Right Reason

We Need Edifying Characters, Not Mary Sue's

 

From “Rey Was Comic-Con’s New Favorite Cosplay, and We’re Loving It”:

Over the course of the con it felt like you couldn’t swing a lit lightsaber and not hit someone dressed like the Force-sensitive young scavenger from Jakku. And considering how important Rey’s character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was to an entire generation of young female Star Wars fans, it was a wonderful thing to behold. 

There's good fantasy and then there's bad fantasy. Fantasy is not just escapism. It is the telling of myths. 

 

Good fantasy teaches us about virtue and inspires us to pursue it. Both Faramir's refusal of the one ring and Princess Leia's willingness to carry out dangerous espionage for the sake of others' liberty are edifying examples that teach the audience about the excellent conduct we should strive for and the sacrifices necessary to achieve it.

The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars alike are modern myths that will, much to the exasperation of their critics, live on as among the supreme cultural works of our era. Both will be read and watched in a thousand years—as long as our species survives that long, that is. They provide their modern readers with the myths to make sense of the ethical questions defining our lives in a similar way that the Illiad served for classical readers. To provide their readers with guidance, those myths need virtuous characters, such as Faramir and Princess Leia, through which their audience can understand their own lives and come to transcend their own vices by empathizing with the heroes of their myths.

 

Bad fantasy is simple wish-fulfillment and the desire to be the center of attention. It is when we write ourselves into our favorite stories as the all-powerful hero everybody loves. These characters do nothing but allow for us to indulge in our own narcissistic impulses. They teach us that the world, and all its inhabitants, shall always revolve revolve around our own particular plot-lines. Rather than pointing its audience to virtue, these myths teach them to worship themselves.

Rey is bad fantasy incarnate, a specimen of that Mary-Sue trope best relegated to fan-fiction than actually written into a serious narrative. The character was written for the sole purpose of the audience, especially the girls of the audience, to identify with her, and yet her only quality is the plot serving her every. Critics of previous stories are right to point out that women have rarely held the role of main protagonist. However, it is equally sexist to not critique a female character by the same standards as a male character.

 

Every event Rey is involved with in The Force Awakens only serves to give her an opportunity to display how perfect she is. Does a starship need to be piloted? Well, Rey has those skills? Does Rey need to escape from what I can suppose is one of the most fortified compounds in the universe? Rey has suddenly learned jedi mind tricks. And on, and on, and on. The invisible hand of Providence serves to guide her every move into making her appear a heroine, without all of the sacrifice that being a heroine entails.

 

The celebration of her character is little but the the egotistical desire to be the plot's preferred (female) character. Rey being a favorite just tells us how shallow people are in their love of characters—and that should not be praised.

So no, I for one am not loving that she is a Comic-Con favorite, and I think an attraction to her character reveals moral dystrophy: The desire to have the fruits at the end of the hero’s journey without the journey, to jump ahead to the confident Luke Skywalker who walked into Jaba’s palace as a Jedi without starting as a whiny farm-boy from Tatooine.

Power and Tolkien's Vision of Evil

JRR Tolkien is all too often characterized as a writer who portrayed the world as a struggle between black and white. One has hideous goblins and orcs, along with their Dark Lord, on one side and the beautiful men and elves, led by a wise king, on the other. The difference between good and evil is vivid and clear in the aesthetics of each force’s followers. Who would actually want to follow the moral code of a people so visibly vile and corrupt? However, such an estimation of Tolkien’s depiction or evil is unfair.
One needn't peer far into Tolkien’s mythos to see that the author dealt with evil. Within The Lord of the Rings, the case of Saruman provides a counter-example to the accusation. The myth of Fëanor and his Oath to reclaim the Silmarils is another counter-example and it is perhaps the most sympathetic depiction of evil that Tolkien even created.
The great theme unifying theme of Tolkien’s depiction of evil was the pursuit of power. In a letter to Milton Waldon, Tolkien directly addressed the connotations the word had throughout his mythos: “'Power' is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods.” For Fëanor, his quest to Middle Earth to reclaim the Silmarils after Melkor stole them would lead to not only his own death, but a grand tragedy of all who followed them as their war against Melkor and his hosts turned into a generations-long quagmire. The power to return what was stolen from Fëanor and to bring Melkor to justice always eluded the elves that followed in Fëanor’s footsteps. Ultimately, all they were left with was tragedy.

In a culture in which we all too often seek our own empowerment, Tolkien's myths are a much-needed warning that power is a word to be distrusted. The desire to have power over others and to leave one’s mark upon the world, however much we may want to praise the motivations, is a temptation that often leads to one’s own misery and, in the large scope, to the perversion the greatest of humanity into their species’ own scourge. The real Dark Lords are those people who try to remake the world in their own image. They are the ones who arrogate to themselves the authority to say that their vision of the world is the one that must be, whatever the consequences.