OOTS #1176 - The Discussion Thread

[Fish]

If you want to describe why Rey is a bad character, describe why Rey is a bad character.

This.

I don’t think Rey is a very well-written character, but I don’t think she’s a Mary Sue. She’s badly written for the same reason that a lot of action heroes are badly written: heroes in this mold are boring, with paper-thin motivations and no depth. They are there to push plot. Luke is an orphaned youth, sent to a foreign land to be raised by surrogate parents, who discovers mighty new powers with the help of a wise old mentor and goes off to fight evil because Reasons. He’s about as deep as, say, Superman, not quite as deep as Harry Potter, both of whom share many of the same story beats, except reskinned as supermagic Dumble-Dor-El Muggle Krypton Fortress of Hogwartitude. Sure, some heroes sometimes get bland motivations like “Rrrrevenge!!” (“Okay, I’m sorry I ate your fish!”) but most of the time, they do good because they are good, and for no other reason.

Rey is about as well-written as Luke, which is to say, not well. Luke wanted to fight the Empire because all his friends did, and Rey is saddled with an ill-defined identity quest whenever the scriptwriters remember and it’s convenient. The thing is, Luke gets a free pass on his bad writing because it was a white dude writing power fantasies about a white dude. Rey doesn’t, because of the gloriously circular argument that Rey is bad because Kathleen Kennedy is bad, and Kennedy is bad because she somehow created Rey to be so bad, because she’s a bad person.