I think she complements max in a way even if someone was to dislike her. Max is calm and reserved and chloe is the opposite. But I think that might be more on the games lack of interesting character or even love interest.
And people hate Korra because she’s cocky (she's a teenager who has been told that she is the chosen one for most of her life) and overpowered (she’s literally the chosen one, and by the start of the story had undergone all the training in all but 1 of the elements, which she was shown to considerably struggle with). But also because she's weak…… wait, what?
As a fan fiction writer myself, Mary Sue is not even a helpful term in that regard Seriously, outside of its original parody, it is not that useful of a writing tip and quite frankly, there has always been a gender bias for how it has been used against The writing advice quickly went to, “Don’t write female characters, or else they'll be called Mary Sue.” Because nearly every OC or self-interest would fall under the Mary Sue archetype or a sub archetype , I was stressed about this as a young writer. If you had a Mary Sue, then Mary Sue roast sites and TH-camrs could find it and make fun of you even better when it is clearly done by a child who made the Sue-that was just all in “Good fun.” And bare in mind you could get called having a Mary Sue for such things as sparkles on their outfit of they were too colourful in design or had dyed hair Frankly, I am glad that Mary Sue is that outdated in fanfics circles. It makes getting actual good feedback easier and frankly makes it way less stressful I’m just happy fan fiction circles have grown out to respect those who are just having fun and those who want genuine feedback
I'm assuming the essay "Don't Worry Guys, Everything Isn't a Mary Sue" by Coelasquid, from over a decade ago, helped with this situation. I also hope it never gets taken down because context and execution really is key.
I was there for a lot of the Mary Sue stuff. It actually stopped me from making characters for a while and set me back. Honestly, it's still such a thing that even when I make a new character these days despite being an adult now, I still ask myself "are they a Mary Sue" despite the fact that I don't really need to worry about that. My friend even pointed this out as I was talking to him about some of my characters. He felt that some of them could be a little bit more than what they are and it's something I agreed with. But that mindset of me not wanting to make them too powerful or too colorful or.... Anything that could be perceived as bad... Has limited my ability to create. Yeah, I don't want to make a super perfect character. But it's made me afraid to make characters that could be bad. Which yeah that sounds good on paper because no one wants to make a bad character, but the reason it sucks is because if I don't write a character that ends up accidentally not being good or even boring, how am I going to learn from my mistakes? I am getting better at getting out of this mindset, But it's still there.
@angelsartandgaming I was there back in the Livejournal Spork days lol so I feel you! And I have similar worries. It's the whole "fail faster" thing and trying not to get discouraged by the idea of scrutiny. Someone in another comment chain pointed out it's an issue with the conflict being interesting, not a characterization issue inherently, and I really do think the solution of using Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs (as Coelasquid suggests) can help or at least reveal dilemmas in the plot. Also, humbleness is imposed upon the marginalized; I don't think pride or even expertise is a problem. It's a matter of how the character tackles their issues and if you, the writer, find it engaging. Perfection is a compliment when someone loves something, but then they're simply biased towards and not against it. I don't think the Darlings even need to die (edit: lol the opposite of what Limyaael used to say), it's simply a matter of allowing them to suffer and making that suffering relatable to an audience. If your friend is willing to give you feedback on where they think you can take a character further, I consider that valuable. It's so hard getting any feedback sometimes and if they have a more critical eye, their input is probably less biased than your own, so I'd definitely take it to heart and see if you can implement any of their suggestions that you're comfortable with.
@DoveJS absolutely and I do! My friend and I are two people who like writing mainly fanfictions, but we also write our own original things too. We're just not good at putting them on paper. XD But yeah we tend to like to help each other with our characters and sometimes I'm so jealous of his lackadaisical way of writing. Because he's not worried about whether his characters are good or bad. If they're considered bad characters, they're bad characters and he can always improve. If they're considered good, then That's perfectly cool!
I swear, to the "culture war/anti-woke" CHUDs Mary Sue has just been redefined as "a woman in a lead role in my nerd franchise" similar to woke being "gay people or minorities existing in my nerd franchise."
I appreciate so much that you called out the inherent misogyny with so many of these criticisms. It’s so transparent oftentimes that the complaint isn’t that a woman was too-perfect, it was that she was competent at all.
yeah, I'm not like... a big fan of she hulk or anything but that scene where she flat out explains WHY she has better control of her emotions is powerful. Listing the impossible expectations, double standards and lose lose situations she always feels pressured by should have been low hanging fruit to empathize with the main character.
@@mikefisher4051 Totally fair. I haven't watched it at all myself, but that's just some straight up reality she talked about. She just said the quiet part out loud that a lot of women deal with day in and day out, and people still refused to listen. There's only so much you can do against willful ignorance.
@@mikefisher4051I think the scene could have been fine if presented in a more tactful and smarter context. What Jen says is mostly fine but then she starts condescendingly talking down to Bruce Banner and taking it all out on him. Up to that point Bruce has only been working to make sure that she isn’t treated like a monster the same way he is. So when she talks down to the guy who has admitted to have discovered that suicide is impossible the hard way..yea I have no sympathy for her. Trying to one up someone’s deeply personal struggles is bad enough, much more so when it’s a guy who’s been ostracized by society for being a ticking time bomb for decades.
@@thecod2345 Alright, I just rewatched some of that episode, and that scene. The only line I feel like gets close to what you mean is "I am an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you, so all of this feels like projecting a lot of shit onto me." Is it mildly aggressive? sure. Has she been showing that she is capable and humoring him for days while saying she just wants to go back home? Also yes. As an audience member of course I see that Bruce is in this case a reasonable cautious teacher who wants what is best for his family member, and she is an inexperienced immensely powerful unwilling hero. I am not trying to talk down to YOU, but I think that your view that the scene could have been done with "more tact" is like exactly her point. From her point of view, she got frustrated after days of being told how to something she already knows how to do, and now you think she's not worthy of sympathy. Which I find a bit drastic, but it's alright if you don't like it. I'm assuming and giving benefit of the doubt because well... you're watching Anthony, you probably ARE better than the nutters who just scream about woke after all. lol
@@mikefisher4051 The only scene I liked in She Hulk was when she beat Daredevil because it actually Showed how easily a Gamma being/Hulk can pack up most street level heroes. Consistent powerscaling is good, actually.
Aspiring writers refusing to write anything out of fear of creating a Mary Sue also applies to not wanting to including problematic/uncomfortable content in their stories out of fear of being accused of endorsing said problematic/uncomfortable even if they make it clear in the text why it shouldn't be endorsed. But that's a topic to discuss for a future video.
@@raphaelmarquez9650 hoo boy do I get this one. There are several things that I want to write stuff that is uncomfortable because it feels like it's the only way I can get certain points across. But at the same time, I don't want to be accused of others thinking that I endorse said uncomfortable things. I feel like people want dark stories but aren't ready for anything that's darker than Hazbin Hotel.
And even then a bad/embarrassing piece of created media can still have ideas that are improved and expounded upon in later works. Look how Toby took the Halloween Hack version of Megalovania and turned it into his signature song both for his composer work for Homestuck and later Undertale.
Owen Grady is 100% a Gary Stu. It's not only women, just women have it pointed out way more because sexism. Dude can effectively psychically command any dinosaur with his hands, tossed mercenaries one armed so hard he flew over him. Straight up captain america super strength. He can survive a pyroclastic flow, hold his breath for several minutes, swim faster than debris can sink, overcome absurd water pressure, dive through the gnashing jaws of an enraged T-Rex, is immune to the bends, can ride a motorcycle through a jungle, shrug off tranquilizers, and is always funny and charismatic, or at least treated that way whenever he does anything. The kids in the first movie say they want to go with him after seeing their aunt take out a dinosaur. Dude is obnoxiously OP, and why? Well, he was in the navy.
Also why the fuck does the hand thing work every time, the only reason the Velociraptors followed his commands is because they were specifically trained to do so and even then they are shown to be able to disobey him! Also why do random Dinosaurs that he was chasing a minute prior care about this especially when they are big enough to end him in a single kick?
I re-watched the franchise with my fiancee and seeing him, his daughter, and Alan grant use that stupid hand to distract Blue Jr had me cackling at how absurd it was to see. If that isn't a sign of him being a mary sue nothing else will be
If we have to argue this much on what a term means, that term is less than useless now We spend more time arguing on made-up schematics for a made-up word rather than actual, substantial character analysis
I dunno if I fully agree with this take. Language evolves over time and it's not unheard of for terms to develop new use cases, which requires people to argue (hopefully civilly) over what they mean The real issue with Mary Sue is the bad faith actors are using it as a club to legitimize their poorly veiled misogyny, not necessarily people being unable agree on its meaning
Controversal opinion. Despite most of the characters who are called Mary Sue being female, most characters who fit verious definitions of this trope are male. Everytime I read or hear someone's definition of Mary Sue it's always the male character that comes to my mind first
@@MILDMONSTER1234 IDK, I'd cbe tempted to chalk up Doom Guy to psychopathy - at least partly from what happened to his colleagues, partly what happened to his rabbit Daisy. 😂
@ In the original games yes, 2016 and Eternal besically reworked the entire character cause the creators didn't understand why doomguy actually works so well
@@MILDMONSTER1234you're right, but i think Doomguy gets a pass because of the media he's in, it's a videogame that works on rule of cool, it's not really that serious, like Bayonetta or Dante
The fact that little girls are dressing up as Rey at conventions and at the Disney parks is proof that the Sequel Trilogy has young fans that resonate with it, and the discourse will eventually become more positive, just like it did with the Prequel Trilogy.
@@gamestation2690 The prequels were widely hated by Gen X and older Millennials that saw them in theaters but became slowly rehabilitated by younger Millennials and Gen Z kids that grew up with them as well as prequel-era media that attempted to fill the gaps left by the films.
I find that hard to believe. The prequels were widely despised at the time of release, but they were still a MASSIVE cultural phenomenon that left an impact, which eventually turned into nostalgia among (at the time) young fans. Maybe it's just my circle, but I feel like the sequels just didn't have nearly as big of an impact when they released. It just doesn't feel like people really care that much about Star Wars these days. It has been demystified.
Exactly right. These fashie types want women in movies to be seen and not heard; to be incompetent, pretty, in the background, and inconsequential to the plot; to not have agency, goals, talents, or power. Otherwise, it feels emasculating to them, it damages their fragile egos. They'd prefer them to be weak, dependent on male characters, or needing to be saved.
I think there’s a balance to strike. The problem I think is that they rarely strike it. When you mix the right amount of competencies and faults in a cohesive way, you generally can get a well formed character, man or woman. When you make it incongruent, too many competencies, especially in an overly good light, you end up with either a Gary Stu or Mary sue.
53:19 Sorry for the second comment but I was one of those kids who ended up not liking to write anymore because of being afraid of making a bad character. And the problem is that if I didn't make a bad character, how was I going to learn to make better characters? Kid me could have really used your speech here at the end. Because in the pursuit of not making a Mary Sue, you just end up not making anything at all. Or resort to characters you just simply don't like because you think this character would be the ultimate goal of writing a sueless character... But you personally just find them so bland without anything that makes them stand out. Sure, they're not a Mary Sue anymore, but they're not exactly a character either. What's even funnier is that these sorts of mindsets never were placed on any of my male characters! Always the female characters... Honestly, thank you for this video! I was looking forward to this since I watched your stream!
I hope you're writing again! One thing that helps me is giving my characters character flaws that cause them problems. It's their own mistakes (or fatal flaw) that trips them up and blocks them from what they want, yet it leads them to what they need. Then, you as the writer, it's your job to give your characters challenges that force them to overcome their fatal flaw. This is what I do to avoid creating "bad" characters. Plus, it creates fascinating and interesting stories with character development. Hope that helps and I hope you write again. ❤
@brittanyg7700 I actually really like that! And I'm hoping to write more. It's kind of one of my New Year's goals to start writing again. I don't think I'm going to release a book anytime soon. But just waiting for myself to be honest.
@@angelsartandgaming I have a personal goal to finish an original novel this year. I also have a set word count goal for every day, too. As someone who has been writing for decades, my advice is to not worry about publishing. Just create. Create something you love. That's the most important thing to do. If you publish, great. If you don't, great. The goal is to create something that you're proud of, that you love, and that you filled your time with doing something beautiful. I know I'm just a random stranger on the internet, but I wish you the best of luck in your writing. I believe in you!
I remember taking one of those Mary Sue quizzes and it coming back that the character was a Mary Sue because she had a pet. That’s when I realized Mary Sue shaming was stupid. There’s no way to make an interesting character without it being considered a Mary Sue by some.
IMO to say it is purely people who are "weirdos on the itnernet" taking issue thouhg, would be erroneous - and rather dismissive of what could be legitimate discussion (yes, it can be exhausting, but the presence of weird ass, and legitimate-good-faith people means blanket statements, IMO, are unhelpful).
@DanknDerpyGamer Look, I was refering at people being made a female protagonist win a fight with a henchman. Those are weirdos and we should call them.
The thing most people leave out is that it applies to characters written into stories that are not their own, because the characters derives from fan-fiction. It may be an author self-insert, or a character that that particular writer is attached to. Hence a LOT of established characters would fit the role of a Mary Sue IF they appeared in any story outside of their own. Sherlock Holmes for example would probably qualify as a Mary Sue if he appeared in stories outside of Doyle’s and put into the that of other literature franchises.
You're honestly not wrong because one of my favorite things that my friend and I like to do is put characters we like in a different universe to see how they'd react or do a swap. They still have all their original powers but they're just in a different place. One of my favorite examples is that my friend and I switched Luffy from One Piece and Jotaro from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure just to theorize how well they would do in each other's worlds. This means that Luffy is the one fighting Dio and Jotaro is the one trying to find the one piece. And throughout we found out that Luffy would be considered pretty overpowered in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure but Jotaro would surprisingly be underpowered in One Piece!
Or not. It still depends on how the story is written. Not every skillful character is a Mary Sue, even if they're ridiculously overpowered. The way they're treated by the narrative plays a crucial role in their status as a Mary Sue.
Reminds me of a joke idea my friend had about role swapping Hamlet and Othello - resulting plays would be about 15 minutes long with a lot less tragedy. But (at least done not as a comedy) they would kind of suck? And more to the point, neither would be described as a Mary Sue.
The Star Trek fandom, the authorities on Mary Sue, compared Wesley Crusher to her. I say Wesley qualifies(and that the term never should have left Star Trek, even if it is too late to close Pandora's box)
@insupportofjunhado But Wesley is a Mary Sue in the traditional sense. That is, an implausibly gifted author avatar. Rey is more the result of incompetent writing than of delieberate author insertion or agenda pushing. They gave her new skills whenever they hit a sbag in the plot. And instead of rewriting and finding creative ways to resolve or avoid those problems, Rey gets a new ability that comes in handy. And it culminates into this perfect, all-powerful angelic being.
I'd be addicted to a second channel hearing you defend Rey Skywalker all day xD It's just so refreshing to hear someone explore her character (and the Sequel Trilogy as a whole) from multiple fair angles, both criticizing and praising what works and doesn't work about the character in a FAIR manner, while not leaving any comparable examples from Star Wars or other media that people just ignore unchecked either. Its one of my favorite topics you touch upon ^^
to bad his argument fall flat once you actually get into star wars just a tad bit and realize he has never actual bothered to get his facts straight. everyone he "argues" against says USE the force, not to be helped by it. WHICH THE FORCE CAN DO. the force can influence things without anyone coercing it. and he take those instances as "anakin used the force". he is just flat out wrong tho. or do you say a child few by itself when it was carried around by their parent? No you don't you said the parent lifted the child.
Gonna be real. As someone who loves The Last Jedi and really likes Force Awakens... You can't really explore the sequel trilogy nor her character as a whole. Because Rey in TRoS is not even the same character anymore. You can defend the argument based on misogyny but she is an absolutely terribly written character as a whole. The last movie retrospectively butchered every single character
@@MikePhantom I'm someone who has been into Star Wars since the late 90s, watched all of the numbered movies and dabbled into the EU and I still think the Mary Sue classification of Rey is dumb Anakin does indeed use the Force. He's been using the Force in podraces as a child, and a human no less. Even the Episode 1 Racer instruction manual points out that Anakin's ability to pilot a podracer is unheard of, primarily because he's the only human in the entire circuit and is matching with other non-human characters through the Force, which he is uniquely far stronger in than anyone else as far as canon is concerned
@gamingsheepy6981 Mary Sues are just symptoms of poor execution, plain and simple. The things people point out as being a Mary Sue (if they're not simply circumstantial difference in preferences) are typically the signs of an inexperienced author. The problems with Rey are that her trilogy is an incoherent vision of multiple writers and directors getting different feedback that they're stuck with having to retroactively cram in. I think a deep dive into Rey and exploring what went wrong is still an excellent idea. I think you can defend her in the sense that the character is the victim of crappy circumstances on a meta-narrative level, same as all the rest in the overarching narrative, but I don't think it was The Plan to craft her into a bland, uninteresting Loved By All Goddess. Executive Meddling is what ruined her potential as a character; I think most people would agree with that even if they for some reason liked the plot twist reveal. (I mean I could be wrong...) Although contrasting and comparing these thoughts, it's easier in this light to see WHY people point at her and call her one, but I don't think she deserved it that much. Last Jedi does have some problems but for example Rose still got a significant chunk of time devoted to her (and then a lot of people hated her; poor woman.) Personally I loved Rose's potential as much as I loved Finn's and Poe's, whether she was dating anyone or not, and it's just a shame that everyone got short-changed in favor of Reylo (the most awkward, creepy romance IMHO.) IDK these movies might've never been amazing but perhaps Rey needs an analysis as if she's three different characters then? It's now more interesting than I initially considered, so thanks for sharing your thoughts! lol well I hope my rambling was interesting to you as well anyway.
@@gamingsheepy6981 Yeah. There’s like 2 types of Rey haters. The ones that genuinely just don’t like lead women, and the ones that know Star Wars enough to see that she doesn’t work as a female lead. Rogue One also had a female lead, and I didn’t see any hate towards Jyn Erso or the supporting characters from the second type of Rey hater. I have problems with Rey, but I also have problems with all the other supporting characters.
22:25 I don't know if you're going to talk about this either, but something a lot of the Rey haters miss is that she doesn't actually really win with the lightsaber either. She usually just barely manages to survive her fights. And the last one she has with Kylo Ren? The guy is sporting a devastating wound that would probably have killed him if he hadn't been trained in the force.
Winning a lightsaber fight is pretty clearly defined as chopping up the other guy. If it wasn’t for the planet literally separating them she would have just killed Kylo Ren at the end of TFA. Rey never gets touched and she chops up Kylo at least a couple of times, right? I’d call that “decisively winning”. Compare Rey “barely surviving” to Luke in ESB. Luke being outmatched by Vader isn’t even a question long before he gets his hand cut off. The entire second half of the movie is “Luke is not ready”. Rey on the other hand might get a little sweat on her brow I guess. Mace Windu and Yoda were more on the ropes in their ROTS fights than Rey ever gets.
@@Dullahan3470 Once again, you're ignoring that Kylo Ren is not operating on the same playing field as Darth Vader was in his trilogy. Kylo is much weaker than Vader, Maul, and Dooku were in their films and also had a hole in his abdomen from a powerful shot earlier. Even still, Rey *would have lost that fight* if she hadn't channeled the Force in a manner not dissimilar to Luke using it to blow up the Death Star in ANH. That's not her being a Mary Sue, that's literally just how movies are written.
@@cartooncritic7045I think a lot of people misunderstand. You can still disapprove of the way these movies are written and you can still critique them. It just really doesn't fit under the definition of "Mary Sue."
I’m not super into Star Wars, so I didn’t know tons about the fandoms response to Rey. Seeing the side by side comparison between her and Anakin, and the responses to each, was crazy interesting. Also, “big fish in a shrinking pond” goes CRAZY hard.
It's really funny how much discussion about Star Wars is ruled by half memories of movies people clearly haven't watched in a while with a side dish of bullshit lore from books nobody reads to make sense of the weird filmmaking gaffes of the original movies that turned into Whole Things along the way. The Star Wars fandom is forever cursed to have bad media literacy, unfortunately.
Ngl, I don't think Rey was ever a Mary Sue. Though, I do think she was an overall wasted character. She could've been pretty cool and interesting due to her backstory, but they didn't have any clear direction for what they wanted to do with her.
@@harlannguyen4048 It wasn't poor planning. The original trilogy wasn't planned either. I actually think it was _trying_ to plan that created a problem. They were trying to create a trilogy, not a story. They failed to make each individual movie it's own story. One of the things that the Clone Wars did so well, despite being sandwiched between 2 already existing movies, was that they wrote each episode as it's own story, with the knowledge that it need to fit in its overall narrative spot sitting in the background. Acknowledged, but not the narrative priority on the micro level.
@@Xkittyloverr1997 to use a Halo tagline, it's a very "From The Beginning You Know The End" sort of storytelling because you *know* where most of the cast is gonna end up with the exception of Ahsoka.
The best part of this video was learning that JAR is losing more money than he makes being a TH-camr and he's so desperate you can literally hear it in his already painful to listen to voice.
You know what I hate about grifters who talk about Mary Sues? They go on and on at every single detail why they hate them on 10 videos a week and yet they always got something to hide.
Those people will crap on Rey for "unrealistically" defeating Kylo Ren but will glaze the crap out of characters like Batman for defeating Superman and John Wick taking down a room full of guys
yeah, i think that definition specifically was good at pointing out how a messes with the story. Describing how a Sue “warps” the story around them made that definition stick with me personally.
The worst part about the Mary Sue discourse (especially in Rey’s part) is that it makes it impossible to criticize the character/story when it’s the vast majority of people criticizing that story are just chuds with weird hangups I try not to even discuss the new Star Wars films because of the negative association
one of the best pieces of art advice I've ever gotten is "don't be afraid of pushing a piece past it's breaking point, because you'll never know where the line is till you've crossed it a few times."
I tend to operate on the definition of Mary Sue that it is a character that is a mouthpiece for the author's opinions and ideals, is a power fantasy for the author, gets everything they want without having to work for it, is amazing at things without trying, and their values/perspective are objectively correct in the world of the narrative. And all these traits are required to be one. For characters with only some of these traits I'll err toward "borderline Sue" or "pseudo Sue" or "writer's pet".
And you can apply that to a lot of characters in fiction, mostly characters that are men. So it's weird (or just misogynistic) to put it on fem characters.
As someone that's writing an action fantasy novel with a female lead, I constantly wonder if my main character would be considered a Mary Sue no matter what I do with her.
By some people? Certainly. But I think the majority of them would only ever encounter this very cool sounding book, if you literally shoved it in their faces. They scream about Marvel, Star Wars and Disney because those are main-stream popular, so I think, or at least I hope, you won't have to deal with a large influx of mysoginists.
In my female lead book, we come into the story when she’s already very skilled and had multiple adventures so a big part of the story is her not really acknowledging her level of skill and other character characters being surprised by what you can do so her story is actually acknowledging yeah, I am kind of a bad ass
What I've started to realize is that most of the time someone tells me "You'll know when you see it", either I won't see it or just don't think it applies as easily as the speaker thinks. It's why people using "anime" as a derogatory adjective drive me insane- for supposedly being cliché, nobody seems to agree on what makes it generic!
You consistently surprise me with how often you churn out genuinely thoughtful content. I have never understood why Rey is put into the Mary Sue category (I mean, I know *why* but still), especially when comparing her story to Anakin's. She's a mechanic that was tinkering with ship parts for her entire upbringing. I think my own issues with the character is less about her traits and more about the journey that the trilogy takes her on and the vast wasted potential, but that can be said about every character in the Sequel Trilogy. Ultimately IMO, if they get they ass beat then they ain't a "Mary Sue", and these characters that people always attach this label to always get an ass-kicking in the story at one point or another.
I mean Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker are both bigger Mary Sues than Rey... but they both have penises (Penors? Peniis? Penopodes? Dwarrow?). Which is likely the biggest way to have some character not be a Mary Sue Clearly, we could solve this issue of her being called a Mary Sue, if we just retcon her to having a penis. Though, then she'll be "bad" for being "woke" at that point
@@tomhur1 look, either Rey isn't a Mary Sue... or the issue is that she isn't enough of a Mary Sue Either outcome indicates the charges against her are wildly incorrect and not applicable to the situation It kind of becomes like accusing Krillin of being a Mary Sue. Actually, no, there is more of an argument for Krillin for being a Mary Sue in DBZ... just compare everything said about Rey, and put it up against the events of the Namekian Saga
@@NimhLabs *I mean Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker are both bigger Mary Sues* How would Luike come close to one? The arguments I've seen ignore a lot of background knowledge explicitly made clear, or easily derived from canon materialk (or the films themselves) that take into account his flying/piloting skills, for instance.
@@DanknDerpyGamer nobody else in the galaxy has anything similar to shooting whomp-rats is kind of one of those sorts of justifications that would be viewed as making somebody a MASSIVE Mary Sue if it was a female protag We have all these skilled military pilots--and then this farm kid whose experience is a Space-Cessna, is able to blow up the Death Star, because of Womp Rat shooting being something that no other pilot in the galaxy has access to doing Then we have the boost of skill between Empire and Return. With it being made explicit that he never returned to Yoda until the scene with Yoda on his death bed -=- This is a series of stories where the main characters regularly do over the top ridiculous things, that is not easy to justify having the skills to do. That is why they are fun The reason Rey isn't fun, is because she isn't doing insane ridiculous over the top crap. And people somehow got what was wrong backwards
I'm not exactly a young writer, but I've been working on my first long-term project for years now, and fighting with internalized fears of Mary Sue-ism for just as long. I often felt scared if there's just a little too much of my personal experience in the protagonist, everyone will immediately disregard anything else about it and call me a terrible writer and hack. Even though I know that it's a deeply irrational worry, I could never quite shake it off. Your more solid definition of a Mary Sue helps dispel some of that fear. Thank you for making this. You've helped one writer already.
all the drama around the "I bypassed the power compressor" line is so funny too because isn't that literally just sci-fi jargon for "I turned off the choke"? anyone who's ridden a motorcycle at any point should know how elementary that statement is lol I've been spending more time in the service manual for my bike recently and I feel like a lot of 70s-80s movies are made by people with mechanical know-how, for people with mechanical know-how, in a way we don't really appreciate nowadays. CGI artists don't get anywhere near the credit they deserve, but you can just TELL when the VFX are made by a bunch of dads who'll tell you to hold the flashlight while they fix the brakes and then proceed to yell at you for doing it wrong 😅 iykyk
Part of the problem is obviously that it was Rey that came up with this solution, a girl who, while having some technical expertise, is not a pilot and has never been on this particular ship. As opposed to Han Solo, who spent literal decades flying around in that ship, modifying it to hell and back and getting to know all its kinks and quirks. That moment on its own isn't the worst thing ever and _could_ have worked as an intentionally funny moment if Rey's characterization, skills and motivations had otherwise been executed well.
@@swagromancer She is a pilot. She says herself that she knows how to fly a ship more than once in the film before ever bypassing the compressor. A core part of her internal conflict in TFA is that she's perfectly capable of leaving Jakku if she wanted but never did because she's been waiting on her parents to come back for her the entire time.
@@cartooncritic7045 Alright, she does say she can fly. But she also says that she is unfamiliar with the Millennium Falcon, specifically. If you absolutely want to have that scene where she bypasses the compressor and make it plausible, it would be an easy fix. Just have her say that she's flown this heap of junk before. Maybe she even already scavenged some parts from it. Anything to make it plausible that she would know the ship's systems so intimately. Or at the very least, don't specifically mention that she _isn't_ familiar with the ship. As I said, the scene on its own isn't terrible, and likely wouldn't be scrutinized to that extend if her character was written better as a whole.
@@swagromancer She has lived on that planet under the offending junker’s custody since she was a toddler. It’s extremely easy to surmise from the film’s context clues that she has worked on ships and compressors similar to the Falcon in the time she’s been on Jakku even if she never directly worked on the Falcon itself. You’re also once again forgetting that Han not knowing how to fix the Falcon’s issues has been a running joke since the OT. Han is a great pilot but a lousy mechanic. Anytime the Falcon needed serious repairs in the old movies it was thanks to Chewie or R2 that anything ever got fixed.
@@cartooncritic7045 You can surmise that if you want, but everything we know about the Falcon says this ship is quite unique, "ships like it" aren't just a dime a dozen. It's heavily customized, which is the exact reason it's so glitchy. Even if you want to say that Han has no clue what he's doing - fine. Chewbacca was also there. You're just shifting the problem, not solving it.
You know I bet somewhere out there, there's a Woman named Mary Sue wondering why her Name is all over the Internet. Edit: FRUITS BASKET MENTION LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
The only problem I had with the mention is the use of "front" as said charm being a genuine part of her personality does not contradict its function at the time as a coping mechanism. Otherwise, great inclusion as she was wrongly criticized in similar manners to the bullshit Mary Sue accusation but thankfully she is more appreciated now.
@nguyenhoangnam8609 I remember someone calling her a Mary Sue in the Comments of a Video about the 2019 Series, and I just instantly Facepalmed (not literally but still).
I really feel embarrassed about watching tons of "MaReY sUe" at the peak of the disney star wars triology discourse. Palpatine's intro being locked behind fortnite is still hilarious.
@@nondescriptcat5620i used to watch him. Some of his old content was okay. But as soon as he ranted about anti heros and harley quin for like 15 minutes
One example that made me revaluate my opinion on the matter was when I kept hearing people call Sadie Adler from Red Dead Redemption 2 a mary sue and I'm like "what are you talking about?". First of all cow girls were a thing back then, they established her background in hunting and combined that with her becoming more vengeful and unhinged it makes sense she'd be good at killing, she needs to be saved by John Marston (a cis straight white guy) twice and nobody supports her behavior, they might go a little easier on her because she recently went through a traumatic event but when she does something crazy Arthur is the first person to say "What the hell is wrong with you?" I've also noticed that when it comes to these sorta ideas. Japanese media is completely off the hook with these people for some reason even if they share the same ideas. For instance if Black Lagoon or Neon Genesis Evangelion were western properties first all the women in those shows would be called mary sues or girl bosses but it's anime so it's fine I guess
People are strange, one of the greatest sharpshooters in history was a woman. Annie Oakley was an absolutely ABSURDLY good shot, even more insane when you consider the rifles she was using weren't even remotely as accurate as modern firearms are and most people could practice for over a decade with modern guns and not come close to what she could do.
and you can't tell me it's because the characters are attractive because as shown with the Hades games and Baldur's Gate 3 they'll turn on characters who are sexualized if they view the product as woke enough
I don't think Sadie is a Mary Sue, but her "development" definitely feels very rushed. Although I think it can be explained by Arthur not being too emotionally intelligent or even interacting with her all that much prior to chapter 3, and as we experience the story through his eyes, she probably just goes through all that development off-screen. It's not really the most elegant way of writing an arc like hers, but left us with a cool character so overall I'm totally fine with it.
I have argued that Mary Sues as a concept don't exist. They are a false attribution of the problems of a story to character and characterization alone. You can tweak the characterization of the supposed Mary Sue all you want. It's not going to change anything unless you overhaul the plot, other characters, and how everything connects. You don't really need a complex character to be compelling. Thrillers and murder mysteries are compelling enough on their own despite using stock characters. As an audience, we're drawn to some kind of conflict, so if your conflict is flat, then that's where your plot falls apart. It's why new writers are often told to not worry about crafting Mary Sues by piling on flaws which ultimately are meaningless nonsense. They're told to make their conflict meaningful.
YES. This. It's all a matter of execution and it's generally a culmination of random beginner mistakes. I like "Don't Worry Guys, Everything Isn't a Mary Sue" by Coelasquid which elaborates on this and offers solutions using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. lol sorry I keep mentioning it but you also hit the nail on the head so I thought you might find that interesting. Please feel free to list where some of the other writing advice is, I'd enjoy perusing it, but don't include l' inks; most of them get auto-recycled. fingers crossed this won't be as well.
No, I disagree. This implies you can never discuss or critique a specific character in isolation. Also consider that Mary Sues tend to be protagonists, so the story revolves around them. If the character was different, the story would also be different (and vice versa, chicken and egg). If the Mary Sue wasn't perfect, they couldn't resolve conflict in a boring way, so the story would be more interesting.
I agree it is false attribution of the problems of a story to characters alone. I will also add it is not just "conflict" that interests us naturally, but causality. Even if it isn't inherently tied to conflict, if something interesting happens (cause) with an interesting effect on the story, the world and/or the characters (effect), someone will want to see what happens next.
I remember watching a video by MangaKamen where he ranted about Mary Sues. Now it was the normal stuff you’d see in a video like this (Korra from LOK and Rey from Star Wars) until towards the end of the vid.. He tries to say Giorno Giovanni from Jojo part 5 was a Mary Sue and uses arguments that I could apply to other Jojo characters (Example: he complains about Giorno doesn’t seem to feel pain during one of the fights when characters like Josuke from part 4 had to deal with a massive wooden fence impaled in his leg during the Kira fight and Jolyne in part 6 survived being lit on fire during her fright with Rikiel.) I bring up his video here because I believe it’s where I came to the idea that the reason why people like JAR, LitteraryDevil or Whoever makes these Mary Sue videos are just using the term “Mary Sue.” as a blanket term/buzzword to try justify a character they dislike and their “reasons for why they’re a Mary Sue” are just their personal reasons why the hate the character.
@User-Wizard He makes vids mostly ranting about Cartoons, anime and occasionally gaming. He’s very similar to JAR in terms of content (ranting about the Woke or SJW in media). I think the only difference between the two is JAR is more into the Commentary side of TH-cam whereas MangaKamen is more rant focus.
@@apieceofbitsandpieces342 I personally thought the guys videos on metal gear rising and a good amount of others were really good. I don't think it's even close to the trash that is JAR.
@@Jerome_M_0 MangaKamen is more similar to JAR than not but MK at least knows how to make a decent video every now and again, which makes him better than JAR. Doesn't stop him from having trash takes, of course.
Hell, we know these “critics” that rag on about Mary sues are big time anime degens that will unironically watch isekai anime and won’t see how they are all Gary Stu’s
23:33 "but here's the thing:" Anakin was a man. That's the thing. Devil can say whatever nonsense he wants, but the real thing for him is that Anakin is a man and Rey is a woman
No, I disagree. Anaking has neither the social/charm factor nor the moral integrity to qualify even remotely as a Mary Sue. Sheer power isn't the only factor, as Anthony acknowledged.
The thing I like the most about this narrative is how they always seem to portray the character accused of being a Mary Sue as being smug or cocky. Especially when it’s demonstrably untrue. I'll never forget a video discussing Rey's supposed Mary Sueness with a screenshot of her smirking (kind of), as if trying to imply that she spend the entire film succeeding in everything, whilst rubbing everyone else’s faces in it. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how she does not do that at any point, in fact she spends much of the film wracked with self doubt. But that seems to be the thing that sticks in people's craws (smugness, arrogance, cockiness) to the point that they will go out of their way to imply that this is also a character trait of the 'Mary Sue' even when they’re not.
This is probably a bit off topic, but your point about Harry doesn't train hard to earn his winning has just reminded me of something. In fact, I've been hearing screaming about "WhY hE's NoT tRaiNinG haRdeR wHAt tHe hElL hE iS doInG wITh hIS LifE" from Asian readers for years now. Is it toxic Asian work ethic? Yes. But could Harry work harder to tune his magical abilities? Also yes. Yet, despite all of this, most of us just think that Harry isn't hard working enough or we mock him of being the "chosen one". Nobody thinks he's a Mary Sue. Mary Sue is a very gender biased accusation. There are much more female characters get the blame for much milder offense IMAO. The critics throw this term on female characters on a "guilty until proven innocent" basis, while for the male characters it is "innocent until proven guilty". Male characters rarely get accused of being a Gary Stu unless they are really bad. Gary Stu also isn't the by default name for this trope. Just like that one added in female character with a pink bow, Gary Stu is more like an after thought. It's the "oh we forgot to include men in this" of the trope because this trope is by default female. It's funny how it's by default female when it's a widely hated trope. But when it's the main cast, the female characters are always the after thought characters with "female" being their entire personality. Edit: One more story on gender based bias. I've read a Chinese webnovel probably more than a decade ago. The progagonist is a street kid who at some point ended up in a gang in some sort of magical ancient China settings. It isn't revealed until later that she's actually a girl. Before the revelation, readers were all cheering for her. She could curse, fight or trick her enemies. They would celebrate her victory. But as soon as her gender was revealed, many people stopped reading and made sure that the author know it's because the protagonist is now a girl (oftentimes through hate comments). The author talked about it later. She found it interesting that how much people's perpective change with just a simple swap. Literally nothing changes about the character except for her gender. And, upon reread, you can actually pick up signs that she's been a girl all along.
She-Hulk wasn't my favorite because the legal humor didn't land with me. (Trying to reach the level of Ally McBeal and Night Court is a major challenge.) But Jennifer's comment on having to keep her anger in check to avoid being labeled "difficult" or worse was compelling.
@TheVeritas1 Yeah, the show was very much about Jennifer's life as a Hulk and not about her life as a lawyer. It's legitimate to see it as a misstep, but I feel that the story they did focus on made for a fun and compelling sitcom.
The irony is that fear of creating a Mary Sue eventual lead people to complain about the traits authors would force on the characters to make them not sues, dubbed the Anti-Sue. Effectively the idea was that people would over correct and make characters that were deemed to be utterly incompetent, have too many flaws, an overly tragic past, has nothing go right, and just as likely to be hated by everyone for no discernible reason as they are to be loved. Which in turn lead to people who would get on to characters for showing weakness or needing help, or being hated by people for reasons beyond the control of the character, or just being miserable because they are struggling with traumatic events in their past. Especially if they were preexisting characters who were beloved for being strong like Samus Aran or Superman. They might not be called anti sues now, but people know that they would be mocked for using that term unironically.
Regarding Rey's Sue-ness specifically, I never really saw anything regarding the Falcon as any degree of Sue-ness traits, because if there's one trait that's 100% solidified and built in, it's that Rey knows machine stuff. She's been tearing apart Star Destroyers and any other flotsam on the planet since she was young, of course she's gonna know general operations of spacecraft and what they do. The part that always kinda leaned my brain that way was her doing the Jedi Mind Trick, but in a more competent story that could have easily been better foreshadowed, and as we all know, the sequel trilogies have issues far, far, FAR past anything minor like that, especially in the entries after Force Awakens. With the extra bits of hindsight, Rey's character is *fine* in TFA but like Poe and Flynn, they suffer worse and worse writing issues between movies.
This is like saying that the guys who strip copper wire out of stuff will know how they work. It is very easy to take stuff apart without any inkling of how they actually work or how to fix them. Still this scene would have been salvageable - just have Han try and take some awkward panel off or something and Rey knows a trick to open it and some cheesy “Learn something new every day” But that is already more thought than the writers put into those movies. The script said [Rey fixes the problem] and that was the extent of their imagining.
@@Dullahan3470 I dunno man. She has her own scrap-home separate from that little compound, with power and everything, so I'd assume she knows enough to put at least that back together without frying herself.
@Dullahan3470 It's a subtle character trait that could've been expanded on. Some guys who strip wire would know, some won't. That's what makes characters unique. Not everyone who does the same things is exactly the same, with the same motivations. Rey could've been the equivalent of a mechanic because she loves tinkering, if any of the movies had bothered to explore that angle thoroughly. As has already been suggested by both of you, it all comes down to the execution.
Except Han Solo has also been doing stuff that is pretty much Jedi Mind Tricks. Obiwan even calls him out on it, and this is used to indicate that Han Solo is an untrained Jedi, who confuses his own Force capacity for him having guile and luck They then point out the Cantina scene where he taps the wall where Greedo shoots--and a long montage of other things Han Solo does Including successfully shooting Darth Vader--who was the most skilled pilot during the Clone Wars, and is trained specifically in "not being hit by blaster fire". Who shoots this person with decades of battle experience who is a god of both the ground based battle field and dog fights? Some rando scruffy looking nerf herder is able to show up in a space freighter that appears to have the same "magical stealth" abilities of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park Then just to go further, this galaxy has "Pod Racing" as a sport--with major leagues being controlled by the Hutt Cartel. What is Han Solo's claim to fame? Being able to navigate an illegal space race known by smugglers (often employed by the Hutt Cartel) in the shortest distance to the point of holding a major record. As a human. In a world where it is established that there are sports that humans are not able to, without usage of the Force, from not having the reaction time to compete with other species Rey has done _NOTHING_ in the force prior to training that even comes close to being on par with what Han Solo has accomplished Heck, Han Solo is even best friends with the greatest Wookie warrior, who personally was held in high regard by Yoda and most of the Jedi Council. With Chewbacca just being okay with Han Solo regularly talking crap about Jedis in front of him. The same character who "wins" Space Chess by tearing the arms off of his opponents But then, Han Solo has a penis... so that allows him to not be questioned for this. IF only Rey were to be able to retconned, so that she could have a penis edit: the person who was able to track down Han Solo was a Bounty Hunter who was specifically raised by the same people who built the Clone Army, and given the exact same training as the Clone Army--on top of the training the Mandellorians were given. The Mandelorians being the only Army shown to be able to regularly take on Jedi consistently in confrontations. He has been given an extremely competent training regiment to be the one guy who can take on Jedi Masters approaching Yoda. Nobody else is able to even come close to being able to bring Han Solo down in service of the Empire. The entire time Boba Fet is made to look like a Dog the Bounty Hunter Wannabe who watched a bunch of reality Tv and lives only to mimick (poorly) that stuff (not Dog himself--but like the sort of person who marathoned his show, and thinks that is the same as intense training)--that is how much Boba Fett is barely able to bring in Han Solo. Han Solo then accidentally unalives Boba Fett while still being blind from surviving Carbonite Freezing, a practice known for having a low survival rate in humans
that is a major mistake because if there is one thing which was clearly established is that Han...is a terrible mechanic. Like seriously, if you watch OT who does all the fixing? Chewie. Han is a user not a maker, each time he tries to fix the falcon it ends badly
I remember when mary sue was used in online spaces just to describe the ocs of people who had every single ability or were perfect to the point it made role-playing difficult
Star Wars: Sequel Trilogy and Mary Sue concept ruined my late teenhood making me an antiwokeist for a time. I stopped that like in 2020 and I'm happier now but I hate my younger self and the "antiwokeist critics"
We all make mistakes when we're young. However, if you learn from them, you are a better person. What's sad are those who repeat their mistakes well into their senior years.
They call the girls Mary Sues because fans can be incredibly sexist and hate when girls are "too powerful" or "too popular" or "get their own way all the time". The only male character I've ever seen called a Gary Stu with equal vitriol is Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Of all the characters you could highlight as a Gary Stu I certainly was not expecting that one. Genuinely never seen anyone get annoyed about Aang being too powerful. Loads about Korra, of course, but not Aang (unless it’s about shipping).
I think the reason why for Aang is that he was a kid during that story. Just feel like anything that's not a grown ass man doing stuff like this gets this critique a lot
@@intergalactic92 Oh yeah, Korra got whacked hard with the Sue Stick. Aang was definitely a case of "he got in the way of my ship" but also "his values are unmanly".
@@intergalactic92Claim that Korra is Mary Sue is also nonsensical. Her being able to bend 2 more elements as kid doesn't make her Mary Sue. Every bender can bend their native element as kid. Being able to bend elements isn't the same as being master of it. That's was the whole point of 13 years time skip. She need that long to master elements and still after that she struggles in fights against villains that are older and more skilled in fighting.
@@Lynn17Claim that Korra is Mary Sue is also nonsensical. The only thing creators do was switch trope with Asami. It is usually the main girl who is very nice and friendly, while other more feminine and usually rich girls are rude and jealous. (The Owl House, Little Witch Academia, Gravity Falls, etc). Korra was jealous of only 3 episodes, and that was enough for ridiculous amounts of unhinged hate. Her being able to bend 2 more elements as kid doesn't make her Mary Sue. Being able to bend elements isn't the same as being master of it. That's was the whole point of 13 years time skip. She need that long to master elements and still after that she struggles in fights against villains that are older and more skilled in fighting.
Rey literally survived by scavenging technology. That is a lifetime of learning and knowing what things are, why they are important, and how to take things apart. The fact she is particularly intuitive about tech on top of that is normal Star Wars shorthand for showing force sensitivity. It is the same reason Luke is automatically accepted as a X-Wing pilot when he has only flown swoops and speeders in an atmosphere. Demonstrated lifelong skills intuitively expanded beyond their scope by the Force. We also know she can fight. She caries a staff and can use it. I actually am pretty angry they didn't give her a double bladed saber, it narratively made sense. On screen; double sabers are usually seen as Sith weapons (which may be why they didn't, and why she does in the vision), but in old expanded lore it was also the weapon of a Jedi Guardian. I was hoping they were going to make her the return of the Jedi Guardian.
Do you know who’s the real gary Stu? Luke and Anakin Skywalker oh, you’re the prophesied child of legend will bring order to the force, and you just happen to have been born by immaculate conception. The untrained force sensitive Youth can move a missile with his mind through a 90° turn. Give me a break.
@CuppaLLX And even if you go beyond simple knowledge, skill, and powerscaling stuff to claim Luke and Anakin _aren't_ Mary Sues in other ways, you'd need to acknowledge that they've both had half a century of character development and exploration both in film and other media. Rey's character has only been around for, what, a _fifth_ of that, and she's largely only known from her trilogy? Measuring up Rey's development against Anakin and Luke's seems like an unfair comparison.
@@chansesturm7103 Literally what are you even talking about. Luke alone gets more characterization in his first 10 minutes of screen time than Rey gets across the entirety of her three movies. Discounting any and all media besides the films, it's painfully obvious what an underdeveloped shell of a character Rey is.
Luke and Anakin were part of the Lucas movies, the original trilogy and the prequels, but the prequels were not as good as the original movies. Even Lucas could not replicate the success and he sold the franchise to disney and star wars as a franchise with disney turned it woke and terrible writing
Thank god you mentioned that whole sequence with Baby Anakin cause everyone had seemingly forgotten it when the whole "Rey is a Mary Sue" thing happened and I felt like I was losing my mind.
Anthony knocked it out of the park with the Anakin comment. What's ironic is that back in 1999 a lot of fans hated baby Anakin saving the day. Now, the anti-woke crowd cheers on baby Anakin as a great role model rather than a Gary Stu.
I’m so glad you brought tohru I feel like people just see kind, gentle and bubbly girls in shoujo especially get a lot of flack for it ever since high school. I also think it was the first anime that warped that she’s only nice and fixes everyone emotional problems since it lean towards the high school romance comedy over the more darker tragedies and struggles the characters have. Also tohru never did fix the problems of the sohmas like ant said all she did was give them the love and support they all were denied being in the cursed sohma family. And that moment of kindness gave them the push to fix their own problems and emotional hang ups that they all were there for her when she spiraled.
Mary Sue has been used more often than not to bash on female characters/creators. Whether it be because of what we see women and girls liking as "cringe" or just "ew feminism" The way I have personally internalized Mary Sues are characters that feel unintentionally unnatural in their stories for a number of different reasons, regardless of gender. Someone stretching disbelief to the point it snaps and becomes uninteresting. Overpowered characters, self insert characters, WOMEN- Dont really matter, but more so how the story works around them.
It really feels like a lot of this "discourse" could just be boiled down to, "is this character a Mary Sue or do you just hate that a women/minority is the main character?".
It's mind blowing how many people said wanda from the mcu is a mary sue because of a scene of someone showing entry... It not a well written scene still it mind blowing seeing how she got beated by a child the next time we see her.
The whole problem with Mary Sue as a concept is that it stifles creativity and passion for writers because then there is such a thing as going too far to try to NOT write a Mary Sue, when the whole point should be to write what you want and what resonates with you. Same idea applies to people who try too hard to write truly "original" stories. It can backfire and make a story boring and the main character dull, if one tries too hard to not write a Mary Sue. Ultimately, stories like that are power fantasies and all writers put some measure of themself into the main character, as you say. Great video, and as always it is literally just a hatred for women that the grifters and chuds have.
37:43 Mizu from Blue Eye Samurai fits that description too... in the way they tend to consume media: no proper training, she learned from LOOKING at a distance at other swordsmen practice, she keeps proving men wrong when they underestimate her, doesn't smile, has a "girlboss" cool "masculine" attitude, made her husband feel insecure by being "too good" with a sword and ultimately killed him, she can take down an entire dojo on her own, invade a castle, defy very pro trained and experienced warriors and obviously defeat men twice her size, most men in the series are either wicked, evil, mamma boi or pathetic...I guess since the show is so broadly loved they didn't dare to go after it. It's like a character is a Mary Sue if enough people dislike her.
To be fair, the way in which she's so competent to the point of being just cartoon logic that let's her survive, is one of the things that bother me a lot about that show, personally speaking. That said, I don't think that she counts as a "Mary sue", simply because, in the end, she gains nothing;she doesn't accomplish her goals, she's not able to form meaningful connections ( which is what she needs ,to be honest), and is spiralling downwards in a negative character arc. If she were a "Mary sue" , the story would have given her anything she wanted and made sure to justify any decisions that she made, which is not the case. She's more of a tragic Greek hero than anything else, I just wish she would have been characterised more like Odisseus ( wins through cunning plans), rather than an Achilles ( wins though sheer might).
@ Well that’s my point. See how I added a sentence before everything to signal I was being sarcastic, she’s not a Mary Sue. I was Referring to how hypocritical and dishonest the anti woke crowd of reviewers often are. They tried to shit on the show for this same reason and turn her into the next Ray but quickly back pedaled when noticed people actually loved her and the show, same happened with Arcane, Spiderverse, Wicked, etc. And are still shitting on black widow for a single fight scene she was “too good” of a fighter for a woman her size and what not ridiculous nitpicking, regardless of that same type of scene is actually a pretty common trope Edited: forgot to say that first, the show is not over, still too soon to affirm she’s a tragic hero when we don’t know the outcome of her path, S1 could have ended with her temporarily touching bottom. Second, none of that undoes the fact that the show “hate men”, as some of these reviewers would likely say. Imagine the audacity of Netflix, making a samurai show where not a single properly trained samurai man seems to be a proper rival for a self taught woman, if they could get away with it, they’d likely had obliterated the show
Good point. I think they actually hate all competent female characters, but their expression of that hatred will depend on how much they can get away with it. Imagine if a female creator did a gender swap version of this. She's going to be criticized into oblivion.
@@-tera-3345 If he was, his tariff "policy" would have fixed our God forsaken economy and he'd actually be a decent mammal and not a bug man. He's just Jar Jar.
I can't imagine how you stomach watching all these rage baiting idiots online that twist facts in the most ridiculous ways just to share misogynist and bigoted ideas but I really appreciate how you thoughtfully counter and find examples of hypocrisy in their arguments. I really feel like these people are effecting others media literacy for the worst and I'm glad that you're willing to call them out for horrible misinterpretations. Please keep up the good work and i hope (though don't expect it) that people will eventually stop falling for this bullshit and people can actually discuss things in a more mature manner.
At this point I just assume the definition of Mary Sue that TH-cam grifters use is “when a female character does what a male character does and has an opinion about that”. If the original Last Airbender series came out today people would have made so many memes about Katara and Toph
I feel the greatest example of "Mary Sue" is how Homer wrote Poochie ("If he's not in the screen, everyone should ask 'where's Poochie?'"). But, yea, this term has melted into a puddle shaped into anything you want to be.
I think the problem here is that none of these characters are executed well. Most of these characters that are oftentimes called Mary Sues are just not good characters. But no one wants to just say "this character is bad" they need to overstate and overexplain why thats the case.
@@captain_trebreh In many cases, it isn't even bad writing, but character has written with flaws (somehow still Mary Sue) that they must overcome through character development (but who has time and patience for multiple episodes and seasons of characters journey).
As someone who was very very scared of writing things because of those people, now that I grow out of it, it's so good to see people like you spreading how bad all of this is for people. How these anti-woke and """"""critics"""""" do more harm than actually helping them. Thank you for doing this.
People complained that Rey never fails and shown better than Luke but in THE LAST JEDI she tries and fails to repeat Luke's greatest triumph, turning someone from the Dark Side back to the light.
Rey was never the problem, she's just another victim of not planning a trilogy ahead of making it. Palpatine's return just reeked of studio panic imho.
@awandererfromys1680 Lucas really didn't plan out ahead the original trilogy either. Vader wasn't intended to be Luke's father in the beginning. I think Abrams did intend for Rey to redeem Kylo in the third movie in a repeat of the OT but he didn't realize how much viewers would hate Kylo for killing Han and wanted to see him dead instead.
@ Sure, that's true, but the Original Trilogy atleast tells a coherent story. What happened in the previous movies mattered in the third. The Sequels are so disjointed that it hardly qualifies as a trilogy imho. Both Abrams and Johnson were given complete freedom to write whatever they wanted and it shows. And Lucas had the advantage that there wasn't any lore or canon to consider. It didn't exist yet, he was creating it. Disney didn't have that luxury. A basic story outline should have been the bare minimum here.
@awandererfromys1680 The prequels had an outline and one vision but that didn't keep people from hating it. Fans really wanted to see Luke be the triumphant hero again and sure that would have made everyone happy but the sequels are supposed to be about the next generation.
@@Mokkari77 I was rooting for the next generation after TFA. I liked all four of them. Lots of wasted potential there. It's not about that, or Luke, or whatever. The Sequels just don't connect narratively, they don't tell the same story. They don't even have the same characters really. They certainly don't share the same vision. Like every movie retcons what the previous one did. It's three movies that pretend to be a trilogy. And it's not really a secret. Johnson has come forward that Disney had no notes or outline for him when he was hired, he was free to come up with whatever he wanted. And well, he did. Interesting take, but it just fails in its execution. It doesn't work as the second act in a trilogy. And what he did to my poor dude Finn is a crime in itself. And with TROS they just panicked.
While of course there are just simply badly written characters of all genders, Mary Sue seems to have become the strawman that media illiterate people use to vent their own misogyny. You have to wonder, how would classic pieces of media like Xena the Warrior Princess, or Terminator 2 be taken, if they were to come out today.
Oh my god! One of my viewers just sent me this. You used one of the clips from my OLD video! I'm too scared to watch it because I'm embarrassed and also because of my anxiety. BUT THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR USING THE CLIP EITHER WAY! I APPRECIATE IT! Thank you!😄😄😄
Thank you for making a good video that helped me craft this one. I always want to credit the videos that helped me come up with ideas and perspectives, and even if you were embarrassed or anxious, I thought your work is pretty damn good. :)
I can't stand to listen to she-hulk criticism because most of it doesn't even try to meet the show where it is. People talk about it like it's the story of a woman getting powers and being better than her male cousin. It's the story of woman trying to go to work and go on dates as sitcom shenanigans ensue. It's not a blockbuster it's a comedy.
@@Jerome_M_0 That's more subjective than factual though. What you don't find funny(She-Hulk) might be funny to someone else. It's more a matter of opinion which you are allowed to have. But you do have to expect that not everyone shares the same thoughts and will have disagreements.
@@goober7959 idk man most people who watched the show disliked it. 32% is a terrible score even for a subjective comedy. No one i have ever met in real life has ever said "man she-hulk was a really funny show" it was either "man that was trash" or "who still watches those?" Like honestly the show is just a messy pile of trash that doesn't know how to mix its comedy with its other aspects. It's CGI is also terrible.
@@Jerome_M_0 Most people whining about it don't even watch it. Also, review bombing is a thing and a lot of people do it to movies and shows they haven't watched
It sucks when your favorite character(s) get accused of being a Mary Sue, despite evidence to the contrary. This is what it’s like being a Rey Skywalker fan.
I watched both. Korra is a Mary Sue who gets protected constantly from her own stupidity by the plot, while Rey just knows how to use the force with no training, can shoot 3 fighters down with one shot with no experience in an ancient freighter, and decides to call herself a Skywalker with no relation to it, when her entire backstop is an insult and a fat turd laid on the old movies. It's tough being stupid isn't it? This is why we needs gatekeep shit, because fucks like you wanna come in and change everything for no fuckin reason. Saying you're a Rey fan is just outing yourself as a smooth brained parasite who can't live on its own without leeching support from others.
It really is frustrating. That's why I gave up on the "Mary Sue" label as a whole. Rey's real problem isn't that she's a Mary Sue (because as Anthony pointed out, what she did isn't as impressive as what Anakin did in Episode 1). Her problem is that the Sequels' writing was so sloppy and rushed that her character wasn't properly fleshed out. Rey didn't fail--the writers failed her.
Mary Sue feels like a loaded term that has been overused. It was originally used for the most extreme story-warping self-insert power fantasies, but any character who has even a small amount of their traits is seen as a full-on Mary Sue.
This is like a spa for my brain. Rey was a flop character for me, but the Mary Sue argument was so stupid it was like huffing glue. Refreshing to hear a good-faith critique.
The way you define "Mary Sue" honestly perfectly depicts how many fans of batman treat the character. "Batman would win because prep time." Style arguments, despite the best stories show that he often loses.
I was misled into thinking Rey was a Mary Sue by Drinker and others like him Over time with the clips we have available, she isn't a Mary Sue, but a wasted character like Poe and Finn I wish that movie 9 stuck with Rey's parents being nobodies. There are force sensitive people like Donnie Yen's character in Rogue One that don't require a lineage. The Force just chooses who to operate through Making her related to Palpatine undermines the message of 8 That's proof that if writers aren't on the same page, the character will suffer
I'm starting to wonder if this is why I stopped writing. I made my characters so plain, they could disappear into the background. Even in my fantasy stories, I had to make absolutely sure it was realistic so I didn't accidentally make a Mary Sue.
John Wick is terribly overrated, never got all the love it got. The new Star Wars doesnt suck because of Rey, it sucks because it didnt do anything really new within an already tired world.
I can't comment on John Wick since I haven't seen any of the films. But you nailed it regarding how the Sequel Trilogy didn't really capitalize on its new characters like Rey. This flaw is even more glaring when you look at how shows like The Mandalorian, Andor, and Skeleton Crew did this well.
your channel is truly such a thought provoking place for me. i appreciate how clear it is to me that you are interpreting media without an agenda, that misogyny in criticism is not only morally reprehensible but also just BAD criticism. i really enjoy the discussions you spark with your videos!
I’m glad this video exists. More people-and especially writers-need to hear this message because it’s incredibly helpful, especially as an aspiring writer.
I'd be interested in hearing about the juxtaposition between the "trivialises conflicts" aspect of a Mary Sue and the actual (contrived) conflicts the Mary Sues _do_ face. Look at the edgy Mary Sues, the Sephiroth-esque/Shadow-esque ones. If they're orphans, they'll probably stay orphans, no matter how much they miss their parents. If life was hard on them in their backstory, they can't just snap their fingers and make their life easy. Except, the only suffering they're allowed to face is the suffering that makes them cooler or more martyr-ly tragic. Ebony D.D.R. Way from My Immortal isn't popular, she doesn't have a smooth relationship with her boyfriend, bad things often happen to her, etc. That's because she was written to match the things a young goth/emo teenager thinks are cool. Enoby won't face a conflict where, say, she trips and falls in a puddle and has to borrow someone's fluffy pink unicorn towel to dry off, because that's uncool and embarrassing. But, if the big bad tries to force her to kill one of her friends, that's cool and dramatic and gives Eboby precious, precious angst fuel.
A Mary sue as terrible writing advice so brilliantly put it, a character, without flaws and so perfect within the story with no internal conflict/reflection that it makes for god awful writing. Everyone in the story loves them, and cannot see any flaws for the protagonist if they are even written into the story. A perfect character with skills without earning it or growing within the story.
That’s not always helpful. Say a character is meant to be a veteran in a war mentoring recruits? Or they’ve been on a fantasy adventure and are helping a rookie starting out.
@@matt0044 I think it's more accurate that the Sue itself warps the story around the character, and the character itself doesn't have to show the skills to be praised for em. For example, you bring up the idea of a veteran mentor, whereas if we really wanted to turn that into a Sue, this same person could, say, be a twenty-something, had never served in a single battle, but is still given the role of monitoring recruits because dangit they're just that much of a well-liked person that noone can say no to them.
Rey is a mary sue coz it was terrible writing. Lucas had 6 movies trying to explain Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader. And Rey was just a copy cat version but not done with Lucas charm
you have a such a captivating style that i cannot quite explain? its the mix between academic/clinical with cheeky insults, it gives me all the fun vibes of academia drama lol. i feel privileged to get to watch you talk about things i find interesting - plus you're into horror and like??? hell yeah??? gushing rn sorry
There should be further explorations of what sort of -Gary Stu- main characters these grifters want in any story. AFAIK, they mostly want overpowered, brooding lone wolves, usually with military experience, in their stories. You know, Starkiller, etc. those sort of main characters. Totally, completely different from Rey or any other alleged "Mary Sue"
![Which Superhero Villain Should [Not] Be President (Or World Ruler)?](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LzEk1KgtBMg/mqdefault.jpg)
![Forced Diversity Does [Not] Exist | Ant vs. Anti-Woke Slop](/img/n.gif)
Mary Sue (and to a similar extent, Woke) has literally become the epitome of the quote:
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
and the Sartre quote. "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies."
@@nondescriptcat5620
"Now remember kids, antisemitism is when you critique bad Writing."
-Salieri
@@RedSunUnderParadise
@@nondescriptcat5620
*Yawn* Fanfic writer ahh response.
@@RedSunUnderParadise
Complaining about a girl’s ability to realistically fight pirates that exist in a magical realm within the stars where children don’t age and can fucking fly with the aid of fairy dust and happy thoughts is fucking wild.
It's even more stupid because in Neverland playing pretend becomes real, so if there is a place in fiction where play fight ACTUALLY transfer into fighting skills is that island 🤦🏻♀️
@@meogatopreto FR it's almost like it's the entire plot?
I haven't watched Peter and Wendy so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think this is one of the examples which does hold more water than the others.
Reading the original "Mary Sue" fanfic, it seems to me the main issue is that "Mary Sue" is a random inserted character who overshadows the actual main characters like Kirk and Spock.
This is more relevant than her overall ability. If Spock picked a lock to escape and Kirk got the Order of Gallantry for running his ship; it wouldn't be such a big deal. The issue is it was done by a random interloper.
While Wendy was in the original story, ultimately the story is meant to be about Peter Pan first and foremost. While Wendy is important in a lot of the emotional/character moments in Peter Pan, Neverland is Peter's world and Wendy is just visiting.
If Wendy overshadows Peter Pan in what is meant to be his own story; that's somewhat Mary Sue-ish, regardless of whether fighting pirates is realistic or not (it's realistic for people to pick locks, after all).
Having now seen the clip of the actual fight scene, I take it back. Peter fights Hook while Wendy *and the others* fight the pirates.
It's a pretty standard trope (and a good one), where the main character fights the big bad while the secondary characters fight the fodder.
I can't really see it as vastly different from the cartoon. John, Michael, and the Lost Boys fight the other pirates there too, the only difference is Wendy joins in.
I think it used to be pretty clearly defined as a self-insert power fantasy character, but nowadays, people just use it to describe any character that the plot clearly wants us to like but isn't quite doing it for me personally.
You say this as if the two archetypes are interchangeable and two halves of the same coin
It was originally made to mock a fanfiction trope of self -insert fanfics. It was never a term made to critic professionally/originally produced media, which is so upsetting.
@@mr_yoru5834
Not just that but a Mary Sue is also heavily serviced by the plot, the plot exists to give that character lots of fun stuff. Basically Isekai smartphone.
now Mary Sue just means when a woman does literally anything
@@timymaxlanguage use does not know hierarchies. That's why dictionaries were forced to expand the definition of literally to include the opposite meaning of the traditionsl understanding. Or why one day Alannys Morisette will have a similar impact on ironic...
maybe the real Mary Sues were the friends we made along the way
Pacifically the one is named Mary
I don't know... I'd watch out for Ensign Sue if I were you.
Mary Sue is like the Bechdel test. Something that was intended as a joke but some people take it WAY too seriously.
Well the Bechdel Test did have some merit. But I do agree that the test itself is limited. Like for example Fire Island a LGBTQ Hulu film was despised by Hanna Rosin for not having a prominent female character. Even though the film was starring male LGBTQ representation which was never represented as much.
As a result female characters being prominent is important. But the bechdel test deserves more criticism.
But the Mary Sue Term was just a Star Trek joke. As a result the bechdel test does kind of have some credit because female characters were never seen. But the mary sue trope is so bad. Which is why it's frustrating people think its an actual writing advice.
@@IAmBored347 The Bechdel Test is just a tool to point out how many pieces of media can't even reach the incredibly low bar of having two named women talking to each other about something that isn't a man. Something passing the Bechdel Test was never meant to give it a seal of approval.
@IAmBored347 The comic where the term was created was a joke. It was about a lesbian having 3 rules about seeing a movie.
The joke is if the movie has two women in it who didn't mention men, the lesbian could imagine the two women were lesbians. It was a joke commeting on the lack of wlw rep in media in the 80s.
Sorry for explaining the joke but your reply is proving my point. By dicussing "well it has merit" you are taking it too seriously.
@@lastflunky in my experience, 99% of people who are vaguely aware of the Bechdel test don’t even realize it came from that DTWOF comic strip and assume that Alison Bechdel is some joyless misandrist media critic rather than a butch lesbian cartoonist whose autobiographical comic book was turned into a Tony Award winning musical. 🤷
Their loss. I’m gonna go listen to “Ring of Keys” again and pretend I have something in my eye when the actor who plays young Bechdel sings “In this whole luncheonette, why am I the only one who sees you’re beautiful? No… I mean… handsome!” 🥹🥰
@@IAmBored347 imagine being the exact person the comment is criticizing
I really liked the video as a whole but I'm just SHOCKED when the guy dropped Wendy as a Mary Sue, its fucking NEVERLAND, if there is a place where play fight would actually translate to fight skills would be Neverland, like, it's a cannon thing in the books, why would you think ten year olds can fight against pirates with sticks and stones?! THATS THE WHOLE POINT
And what's even better in the stream was jar was basically saying that Captain Hook is an expert fighter or something? Captain Hook! One of the most well-known ineffectual villains even in its source material!
EXCUSE ME?! HOOK IS A SCHOOLBOY THAT GREW UP TOT
I think unironically trying to gas up Captain Hook as a skilled fighter should be cause for alarm when it comes to these “critics” and how they interpret media, but hey, whatever it takes to be right I guess
The Anti-Woke grifters will call every female character a Mary Sue. Imagine if Alien was released today, they would call Ripley a Mary Sue. If The Terminator was released today, they would call Sarah Connor a Mary Sue.
Not only they call every woman a Mary Sue, but then they love Sword Art Online (awesome anime that got me into MMORPGs) and cannot even realize that Kirito is a Gary Stu.
They like to use those two movies as a basis for "how to make a believable female character." To them, wokeism didn't exist in the 80s and 90s up until 2015, apparently. By the way, don't forget that Vasquez would make their brains explode
Edit: I haven't watched SAO in decades, but I've seen at least a couple people criticizing Kirito's Gary Stu-ness. Besides, he gets memed by Guts from Berserk because of "Black Swordsmen"
Editx2: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Kill Bill. If that movie were to come out today, 9 out of 10, they'd say Beatrix is a Mary Sue
@@VideoGamesAndTheWorld
Bro, Aliens is a trash Film. The only decent parts about it were Ellen and the Xenomorph.
Sword Art Online is easily one of the most hated animes in anime circles, with Kirito widely considered a Gary Stue of the worst kind. So I don't get this point at all. Literally no-one thinks SAO is well written or that Kirito isn't a Gary Stue.
@hian
Bro called SAO awesome is the best part. Clear hint of Irony is what I would say but the dude liked Aliens. Masochism lite.
@@RedSunUnderParadise
I mean, he's entitled to that opinion. I don't see anything wrong in liking SAO. I just didn't get what point he was trying to make, because it isn't like most anime fans are in denial about Kirito being a Gary Stue.
More like vast amounts of people consider SAO and Kirito the primary culprits behind the terrible wave of generic mmo/Isekai shows that followed, and the tropes they employ. He literally couldn't have picked a worse example.
What I love about Steven Universe is Pink never explained why she made Steven. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what Steven does with his life. Just like Megamind. The protagonist’s parents told his purpose but it got cut out. It never mattered what were the parents intentions.
I think they did technically explain why she made steven but not in a "this is his purpose" kind of way, it just seemed to be the epitome of her fascination with humanity
That is why she made him though: To create an entity that could do whatever it wanted with its life. She herself couldn't do that because she was a war fugitive wanted for assassinating royalty. For the sake of the planet's peace, she had to go away.
Pink admired humanities ability to grow and change and despaired that she herself couldn't.
even as rose she was still just a template with a singular purpose. a gem is ageless and basically immortal and cannot do anything beyond what purpose it was grown to fulfill.
A human lifespan is so small compared to a gem but the human grows and fundamentally changes many times in such a short amount of time and pink wanted to experience that for herself so she became Steven, something completely unique in the universe with the potential to grow.
TLDR gems can't grow past a single purpose, humans can, so pink became a human to grow beyond her original purpose.
"Rey pilots The Falcon better than Han" _clips of Falcon dragging across the ground and banging into cliffs_
I mean... there are a couple scenes in The Empire Strikes Back that could be cherry picked to play up Han Solo to be fairly bad...
But like... you'd have to ignore a lot of other stuff in order to accomplish this
@@NimhLabs He flew through an asteroid field without getting hit and successfully evaded and hid from an Imperial fleet. He looked like an awesome pilot in EMPIRE!
@@Mokkari77 Again... the amount of cherry picking you would need to do, is just so off the hook, that it would qualify for purchasing a record from that Guiness Book which turns out to not be as trust worthy of a resource as previous thought
@@NimhLabs If it was Han or any experienced pilot flying the Falcon on Jakku they would have gone into space immediately. The point was Rey and Finn didn't know what they were doing.
@ Again... I was mostly just highlighting how bad of an argument the "Rey could fly the Falcon" actually was by pointing out how much effort would need to done to have the other people to pilot it be shown at a similar skill level
It would require a Crack Edit video to rival those JAndrew Star Trek edits. Which... while _possible_ ... the amount of effort would mostly show it as being completely incorrect via what is needed to succeed at it
Think of it like one of those Jedi Controller toy devices (the ones that attach to your head) being used to play Dark Souls. It _IS_ possible... but... yeah...
The term mary sue has literally ruined how we crituque character and gender bias. But even if a female character isn't a mary sue they are despise.
People dislike Amethsyt's rowdiness and immaturity even though she matured into a good responsible gem that didn't burden Steven
People dislike Frieren for overtaking the number one spot anime Fullmetal Alchemist even though she is a well written character and her show deserves more appreciation.
People dislike Chloe for being a rude friend to Max Caufield but she is literally more than a "bad friend".
People dislike Princess Bubblegum for her true personality as a "manipulator" but that makes her actions and character interesting.
People dislike Mabel Pines for being selfish when she is a kid trying her best to help people and Dipper isn't called out for his behavior on wanting Wendy.
People dislike Gabi even though she is a well developed character and foil to Eren
People dislike Sailor Moon for being a brat even though she is supposed to act like an ACTUAL teenager.
People dislike Lae'zel for being a jerk to others when she literally stop acting like one and actually matured.
People dislike Sayaka Miki for making a dumb wish over some guy when her story is more complex than that and she ACTS like a reasonable teenager.
People dislike Spider Gwen for not telling Miles the truth when she is trying to preserve her friendship as well as dealing with the burden of being a superhero.
And people despise Katara for being annoying when once AGAIN she acts like an actual teenager and is a well developed character
And etcetera. I feel so sorry for new creators because even if they're female characters are not deemed "mary sue" they're still mocked. At this point I wished people will learn mary sue is a fanfic term that shouldn't exist for actual writing.
Edit: Also it is fine disliking these chatacters. I am not even a big fan of Chloe from LIS. But please do not misunderstand the character.
I think disliking a character is fine? Don't think there's anything wrong with people disliking characters. I dislike kiwi from cyberpunk due to her betrayal setting all up for the finale and how if she didn't betray them things would have turned out differently.
Did people really dislike frieren just for that? I'm sure it was simply the Fullmetal diehard that want Fullmetal as no.1 always.
People will always dislike or like characters. Male characters are disliked and so are females.
Edit- I'll give you that females might be disliked most. But things you mentioned can be applied to male characters as well.
People don't like Asta cause he screams for example. They forget about everything else.
People don't like deku cause of him crying at the beginning. Same applies to tanjiro. These are small things people dislike characters for
I think disliking Chloe could be fine and I think there are a good amount of LiS fans that aren't bias and don't like her as well.
All about someone's reasoning. Chloe can be a bad friend and Max was a bad one as well. But a lot of the things that are a bad part of Chloe is something the game calls her out on or something Chloe apologizes for.
@channel45853 interestingly enough her absence in the recent game disappointed me. I think she complements max in a way even if someone was to dislike her. Max is calm and reserved and chloe is the opposite. But I think that might be more on the games lack of interesting character or even love interest.
And people hate Korra because she’s cocky (she's a teenager who has been told that she is the chosen one for most of her life) and overpowered (she’s literally the chosen one, and by the start of the story had undergone all the training in all but 1 of the elements, which she was shown to considerably struggle with). But also because she's weak…… wait, what?
@@IAmBored347
Who on God's green earth hates Katara other than edgy Azula fans? Most of the TLA fanbase stans her.
As a fan fiction writer myself, Mary Sue is not even a helpful term in that regard
Seriously, outside of its original parody, it is not that useful of a writing tip and quite frankly, there has always been a gender bias for how it has been used against
The writing advice quickly went to, “Don’t write female characters, or else they'll be called Mary Sue.”
Because nearly every OC or self-interest would fall under the Mary Sue archetype or
a sub archetype , I was stressed about this as a young writer. If you had a Mary Sue, then Mary Sue roast sites and TH-camrs could find it and make fun of you even better when it is clearly done by a child who made the Sue-that was just all in “Good fun.”
And bare in mind you could get called having a Mary Sue for such things as sparkles on their outfit of they were too colourful in design or had dyed hair
Frankly, I am glad that Mary Sue is that outdated in fanfics circles. It makes getting actual good feedback easier and frankly makes it way less stressful
I’m just happy fan fiction circles have grown out to respect those who are just having fun and those who want genuine feedback
I'm assuming the essay "Don't Worry Guys, Everything Isn't a Mary Sue" by Coelasquid, from over a decade ago, helped with this situation. I also hope it never gets taken down because context and execution really is key.
I was there for a lot of the Mary Sue stuff. It actually stopped me from making characters for a while and set me back. Honestly, it's still such a thing that even when I make a new character these days despite being an adult now, I still ask myself "are they a Mary Sue" despite the fact that I don't really need to worry about that.
My friend even pointed this out as I was talking to him about some of my characters. He felt that some of them could be a little bit more than what they are and it's something I agreed with. But that mindset of me not wanting to make them too powerful or too colorful or.... Anything that could be perceived as bad... Has limited my ability to create.
Yeah, I don't want to make a super perfect character. But it's made me afraid to make characters that could be bad. Which yeah that sounds good on paper because no one wants to make a bad character, but the reason it sucks is because if I don't write a character that ends up accidentally not being good or even boring, how am I going to learn from my mistakes?
I am getting better at getting out of this mindset, But it's still there.
the misuse of the term is a symptom of an amateur criticism and bad faith 🤷♂️
@angelsartandgaming I was there back in the Livejournal Spork days lol so I feel you! And I have similar worries. It's the whole "fail faster" thing and trying not to get discouraged by the idea of scrutiny. Someone in another comment chain pointed out it's an issue with the conflict being interesting, not a characterization issue inherently, and I really do think the solution of using Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs (as Coelasquid suggests) can help or at least reveal dilemmas in the plot.
Also, humbleness is imposed upon the marginalized; I don't think pride or even expertise is a problem. It's a matter of how the character tackles their issues and if you, the writer, find it engaging. Perfection is a compliment when someone loves something, but then they're simply biased towards and not against it. I don't think the Darlings even need to die (edit: lol the opposite of what Limyaael used to say), it's simply a matter of allowing them to suffer and making that suffering relatable to an audience.
If your friend is willing to give you feedback on where they think you can take a character further, I consider that valuable. It's so hard getting any feedback sometimes and if they have a more critical eye, their input is probably less biased than your own, so I'd definitely take it to heart and see if you can implement any of their suggestions that you're comfortable with.
@DoveJS absolutely and I do! My friend and I are two people who like writing mainly fanfictions, but we also write our own original things too. We're just not good at putting them on paper. XD
But yeah we tend to like to help each other with our characters and sometimes I'm so jealous of his lackadaisical way of writing. Because he's not worried about whether his characters are good or bad. If they're considered bad characters, they're bad characters and he can always improve. If they're considered good, then That's perfectly cool!
I swear, to the "culture war/anti-woke" CHUDs Mary Sue has just been redefined as "a woman in a lead role in my nerd franchise" similar to woke being "gay people or minorities existing in my nerd franchise."
Nailed it.
I appreciate so much that you called out the inherent misogyny with so many of these criticisms. It’s so transparent oftentimes that the complaint isn’t that a woman was too-perfect, it was that she was competent at all.
yeah, I'm not like... a big fan of she hulk or anything but that scene where she flat out explains WHY she has better control of her emotions is powerful. Listing the impossible expectations, double standards and lose lose situations she always feels pressured by should have been low hanging fruit to empathize with the main character.
@@mikefisher4051 Totally fair. I haven't watched it at all myself, but that's just some straight up reality she talked about. She just said the quiet part out loud that a lot of women deal with day in and day out, and people still refused to listen. There's only so much you can do against willful ignorance.
@@mikefisher4051I think the scene could have been fine if presented in a more tactful and smarter context. What Jen says is mostly fine but then she starts condescendingly talking down to Bruce Banner and taking it all out on him. Up to that point Bruce has only been working to make sure that she isn’t treated like a monster the same way he is. So when she talks down to the guy who has admitted to have discovered that suicide is impossible the hard way..yea I have no sympathy for her. Trying to one up someone’s deeply personal struggles is bad enough, much more so when it’s a guy who’s been ostracized by society for being a ticking time bomb for decades.
@@thecod2345 Alright, I just rewatched some of that episode, and that scene. The only line I feel like gets close to what you mean is "I am an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you, so all of this feels like projecting a lot of shit onto me." Is it mildly aggressive? sure. Has she been showing that she is capable and humoring him for days while saying she just wants to go back home? Also yes.
As an audience member of course I see that Bruce is in this case a reasonable cautious teacher who wants what is best for his family member, and she is an inexperienced immensely powerful unwilling hero. I am not trying to talk down to YOU, but I think that your view that the scene could have been done with "more tact" is like exactly her point. From her point of view, she got frustrated after days of being told how to something she already knows how to do, and now you think she's not worthy of sympathy. Which I find a bit drastic, but it's alright if you don't like it.
I'm assuming and giving benefit of the doubt because well... you're watching Anthony, you probably ARE better than the nutters who just scream about woke after all. lol
@@mikefisher4051
The only scene I liked in She Hulk was when she beat Daredevil because it actually Showed how easily a Gamma being/Hulk can pack up most street level heroes. Consistent powerscaling is good, actually.
Aspiring writers refusing to write anything out of fear of creating a Mary Sue also applies to not wanting to including problematic/uncomfortable content in their stories out of fear of being accused of endorsing said problematic/uncomfortable even if they make it clear in the text why it shouldn't be endorsed. But that's a topic to discuss for a future video.
So a Lose/Lose Situation from both side.😞
@@raphaelmarquez9650 hoo boy do I get this one. There are several things that I want to write stuff that is uncomfortable because it feels like it's the only way I can get certain points across.
But at the same time, I don't want to be accused of others thinking that I endorse said uncomfortable things.
I feel like people want dark stories but aren't ready for anything that's darker than Hazbin Hotel.
@@angelsartandgaming And even Hazbin Hotel is met with scrutiny by "progressives" with puritan mindsets.
critics were a mistake
I'd rather have weary writers than have an influx of Mary Sues/Marty Stu's and trashy plots like what the Light Novel industry is infested with.
I love the final speech about how writing bad stuff is better than writing nothing. you can't make and undertale without an earthbound Halloween hack
I HAVE F****** HAD IT WITH YOUR BULL****
And even then a bad/embarrassing piece of created media can still have ideas that are improved and expounded upon in later works.
Look how Toby took the Halloween Hack version of Megalovania and turned it into his signature song both for his composer work for Homestuck and later Undertale.
these men crying about Mary Sues being invincible and then crying about Superman being defeated and not perfect is the cherry on top
But you see, Superman earned his power by… uh… getting a suntan.
Men LOVE Mary Sues as long as their boys
@@OtherlingQueen
Who tf is crying About Supes getting finesed? Ma'am, you good?
@@RedSunUnderParadise did you watch the video?
@@OtherlingQueen
Not sure how relevant that is seeing as people have gotten used to Supes taking phat Ls.
Owen Grady is 100% a Gary Stu. It's not only women, just women have it pointed out way more because sexism. Dude can effectively psychically command any dinosaur with his hands, tossed mercenaries one armed so hard he flew over him. Straight up captain america super strength. He can survive a pyroclastic flow, hold his breath for several minutes, swim faster than debris can sink, overcome absurd water pressure, dive through the gnashing jaws of an enraged T-Rex, is immune to the bends, can ride a motorcycle through a jungle, shrug off tranquilizers, and is always funny and charismatic, or at least treated that way whenever he does anything. The kids in the first movie say they want to go with him after seeing their aunt take out a dinosaur. Dude is obnoxiously OP, and why? Well, he was in the navy.
Kind of random, but I remember seeing an edit of the motorcycle scene where the raptors also have motorcycles.
Also why the fuck does the hand thing work every time, the only reason the Velociraptors followed his commands is because they were specifically trained to do so and even then they are shown to be able to disobey him! Also why do random Dinosaurs that he was chasing a minute prior care about this especially when they are big enough to end him in a single kick?
We need more Jurassic world hate in this world
@@clonedelta22
Pretty sure Gary Stu's are either Anti heroes or are Deadahh evil. But yeah, Owen "Budget Rexar from Warcraft" Grady is a Marty Stu.
I re-watched the franchise with my fiancee and seeing him, his daughter, and Alan grant use that stupid hand to distract Blue Jr had me cackling at how absurd it was to see. If that isn't a sign of him being a mary sue nothing else will be
If we have to argue this much on what a term means, that term is less than useless now
We spend more time arguing on made-up schematics for a made-up word rather than actual, substantial character analysis
I dunno if I fully agree with this take. Language evolves over time and it's not unheard of for terms to develop new use cases, which requires people to argue (hopefully civilly) over what they mean
The real issue with Mary Sue is the bad faith actors are using it as a club to legitimize their poorly veiled misogyny, not necessarily people being unable agree on its meaning
Very true. The term exists to facilitate discourse, and if it's not useful for discourse, there's really no need to argue over the semantics of it.
Controversal opinion. Despite most of the characters who are called Mary Sue being female, most characters who fit verious definitions of this trope are male.
Everytime I read or hear someone's definition of Mary Sue it's always the male character that comes to my mind first
Gary Stu's. They're the lead in every cheezy action movie.
Doomguy
@@MILDMONSTER1234 IDK, I'd cbe tempted to chalk up Doom Guy to psychopathy - at least partly from what happened to his colleagues, partly what happened to his rabbit Daisy. 😂
@ In the original games yes, 2016 and Eternal besically reworked the entire character cause the creators didn't understand why doomguy actually works so well
@@MILDMONSTER1234you're right, but i think Doomguy gets a pass because of the media he's in, it's a videogame that works on rule of cool, it's not really that serious, like Bayonetta or Dante
The fact that little girls are dressing up as Rey at conventions and at the Disney parks is proof that the Sequel Trilogy has young fans that resonate with it, and the discourse will eventually become more positive, just like it did with the Prequel Trilogy.
people hate to admit it but it WILL happen again.
@@yurifairy2969 What do you mean, "again"?
@@gamestation2690 The prequels were widely hated by Gen X and older Millennials that saw them in theaters but became slowly rehabilitated by younger Millennials and Gen Z kids that grew up with them as well as prequel-era media that attempted to fill the gaps left by the films.
@ We have been getting lots of novels and comics that fill in the Sequel Trilogy gaps.
I find that hard to believe. The prequels were widely despised at the time of release, but they were still a MASSIVE cultural phenomenon that left an impact, which eventually turned into nostalgia among (at the time) young fans. Maybe it's just my circle, but I feel like the sequels just didn't have nearly as big of an impact when they released. It just doesn't feel like people really care that much about Star Wars these days. It has been demystified.
A woman doing anything competent in a modern movie is a Mary Sue
Exactly right. These fashie types want women in movies to be seen and not heard; to be incompetent, pretty, in the background, and inconsequential to the plot; to not have agency, goals, talents, or power. Otherwise, it feels emasculating to them, it damages their fragile egos. They'd prefer them to be weak, dependent on male characters, or needing to be saved.
Woman:Breathes
Critical Drinker & Just a Robot:Autistic screeching
Not at all. A woman being a competent sandwich maker is always welcomed.
(Joke, btw)
I think there’s a balance to strike. The problem I think is that they rarely strike it. When you mix the right amount of competencies and faults in a cohesive way, you generally can get a well formed character, man or woman. When you make it incongruent, too many competencies, especially in an overly good light, you end up with either a Gary Stu or Mary sue.
@@thecod2345Can you elaborate more on your last statement?
53:19
Sorry for the second comment but I was one of those kids who ended up not liking to write anymore because of being afraid of making a bad character. And the problem is that if I didn't make a bad character, how was I going to learn to make better characters?
Kid me could have really used your speech here at the end. Because in the pursuit of not making a Mary Sue, you just end up not making anything at all. Or resort to characters you just simply don't like because you think this character would be the ultimate goal of writing a sueless character... But you personally just find them so bland without anything that makes them stand out. Sure, they're not a Mary Sue anymore, but they're not exactly a character either.
What's even funnier is that these sorts of mindsets never were placed on any of my male characters! Always the female characters...
Honestly, thank you for this video! I was looking forward to this since I watched your stream!
I hope you're writing again! One thing that helps me is giving my characters character flaws that cause them problems. It's their own mistakes (or fatal flaw) that trips them up and blocks them from what they want, yet it leads them to what they need. Then, you as the writer, it's your job to give your characters challenges that force them to overcome their fatal flaw. This is what I do to avoid creating "bad" characters. Plus, it creates fascinating and interesting stories with character development. Hope that helps and I hope you write again. ❤
@brittanyg7700 I actually really like that! And I'm hoping to write more. It's kind of one of my New Year's goals to start writing again. I don't think I'm going to release a book anytime soon. But just waiting for myself to be honest.
@@angelsartandgaming I have a personal goal to finish an original novel this year. I also have a set word count goal for every day, too. As someone who has been writing for decades, my advice is to not worry about publishing. Just create. Create something you love. That's the most important thing to do. If you publish, great. If you don't, great. The goal is to create something that you're proud of, that you love, and that you filled your time with doing something beautiful. I know I'm just a random stranger on the internet, but I wish you the best of luck in your writing. I believe in you!
@@brittanyg7700 thank you so much!! And yeah I will!
Without critique-how will you ever know that your characters are well written? You can’t have highs without the lows.
I remember taking one of those Mary Sue quizzes and it coming back that the character was a Mary Sue because she had a pet. That’s when I realized Mary Sue shaming was stupid. There’s no way to make an interesting character without it being considered a Mary Sue by some.
I admit, I do think those quizzes are just a joke or trying to be satirical, but feel like that's negated when enough people take it too seriously.
@ Nowadays they definitely are! They seemed to be taken fairly seriously back in 2009 when I did it.
Any female protagonist showing competence (like they should do).
Weirdo on the internet: IT IS A MARY SUE.
IMO to say it is purely people who are "weirdos on the itnernet" taking issue thouhg, would be erroneous - and rather dismissive of what could be legitimate discussion (yes, it can be exhausting, but the presence of weird ass, and legitimate-good-faith people means blanket statements, IMO, are unhelpful).
@DanknDerpyGamer Look, I was refering at people being made a female protagonist win a fight with a henchman. Those are weirdos and we should call them.
The thing most people leave out is that it applies to characters written into stories that are not their own, because the characters derives from fan-fiction. It may be an author self-insert, or a character that that particular writer is attached to. Hence a LOT of established characters would fit the role of a Mary Sue IF they appeared in any story outside of their own. Sherlock Holmes for example would probably qualify as a Mary Sue if he appeared in stories outside of Doyle’s and put into the that of other literature franchises.
You're honestly not wrong because one of my favorite things that my friend and I like to do is put characters we like in a different universe to see how they'd react or do a swap. They still have all their original powers but they're just in a different place.
One of my favorite examples is that my friend and I switched Luffy from One Piece and Jotaro from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure just to theorize how well they would do in each other's worlds. This means that Luffy is the one fighting Dio and Jotaro is the one trying to find the one piece.
And throughout we found out that Luffy would be considered pretty overpowered in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure but Jotaro would surprisingly be underpowered in One Piece!
Or not. It still depends on how the story is written. Not every skillful character is a Mary Sue, even if they're ridiculously overpowered. The way they're treated by the narrative plays a crucial role in their status as a Mary Sue.
Reminds me of a joke idea my friend had about role swapping Hamlet and Othello - resulting plays would be about 15 minutes long with a lot less tragedy. But (at least done not as a comedy) they would kind of suck?
And more to the point, neither would be described as a Mary Sue.
The Star Trek fandom, the authorities on Mary Sue, compared Wesley Crusher to her. I say Wesley qualifies(and that the term never should have left Star Trek, even if it is too late to close Pandora's box)
@insupportofjunhado But Wesley is a Mary Sue in the traditional sense. That is, an implausibly gifted author avatar. Rey is more the result of incompetent writing than of delieberate author insertion or agenda pushing. They gave her new skills whenever they hit a sbag in the plot. And instead of rewriting and finding creative ways to resolve or avoid those problems, Rey gets a new ability that comes in handy. And it culminates into this perfect, all-powerful angelic being.
I'd be addicted to a second channel hearing you defend Rey Skywalker all day xD It's just so refreshing to hear someone explore her character (and the Sequel Trilogy as a whole) from multiple fair angles, both criticizing and praising what works and doesn't work about the character in a FAIR manner, while not leaving any comparable examples from Star Wars or other media that people just ignore unchecked either. Its one of my favorite topics you touch upon ^^
to bad his argument fall flat once you actually get into star wars just a tad bit and realize he has never actual bothered to get his facts straight. everyone he "argues" against says USE the force, not to be helped by it. WHICH THE FORCE CAN DO. the force can influence things without anyone coercing it. and he take those instances as "anakin used the force". he is just flat out wrong tho.
or do you say a child few by itself when it was carried around by their parent? No you don't you said the parent lifted the child.
Gonna be real. As someone who loves The Last Jedi and really likes Force Awakens... You can't really explore the sequel trilogy nor her character as a whole. Because Rey in TRoS is not even the same character anymore. You can defend the argument based on misogyny but she is an absolutely terribly written character as a whole. The last movie retrospectively butchered every single character
@@MikePhantom I'm someone who has been into Star Wars since the late 90s, watched all of the numbered movies and dabbled into the EU and I still think the Mary Sue classification of Rey is dumb
Anakin does indeed use the Force. He's been using the Force in podraces as a child, and a human no less. Even the Episode 1 Racer instruction manual points out that Anakin's ability to pilot a podracer is unheard of, primarily because he's the only human in the entire circuit and is matching with other non-human characters through the Force, which he is uniquely far stronger in than anyone else as far as canon is concerned
@gamingsheepy6981 Mary Sues are just symptoms of poor execution, plain and simple. The things people point out as being a Mary Sue (if they're not simply circumstantial difference in preferences) are typically the signs of an inexperienced author. The problems with Rey are that her trilogy is an incoherent vision of multiple writers and directors getting different feedback that they're stuck with having to retroactively cram in. I think a deep dive into Rey and exploring what went wrong is still an excellent idea. I think you can defend her in the sense that the character is the victim of crappy circumstances on a meta-narrative level, same as all the rest in the overarching narrative, but I don't think it was The Plan to craft her into a bland, uninteresting Loved By All Goddess. Executive Meddling is what ruined her potential as a character; I think most people would agree with that even if they for some reason liked the plot twist reveal. (I mean I could be wrong...)
Although contrasting and comparing these thoughts, it's easier in this light to see WHY people point at her and call her one, but I don't think she deserved it that much. Last Jedi does have some problems but for example Rose still got a significant chunk of time devoted to her (and then a lot of people hated her; poor woman.) Personally I loved Rose's potential as much as I loved Finn's and Poe's, whether she was dating anyone or not, and it's just a shame that everyone got short-changed in favor of Reylo (the most awkward, creepy romance IMHO.) IDK these movies might've never been amazing but perhaps Rey needs an analysis as if she's three different characters then? It's now more interesting than I initially considered, so thanks for sharing your thoughts! lol well I hope my rambling was interesting to you as well anyway.
@@gamingsheepy6981 Yeah. There’s like 2 types of Rey haters. The ones that genuinely just don’t like lead women, and the ones that know Star Wars enough to see that she doesn’t work as a female lead. Rogue One also had a female lead, and I didn’t see any hate towards Jyn Erso or the supporting characters from the second type of Rey hater. I have problems with Rey, but I also have problems with all the other supporting characters.
22:25 I don't know if you're going to talk about this either, but something a lot of the Rey haters miss is that she doesn't actually really win with the lightsaber either. She usually just barely manages to survive her fights. And the last one she has with Kylo Ren? The guy is sporting a devastating wound that would probably have killed him if he hadn't been trained in the force.
Wow. It was the very next thing you said after I made this comment. -_- Like you hit all the points I was making.
Winning a lightsaber fight is pretty clearly defined as chopping up the other guy. If it wasn’t for the planet literally separating them she would have just killed Kylo Ren at the end of TFA.
Rey never gets touched and she chops up Kylo at least a couple of times, right? I’d call that “decisively winning”.
Compare Rey “barely surviving” to Luke in ESB. Luke being outmatched by Vader isn’t even a question long before he gets his hand cut off. The entire second half of the movie is “Luke is not ready”.
Rey on the other hand might get a little sweat on her brow I guess. Mace Windu and Yoda were more on the ropes in their ROTS fights than Rey ever gets.
@@Dullahan3470 Once again, you're ignoring that Kylo Ren is not operating on the same playing field as Darth Vader was in his trilogy. Kylo is much weaker than Vader, Maul, and Dooku were in their films and also had a hole in his abdomen from a powerful shot earlier. Even still, Rey *would have lost that fight* if she hadn't channeled the Force in a manner not dissimilar to Luke using it to blow up the Death Star in ANH. That's not her being a Mary Sue, that's literally just how movies are written.
not only did he get hit with the bowcaster, finn also hit him with a lightsaber before he fights rey
@@cartooncritic7045I think a lot of people misunderstand. You can still disapprove of the way these movies are written and you can still critique them. It just really doesn't fit under the definition of "Mary Sue."
I’m not super into Star Wars, so I didn’t know tons about the fandoms response to Rey. Seeing the side by side comparison between her and Anakin, and the responses to each, was crazy interesting. Also, “big fish in a shrinking pond” goes CRAZY hard.
It's really funny how much discussion about Star Wars is ruled by half memories of movies people clearly haven't watched in a while with a side dish of bullshit lore from books nobody reads to make sense of the weird filmmaking gaffes of the original movies that turned into Whole Things along the way.
The Star Wars fandom is forever cursed to have bad media literacy, unfortunately.
@@cartooncritic7045 Don't mess with Star Wars fans they don't watch their movies
Ngl, I don't think Rey was ever a Mary Sue. Though, I do think she was an overall wasted character. She could've been pretty cool and interesting due to her backstory, but they didn't have any clear direction for what they wanted to do with her.
That's the real problem with the Sequel Trilogy, ain't it? It wasn't just the bad writing and poor planning; it was nothing but missed potential.
@@harlannguyen4048 Do the Sequels even qualify as a trilogy?
Yeah @@awandererfromys1680
@@harlannguyen4048 It wasn't poor planning. The original trilogy wasn't planned either. I actually think it was _trying_ to plan that created a problem. They were trying to create a trilogy, not a story. They failed to make each individual movie it's own story. One of the things that the Clone Wars did so well, despite being sandwiched between 2 already existing movies, was that they wrote each episode as it's own story, with the knowledge that it need to fit in its overall narrative spot sitting in the background. Acknowledged, but not the narrative priority on the micro level.
@@Xkittyloverr1997 to use a Halo tagline, it's a very "From The Beginning You Know The End" sort of storytelling because you *know* where most of the cast is gonna end up with the exception of Ahsoka.
The best part of this video was learning that JAR is losing more money than he makes being a TH-camr and he's so desperate you can literally hear it in his already painful to listen to voice.
You know what I hate about grifters who talk about Mary Sues? They go on and on at every single detail why they hate them on 10 videos a week and yet they always got something to hide.
Those people will crap on Rey for "unrealistically" defeating Kylo Ren but will glaze the crap out of characters like Batman for defeating Superman and John Wick taking down a room full of guys
@albertthepeacock8020 I'm convinced they want strong women to suffer the Peter Parker is suffering in the comics right now.
@@UnrealNeoBat It’s not even that complicated. These dudes don’t like women and simply want them to be subservient to men at all times.
@@albertthepeacock8020 Do you not know the difference between Batman and John Wick and Rey from TFA?
@@Jdudec367Yes we do, but why don't you say what you think it is?
Ive always liked the definition OSP gave where Mary Sue harms the story by harmful authorial bias
OSP couldn't give a straight definition and examples of fridging. So I wouldn't take her word regarding Mary Sues.
yeah, i think that definition specifically was good at pointing out how a messes with the story. Describing how a Sue “warps” the story around them made that definition stick with me personally.
The worst part about the Mary Sue discourse (especially in Rey’s part) is that it makes it impossible to criticize the character/story when it’s the vast majority of people criticizing that story are just chuds with weird hangups
I try not to even discuss the new Star Wars films because of the negative association
seriously I dislike the star sequels and last of us 2, but chuds have to ruined the discussion as they find it a way to express their sexism
Great point.
R2-D2 is the real Mary Sue of Star Wars
😁
one of the best pieces of art advice I've ever gotten is "don't be afraid of pushing a piece past it's breaking point, because you'll never know where the line is till you've crossed it a few times."
I tend to operate on the definition of Mary Sue that it is a character that is a mouthpiece for the author's opinions and ideals, is a power fantasy for the author, gets everything they want without having to work for it, is amazing at things without trying, and their values/perspective are objectively correct in the world of the narrative. And all these traits are required to be one. For characters with only some of these traits I'll err toward "borderline Sue" or "pseudo Sue" or "writer's pet".
Writer's pet is a good definition of it to be honest.
Based.
So...Bella Swan from Twilight then?
@@tomhur1 Y e s.
And you can apply that to a lot of characters in fiction, mostly characters that are men. So it's weird (or just misogynistic) to put it on fem characters.
Honestly "Mary Sue" is such a nothing term these days. It's literally gone from 'plot tumor' to 'I don't like this character'.
As someone that's writing an action fantasy novel with a female lead, I constantly wonder if my main character would be considered a Mary Sue no matter what I do with her.
As long as literally every character doesn't dick ride for them and any flaws aren't over come as quickly as they're introduced, you'll be fine.
By some people? Certainly. But I think the majority of them would only ever encounter this very cool sounding book, if you literally shoved it in their faces. They scream about Marvel, Star Wars and Disney because those are main-stream popular, so I think, or at least I hope, you won't have to deal with a large influx of mysoginists.
The people who would throw that term around aren't worth listening to. If you've written her as a person then you'll be just fine.
@@BubblingBrooke I figured they wouldn't even want to read it anyways. The fact she's the lead is bad enough.
In my female lead book, we come into the story when she’s already very skilled and had multiple adventures so a big part of the story is her not really acknowledging her level of skill and other character characters being surprised by what you can do so her story is actually acknowledging yeah, I am kind of a bad ass
What I've started to realize is that most of the time someone tells me "You'll know when you see it", either I won't see it or just don't think it applies as easily as the speaker thinks.
It's why people using "anime" as a derogatory adjective drive me insane- for supposedly being cliché, nobody seems to agree on what makes it generic!
because anime is a industry 😅
who knows how to make alot of money of cheap sexually and overdose of tropes 🤷♂️
You consistently surprise me with how often you churn out genuinely thoughtful content. I have never understood why Rey is put into the Mary Sue category (I mean, I know *why* but still), especially when comparing her story to Anakin's. She's a mechanic that was tinkering with ship parts for her entire upbringing.
I think my own issues with the character is less about her traits and more about the journey that the trilogy takes her on and the vast wasted potential, but that can be said about every character in the Sequel Trilogy.
Ultimately IMO, if they get they ass beat then they ain't a "Mary Sue", and these characters that people always attach this label to always get an ass-kicking in the story at one point or another.
I mean Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker are both bigger Mary Sues than Rey... but they both have penises (Penors? Peniis? Penopodes? Dwarrow?). Which is likely the biggest way to have some character not be a Mary Sue
Clearly, we could solve this issue of her being called a Mary Sue, if we just retcon her to having a penis. Though, then she'll be "bad" for being "woke" at that point
@@NimhLabs Okay hot take here. I don't think the solution to "proving" Rey isn't a Mary Sue is to accuse Anakin and Luke of being "bigger" ones.
@@tomhur1 look, either Rey isn't a Mary Sue... or the issue is that she isn't enough of a Mary Sue
Either outcome indicates the charges against her are wildly incorrect and not applicable to the situation
It kind of becomes like accusing Krillin of being a Mary Sue. Actually, no, there is more of an argument for Krillin for being a Mary Sue in DBZ... just compare everything said about Rey, and put it up against the events of the Namekian Saga
@@NimhLabs *I mean Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker are both bigger Mary Sues*
How would Luike come close to one? The arguments I've seen ignore a lot of background knowledge explicitly made clear, or easily derived from canon materialk (or the films themselves) that take into account his flying/piloting skills, for instance.
@@DanknDerpyGamer nobody else in the galaxy has anything similar to shooting whomp-rats is kind of one of those sorts of justifications that would be viewed as making somebody a MASSIVE Mary Sue if it was a female protag
We have all these skilled military pilots--and then this farm kid whose experience is a Space-Cessna, is able to blow up the Death Star, because of Womp Rat shooting being something that no other pilot in the galaxy has access to doing
Then we have the boost of skill between Empire and Return. With it being made explicit that he never returned to Yoda until the scene with Yoda on his death bed
-=-
This is a series of stories where the main characters regularly do over the top ridiculous things, that is not easy to justify having the skills to do. That is why they are fun
The reason Rey isn't fun, is because she isn't doing insane ridiculous over the top crap. And people somehow got what was wrong backwards
I'm not exactly a young writer, but I've been working on my first long-term project for years now, and fighting with internalized fears of Mary Sue-ism for just as long. I often felt scared if there's just a little too much of my personal experience in the protagonist, everyone will immediately disregard anything else about it and call me a terrible writer and hack. Even though I know that it's a deeply irrational worry, I could never quite shake it off. Your more solid definition of a Mary Sue helps dispel some of that fear. Thank you for making this. You've helped one writer already.
all the drama around the "I bypassed the power compressor" line is so funny too because isn't that literally just sci-fi jargon for "I turned off the choke"? anyone who's ridden a motorcycle at any point should know how elementary that statement is lol
I've been spending more time in the service manual for my bike recently and I feel like a lot of 70s-80s movies are made by people with mechanical know-how, for people with mechanical know-how, in a way we don't really appreciate nowadays. CGI artists don't get anywhere near the credit they deserve, but you can just TELL when the VFX are made by a bunch of dads who'll tell you to hold the flashlight while they fix the brakes and then proceed to yell at you for doing it wrong 😅 iykyk
Part of the problem is obviously that it was Rey that came up with this solution, a girl who, while having some technical expertise, is not a pilot and has never been on this particular ship. As opposed to Han Solo, who spent literal decades flying around in that ship, modifying it to hell and back and getting to know all its kinks and quirks.
That moment on its own isn't the worst thing ever and _could_ have worked as an intentionally funny moment if Rey's characterization, skills and motivations had otherwise been executed well.
@@swagromancer She is a pilot. She says herself that she knows how to fly a ship more than once in the film before ever bypassing the compressor. A core part of her internal conflict in TFA is that she's perfectly capable of leaving Jakku if she wanted but never did because she's been waiting on her parents to come back for her the entire time.
@@cartooncritic7045 Alright, she does say she can fly. But she also says that she is unfamiliar with the Millennium Falcon, specifically. If you absolutely want to have that scene where she bypasses the compressor and make it plausible, it would be an easy fix. Just have her say that she's flown this heap of junk before. Maybe she even already scavenged some parts from it. Anything to make it plausible that she would know the ship's systems so intimately. Or at the very least, don't specifically mention that she _isn't_ familiar with the ship.
As I said, the scene on its own isn't terrible, and likely wouldn't be scrutinized to that extend if her character was written better as a whole.
@@swagromancer She has lived on that planet under the offending junker’s custody since she was a toddler. It’s extremely easy to surmise from the film’s context clues that she has worked on ships and compressors similar to the Falcon in the time she’s been on Jakku even if she never directly worked on the Falcon itself.
You’re also once again forgetting that Han not knowing how to fix the Falcon’s issues has been a running joke since the OT. Han is a great pilot but a lousy mechanic. Anytime the Falcon needed serious repairs in the old movies it was thanks to Chewie or R2 that anything ever got fixed.
@@cartooncritic7045 You can surmise that if you want, but everything we know about the Falcon says this ship is quite unique, "ships like it" aren't just a dime a dozen. It's heavily customized, which is the exact reason it's so glitchy.
Even if you want to say that Han has no clue what he's doing - fine. Chewbacca was also there. You're just shifting the problem, not solving it.
You know I bet somewhere out there, there's a Woman named Mary Sue wondering why her Name is all over the Internet.
Edit: FRUITS BASKET MENTION LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
The only problem I had with the mention is the use of "front" as said charm being a genuine part of her personality does not contradict its function at the time as a coping mechanism. Otherwise, great inclusion as she was wrongly criticized in similar manners to the bullshit Mary Sue accusation but thankfully she is more appreciated now.
@nguyenhoangnam8609 I remember someone calling her a Mary Sue in the Comments of a Video about the 2019 Series, and I just instantly Facepalmed (not literally but still).
@@WalkmanWillWalkAllOverYou People really need to understand how difficult it is to be as kind as Tohru in real life.
@ 100% they should.
I really feel embarrassed about watching tons of "MaReY sUe" at the peak of the disney star wars triology discourse.
Palpatine's intro being locked behind fortnite is still hilarious.
i don't know how anyone voluntarily listens to just a robot's voice.
same for literature devil. in fact, at first i didn't even notice it was a different grifter. both of their voices are terrible.
@@nondescriptcat5620i used to watch him. Some of his old content was okay. But as soon as he ranted about anti heros and harley quin for like 15 minutes
One example that made me revaluate my opinion on the matter was when I kept hearing people call Sadie Adler from Red Dead Redemption 2 a mary sue and I'm like "what are you talking about?". First of all cow girls were a thing back then, they established her background in hunting and combined that with her becoming more vengeful and unhinged it makes sense she'd be good at killing, she needs to be saved by John Marston (a cis straight white guy) twice and nobody supports her behavior, they might go a little easier on her because she recently went through a traumatic event but when she does something crazy Arthur is the first person to say "What the hell is wrong with you?"
I've also noticed that when it comes to these sorta ideas. Japanese media is completely off the hook with these people for some reason even if they share the same ideas. For instance if Black Lagoon or Neon Genesis Evangelion were western properties first all the women in those shows would be called mary sues or girl bosses but it's anime so it's fine I guess
It's like that one meme where it's like
Thing: 😠
Thing, Japan: 🤯
Because I noticed that too!
People are strange, one of the greatest sharpshooters in history was a woman. Annie Oakley was an absolutely ABSURDLY good shot, even more insane when you consider the rifles she was using weren't even remotely as accurate as modern firearms are and most people could practice for over a decade with modern guns and not come close to what she could do.
@@matthewgagnon9426 funny how they claim to care about historical accuracy when it's convenient for them
and you can't tell me it's because the characters are attractive because as shown with the Hades games and Baldur's Gate 3 they'll turn on characters who are sexualized if they view the product as woke enough
I don't think Sadie is a Mary Sue, but her "development" definitely feels very rushed. Although I think it can be explained by Arthur not being too emotionally intelligent or even interacting with her all that much prior to chapter 3, and as we experience the story through his eyes, she probably just goes through all that development off-screen. It's not really the most elegant way of writing an arc like hers, but left us with a cool character so overall I'm totally fine with it.
I have argued that Mary Sues as a concept don't exist. They are a false attribution of the problems of a story to character and characterization alone. You can tweak the characterization of the supposed Mary Sue all you want. It's not going to change anything unless you overhaul the plot, other characters, and how everything connects. You don't really need a complex character to be compelling. Thrillers and murder mysteries are compelling enough on their own despite using stock characters. As an audience, we're drawn to some kind of conflict, so if your conflict is flat, then that's where your plot falls apart. It's why new writers are often told to not worry about crafting Mary Sues by piling on flaws which ultimately are meaningless nonsense. They're told to make their conflict meaningful.
You know what, you might be onto something here.
YES. This. It's all a matter of execution and it's generally a culmination of random beginner mistakes. I like "Don't Worry Guys, Everything Isn't a Mary Sue" by Coelasquid which elaborates on this and offers solutions using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. lol sorry I keep mentioning it but you also hit the nail on the head so I thought you might find that interesting. Please feel free to list where some of the other writing advice is, I'd enjoy perusing it, but don't include l' inks; most of them get auto-recycled. fingers crossed this won't be as well.
The Cat In The Hat is compelling as fuck and who even are those kids.
No, I disagree. This implies you can never discuss or critique a specific character in isolation. Also consider that Mary Sues tend to be protagonists, so the story revolves around them. If the character was different, the story would also be different (and vice versa, chicken and egg). If the Mary Sue wasn't perfect, they couldn't resolve conflict in a boring way, so the story would be more interesting.
I agree it is false attribution of the problems of a story to characters alone. I will also add it is not just "conflict" that interests us naturally, but causality. Even if it isn't inherently tied to conflict, if something interesting happens (cause) with an interesting effect on the story, the world and/or the characters (effect), someone will want to see what happens next.
I remember watching a video by MangaKamen where he ranted about Mary Sues. Now it was the normal stuff you’d see in a video like this (Korra from LOK and Rey from Star Wars) until towards the end of the vid..
He tries to say Giorno Giovanni from Jojo part 5 was a Mary Sue and uses arguments that I could apply to other Jojo characters (Example: he complains about Giorno doesn’t seem to feel pain during one of the fights when characters like Josuke from part 4 had to deal with a massive wooden fence impaled in his leg during the Kira fight and Jolyne in part 6 survived being lit on fire during her fright with Rikiel.)
I bring up his video here because I believe it’s where I came to the idea that the reason why people like JAR, LitteraryDevil or Whoever makes these Mary Sue videos are just using the term “Mary Sue.” as a blanket term/buzzword to try justify a character they dislike and their “reasons for why they’re a Mary Sue” are just their personal reasons why the hate the character.
Who exactly is MangaKamen, I seen his videos show up in my feed but never watched them because the titles and thumbnails felt clickbaity
@User-Wizard He makes vids mostly ranting about Cartoons, anime and occasionally gaming. He’s very similar to JAR in terms of content (ranting about the Woke or SJW in media). I think the only difference between the two is JAR is more into the Commentary side of TH-cam whereas MangaKamen is more rant focus.
I'm always baffled when people call Korra a Mary Sue. She has way too many flaws and takes so many Ls.
@@apieceofbitsandpieces342 I personally thought the guys videos on metal gear rising and a good amount of others were really good. I don't think it's even close to the trash that is JAR.
@@Jerome_M_0 MangaKamen is more similar to JAR than not but MK at least knows how to make a decent video every now and again, which makes him better than JAR.
Doesn't stop him from having trash takes, of course.
Hell, we know these “critics” that rag on about Mary sues are big time anime degens that will unironically watch isekai anime and won’t see how they are all Gary Stu’s
The Mary Sue on the thumbnail low-key has a good design, also once again a banger video. Always look forward to these videos
23:33 "but here's the thing:"
Anakin was a man. That's the thing. Devil can say whatever nonsense he wants, but the real thing for him is that Anakin is a man and Rey is a woman
I wish this wasn't true but the more I see of these antiwoke "critics" the clearer it becomes that this is really at the heart of their complaints
No, I disagree. Anaking has neither the social/charm factor nor the moral integrity to qualify even remotely as a Mary Sue. Sheer power isn't the only factor, as Anthony acknowledged.
The thing I like the most about this narrative is how they always seem to portray the character accused of being a Mary Sue as being smug or cocky. Especially when it’s demonstrably untrue. I'll never forget a video discussing Rey's supposed Mary Sueness with a screenshot of her smirking (kind of), as if trying to imply that she spend the entire film succeeding in everything, whilst rubbing everyone else’s faces in it. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how she does not do that at any point, in fact she spends much of the film wracked with self doubt.
But that seems to be the thing that sticks in people's craws (smugness, arrogance, cockiness) to the point that they will go out of their way to imply that this is also a character trait of the 'Mary Sue' even when they’re not.
This is probably a bit off topic, but your point about Harry doesn't train hard to earn his winning has just reminded me of something. In fact, I've been hearing screaming about "WhY hE's NoT tRaiNinG haRdeR wHAt tHe hElL hE iS doInG wITh hIS LifE" from Asian readers for years now. Is it toxic Asian work ethic? Yes. But could Harry work harder to tune his magical abilities? Also yes.
Yet, despite all of this, most of us just think that Harry isn't hard working enough or we mock him of being the "chosen one". Nobody thinks he's a Mary Sue.
Mary Sue is a very gender biased accusation. There are much more female characters get the blame for much milder offense IMAO. The critics throw this term on female characters on a "guilty until proven innocent" basis, while for the male characters it is "innocent until proven guilty". Male characters rarely get accused of being a Gary Stu unless they are really bad. Gary Stu also isn't the by default name for this trope. Just like that one added in female character with a pink bow, Gary Stu is more like an after thought. It's the "oh we forgot to include men in this" of the trope because this trope is by default female.
It's funny how it's by default female when it's a widely hated trope. But when it's the main cast, the female characters are always the after thought characters with "female" being their entire personality.
Edit: One more story on gender based bias. I've read a Chinese webnovel probably more than a decade ago. The progagonist is a street kid who at some point ended up in a gang in some sort of magical ancient China settings. It isn't revealed until later that she's actually a girl. Before the revelation, readers were all cheering for her. She could curse, fight or trick her enemies. They would celebrate her victory. But as soon as her gender was revealed, many people stopped reading and made sure that the author know it's because the protagonist is now a girl (oftentimes through hate comments). The author talked about it later. She found it interesting that how much people's perpective change with just a simple swap. Literally nothing changes about the character except for her gender. And, upon reread, you can actually pick up signs that she's been a girl all along.
This.
It is exceptionally rare to find on TH-cam, but every once in a while, I see a TH-camr who actually paid attention when they watched She-Hulk.
She-Hulk wasn't my favorite because the legal humor didn't land with me. (Trying to reach the level of Ally McBeal and Night Court is a major challenge.) But Jennifer's comment on having to keep her anger in check to avoid being labeled "difficult" or worse was compelling.
@TheVeritas1 Yeah, the show was very much about Jennifer's life as a Hulk and not about her life as a lawyer. It's legitimate to see it as a misstep, but I feel that the story they did focus on made for a fun and compelling sitcom.
The irony is that fear of creating a Mary Sue eventual lead people to complain about the traits authors would force on the characters to make them not sues, dubbed the Anti-Sue. Effectively the idea was that people would over correct and make characters that were deemed to be utterly incompetent, have too many flaws, an overly tragic past, has nothing go right, and just as likely to be hated by everyone for no discernible reason as they are to be loved. Which in turn lead to people who would get on to characters for showing weakness or needing help, or being hated by people for reasons beyond the control of the character, or just being miserable because they are struggling with traumatic events in their past. Especially if they were preexisting characters who were beloved for being strong like Samus Aran or Superman. They might not be called anti sues now, but people know that they would be mocked for using that term unironically.
Regarding Rey's Sue-ness specifically, I never really saw anything regarding the Falcon as any degree of Sue-ness traits, because if there's one trait that's 100% solidified and built in, it's that Rey knows machine stuff. She's been tearing apart Star Destroyers and any other flotsam on the planet since she was young, of course she's gonna know general operations of spacecraft and what they do. The part that always kinda leaned my brain that way was her doing the Jedi Mind Trick, but in a more competent story that could have easily been better foreshadowed, and as we all know, the sequel trilogies have issues far, far, FAR past anything minor like that, especially in the entries after Force Awakens. With the extra bits of hindsight, Rey's character is *fine* in TFA but like Poe and Flynn, they suffer worse and worse writing issues between movies.
This is like saying that the guys who strip copper wire out of stuff will know how they work.
It is very easy to take stuff apart without any inkling of how they actually work or how to fix them.
Still this scene would have been salvageable - just have Han try and take some awkward panel off or something and Rey knows a trick to open it and some cheesy “Learn something new every day”
But that is already more thought than the writers put into those movies. The script said [Rey fixes the problem] and that was the extent of their imagining.
@@Dullahan3470 I dunno man. She has her own scrap-home separate from that little compound, with power and everything, so I'd assume she knows enough to put at least that back together without frying herself.
@Dullahan3470 It's a subtle character trait that could've been expanded on. Some guys who strip wire would know, some won't. That's what makes characters unique. Not everyone who does the same things is exactly the same, with the same motivations. Rey could've been the equivalent of a mechanic because she loves tinkering, if any of the movies had bothered to explore that angle thoroughly. As has already been suggested by both of you, it all comes down to the execution.
Except Han Solo has also been doing stuff that is pretty much Jedi Mind Tricks. Obiwan even calls him out on it, and this is used to indicate that Han Solo is an untrained Jedi, who confuses his own Force capacity for him having guile and luck
They then point out the Cantina scene where he taps the wall where Greedo shoots--and a long montage of other things Han Solo does
Including successfully shooting Darth Vader--who was the most skilled pilot during the Clone Wars, and is trained specifically in "not being hit by blaster fire". Who shoots this person with decades of battle experience who is a god of both the ground based battle field and dog fights? Some rando scruffy looking nerf herder is able to show up in a space freighter that appears to have the same "magical stealth" abilities of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park
Then just to go further, this galaxy has "Pod Racing" as a sport--with major leagues being controlled by the Hutt Cartel. What is Han Solo's claim to fame? Being able to navigate an illegal space race known by smugglers (often employed by the Hutt Cartel) in the shortest distance to the point of holding a major record. As a human. In a world where it is established that there are sports that humans are not able to, without usage of the Force, from not having the reaction time to compete with other species
Rey has done _NOTHING_ in the force prior to training that even comes close to being on par with what Han Solo has accomplished
Heck, Han Solo is even best friends with the greatest Wookie warrior, who personally was held in high regard by Yoda and most of the Jedi Council. With Chewbacca just being okay with Han Solo regularly talking crap about Jedis in front of him. The same character who "wins" Space Chess by tearing the arms off of his opponents
But then, Han Solo has a penis... so that allows him to not be questioned for this. IF only Rey were to be able to retconned, so that she could have a penis
edit: the person who was able to track down Han Solo was a Bounty Hunter who was specifically raised by the same people who built the Clone Army, and given the exact same training as the Clone Army--on top of the training the Mandellorians were given. The Mandelorians being the only Army shown to be able to regularly take on Jedi consistently in confrontations. He has been given an extremely competent training regiment to be the one guy who can take on Jedi Masters approaching Yoda. Nobody else is able to even come close to being able to bring Han Solo down in service of the Empire. The entire time Boba Fet is made to look like a Dog the Bounty Hunter Wannabe who watched a bunch of reality Tv and lives only to mimick (poorly) that stuff (not Dog himself--but like the sort of person who marathoned his show, and thinks that is the same as intense training)--that is how much Boba Fett is barely able to bring in Han Solo. Han Solo then accidentally unalives Boba Fett while still being blind from surviving Carbonite Freezing, a practice known for having a low survival rate in humans
that is a major mistake because if there is one thing which was clearly established is that Han...is a terrible mechanic. Like seriously, if you watch OT who does all the fixing?
Chewie.
Han is a user not a maker, each time he tries to fix the falcon it ends badly
I remember when mary sue was used in online spaces just to describe the ocs of people who had every single ability or were perfect to the point it made role-playing difficult
Star Wars: Sequel Trilogy and Mary Sue concept ruined my late teenhood making me an antiwokeist for a time. I stopped that like in 2020 and I'm happier now but I hate my younger self and the "antiwokeist critics"
We all make mistakes when we're young. However, if you learn from them, you are a better person.
What's sad are those who repeat their mistakes well into their senior years.
Can I just say that Sai's drawing of Rey in the thumbnail is extremely cute?!
And the Mary Sue design as well is so good too, I saw her stream drawing it, watching this after her stream on shadiversity is perfect lol
They call the girls Mary Sues because fans can be incredibly sexist and hate when girls are "too powerful" or "too popular" or "get their own way all the time". The only male character I've ever seen called a Gary Stu with equal vitriol is Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Of all the characters you could highlight as a Gary Stu I certainly was not expecting that one. Genuinely never seen anyone get annoyed about Aang being too powerful. Loads about Korra, of course, but not Aang (unless it’s about shipping).
I think the reason why for Aang is that he was a kid during that story. Just feel like anything that's not a grown ass man doing stuff like this gets this critique a lot
@@intergalactic92 Oh yeah, Korra got whacked hard with the Sue Stick. Aang was definitely a case of "he got in the way of my ship" but also "his values are unmanly".
@@intergalactic92Claim that Korra is Mary Sue is also nonsensical. Her being able to bend 2 more elements as kid doesn't make her Mary Sue. Every bender can bend their native element as kid.
Being able to bend elements isn't the same as being master of it.
That's was the whole point of 13 years time skip.
She need that long to master elements and still after that she struggles in fights against villains that are older and more skilled in fighting.
@@Lynn17Claim that Korra is Mary Sue is also nonsensical.
The only thing creators do was switch trope with Asami.
It is usually the main girl who is very nice and friendly, while other more feminine and usually rich girls are rude and jealous. (The Owl House, Little Witch Academia, Gravity Falls, etc).
Korra was jealous of only 3 episodes, and that was enough for ridiculous amounts of unhinged hate.
Her being able to bend 2 more elements as kid doesn't make her Mary Sue.
Being able to bend elements isn't the same as being master of it.
That's was the whole point of 13 years time skip.
She need that long to master elements and still after that she struggles in fights against villains that are older and more skilled in fighting.
wow that Literature Devil guy sounded disgusting when he was talking about women
Rey literally survived by scavenging technology. That is a lifetime of learning and knowing what things are, why they are important, and how to take things apart. The fact she is particularly intuitive about tech on top of that is normal Star Wars shorthand for showing force sensitivity. It is the same reason Luke is automatically accepted as a X-Wing pilot when he has only flown swoops and speeders in an atmosphere. Demonstrated lifelong skills intuitively expanded beyond their scope by the Force.
We also know she can fight. She caries a staff and can use it. I actually am pretty angry they didn't give her a double bladed saber, it narratively made sense. On screen; double sabers are usually seen as Sith weapons (which may be why they didn't, and why she does in the vision), but in old expanded lore it was also the weapon of a Jedi Guardian. I was hoping they were going to make her the return of the Jedi Guardian.
Do you know who’s the real gary Stu? Luke and Anakin Skywalker oh, you’re the prophesied child of legend will bring order to the force, and you just happen to have been born by immaculate conception. The untrained force sensitive Youth can move a missile with his mind through a 90° turn. Give me a break.
@CuppaLLX And even if you go beyond simple knowledge, skill, and powerscaling stuff to claim Luke and Anakin _aren't_ Mary Sues in other ways, you'd need to acknowledge that they've both had half a century of character development and exploration both in film and other media. Rey's character has only been around for, what, a _fifth_ of that, and she's largely only known from her trilogy? Measuring up Rey's development against Anakin and Luke's seems like an unfair comparison.
@@CuppaLLX Oh jeez, now that's a braindead take if I've ever seen one.
@@chansesturm7103 Literally what are you even talking about. Luke alone gets more characterization in his first 10 minutes of screen time than Rey gets across the entirety of her three movies. Discounting any and all media besides the films, it's painfully obvious what an underdeveloped shell of a character Rey is.
Luke and Anakin were part of the Lucas movies, the original trilogy and the prequels, but the prequels were not as good as the original movies. Even Lucas could not replicate the success and he sold the franchise to disney and star wars as a franchise with disney turned it woke and terrible writing
Q. What do you call a male Mary Sue?
A. A protagonist.
Thank god you mentioned that whole sequence with Baby Anakin cause everyone had seemingly forgotten it when the whole "Rey is a Mary Sue" thing happened and I felt like I was losing my mind.
Anthony knocked it out of the park with the Anakin comment. What's ironic is that back in 1999 a lot of fans hated baby Anakin saving the day.
Now, the anti-woke crowd cheers on baby Anakin as a great role model rather than a Gary Stu.
@@captainstrato5578
Both sides unironically forgetting that Phantom Menace was loathed will never not be funny.
I’m so glad you brought tohru I feel like people just see kind, gentle and bubbly girls in shoujo especially get a lot of flack for it ever since high school. I also think it was the first anime that warped that she’s only nice and fixes everyone emotional problems since it lean towards the high school romance comedy over the more darker tragedies and struggles the characters have. Also tohru never did fix the problems of the sohmas like ant said all she did was give them the love and support they all were denied being in the cursed sohma family. And that moment of kindness gave them the push to fix their own problems and emotional hang ups that they all were there for her when she spiraled.
Mary Sue has been used more often than not to bash on female characters/creators. Whether it be because of what we see women and girls liking as "cringe" or just "ew feminism"
The way I have personally internalized Mary Sues are characters that feel unintentionally unnatural in their stories for a number of different reasons, regardless of gender. Someone stretching disbelief to the point it snaps and becomes uninteresting.
Overpowered characters, self insert characters, WOMEN-
Dont really matter, but more so how the story works around them.
when I enter a media illiteracy contest and my opponent is Literature Devil
It really feels like a lot of this "discourse" could just be boiled down to, "is this character a Mary Sue or do you just hate that a women/minority is the main character?".
That's...What a lot of discourse could boil down to, unfortunately. Fandoms ruin everything, but bigots ruin fandoms.
It's mind blowing how many people said wanda from the mcu is a mary sue because of a scene of someone showing entry... It not a well written scene still it mind blowing seeing how she got beated by a child the next time we see her.
The whole problem with Mary Sue as a concept is that it stifles creativity and passion for writers because then there is such a thing as going too far to try to NOT write a Mary Sue, when the whole point should be to write what you want and what resonates with you. Same idea applies to people who try too hard to write truly "original" stories. It can backfire and make a story boring and the main character dull, if one tries too hard to not write a Mary Sue. Ultimately, stories like that are power fantasies and all writers put some measure of themself into the main character, as you say. Great video, and as always it is literally just a hatred for women that the grifters and chuds have.
37:43 Mizu from Blue Eye Samurai fits that description too... in the way they tend to consume media: no proper training, she learned from LOOKING at a distance at other swordsmen practice, she keeps proving men wrong when they underestimate her, doesn't smile, has a "girlboss" cool "masculine" attitude, made her husband feel insecure by being "too good" with a sword and ultimately killed him, she can take down an entire dojo on her own, invade a castle, defy very pro trained and experienced warriors and obviously defeat men twice her size, most men in the series are either wicked, evil, mamma boi or pathetic...I guess since the show is so broadly loved they didn't dare to go after it. It's like a character is a Mary Sue if enough people dislike her.
To be fair, the way in which she's so competent to the point of being just cartoon logic that let's her survive, is one of the things that bother me a lot about that show, personally speaking.
That said, I don't think that she counts as a "Mary sue", simply because, in the end, she gains nothing;she doesn't accomplish her goals, she's not able to form meaningful connections ( which is what she needs ,to be honest), and is spiralling downwards in a negative character arc.
If she were a "Mary sue" , the story would have given her anything she wanted and made sure to justify any decisions that she made, which is not the case.
She's more of a tragic Greek hero than anything else, I just wish she would have been characterised more like Odisseus ( wins through cunning plans), rather than an Achilles ( wins though sheer might).
@ Well that’s my point. See how I added a sentence before everything to signal I was being sarcastic, she’s not a Mary Sue. I was Referring to how hypocritical and dishonest the anti woke crowd of reviewers often are. They tried to shit on the show for this same reason and turn her into the next Ray but quickly back pedaled when noticed people actually loved her and the show, same happened with Arcane, Spiderverse, Wicked, etc. And are still shitting on black widow for a single fight scene she was “too good” of a fighter for a woman her size and what not ridiculous nitpicking, regardless of that same type of scene is actually a pretty common trope
Edited: forgot to say that first, the show is not over, still too soon to affirm she’s a tragic hero when we don’t know the outcome of her path, S1 could have ended with her temporarily touching bottom. Second, none of that undoes the fact that the show “hate men”, as some of these reviewers would likely say. Imagine the audacity of Netflix, making a samurai show where not a single properly trained samurai man seems to be a proper rival for a self taught woman, if they could get away with it, they’d likely had obliterated the show
Good point. I think they actually hate all competent female characters, but their expression of that hatred will depend on how much they can get away with it.
Imagine if a female creator did a gender swap version of this. She's going to be criticized into oblivion.
When you're in a sexual insecurity competition and your opponents are Just a robot and Literature devil: 💀☠️
52:03 "Who could say anything they wanted and still be respected"
Wait, is Donald Trump a Mary Sue?
Debatably
Proof that our "reality" is just bad fan fiction.
@@-tera-3345
If he was, his tariff "policy" would have fixed our God forsaken economy and he'd actually be a decent mammal and not a bug man. He's just Jar Jar.
In short, "Mary Sue" has come to mean "female character with any agency whatsoever."
Their real issue is that women have power.
I can't imagine how you stomach watching all these rage baiting idiots online that twist facts in the most ridiculous ways just to share misogynist and bigoted ideas but I really appreciate how you thoughtfully counter and find examples of hypocrisy in their arguments. I really feel like these people are effecting others media literacy for the worst and I'm glad that you're willing to call them out for horrible misinterpretations. Please keep up the good work and i hope (though don't expect it) that people will eventually stop falling for this bullshit and people can actually discuss things in a more mature manner.
At this point I just assume the definition of Mary Sue that TH-cam grifters use is “when a female character does what a male character does and has an opinion about that”. If the original Last Airbender series came out today people would have made so many memes about Katara and Toph
Truth. Heck, The Legend of Korra got pushback from some early anti-woke types because of her confidence, competence, and complexity.
I feel the greatest example of "Mary Sue" is how Homer wrote Poochie ("If he's not in the screen, everyone should ask 'where's Poochie?'"). But, yea, this term has melted into a puddle shaped into anything you want to be.
I think the problem here is that none of these characters are executed well. Most of these characters that are oftentimes called Mary Sues are just not good characters. But no one wants to just say "this character is bad" they need to overstate and overexplain why thats the case.
What other characters you talking about, besides Rey?
Its almost as if the issue is bad writing and not gender/race etc.
@@captain_trebreh In many cases, it isn't even bad writing, but character has written with flaws (somehow still Mary Sue) that they must overcome through character development (but who has time and patience for multiple episodes and seasons of characters journey).
@@captain_trebreh that's infact what I was saying. You just restated the point
As someone who was very very scared of writing things because of those people, now that I grow out of it, it's so good to see people like you spreading how bad all of this is for people. How these anti-woke and """"""critics"""""" do more harm than actually helping them. Thank you for doing this.
People complained that Rey never fails and shown better than Luke but in THE LAST JEDI she tries and fails to repeat Luke's greatest triumph, turning someone from the Dark Side back to the light.
Rey was never the problem, she's just another victim of not planning a trilogy ahead of making it. Palpatine's return just reeked of studio panic imho.
@awandererfromys1680 Lucas really didn't plan out ahead the original trilogy either. Vader wasn't intended to be Luke's father in the beginning. I think Abrams did intend for Rey to redeem Kylo in the third movie in a repeat of the OT but he didn't realize how much viewers would hate Kylo for killing Han and wanted to see him dead instead.
@ Sure, that's true, but the Original Trilogy atleast tells a coherent story. What happened in the previous movies mattered in the third.
The Sequels are so disjointed that it hardly qualifies as a trilogy imho. Both Abrams and Johnson were given complete freedom to write whatever they wanted and it shows.
And Lucas had the advantage that there wasn't any lore or canon to consider. It didn't exist yet, he was creating it. Disney didn't have that luxury. A basic story outline should have been the bare minimum here.
@awandererfromys1680 The prequels had an outline and one vision but that didn't keep people from hating it. Fans really wanted to see Luke be the triumphant hero again and sure that would have made everyone happy but the sequels are supposed to be about the next generation.
@@Mokkari77 I was rooting for the next generation after TFA. I liked all four of them. Lots of wasted potential there. It's not about that, or Luke, or whatever.
The Sequels just don't connect narratively, they don't tell the same story. They don't even have the same characters really. They certainly don't share the same vision. Like every movie retcons what the previous one did.
It's three movies that pretend to be a trilogy.
And it's not really a secret. Johnson has come forward that Disney had no notes or outline for him when he was hired, he was free to come up with whatever he wanted.
And well, he did. Interesting take, but it just fails in its execution. It doesn't work as the second act in a trilogy. And what he did to my poor dude Finn is a crime in itself.
And with TROS they just panicked.
Just because Rey happens to be skilled at certain things, doesn’t mean she’s flawless on the INSIDE.
While of course there are just simply badly written characters of all genders, Mary Sue seems to have become the strawman that media illiterate people use to vent their own misogyny. You have to wonder, how would classic pieces of media like Xena the Warrior Princess, or Terminator 2 be taken, if they were to come out today.
Oh my god! One of my viewers just sent me this. You used one of the clips from my OLD video! I'm too scared to watch it because I'm embarrassed and also because of my anxiety. BUT THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR USING THE CLIP EITHER WAY! I APPRECIATE IT! Thank you!😄😄😄
Thank you for making a good video that helped me craft this one. I always want to credit the videos that helped me come up with ideas and perspectives, and even if you were embarrassed or anxious, I thought your work is pretty damn good. :)
I can't stand to listen to she-hulk criticism because most of it doesn't even try to meet the show where it is. People talk about it like it's the story of a woman getting powers and being better than her male cousin. It's the story of woman trying to go to work and go on dates as sitcom shenanigans ensue. It's not a blockbuster it's a comedy.
Well damn, it was really unfunny too so I guess it fails no matter which way you look at it
@@Jerome_M_0 That's more subjective than factual though. What you don't find funny(She-Hulk) might be funny to someone else. It's more a matter of opinion which you are allowed to have. But you do have to expect that not everyone shares the same thoughts and will have disagreements.
@@goober7959 idk man most people who watched the show disliked it. 32% is a terrible score even for a subjective comedy. No one i have ever met in real life has ever said "man she-hulk was a really funny show" it was either "man that was trash" or "who still watches those?"
Like honestly the show is just a messy pile of trash that doesn't know how to mix its comedy with its other aspects. It's CGI is also terrible.
@@Jerome_M_0 Most people whining about it don't even watch it. Also, review bombing is a thing and a lot of people do it to movies and shows they haven't watched
It sucks when your favorite character(s) get accused of being a Mary Sue, despite evidence to the contrary. This is what it’s like being a Rey Skywalker fan.
You can always just stop defending the trillion dollar megacorpo slop's inane writing kid. Ma-Rey Sue is a bad punchline to a bad joke.
Same. I love Korra. And the people who accuse her of being a Mary Sue clearly never watched the show. It’s infuriating.
dont call her that, identity fraud is not a joke
I watched both. Korra is a Mary Sue who gets protected constantly from her own stupidity by the plot, while Rey just knows how to use the force with no training, can shoot 3 fighters down with one shot with no experience in an ancient freighter, and decides to call herself a Skywalker with no relation to it, when her entire backstop is an insult and a fat turd laid on the old movies.
It's tough being stupid isn't it? This is why we needs gatekeep shit, because fucks like you wanna come in and change everything for no fuckin reason. Saying you're a Rey fan is just outing yourself as a smooth brained parasite who can't live on its own without leeching support from others.
It really is frustrating. That's why I gave up on the "Mary Sue" label as a whole.
Rey's real problem isn't that she's a Mary Sue (because as Anthony pointed out, what she did isn't as impressive as what Anakin did in Episode 1).
Her problem is that the Sequels' writing was so sloppy and rushed that her character wasn't properly fleshed out. Rey didn't fail--the writers failed her.
Mary Sue feels like a loaded term that has been overused. It was originally used for the most extreme story-warping self-insert power fantasies, but any character who has even a small amount of their traits is seen as a full-on Mary Sue.
This is like a spa for my brain. Rey was a flop character for me, but the Mary Sue argument was so stupid it was like huffing glue. Refreshing to hear a good-faith critique.
The way you define "Mary Sue" honestly perfectly depicts how many fans of batman treat the character. "Batman would win because prep time." Style arguments, despite the best stories show that he often loses.
I was misled into thinking Rey was a Mary Sue by Drinker and others like him
Over time with the clips we have available, she isn't a Mary Sue, but a wasted character like Poe and Finn
I wish that movie 9 stuck with Rey's parents being nobodies. There are force sensitive people like Donnie Yen's character in Rogue One that don't require a lineage. The Force just chooses who to operate through
Making her related to Palpatine undermines the message of 8
That's proof that if writers aren't on the same page, the character will suffer
I'm starting to wonder if this is why I stopped writing.
I made my characters so plain, they could disappear into the background. Even in my fantasy stories, I had to make absolutely sure it was realistic so I didn't accidentally make a Mary Sue.
John Wick is terribly overrated, never got all the love it got. The new Star Wars doesnt suck because of Rey, it sucks because it didnt do anything really new within an already tired world.
This!👆
I can't comment on John Wick since I haven't seen any of the films. But you nailed it regarding how the Sequel Trilogy didn't really capitalize on its new characters like Rey.
This flaw is even more glaring when you look at how shows like The Mandalorian, Andor, and Skeleton Crew did this well.
your channel is truly such a thought provoking place for me. i appreciate how clear it is to me that you are interpreting media without an agenda, that misogyny in criticism is not only morally reprehensible but also just BAD criticism. i really enjoy the discussions you spark with your videos!
Definitely not what Critical Drinker or Nerdrotic describes a Mary Sue as
It's hard to take Critical Drinker seriously after saying Zendaya couldn't get married because she's Black.
I’m glad this video exists. More people-and especially writers-need to hear this message because it’s incredibly helpful, especially as an aspiring writer.
This Devil guy and the robot sound like giant man children who just wanted to complain rather then give constructive criticism.
Yep.
I'd be interested in hearing about the juxtaposition between the "trivialises conflicts" aspect of a Mary Sue and the actual (contrived) conflicts the Mary Sues _do_ face.
Look at the edgy Mary Sues, the Sephiroth-esque/Shadow-esque ones. If they're orphans, they'll probably stay orphans, no matter how much they miss their parents. If life was hard on them in their backstory, they can't just snap their fingers and make their life easy.
Except, the only suffering they're allowed to face is the suffering that makes them cooler or more martyr-ly tragic.
Ebony D.D.R. Way from My Immortal isn't popular, she doesn't have a smooth relationship with her boyfriend, bad things often happen to her, etc. That's because she was written to match the things a young goth/emo teenager thinks are cool.
Enoby won't face a conflict where, say, she trips and falls in a puddle and has to borrow someone's fluffy pink unicorn towel to dry off, because that's uncool and embarrassing. But, if the big bad tries to force her to kill one of her friends, that's cool and dramatic and gives Eboby precious, precious angst fuel.
46:23 Bro says this while literally comparing "SJWs" with nazis in the same video.
A Mary sue as terrible writing advice so brilliantly put it, a character, without flaws and so perfect within the story with no internal conflict/reflection that it makes for god awful writing. Everyone in the story loves them, and cannot see any flaws for the protagonist if they are even written into the story. A perfect character with skills without earning it or growing within the story.
That’s not always helpful. Say a character is meant to be a veteran in a war mentoring recruits? Or they’ve been on a fantasy adventure and are helping a rookie starting out.
@@matt0044 I think it's more accurate that the Sue itself warps the story around the character, and the character itself doesn't have to show the skills to be praised for em. For example, you bring up the idea of a veteran mentor, whereas if we really wanted to turn that into a Sue, this same person could, say, be a twenty-something, had never served in a single battle, but is still given the role of monitoring recruits because dangit they're just that much of a well-liked person that noone can say no to them.
Rey is a mary sue coz it was terrible writing. Lucas had 6 movies trying to explain Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader. And Rey was just a copy cat version but not done with Lucas charm
@gratuitouslurking8610 A good answer. Thanks.
@@WhatTimeisLove Whatever you say goofy
you have a such a captivating style that i cannot quite explain? its the mix between academic/clinical with cheeky insults, it gives me all the fun vibes of academia drama lol. i feel privileged to get to watch you talk about things i find interesting - plus you're into horror and like??? hell yeah??? gushing rn sorry
There should be further explorations of what sort of -Gary Stu- main characters these grifters want in any story.
AFAIK, they mostly want overpowered, brooding lone wolves, usually with military experience, in their stories. You know, Starkiller, etc. those sort of main characters. Totally, completely different from Rey or any other alleged "Mary Sue"