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 🤦🏻♀️
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.”
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It was originally made to mock a fanfiction trope of self -insert fanfics.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...
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...
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!
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.
@@RedSunUnderParadise tens if not hundreds of millions, apparently, unless you're supposing that tens if not hundreds of millions irony-poisoned individuals have kept a film franchise, that they don't even care for, prolific through sheer devotion to insincerity i doubt it, though, considering how well the series has done outside of domestic theatres and i don't think those countries struggle with being genuine nearly as much - or at least, don't struggle with the same form of disingenuine
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 UA-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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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?
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)
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.
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. 😂
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
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
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.
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!
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
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 criticize a 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’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.
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".
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.
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
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.
The best part of this video was learning that JAR is losing more money than he makes being a UA-camr and he's so desperate you can literally hear it in his already painful to listen to voice.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 UA-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.
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
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!
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.
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).
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
I hate to give Just a Robot a compliment, but the idea tacking on a previously unsuccessful, but related video and billing it as "bonus content" in order to pad out runtime is honestly lowkey brilliant. I've done some compilations of related videos, but that exact framing as a "bonus" is interesting. Might try experimenting with it sometime since I put a lot of work into my content and it breaks my heart when something bombs.
That is absolutely fair. Making something that doesn't end up finding its audience is super disheartening. The problem I have (and I didn't bring this up in this vid because it wasn't super relevant) is how his bonus content actually totally contradicted what he said in the main vid....
I mean, some youtubers do something like that, though more of just stating it during the video that a previous vid relates to and can add more context. If the video wasn't successful or not might not matter there though, since that method more in line with essay-writing where you'd reference your sources.
@blutygar having been making UA-cam videos professionally for over a decade, I feel pretty confident in saying that while some people do go click videos that are referenced in other videos, it is a VERY small number in the grand scheme of things.
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
As was touched on here, a Mary Sue overcomes and side-steps conflict with little to no struggle, thus cheapening any conflict they're in. That's why the anti-woke crowd will point to unearned powers as an easy criticism. Unearned power can be a problem if it goes against the established rules of a story's magic system, but it's the unearned achievements that are the real problem, since those are what actually cheapen the conflict. Rey gets more flak than she deserves, but using a mind-trick in Ep 7 did stand out as a blatant Mary Sue moment to me, due to the lack of struggling. A simple scene of training with Maz - like Luke being mentored by Obi Wan - would've gone a long way to make it feel more earned, but also to flesh out Rey in a movie that didn't establish her as well as it should've. As for why Anakin gets a pass... well he doesn't, people complain about him too. But for the sake of argument, characters like Anakin can remain interesting in spite of how destiny is literally on his side, because his knowledge of the future is as much a curse as a blessing. Yes it lets him achieve a lot, but it doesn't cheapen the conflict, it creates conflict by showing him get corrupted and led astray. There were hints of this with Rey as well, which IMO would've made her far more interesting, had the writers not pulled their punches.
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"
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.
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.
At this point I just assume the definition of Mary Sue that UA-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 would still argue that rey is a Mary sue, but not because of the 1st movie but the 2nd. In that one literally a week and a half later she trained under Skywalker. They try to course correct in the 3rd one but between somehow Palpatine returning and other issues it was too late
“Rey is such a Mary Sue!” “OMG DID YOU SEE THAT?! ANAKIN BLEW UP AN EVIL SPACE STATION THAT WAS POWERING THE BATTLE DROIDS ON NABOO IN A SHIP HE NEVER FLEW WHEN HE WAS NINE!!! THE PREQUELS ARE SECRETLY GENIUS! WHAT A WELL WRITTEN CHARACTER” -The same nerds that hate how “overpowered” Rey is
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.
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
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.
Semi-related note, but there's a diametrically opposite concept called the Anti-Sue - in fanfiction, this is what happens when you try to "parody" mary sues, but the end result is much worse
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.
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
I've always mentally believed Mary Sues and Gary Stus were characters that lacked a fatal flaw and lacked major internal character struggle. Because they're flawless, they're able to solve plot problems relatively simply. When I watched Rey for the first time, I felt she was a Mary Sue, but I can't remember why I felt that way. But I also hate that movie (I feel like it was a hot mess of a plot and things didn't make sense) where she first appears, so it could be those wires crossed. I never felt self inserts were Mary Sue, though. This was a FANTASTIC video. Just S Tier level. I really love your videos so much. It's been really nice watching your channel grow over the time I've been here. I can't remember when I showed up. I think when you had 10k followers? Not sure. But it's been a great pleasure to watch your content evolve and grow over time. Thank you for creating!
My problem with Rey has always been her stiff acting. I felt like they didn’t give us much to work with in terms of her personality. Now I haven’t seen the sequel movies in a long time, so when people started calling her a Mary Sue unanonimously, I kinda bought into it. I definitely owe her an apology. 😅
I always think the best advice is to just try, and to write or create. Let people react As long as you're writing, you're already off to a better start than you were when you weren't 👍
I'm not sure if you actually wanted to imply that Anakin is a Mary Sue or just compared him to Rey to reinforce your point about her, but I think claiming that Anakin classifies as a Mary Sue would be kind of ridiculous. He doesn't have the charm factor you mentioned (the most important conflict in episode 2 and 3 is the Jedi order not trusting him) and I don't think actual Mary Sues can fall to the dark side or really have any kind of moral failing. Simply being a powerful character is not enough to be a Mary Sue, as you yourself acknowledged. I also disagree with the Harry Potter bit. The whole point of the story is that he doesn't have "unearned power". He really has *no* power. He's set up to win by Dumbledore. Dumbledore is really the one to beat Voldemort, not Harry. Harry is (to some extent) a pawn with very little power or agency, which by definition can’t be a Mary Sue.
The "Mary Sue" drawing you use amuses me greatly, because while I was listening to this, I was playing Guilty Gear as Dizzy, whose visual design is VERY CLOSE to this XD
15:20 Interesting to declare Sailor Moon as an "incredibly charming protagonist". I'm not saying I don't like her (I've watched all 200 episodes); it's more that the show goes out of its way to show that her lack of charisma/leadership capabilities is one of her primary struggles. She has moments of overcoming that struggle when really needed but even then often falls back afterwards. A lot of her successes are from her friends lifting her up.
@@agramuglia Sure, but it remains that the show points out she struggles with both very frequently. It's honestly one of its main themes that she learns to rise above her shortcomings in that area. I feel like, sexism aside, the idea of a Mary Sue (on paper) is that they don't struggle in order to succeed, and Sailor Moon is all about her struggling.
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.
I don't know how to explain it, but I love Ant's background with the bookshelf, for some reason it captures the vibe of the 2010s media criticism like Lindsay Ellis. Not sure why but I love it, my new fav channel.
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.
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.
Dan Slott the writer of She Hulk comics himself said its most comic accurate tv series and She Hulk got Best Actress in Superhero series award in Critics Choice Super Awards and other nominations
(Have not seen the whole video yet) As much as I dislike badly written female characters, the term "Mary Sue" gets used to excuse misogyny, a LOT of times. Like I've seen people say characters like Yona from Yona of the Dawn or Tohru from Fruits Basket are Mary Sues but they're not. They're insanely well written. They're not overpowered or perfect angels who can do no wrong. They're *characters.* Like you said, their (Tohru's) traits alone aren't enough to instantly quell conflict, conflicts in Yona aren't settled by Yona instantly shooting the bad guy in the face, in that series, EVERYONE has a hand in settling conflict. Those people probably just hate seeing female characters who don't exist to make the men look good. This also goes into the "girlboss archetype" debate as people use that term the same way people use "Mary Sue" and how it shows that writers being too scared to give female characters strengths for fear of being accused of writing this archetype run the risk of bringing us back to square one. Shallow girlbosses are bad, but satellite love interests are just as, if not worse. (MASSIVE SONIC 3 SPOILERS INCOMING) I've seen people say they don't want Amy to be like Movie Peach and that rubs me the wrong way. It comes off like they just don't want her to be capable on her own or have a life outside of her crush on Sonic. People want better female characters but always shit on the ones we get.
you right and more people need to be saying it. We need to stop shutting down young girls who are writing for the first time simply because they are writing a story that THEY want to see. we need to divorce the idea that art has to be 'good' to be respected.
@@lukaszzylik4437 literally the entire premise of the concept is that mary sues are a bad trope that shouldn't be used because they are inherently bad writing, and that criticism gets thrown around at literally every turn without cause. you can't make a mary sue "well-written" because the point is that they are "bad Writing". OP basically said "This term is used to tell people to shut up." and you proceeded to tell them to shut up...🤨real classy there
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.
Personally, I think one could make a character as powerful or good or liked as they wish as long as the story has CONFLICT. That’s why it’s so hard to define a Mary sue cuz one character could be all good and all powerful and sick while another character with those same traits could belong to an amazing story because those traits are used to further conflict. And conflict is what makes stories interesting
Sad that Ebony Darkness Raven Way wasn't mentioned from the Harry Potter fanfic My Immortal. It might be the perfect representation of what a Mary Sue is. There's also a book called Maradonia Saga which has some great representations of them as well. Please check them out, you will be very entertained by them.
I used to like Literature Devil and JAR but they were suspicious in their arguments. They were rather agressive on how they explain their criticism. Especially on how they view women and representation. When I notice JAR acted very agressive and saved many sus people to help him I knew he was horrible. Especially a video on him acting inappropriately to his community. Which is why I feel frustrated they any other youtuber use the term mary sue as a weapon against well developed female chaarcters. Because I have seen female characters that seem like mary sue like Mizu from Blue Eye Samurai, Emma Frost from Marvel's X Men, Medaka from Medaka Box, Ann from Persona 5, or Frieren but they are not mary sue they are good characters. Or self inserts like Shinji Ikari from NGE who is a representation of Anno's depression so he is not a power fantasy. In my eyes I feel I owe an apology to Rey kind of. I still felt she was a bad character but I never view her as horrible. She was just a inexperienced fighter who ended up being an escapegoat as a mary sue. I still feel she deserve more development but in all honesty I've seen more badly written heroines like Asha from Wish. I used to believe in Mary Sues. But I was insecure on writing female characters. Afraid if they were just judged. But now I feel the term finally is judged as a bad writing advice. Which is why I wish we need to not use the mary sue term anymore. EDIT: Also JAR why do you think lock picking is a mary sue trait? You're just making up stuff to justify how you think of female characters and women in general.
This level of engagement is insane in 1 hour. Congratulations 🎉 encountered your videos for the first time, finished that video and came straight here to find this
"Deflating the plot" isn't necessarily a downside, though. Look at something like One Punch Man. Saitama's role in events is almost wholly to deflate the plot. Villain shows up, badly injures most of the cast, threatens to kill many innocent people, goes through a long-winded speech. Then gets one-shot like a low-level mook. The story remains interesting despite the audience knowing full well that there are no stakes by... not being about that specific conflict. The rest of the cast each have their own stories to go through. If anything, Saitama's core weakness is that he kind of doesn't have a story of his own. He's too strong. But in BEING too strong, the narrative ends up conforming around him. Not every story needs to have conflict. It just needs a reason for the audience to keep reading. Yes, resolving the storm of death with a sneeze robs THAT aspect of the story of its gravitas. OK, but what about the rest of it? What effect does this have on, say, a society grown used to annual storms of death? Normally, the population gets massively culled, with only a few survivors. Now we have a full society without the infrastructure to feed and house it. What does this do to power structures, which now no longer reset? Will people now start questioning whether the storm of death should have been stopped in the first place? A plot which cannot survive deflating a single plot point, I would argue, makes for a shallow story. It's shallow, because there's no world around it which matters if events turn out a different way.
I’d say the difference between that and what Ant is talking about is that One Punch Man does still have a plot beyond simply the heroes fighting villains. Saitama is dealing with an internal struggle regarding his desire for excitement and his strength preventing him from feeling it. That is a plot, that is a conflict. His idea of “deflating the plot” would basically be OPM without Saitama’s internal conflict.
@ It's presented as a comedy, but it tackles incredibly heavy subject matter for pretty much everyone besides Saitama. I don't even mean just the physical violence - the entire cast is dealing with psychological trauma of their own. Saitama does sometimes get played for comedy, but his intervention does get played straight a lot of the time, as well. The thing is that One Punch Man... kind of isn't about the fights, when you get down to it.
@ Honestly, he barely has one. It's alluded to a few times, but is largely irrelevant to pretty much anything going on in the show. You could remove Saitama's internal conflict altogether, and indeed cut his solo scenes out entirely... and very little of substance would change. I've not read the manga so maybe things are different there, but he's almost superfluous in the show. Season 2 does pretty much what I described above. He's barely on-screen, what screen time he has is devoted to an entirely superfluous "tournament arc" (I suspect put there as a parody), he isn't even aware of the plot until the very end. Season 2 of One Punch Man is pretty much "One Punch Man without Saitama's internal conflict". Granted, it does suffer for it since... I kind of like Saitama's perspective and don't really care for most of the rest of the cast, but oh well. That was just an example, though. My broader point is that viewing storytelling through the lens of "conflict" exclusively just... isn't necessary. There are plenty of reasons to stick with a story besides conflict. One Punch Man is just one of the few properties out there that actually does this. If anything, I wish the story doubled-down on its own premise and explored the effect Saitama has on that society, rather than effectively sidelining his strength while a shonen anime happens where he isn't looking. That very pursuit of conflict is, I personally believe, holding One Punch Man back, by shackling it to the requirements of conventional storytelling. This is why I tend to argue this specific point. Trying to hammer every narrative into the same general mould just isn't necessary, in order to tell good stories.
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."
![Forced Diversity Does [Not] Exist | Ant vs. Anti-Woke Slop](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/gDh1cuxCie4/mqdefault.jpg)
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 🤦🏻♀️
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
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...
"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...
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!” 🥹🥰
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
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.
Incels will call every female charcter a Mary Sue but then love the Fast and Furious franchise (fyi it's filled with nothing but Gary Stus"
Tej Parker character arc is crazy
@@FinalSeraphLeo
Blud's straight up Shadow Boxing rn. Who likes F&F Unironically?
@@RedSunUnderParadise Why do they keep making money? Because at least one dumbass likes them.
@@RedSunUnderParadise tens if not hundreds of millions, apparently, unless you're supposing that tens if not hundreds of millions irony-poisoned individuals have kept a film franchise, that they don't even care for, prolific through sheer devotion to insincerity
i doubt it, though, considering how well the series has done outside of domestic theatres and i don't think those countries struggle with being genuine nearly as much - or at least, don't struggle with the same form of disingenuine
how are they gary stus?
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 UA-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 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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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."
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?
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)
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.
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)
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. 😂
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
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.
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.
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!
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?
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 criticize a 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’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
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".
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?
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
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.
The best part of this video was learning that JAR is losing more money than he makes being a UA-camr and he's so desperate you can literally hear it in his already painful to listen to voice.
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.
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 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.
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.
R2-D2 is the real Mary Sue of Star Wars
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.
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 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.
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 UA-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.
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
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 🤷♂️
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.
The Mary Sue on the thumbnail low-key has a good design, also once again a banger video. Always look forward to these videos
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.
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
Honestly "Mary Sue" is such a nothing term these days. It's literally gone from 'plot tumor' to 'I don't like this character'.
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.
I'm glad you refferanced Overly Sarcastic's video on the topic.
This video is refreshing.
Kinda hope the people who need to see it will see it
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
Definitely not what Critical Drinker or Nerdrotic describes a Mary Sue as
It is exceptionally rare to find on UA-cam, but every once in a while, I see a UA-camr who actually paid attention when they watched She-Hulk.
I hate to give Just a Robot a compliment, but the idea tacking on a previously unsuccessful, but related video and billing it as "bonus content" in order to pad out runtime is honestly lowkey brilliant.
I've done some compilations of related videos, but that exact framing as a "bonus" is interesting. Might try experimenting with it sometime since I put a lot of work into my content and it breaks my heart when something bombs.
That is absolutely fair. Making something that doesn't end up finding its audience is super disheartening. The problem I have (and I didn't bring this up in this vid because it wasn't super relevant) is how his bonus content actually totally contradicted what he said in the main vid....
I mean, some youtubers do something like that, though more of just stating it during the video that a previous vid relates to and can add more context. If the video wasn't successful or not might not matter there though, since that method more in line with essay-writing where you'd reference your sources.
@blutygar having been making UA-cam videos professionally for over a decade, I feel pretty confident in saying that while some people do go click videos that are referenced in other videos, it is a VERY small number in the grand scheme of things.
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
As was touched on here, a Mary Sue overcomes and side-steps conflict with little to no struggle, thus cheapening any conflict they're in. That's why the anti-woke crowd will point to unearned powers as an easy criticism. Unearned power can be a problem if it goes against the established rules of a story's magic system, but it's the unearned achievements that are the real problem, since those are what actually cheapen the conflict.
Rey gets more flak than she deserves, but using a mind-trick in Ep 7 did stand out as a blatant Mary Sue moment to me, due to the lack of struggling. A simple scene of training with Maz - like Luke being mentored by Obi Wan - would've gone a long way to make it feel more earned, but also to flesh out Rey in a movie that didn't establish her as well as it should've.
As for why Anakin gets a pass... well he doesn't, people complain about him too. But for the sake of argument, characters like Anakin can remain interesting in spite of how destiny is literally on his side, because his knowledge of the future is as much a curse as a blessing. Yes it lets him achieve a lot, but it doesn't cheapen the conflict, it creates conflict by showing him get corrupted and led astray. There were hints of this with Rey as well, which IMO would've made her far more interesting, had the writers not pulled their punches.
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"
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.
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.
At this point I just assume the definition of Mary Sue that UA-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 would still argue that rey is a Mary sue, but not because of the 1st movie but the 2nd. In that one literally a week and a half later she trained under Skywalker. They try to course correct in the 3rd one but between somehow Palpatine returning and other issues it was too late
In short, "Mary Sue" has come to mean "female character with any agency whatsoever."
Their real issue is that women have power.
“Rey is such a Mary Sue!”
“OMG DID YOU SEE THAT?! ANAKIN BLEW UP AN EVIL SPACE STATION THAT WAS POWERING THE BATTLE DROIDS ON NABOO IN A SHIP HE NEVER FLEW WHEN HE WAS NINE!!! THE PREQUELS ARE SECRETLY GENIUS! WHAT A WELL WRITTEN CHARACTER”
-The same nerds that hate how “overpowered” Rey is
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.
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
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.
Semi-related note, but there's a diametrically opposite concept called the Anti-Sue - in fanfiction, this is what happens when you try to "parody" mary sues, but the end result is much worse
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.
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
I've always mentally believed Mary Sues and Gary Stus were characters that lacked a fatal flaw and lacked major internal character struggle. Because they're flawless, they're able to solve plot problems relatively simply. When I watched Rey for the first time, I felt she was a Mary Sue, but I can't remember why I felt that way. But I also hate that movie (I feel like it was a hot mess of a plot and things didn't make sense) where she first appears, so it could be those wires crossed. I never felt self inserts were Mary Sue, though.
This was a FANTASTIC video. Just S Tier level. I really love your videos so much. It's been really nice watching your channel grow over the time I've been here. I can't remember when I showed up. I think when you had 10k followers? Not sure. But it's been a great pleasure to watch your content evolve and grow over time. Thank you for creating!
My problem with Rey has always been her stiff acting. I felt like they didn’t give us much to work with in terms of her personality. Now I haven’t seen the sequel movies in a long time, so when people started calling her a Mary Sue unanonimously, I kinda bought into it. I definitely owe her an apology. 😅
I always think the best advice is to just try, and to write or create. Let people react
As long as you're writing, you're already off to a better start than you were when you weren't 👍
Accepting criticism is also key to becoming a better writer
I'm not sure if you actually wanted to imply that Anakin is a Mary Sue or just compared him to Rey to reinforce your point about her, but I think claiming that Anakin classifies as a Mary Sue would be kind of ridiculous. He doesn't have the charm factor you mentioned (the most important conflict in episode 2 and 3 is the Jedi order not trusting him) and I don't think actual Mary Sues can fall to the dark side or really have any kind of moral failing. Simply being a powerful character is not enough to be a Mary Sue, as you yourself acknowledged.
I also disagree with the Harry Potter bit. The whole point of the story is that he doesn't have "unearned power". He really has *no* power. He's set up to win by Dumbledore. Dumbledore is really the one to beat Voldemort, not Harry. Harry is (to some extent) a pawn with very little power or agency, which by definition can’t be a Mary Sue.
The "Mary Sue" drawing you use amuses me greatly, because while I was listening to this, I was playing Guilty Gear as Dizzy, whose visual design is VERY CLOSE to this XD
Q. What do you call a male Mary Sue?
A. A protagonist.
15:20 Interesting to declare Sailor Moon as an "incredibly charming protagonist". I'm not saying I don't like her (I've watched all 200 episodes); it's more that the show goes out of its way to show that her lack of charisma/leadership capabilities is one of her primary struggles. She has moments of overcoming that struggle when really needed but even then often falls back afterwards. A lot of her successes are from her friends lifting her up.
Charm is different than charisma
@@agramuglia Sure, but it remains that the show points out she struggles with both very frequently. It's honestly one of its main themes that she learns to rise above her shortcomings in that area. I feel like, sexism aside, the idea of a Mary Sue (on paper) is that they don't struggle in order to succeed, and Sailor Moon is all about her struggling.
@@alistairetheblu fair point!
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.
I don't know how to explain it, but I love Ant's background with the bookshelf, for some reason it captures the vibe of the 2010s media criticism like Lindsay Ellis. Not sure why but I love it, my new fav channel.
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.
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.
Dan Slott the writer of She Hulk comics himself said its most comic accurate tv series and She Hulk got Best Actress in Superhero series award in Critics Choice Super Awards and other nominations
(Have not seen the whole video yet) As much as I dislike badly written female characters, the term "Mary Sue" gets used to excuse misogyny, a LOT of times. Like I've seen people say characters like Yona from Yona of the Dawn or Tohru from Fruits Basket are Mary Sues but they're not. They're insanely well written. They're not overpowered or perfect angels who can do no wrong. They're *characters.* Like you said, their (Tohru's) traits alone aren't enough to instantly quell conflict, conflicts in Yona aren't settled by Yona instantly shooting the bad guy in the face, in that series, EVERYONE has a hand in settling conflict. Those people probably just hate seeing female characters who don't exist to make the men look good.
This also goes into the "girlboss archetype" debate as people use that term the same way people use "Mary Sue" and how it shows that writers being too scared to give female characters strengths for fear of being accused of writing this archetype run the risk of bringing us back to square one. Shallow girlbosses are bad, but satellite love interests are just as, if not worse.
(MASSIVE SONIC 3 SPOILERS INCOMING)
I've seen people say they don't want Amy to be like Movie Peach and that rubs me the wrong way. It comes off like they just don't want her to be capable on her own or have a life outside of her crush on Sonic. People want better female characters but always shit on the ones we get.
mary sue is just a term to bring elitism and gatekeeping into creative writing in amateur/fanfic circles.
Relax. It's just a writing trope. If well written then any trope can be good. For example John Wick is a fun Mary Sue.
@@lukaszzylik4437 just saying what it is
you right and more people need to be saying it. We need to stop shutting down young girls who are writing for the first time simply because they are writing a story that THEY want to see. we need to divorce the idea that art has to be 'good' to be respected.
@@lukaszzylik4437 literally the entire premise of the concept is that mary sues are a bad trope that shouldn't be used because they are inherently bad writing, and that criticism gets thrown around at literally every turn without cause. you can't make a mary sue "well-written" because the point is that they are "bad Writing". OP basically said "This term is used to tell people to shut up." and you proceeded to tell them to shut up...🤨real classy there
@@spiderbug7615 No, we don't. Because that's how you get terrible art forever.
Jen also has been breaking the fourth wall since the 80s, like before Deadpool got his own personality
The fact that korra is considered a mary sue is proof no one knows. A character being OP does not make you a sue.
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.
Personally, I think one could make a character as powerful or good or liked as they wish as long as the story has CONFLICT. That’s why it’s so hard to define a Mary sue cuz one character could be all good and all powerful and sick while another character with those same traits could belong to an amazing story because those traits are used to further conflict. And conflict is what makes stories interesting
Sad that Ebony Darkness Raven Way wasn't mentioned from the Harry Potter fanfic My Immortal. It might be the perfect representation of what a Mary Sue is. There's also a book called Maradonia Saga which has some great representations of them as well. Please check them out, you will be very entertained by them.
I used to like Literature Devil and JAR but they were suspicious in their arguments. They were rather agressive on how they explain their criticism. Especially on how they view women and representation. When I notice JAR acted very agressive and saved many sus people to help him I knew he was horrible. Especially a video on him acting inappropriately to his community.
Which is why I feel frustrated they any other youtuber use the term mary sue as a weapon against well developed female chaarcters. Because I have seen female characters that seem like mary sue like Mizu from Blue Eye Samurai, Emma Frost from Marvel's X Men, Medaka from Medaka Box, Ann from Persona 5, or Frieren but they are not mary sue they are good characters. Or self inserts like Shinji Ikari from NGE who is a representation of Anno's depression so he is not a power fantasy.
In my eyes I feel I owe an apology to Rey kind of. I still felt she was a bad character but I never view her as horrible. She was just a inexperienced fighter who ended up being an escapegoat as a mary sue. I still feel she deserve more development but in all honesty I've seen more badly written heroines like Asha from Wish.
I used to believe in Mary Sues. But I was insecure on writing female characters. Afraid if they were just judged. But now I feel the term finally is judged as a bad writing advice. Which is why I wish we need to not use the mary sue term anymore.
EDIT: Also JAR why do you think lock picking is a mary sue trait? You're just making up stuff to justify how you think of female characters and women in general.
This level of engagement is insane in 1 hour. Congratulations 🎉 encountered your videos for the first time, finished that video and came straight here to find this
51:20 Yassified Aloy still inspires a deep level of cringe in me.
She just looks so.... _wrong._
"Deflating the plot" isn't necessarily a downside, though. Look at something like One Punch Man. Saitama's role in events is almost wholly to deflate the plot. Villain shows up, badly injures most of the cast, threatens to kill many innocent people, goes through a long-winded speech. Then gets one-shot like a low-level mook. The story remains interesting despite the audience knowing full well that there are no stakes by... not being about that specific conflict. The rest of the cast each have their own stories to go through. If anything, Saitama's core weakness is that he kind of doesn't have a story of his own. He's too strong. But in BEING too strong, the narrative ends up conforming around him.
Not every story needs to have conflict. It just needs a reason for the audience to keep reading. Yes, resolving the storm of death with a sneeze robs THAT aspect of the story of its gravitas. OK, but what about the rest of it? What effect does this have on, say, a society grown used to annual storms of death? Normally, the population gets massively culled, with only a few survivors. Now we have a full society without the infrastructure to feed and house it. What does this do to power structures, which now no longer reset? Will people now start questioning whether the storm of death should have been stopped in the first place?
A plot which cannot survive deflating a single plot point, I would argue, makes for a shallow story. It's shallow, because there's no world around it which matters if events turn out a different way.
I’d say the difference between that and what Ant is talking about is that One Punch Man does still have a plot beyond simply the heroes fighting villains. Saitama is dealing with an internal struggle regarding his desire for excitement and his strength preventing him from feeling it. That is a plot, that is a conflict. His idea of “deflating the plot” would basically be OPM without Saitama’s internal conflict.
One Punch Man is a comedy, different rules, everything is second to getting the laugh.
@ It's presented as a comedy, but it tackles incredibly heavy subject matter for pretty much everyone besides Saitama. I don't even mean just the physical violence - the entire cast is dealing with psychological trauma of their own. Saitama does sometimes get played for comedy, but his intervention does get played straight a lot of the time, as well. The thing is that One Punch Man... kind of isn't about the fights, when you get down to it.
@ Honestly, he barely has one. It's alluded to a few times, but is largely irrelevant to pretty much anything going on in the show. You could remove Saitama's internal conflict altogether, and indeed cut his solo scenes out entirely... and very little of substance would change. I've not read the manga so maybe things are different there, but he's almost superfluous in the show.
Season 2 does pretty much what I described above. He's barely on-screen, what screen time he has is devoted to an entirely superfluous "tournament arc" (I suspect put there as a parody), he isn't even aware of the plot until the very end. Season 2 of One Punch Man is pretty much "One Punch Man without Saitama's internal conflict". Granted, it does suffer for it since... I kind of like Saitama's perspective and don't really care for most of the rest of the cast, but oh well.
That was just an example, though. My broader point is that viewing storytelling through the lens of "conflict" exclusively just... isn't necessary. There are plenty of reasons to stick with a story besides conflict. One Punch Man is just one of the few properties out there that actually does this. If anything, I wish the story doubled-down on its own premise and explored the effect Saitama has on that society, rather than effectively sidelining his strength while a shonen anime happens where he isn't looking. That very pursuit of conflict is, I personally believe, holding One Punch Man back, by shackling it to the requirements of conventional storytelling.
This is why I tend to argue this specific point. Trying to hammer every narrative into the same general mould just isn't necessary, in order to tell good stories.
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."