Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Rey does stuff


"Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male." - Simone de Beauvoir

The other big complaint I have seen about The Force Awakens - though I have seen more people refuting the complaint - is that Rey is a Mary Sue.

You can make good arguments for why she is not, but then other people were arguing that the term should be done away with completely. Having thought about the term at length previously, I couldn't agree with that, but people are definitely applying the term in ways that are not appropriate. I think I may have a great deal to say about Mary Sues and Strong Female Characters at a later date, but for now, let's stick to this movie.

The complaint is that Rey is too good at too many things, making her unrealistic, and then if you really hate that plus hate Finn being black then the real problem is that this is a fan-servicing Social Justice Warrior favoring movie, and how dare they pander like that?

Given that this type of complaint looks suspiciously racist and sexist anyway, it's tempting to simply ignore it, but this stuff in between, that people miss when they are looking for reasons to be offended, is exactly what interests me, so I shall blog on, and there are going to be some real spoilers here.

We see Rey being good at three things: mechanics, piloting, and the Force. In some of those cases, "good" can be relative. Also, we see that she is strong, smart, and scrappy - not terribly surprising for someone who has been surviving as a scavenger.

The scavenging of mechanical parts makes her skill with mechanical repair more plausible. I'm sure you can scavenge without knowing a lot about parts, but knowing more will help, and there is something else that we see when she is discussing the Falcon with Han Solo later: Rey loves this stuff.

She could have grown up merely trying to understand which parts would be most valuable, and probably many of her fellow scavengers are more like that, but she likes this stuff, so she has learned more. I've worked with computer geeks, and I have seen that light that goes on when there is a new problem that requires unraveling. That doesn't happen for me when the issue is a computer problem (for other things, yes). The majority of her waking hours are spent crawling around on old vehicles; with the interest and inclination she has in them, it's no shock that she gets to be good with them.

And they don't have to go together. Poe is presumably a better pilot than Rey, because he is a better pilot than anyone, but he probably is not a mechanic. I believe one of the reasons X-wing pilots have droids with them is for diagnostics and repairs. That's okay. There are probably also good mechanics that don't care much for vehicle operation.

Personally, I am good at more than one thing. Some of them are things that I do because I have to - they are associated with a job or some type of responsibility. Some things I am good at because I love them and I pursue them even when I don't need to. However, my sisters and I share an ability that is almost mystical, in that we are quite good with claw machines. Other people don't understand it, they send us articles on how they are rigged, but we just keep on accumulating prizes and then giving them to toy drives. That "force" is strong in our family.

Before I get into Rey's quick adaptation to the Force, I'm going to take a detour. Among the many storylines that I have thought of occurring in the Star Wars universe, there was a planet where those who followed the Force were not Jedi. They mainly used it for agriculture and understanding the balance between man and nature. Some of that came from Qui-Gon not disintegrating at death, when Obi-Wan and Yoda did. Like maybe they learned if from the farmers, who took "dust-to-dust" a little more literally. (Okay, I didn't like those movies, but I thought about them.)

My point with that is that if the force is always there, the Jedi can be one discipline for understanding and harnessing it, but not necessarily the only one. If the Force exists independent of the Jedi, and some people can be inclined toward it before training, then it should be possible to gain at least some traction with it without formal training.

So, in the process of being interrogated by Kylo Ren, Rey learns how to resist and pulls something from him. It is only a beginning, but it is a good beginning and plausible. Have you never been going toe to toe with someone and things come out you didn't mean to? Didn't that even happen with Harry Potter and Snape?

Practicing it, she is able to get a storm trooper to obey her. It doesn't work on the first try, but she doesn't give up. Also, storm troopers are conditioned for obedience, which probably doesn't hurt.

If Rey had defeated Ren on her own, that might be hard to swallow, but there are a few key points there. Ren was injured, and I hope there was some emotional toll going on there. And frankly, I'm glad we got to see the injury because the way he dealt with it by hitting the injury, like it was a nuisance instead of a serious medical problem, was super creepy and really gave insight into him. (And he is not villain that Darth Vader was. He doesn't have nearly the level of control, and while his training is not complete yet, you have to wonder what his personality will allow.)

In addition, Rey and Finn tag-teamed him, and they were both seriously injured. Rey was unconscious while Finn was fighting him. Actually, another good thing about the fight is that the side flares on Ren's light saber seemed foolish to me before, like you would be more likely to injure yourself than your opponent, but okay, I saw their purpose during the combat. Sorry about your shoulders, Finn.

Finally, it was not a definitive defeat. They kept the fight up long enough to have a chance to get away, which was greatly helped by the planet starting to fall apart.

Those are fascinating things for me: how we learn, how we become the people we are, what gives the edge in a fight. You have to ignore all of those mitigating factors if you want to declare that Rey is unbelievable, but doing so also ignores that at least in the past it has been common to have heroes who were good at everything and it wasn't questioned. Those types of characters can be boring, and we don't see them as much now, but did people find it implausible that James Bond was good at shooting and gambling and mixing drinks and strategy, not to mention good with the ladies? Oh well, I guess he had really good training.

I think it is reasonable for Rey to accomplish what she does based on the resources she has available. Even if that does not make her extraordinarily gifted, some human beings are, and some of these human beings are women.

If that sounds too terrible to be accepted, I do have one other quote from Simone de Beauvoir:

"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility."

Really makes you think.

Related posts:

No comments: