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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31064 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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There was Rey being a Mary Sue

I mean, at that point it's a choice between Rey Sue or Mara Sue, the perfect jedi girl with a Dark Past who the hero falls in love with but all the other girls hate because she's just so perfect (also her eyes change colour, original character DO NOT STEAL).

(It's been a while since I read the series and other books she was in, maybe I'm just misremembering. I definitely remember not liking all the stuff EU authors did with tractor beams, which should have revolutionized warfare but didn't because nobody was smart enough to think of it until the hero of that particular book.)

How is Mara a Sue? She's supposed to be good at her job, being an ex-Imperial Assassin and force sensitive. She's not some random scavenger who knows the Millennium Falcon better than Han within the first hour she steps on board. If she is a Sue then it's much less blatant.

In this particular example, they hit Luke with the beam and he tries to shake it off, using various tactics before explosively reversing his trajectory in an unorthodox way. Luke damages his hyperdrive severely, falling out of hyperspace shortly and getting stranded in deep space. On the Imperial side, Thrawn finds that the crewman responsible was incompetent, that they were supposed to be trained for this but the guy was a conscript as opposed to a proper professional soldier and didn't give it his best effort (tried to deflect blame onto his officer), so he has him killed. It's part of the post-Endor decline of the Imperial fleet. The tactic is not absolutely broken like FTL-ramming a gigantic battleship, it doesn't obsolete the entirety of Star Wars space warfare.

The tractor beam stuff was all over the EU books IIRC. I think it was Stackpole(?) who had a corvette beating a star destroyer by tractor-beaming a moon or something. It just irritated me after a while.

Stackpole was really fond of unorthodox tactics enabling major underdog victories, so I’d write that off as ‘Stackpole uses Mary Sues’.

I haven't read Stackpole's Star Wars stuff, but I have read a number of his BattleTech books, and yeah, that's probably an accurate characterization (see the Phantom 'Mech thing for an example).

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