I agree 100%. Daala had a *great* character setup which was completely wasted, especially by the fact that at the time she was written, the EU wasn't really permitting any Imperial character to have moral depth unless they were going to defect to the Alliance/New Republic.
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I agree 100%. Daala had a *great* character setup which was completely wasted, especially by the fact that at the time she was written, the EU wasn't really permitting any Imperial character to have moral depth unless they were going to defect to the Alliance/New Republic.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Yeah, she got hosed by the editors, no developed Imperials and no ordinary mortal could win against a Jedi no matter what. How the heck did the Padawans manage to throw FTL-capable ships so far it would take Daala weeks to fly back to Yavin? That's supposed to be "cross the entire galaxy" time in setting.
One of the reasons why i like Star Wars Legacy so much.
IIRC, the story claimed that the Star Destroyers had to fly back purely on sublight drive because their hyperdrives were knocked out by the Force Asspull of Plot.
LindyAF
Well-known member
I generally agree that the EU average was pretty bad and is probably worse than the sequels, although the Disney EU stuff is also pretty bad and wacky at times, like Mortis in Clone Wars, or Operation Cinder. Both EUs have a recurring problem of sticking in stuff in some obscure book or something that's too high power level and too important when compared to the movies. I think they might also have a fundamental issue in that the Original Trilogy and the Prequels don't have the same feel to them, it doesn't feel like the same universe and so it's hard to make anything really work.
Extremely Hot Take but Rey wasn't really that bad, at least in TFA (haven't seen TRoS). Yeah, she was a bit OP, but main characters IMO have to be the kind of people that are competent enough to actually matter on the grand scale, and some selection bias for that is fine.
The most Sueish thing about her was that Han liked her inordinately but that was fairly minor.
Extremely Hot Take but Rey wasn't really that bad, at least in TFA (haven't seen TRoS). Yeah, she was a bit OP, but main characters IMO have to be the kind of people that are competent enough to actually matter on the grand scale, and some selection bias for that is fine.
The most Sueish thing about her was that Han liked her inordinately but that was fairly minor.
AspblastUSA
Well-known member
To be fair, that's a good explanation for toning down such a feat. At sublight speeds weeks of travel is probably the far side of the solar system at furthest. Still an entirely unreasonable level of power for padawans, but much less unreasonable than yeeting a fleet across the galaxy. Hell, even disabling the hyper wouldn't be that hard by comparison. If you already have enough power to grab the entire Star Destroyer, why not crush the hyperdrive generator like a tin can while you're at it?
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Oddly enough said Star Destroyers had no problem escaping at Hyper, they just couldn't get to Yavin in time.
SDs are supposed to accelerate at something like 3000G... the distance would have to be obscenely stupidly large even by the standards of space. They would break .5C in under four hours.
I'm probably beating a dead horse here though, this is old news as far as stupid writing goes.
You've hit the nail on the head. Rey is not a sue on her own aspects. The issue is everybody else around her. Rey's accomplishments are generally acceptable (I find her learning piloting so fast that she goes from barely lifting off without crashing to doing loop-the-loops inside a Star Destroyer's internals in under five minutes pretty suspect). It's expected for a hero to do heroic things and she does heroic things.
Too many "Mary Sue Litmus Tests" are based on superficial aspects of the character like exotic hair color or tragic backstory. But a Sue is a Sue because of how the plot warps around them, how everyone else reacts to them. The problem isn't Rey but how in any scene with Rey, she's the most important person in the room. Han loves her instantly, and after Han's death Leia ignores Chewbacca to go hug and comfort Rey. Every attempt at harming or hindering Rey either fails utterly or, more often, hands her a power up. Finn is somehow able to wield a lightsaber and fight Kylo Ren on his own... until Rey wakes up at which point Finn's instantly defeated and Rey can do it all on her own. In any situation where Rey should be part of a team, events will somehow cause the rest of the team to be disabled or removed (Kylo Ren yeeted down a hole by Palpatine, Finn knocked out multiple times, Chewbacca somehow always needing to leave to go get the Falcon for her, Luke dies leaving the team trapped in a cave on Crait, etc.) so that Rey can save the day on her own.
Ironically, the Sue issue isn't about Rey, it's about how everything else is about Rey.
Jaenera Targaryen
Well-known member
*snorts*
Any of the PCs from SWTOR or even Revan and Meetra from the original KOTOR games are leagues above Ma-Rei Sue. Considering those are PCs and therefore literal player inserts, that's saying a lot.
Sure, but they earned these status as sues. Each of them had to overcome challenges, even before the game actually started.
Jaenera Targaryen
Well-known member
Considering how Revan and Meetra's stories ended, I don't really think they count as sues anymore. Sues typically have happy endings where they get everything they started out to get, or something along that line.
Revan ended up a chew toy for the Sith Emperor and the Dread Masters for 300 years, in which time Bastila died never being reunited with her husband. And even after getting freed by the Jedi after those 300 years, Revan started backsliding into Darth Revan, starting with plotting to defeat the Sith Empire once and for all by literally committing genocide with the mass murder of 98% of the Sith Empire's population. Then he gets his soul torn in half after (nearly) getting killed by the Emperor's Wrath/Darth Nox/Cipher-9/the Grand Champion of the Great Hunt/all four of them, with Darth Revan emerging triumphant and somehow even more insane than before. Because you know, bring about MAD between the Republic and the Empire just so you can give the Sith Emperor a new body that you can hopefully perma-kill totally won't backfire.
...anyone who calls Revan a Gary Stu after all the shit he ended up drowning in doesn't know what they're talking about.
EDIT: If anything, Revan is a tragic hero in the Classical Greek sense. A great man with a sense of destiny, but he reaches too high, and ends up falling low and hard.
EDIT: Even the rest of Revan's legacy only echoes the man's tragic fate. Revan's own family are reduced to just Bastila and Theron, both of whom are barely on speaking terms with each other. Canderous Ordo aka Mandalore the Preserver tried to remake the Mandalorians into something nobler than the galaxy-scouring horde they were under Mandalores the Indomitable and the Ultimate, but as of the Galactic Wars, the last of his followers gets hunted down and killed by the Grand Champion of the Great Hunt. All three of Canderous' successors at the time, Mandalores the Lesser, the Vindicated, and the Avenger? All three of them were Imperial allies.
Hell, there's even that one flashpoint, the Black Talon. The final boss is a padawan by the name of Yadira Ban, implicitly the descendant of the Dark Jedi Yuthura Ban, who Revan redeemed during the Jedi Civil War. And she ends up getting left a cooling corpse on the Brentaal Star's deck by the Imperial PCs.
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I was refering to the protags of the MMO game, but there're seriously people who claim Revan to be a sue? That guy can be compared to a Greek Drama. He's a tragedy at best.
Jaenera Targaryen
Well-known member
And yet any of us still got more character depth than Ma-Rei Sue. We're certainly more fashionable too
Jaenera Targaryen
Well-known member
Tempting, but knowing Lucasfilm they'd just run it into the ground. Best to just leave it as a game, and have Bioware/EA keep up the good work.
EDIT: For instance, I strongly doubt Lucasfilm would allow an adaptation to keep the Imperial storyline equally canon to the Republic side. I also doubt they'd give any Imperial character depth, instead keeping them one-dimensional moustache-twirling villains while ratcheting up the Republic characters to Ma-Rei Sue levels of wank.
Considering it seems that plans for KOTOR's adaptation don't involve Bioware or indeed, anyone who worked on the games, I have little faith in Lucasfilm's ability to stay faithful to the source material. They'd just bastardize it to suit their left-wing feminazi agenda while spitting on the fandom's face when we refuse to lap up their poison.
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Yet Lucasfilm also had Filoni and Favrou do a great series.
I get nit having positive hopes, but one shouldn't still just shit on anything.
If they had Favrou in charge of the SWTOR or Filonj (even if he has some issues) would be great
I would again point out that *most* of the pre-Disney EU was also characterized by the rule that Imperial characters were only allowed to have nuanced/sympathetic backgrounds if they were going to defect and that they were also not allowed even basic competence except offscreen. Only the Thrawn Trilogy and then a small minority of late EU material had any good writing where the Empire was concerned.
Jaenera Targaryen
Well-known member
Still better than anything Disney has done, and nothing you say or do will convince me otherwise.
The comics
Which comics are you talking about?