OOTS #1176 - The Discussion Thread

[Peelee]

@Peelee:
Yeah, Poe being shot might have resolved any number of issues with the film, but I suspect that the actor has a three picture deal with Disney. (In the Force Awakens, I recall my son catching a hole early on having to do with Poe's jacket and that plane crash ... but no, I am not going to watch that movie again just to remember what my son commented upon).

No need, I can remind you! His jacket was outside of the TIE fighter even though it's remarkably hard to imagine how it could have come off if he was trapped inside the TIE fighter. Also, if he was trapped inside the TIE fighter, how did he live? If he wasn't, why couldn't Finn find him? It's a mess, he should have just stayed dead like he was originally written to.

As one of the posters further up pointed out, there are so many problems with TFA and TLJ that any imperfections in Rey's character hardly raise a blip on my rader screen.

I totally agree with that. I'm mostly just railing at unjust criticism when there's a plethora of valid criticism that can be hurled at 'em.

[Snails]

The criticisms were blatantly sexist. There's nothing particularly sexist about her role as written.

I would go so far as to say the character as written is highly unoriginal. The things she does, both good and bad, have all been done by characters in leadership positions in other movies, including her imitation of an expired piscine.

Especially heated critiques of story facets that are tried and true within this genre imply a certain kind of ulterior motive.

[Jasdoif]

Incidentally, Hel's just said "release the Snarl" is a viable short-term goal.

So did about half of the gods at the Godsmoot.

Half of the gods at the Godsmoot voted "destroy the world", with one of them explicitly saying they'll get the mortals' souls that way.

Hel just indicated getting souls is optional.

[Fish]

Yeah, bad characterization all around and Rey is no exception. An assumption of sexism in criticism of Rey isn't unreasonable. She is a horrible character, so it's certainly possible to criticize her without being a sexist, but there's some question as to why you'd bother to pick her out of the crowd.

And use opaque, technically incorrect, and loaded terminology to do so. Calling Rey a poorly written character is an observation, viz, “This is poorly done.” Calling her a Mary Sue fangirl self-insert of the head of Lucasfilm is an attack with an agenda, viz, “All evidence to the contrary, this is the fault of a woman who must be fired and replaced by a white guy who will pander to {scrubbed} like me.”*

*Not that all people who use the term Mary Sue or dislike Rey have {scrubbed} , etc.

[Riftwolf]

Half of the gods at the Godsmoot voted "destroy the world", with one of them explicitly saying they'll get the mortals' souls that way.

Hel just indicated getting souls is optional.

She's raging at Loki holding the clock on World destruction, which could arguably mean all souls get erased if the Gods don't catch it in time (and, if they require another Godsmoot to do it, that's a distinct possibility). If that happens, she believes it'll be a level playing field for her and Loki (debatable) as neither one wins. What she says next is arguably lottery-thinking, saying what she'd do to screw over her dad if she got her way and could erase him from existence like he's erasing her (arguably, also arguable that its his intention).
In short, lot of arguments to be had with what Hel's saying. Maybe we should argue about them rather than the Last Jedi which, going back on the thread, was initiated by an easily ignored troll who's decided the comics terrible and leaving pissy single comments on each discussion thread is more fun than, say, finding something else to like.

[Jasdoif]

She's raging at Loki holding the clock on World destruction, which could arguably mean all souls get erased if the Gods don't catch it in time (and, if they require another Godsmoot to do it, that's a distinct possibility). If that happens, she believes it'll be a level playing field for her and Loki (debatable) as neither one wins. What she says next is arguably lottery-thinking, saying what she'd do to screw over her dad if she got her way and could erase him from existence like he's erasing her (arguably, also arguable that its his intention).

Yes. She says she has a goal in mind besides (other than?) winning at the Godsmoot; one that doesn't require getting a bunch of souls from the current world, and thus one that an uncontrolled release of the Snarl doesn't necessarily negate.

Whether that will translate into Hel throwing vampires at the last Gate (as opposed to a different type of undead creature) is another matter entirely.

[Anansiil]

Care to actually spell out these "various ways"? Because I sure as heck don't remember them. I mean, even if you go with "Well, we saw Rey fighting with her staff in Episode VII, so that proves she was already a good fighter!", that doesn't (a) explain how she picks up the very different fighting style of a lightsaber--lot easier to handle a weapon that you can't chop bits of yourself off with, after all--and (b) even if she was the most spectacular fighter in the universe, how she was able to actually beat a trained Jedi/Sith in a lightsaber duel. I mean, even Luke, who'd had a lot of training by that point, wasn't able to beat Darth Vader in a straight-up fight in Ep6 until he started channeling the Dark Side.

Some people are better than others. If one ever plays or pays attention to sports, some, even with training, will never be better than those with talent.

Also, it's a fictional film. It's disheartening that such nuance can be so important to you... enough that it dominates an OOTS thread, squelching the conversations related to this comic strip :/

[Schroeswald]

Also, it's a fictional film. It's disheartening that such nuance can be so important to you... enough that it dominates an OOTS thread, squelching the conversations related to this comic strip :/

This strip just launched three different threads in less than 48 hours, we can discuss off topic stuff all we want, for example:

Superman is the best superhero, my personal fave is D-ick Grayson (in any identity he may take), but Superman (Clark Kent) is the best (I win ten quatloos if this causes an actual conversation).

[Ruck]

Was she referring to the song by Evanescence or the harry potter fan fic?

The latter, though I am blissfully unaware of both. The Evanescence one at least was roughly in my age-appropriate time frame.

[Goblin_Priest]

Gonna stop you right there, because she's not proficient with all forms of weapons. She's proficient with a staff and and sword. That's it. Now, if you want to argue, "but the staff and sword are very different!", I can just point to "Luke flew an entirely different kind of ship in the original, and coincidentally enough, Boeing very kindly told us recently that even in the exact same vehicle, if changes are made, pilots need to be entirely retrained or the vehicle will quite literally crash, despite being flown by experienced pilots specifically trained for that vehicle. So Luke jumping from a T-16 to a T-65 - a civilian shuttle to high-performance military hardware - is far and away more complex and ridiculous than going from a staff to a sword. And even then, she didn't master the lightsaber; she was against less-than-fully-trained fighter who was shot in the gut by a weapon that explodes most other people. The fact that he was still standing alone is kind of ridiculous, the fact that he lost to a newbie isn't at all, because he should have lost to her. Hell, he should have lost to Finn, dude was barely holding it together there!

And hey, that ship thing also shows us something that Luke did way better than Rey; he flew against moon-sized space station, with the entire surface covered in guns that were shooting at him, with a full complement of TIEs that were shooting at him, with Darth Vader personally shooting at him, and ended up being one of the few that lives. Rey, conversely, starts crashing the Falcon all over the desert, then manages to survive against a measly two TIEs long enough for Finn to shoot one down, then performs a maneuver through a motionless wreck that she intricately knows because she spends large amounts of her life in there. So she's nowhere near as good a pilot as Luke, who we can assume is such a good pilot due to the Force.

Lastly, there's a vast gulf between "I'm going to have strong female characters" and "she's an idealized character without any flaws," which was what you claimed. Ripley is a strong female character. So is Leia in the first movie. So is Sarah Connor. Kennedy is saying that they are vastly underrepresented in Hollywood, and that she is trying to change that. She is not saying "and the way to do that is to have super-good not-bad-at-anything characters" like you are implying.

You are transferring incompetence of Luke's opponents into skill or merit of his own. Rey defeats her imperial adversaries. Luke, well, he just gets off light. When he approaches the Death Star, do we see him dodging a million canon shots? No. I'm sure that the Death Star "officially" was covered with a butt ton of canons. But that's not what we saw on screen. There were few canons shooting at the rebels (range issues?), and Luke had plenty of canon fodder to soak up the hits for him. He doesn't really get any merit for that. Just like how storm troopers are said to be really precise and accurate, but really we never see them hitting anything. Again, not Luke being super badass and dodging everything, just his enemies sucking. Plot armor? Sure. A movie sin, sure. But it doesn't fall against his character, because it's all rather consistent. For example, except for that one time they shot off-screen that we were merely told about (and honestly, the wreckage didn't scream of "precision strikes", I think Oni-Wan was full of bull**** there), storm troops have terrible aim and reflexes against everyone, not just Luke.

You are inferring that a T-65 is radically different to fly than a T-16, but we don't see that being the case. Are some planes very different to fly? Sure. They aren't all, though. These could be quite similar, we've got nothing in-movie to suggest otherwise. A staff and a sword are quite different, on the other hand. Heck, well will you look at that, wookipedia says about the T-16: "The controls were similar to Incom's T-65B X-wing starfighter, which greatly benefited Skywalker during the Battle of Yavin.[5]" Luke had years of experience flying, did Rey ever touch a ship's controls before? He also doesn't do very complex maneuvers... he's not the pilot when the Millenium Falcon goes and does all kinds of near-suicidal stunts. Han does... as does Rey, without 1% of Han's experience with the ship under her belt.

I don't recall the movie showing Kylo as being all that affected by the blast. He fights as if he just shrugged it off. If the wound was meant to be meaningful, they should have showed it so, but I don't recall him fighting sluggish. Pain and anger fuel the dark side.

Rey isn't a "strong female character", that's just the concept, the pitch-line. It was the target, but not the result. She's just an overpowered one-dimensional female character with no strength of character. Leia, Conor, Ripley are all examples of interesting strong female characters. Rey is not, she does not belong to that club.

Kennedy doesn't say that word per word, but actions speak louder than words. She said she wants to bring more "strong female characters" to Hollywood, and then she delivers us ridiculous one-dimension characters of unexplained power levels. And they've geared so much of their marketing around that, and they've repeated it enough that the lazy media just picked up the sales pitch and regurgitated it all over. Phantasma? On paper, badass. First time you see you, badass. Actual delivery? What a mess. Holdo, same.

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.

Luke is not perfect, but I think you underrate him significantly. He does have a goody-two-shoes attitude, but it feels more sincere than most "good" characters who do good because it's the good thing to do. He also does have multiple layers of motivations, as well as character growth through the movies. These points were brought up earlier.

I do agree that the problems with Rey aren't limited to her, nor to female characters. The sequel trilogy is plagued with bad characters and poor writing, TLJ being particularly egregious. Poe, Finn, and others aren't really much better. Leia was a great character in the OT, not so much in the ST. Her going Mary Poppins was quite regrettable. And while being on that level, the blame on movie makers lies not only on the female players (Kennedy), but also male ones (Rian Johnson).

That's a take that fits what I saw on screen. Badly written characters are a Star Wars staple, however. Why should Rey be any different?

She is no Ripley; she is no Sarah Connor.

It began with someone calling the dwarves Mary Sues. The star wars sequel characters have lots of problems, male and female alike, but only one of them really resonates on the "Mary Sue" critic.

[Xyril]

This is a pointless argument over definitions. Whether or not Rey is a Mary Sue depends completely on how you define it. The actual issue is whether or not she's a bad character, and I don't think that's the main problem with the film.

For the record, I have been using the original definition of "Mary Sue," in which a Mary Sue is by definition a bad, poorly written character.

… and this is precisely why it's not a pointless argument (assuming, of course, that JBiddles doesn't also regard arguments over whether a character is a good character to be equally pointless.)

The original term specifically described a particular kind of bad character who was bad for specific reasons, while also carrying an implied judgement/guess as to why that particular bad character was written in a particular way. People now use the term to refer to any number of things, including general power creep (particularly among characters they feel aren't entitled to power for whatever reason) and issues of personal taste and the like.

Maybe "arguing" about the term is pointless, but we're pretty much at such a point of linguistic ambiguity that if people aren't pretty specific about how they are using the term, any conversation would be hopelessly muddled and unproductive. Natural linguistic drift notwithstanding, there are also folks who seem to deliberately push the boundaries of this and under terms in bad faith, trying to enforce a more nuanced definition to a term that carries a strong connotation of judgment. It seems unproductive to let people get away with deliberately misusing a loaded term in a discussion, continually reinforcing its association with one meaning while taking a technically unassailable position, much like the elementary school students who discover the archaic meaning for a certain word and insist that there's nothing objectionable to calling their classmates bundles of sticks.

[Worldsong]

On the subject of why one might want to worship Hel, I might be assuming a bit too much here but Greg seems to imply Hel also has some level of control over the prevention and curing of illnesses as much as she inflicts them. Maybe one could think that worshipping Hel actually safeguards them from disease and an untimely demise.

Actually in a 5e campaign I made a Duergar Grave Cleric who could have worshipped Hel (I ended up using Dumathoin from Forgotten Realms instead). If we assume we're talking about worshipping Hel outside of the circumstances of the bet he could have chosen to worship Hel with the belief that through her guidance as a goddess of death he can both save those whose time has not yet come and help ensure a peaceful passing on for those whose time HAS come. Before he received the divine message telling him to leave his home one of his main duties was to entomb the recently deceased and help look after the dwarven dead, and one of his main shticks was the insistence that while it's natural for the living to fear death mortality is not a bad or evil thing, and that the goal of all living things should be to have good and meaningful lives and then die well and with peace of mind.

Of course given that Hel appears to be Evil he might be wrong in thinking she'd help guide him in saving those whose time hasn't yet come but most Evil gods kind of have the issue that sensible folk might be quick to seek a more benevolent deity.

[Doug Lampert]

Well, I guess I missed that , so um pretend I wrote something about how we only saw her connected to Poe and that plan and then that I'll explain how the plan was good below.

The escape plan was fine, and I never criticized it in any way. The horrible delay was what she did AFTER the escape ships were all launched.

[Schroeswald]

The escape plan was fine, and I never criticized it in any way. The horrible delay was what she did AFTER the escape ships were all launched.

I don’t remember that long of a delay, any delay would be the fact that hyperdrive stuff has controls to make sure you don’t do it (at least in Legends, which I presume still applies), or as at least wookiepedia says, she hadn’t actually planned that, she was staying on the ship as a ploy and decided to do the hyperspace thing on the spot (I find the first more reasonable IMO but both are decent explanations).

[Peelee]

You are transferring incompetence of Luke's opponents into skill or merit of his own.

Incompetence? The entire movie, the enemies are shown to be incredibly competent (the only time they appear incompetent is when they are letting the heroes escape, which the movie explicitly states is intentional on their part, which conveys competence), and Luke is shown to be able to fly by skill and merit of his own. If you disagree... I don't know what to say.

You are inferring that a T-65 is radically different to fly than a T-16, but we don't see that being the case. Are some planes very different to fly? Sure. They aren't all, though. These could be quite similar, we've got nothing in-movie to suggest otherwise. A staff and a sword are quite different, on the other hand.

A staff and a lightsaber could be quite similar, and we've got nothing in-movie to suggest otherwise.

Trust me, I'm very familiar with how the T16 and the T65 are supposed to be similar. It's still going from an atmospheric crop duster to an intergalactic piece of military hardware, with no time to get accustomed to any differences, being thrust immediately into a dogfight against the most superior weapon the Empire had available and an entire squad of TIE fighters with turbolasers lighting up the skies in the meantime (the film also explicitly states that the ships can evade the turbolasers, but that means actively evading them, which adds complexity to flying, especially in a dogfight against enemy fighters), and Darth Vader and his personal wingmen.

I say again, if you think any part of this is supposed to convey incompetence on the enemies instead of supreme skill on Luke's part... I don't know what to say.

I don't recall the movie showing Kylo as being all that affected by the blast. He fights as if he just shrugged it off. If the wound was meant to be meaningful, they should have showed it so, but I don't recall him fighting sluggish. Pain and anger fuel the dark side.

He favors that side, he is constantly making pained expressions, and he moves poorly compared to before. Seems like they show him being affected by that blast. Were you expecting him to turn to the camera and say "I am weakened by being shot"?

[RatElemental]

Were you expecting him to turn to the camera and say "I am weakened by being shot"?

I just want to say, reading this gave me a chuckle. That reads like something right out of a parody work.

[Yirggzmb]

Superman is the best superhero, my personal fave is D-ick Grayson (in any identity he may take), but Superman (Clark Kent) is the best (I win ten quatloos if this causes an actual conversation).

I'd say Superman is "best" in the sense that he's nigh invincible and would probably win a fight with most other superheroes. On the other hand, if we're defining "best" based on some other quality, that may be up in the air.

[PontificatusRex]

{scrubbed};24102024]A gigantic amount of hate directed towards some science fiction films

Man, would you folks take it over to the other media boards where it can be easily ignored?

I'm so old, I remember when us geeks got together to talk about what we liked about stuff.

[Dion]

Man, would you folks take it over to the other media boards where it can be easily ignored?

I'm so old, I remember when us geeks got together to talk about what we liked about stuff.

I’m so old that I remember when I used to complain about old people!

What was I thinking? I was crazy!

Clearly the real trouble with the world is young people, and the media they consume. Also, the beeping and the booping, and whatever else it is the robots do.

[GregTD]

Gonna stop you right there, because she's not proficient with all forms of weapons. She's proficient with a staff and and sword. That's it. Now, if you want to argue, "but the staff and sword are very different!", I can just point to "Luke flew an entirely different kind of ship in the original, and coincidentally enough, Boeing very kindly told us recently that even in the exact same vehicle, if changes are made, pilots need to be entirely retrained or the vehicle will quite literally crash, despite being flown by experienced pilots specifically trained for that vehicle. So Luke jumping from a T-16 to a T-65 - a civilian shuttle to high-performance military hardware - is far and away more complex and ridiculous than going from a staff to a sword. And even then, she didn't master the lightsaber; she was against less-than-fully-trained fighter who was shot in the gut by a weapon that explodes most other people. The fact that he was still standing alone is kind of ridiculous, the fact that he lost to a newbie isn't at all, because he should have lost to her. Hell, he should have lost to Finn, dude was barely holding it together there!

And hey, that ship thing also shows us something that Luke did way better than Rey; he flew against moon-sized space station, with the entire surface covered in guns that were shooting at him, with a full complement of TIEs that were shooting at him, with Darth Vader personally shooting at him, and ended up being one of the few that lives. Rey, conversely, starts crashing the Falcon all over the desert, then manages to survive against a measly two TIEs long enough for Finn to shoot one down, then performs a maneuver through a motionless wreck that she intricately knows because she spends large amounts of her life in there. So she's nowhere near as good a pilot as Luke, who we can assume is such a good pilot due to the Force.

Lastly, there's a vast gulf between "I'm going to have strong female characters" and "she's an idealized character without any flaws," which was what you claimed. Ripley is a strong female character. So is Leia in the first movie. So is Sarah Connor. Kennedy is saying that they are vastly underrepresented in Hollywood, and that she is trying to change that. She is not saying "and the way to do that is to have super-good not-bad-at-anything characters" like you are implying.

1: The 737 MAX was an utter engineering disaster at the software level. Speaking as a software engineer here, everyone involved with that abortion, who wasn't screaming in email that it was a total FUBAR, should be fired, and never hired by anyone else.

So no, the 737 MAX debacle does not support a claim that any model change will require significant retraining. it just supports the claim that Boeing screwed the pooch.

2: Luke had a bunch of training in how to use the Force from Ben, before he went out and used it at all. Mary Sue, i mean Rey, just magically picked up more "Forciness" in the first moive (from where?) than Luke got in all his training from Ben.

3: Luke was at a rebel base, that presumably had, oh, flight simulators, where he could be taught the differences. For that matter, they have solid AI, and he had R2 there. They could have remapped the controls to exactly match what he was used to, plus weapons.

Rey, OTOH, there's no explanation other than "the writer loved her" for why she's capable of doing pretty much all the things she did in the 1st movie.

Which is why it's the last Star Wars movie i'll ever see.

[F.Harr]

Poor Loki. That was mean. In this case, I think a person should think of him as a parent. Maybe not a good one (I don't know), but it still hurts.

[BasiliskSoldier]

Luke was at a rebel base, that presumably had, oh, flight simulators, where he could be taught the differences. For that matter, they have solid AI, and he had R2 there. They could have remapped the controls to exactly match what he was used to, plus weapons.

I got the impression that the Rebels were pretty tight on time, and didn't have the time for anything but maybe a quick 101 session.

With complex pieces of equipment, even between similar models, people generally require training to get accustomed. I speak from personal experience with that. Luke knows how to fly an atmospheric light aircraft, and he should pick up some skills that can be transferred to a spacecraft that controls similarly. But he's still never flown out-of-atmos before, and to our knowledge he's never flown in a combat scenario against a target that could shoot back.

Luke is able to make the leap from in-atmos commerical model aircraft to military grade spacecraft and still be ungodly levels of talented is a a bigger leap than 'Someone who's proficient with a staff is also able to use a sword effectively'. I think both of those are pretty easy leaps to make, especially when both characters have space Magic on their side.

Rey, OTOH, there's no explanation other than "the writer loved her" for why she's capable of doing pretty much all the things she did in the 1st movie.

Rey actually has a pretty decent explanation for all her skills. She's proficient with a Staff, because it's a skill she picked up as a scavenger on a lawless frontier planet. She frequently does work for Unkar Plutt on his collection of spaceships, doing maintenence work on some (presumably including the Falcon) and even flying some in-atmos. She can climb sheer faces, established immediately as a skill necessary to scavenge Starship husks.

As far as force goes, she does a mind trick on a stormtrooper and after a bit of training is able to make some rocks float. I don't think either of those were presented as difficult tasks in universe. She's also able to defeat an opponent of superior skill because he was severely injured and suffering an emotional crisis.

I don't think Rey is a great character, but nothing she does strains my suspension of disbelief.

[Snails]

Rey, OTOH, there's no explanation other than "the writer loved her" for why she's capable of doing pretty much all the things she did in the 1st movie.

You are just not paying attention.

Rey was a reasonably capable person in many ways from the get go and had sufficient motivation and means to learn skills. We have good reasons to expect her to be more competent than Luke in most every respect, with the notable exception of piloting skills. The piloting bit, I do find annoying. Alas it has been established in this universe that very strong Force users can be magically good at all sorts of things -- that makes me want to upchuck, but it is what it is.

Yes, George loved Luke and George loved Anakin, and we held our nose and accepted a lot of nonsense. Rey is not much of a deviation from in universe precedent, unfortunately -- I wish she were more so.

[Fish]

2: Luke had a bunch of training in how to use the Force from Ben, before he went out and used it at all. Mary Sue, i mean Rey, just magically picked up more "Forciness" in the first moive (from where?) than Luke got in all his training from Ben.

Luke blocked three laser blasts in the first training scene, with no prior combat experience. With a blinding blast helmet on. So tell me why you think Rey, who also has the Force, and who has combat experience with a staff, should be worse (or no better) than Luke in her first attempt.

[Cazero]

Luke couldn't fight off a single tusken in melee to save his life. He then proceeded to have something like 3 months total of training over three movies, and only a small fraction of that appeared to be about wielding a lightsaber. Rey fought over trash for most of her life.
If you want to compare the two to frame Rey as a Mary Sue, fighting proficiency is not the subject you want to bring up.

[Forikroder]

Poor Loki. That was mean. In this case, I think a person should think of him as a parent. Maybe not a good one (I don't know), but it still hurts.

hes trying to kill his daughter and has subjected her to suffering for thousands of years

everything she said to him was something he entirely deserved, his wager he tricked Hel into seemed to exist only to make her existance terrible and painful

i honestly feel bad for Hel and feel like everything shes done is entirely because of that wager and wouldnt be nearly as terrible a person without it, if she had proper worship and wasnt just seen as the keeper of the dishonoured dead, and hated for it

[WindStruck]

The only thing I thought was ridiculous about the Force Awakens is how Rey began to mind-control that one guard as she was strapped to a table.

Like... How would she know to try that? How did it end up working so quickly?? How was that actually a thing that happened when she literally had zero training??? It actually made me cringe, although to be fair it was a somewhat humorous cringe.

[factotum]

coincidentally enough, Boeing very kindly told us recently that even in the exact same vehicle, if changes are made, pilots need to be entirely retrained or the vehicle will quite literally crash, despite being flown by experienced pilots specifically trained for that vehicle. So Luke jumping from a T-16 to a T-65 - a civilian shuttle to high-performance military hardware - is far and away more complex and ridiculous than going from a staff to a sword.

If this is about the 747 Max affair, Boeing made major changes to the way the plane flew--it wasn't even close to being "the exact same vehicle", at least as far as handling characteristics are concerned. Also, how do you think this worked before simulators were a thing? Somebody who wanted to learn how to fly a plane had to get into the plane and actually fly it, so if they were inevitably going to crash because of the differences, seems amazing any pilots ever survived long enough to learn how to fly anything. Heck, test pilots are often required to get into aircraft that have literally never flown before and be able to test them to the limits without crashing, and they can do this because the basics of how the controls work are standardised across aircraft--you're not going to find one where pulling the stick back makes it *dive*, for an obvious example.

Staff and sword are very, very different, though. As I said, you can't chop bits off yourself using a staff, for a start, and the usual method of wielding one means you have both ends available for blocking or hitting your opponent. This is not the case with a sword. Oh, and don't think I'm being particularly down on Rey here--I consider it just as ridiculous that Finn was able to pick up a lightsaber and last more than 0.02 seconds in a fight against a trained user, even if he did end up nearly dead because of it.

[Yirggzmb]

The only thing I thought was ridiculous about the Force Awakens is how Rey began to mind-control that one guard as she was strapped to a table.

Like... How would she know to try that? How did it end up working so quickly?? How was that actually a thing that happened when she literally had zero training??? It actually made me cringe, although to be fair it was a somewhat humorous cringe.

My theory is that Luke grew up being shielded from hearing about the force out of fear he'd end up like his father, so part of his learning was to let go of the idea things weren't possible. Meanwhile, Rey grew up hearing all the great stories and rumors about what Luke and other force users had done, perhaps making her more likely to experiment sooner and believe that it might work.

Also I've seen some people speculate that Kylo mucking about in her head "unlocked" some of her force abilities. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I could buy that it could have reminded her of what she had heard about the force and made her want to try.

[Thecommander236]

To be fair, why the hell did Loki decide to **** over his daughter so badly on the first place? I'm sure he had some reason for it, but it's still an incredibly horrible thing to do even if he is chaotic evil.