Is Starkiller a mary sue?

DarthSkywalker0 wrote:

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

Azronger wrote:

DarthSkywalker0 wrote:

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

Go to pms.

DarthSkywalker0 wrote:

Could you explain?

DarthSkywalker0 wrote:

Azronger wrote:

DarthSkywalker0 wrote:

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

Go to pms.

No. Explain it here.

I don't think Galen Marek is a Mary Sue / Gary Stu. He is absurdly strong, sure thing but he experienced defeat and danger. He has been on an extreme training by Vader throughout his entire life. He still lost against Shaak Ti. His character has flaws and weaknesses. As a character, I don't like him at all but I also don't think that he is a Mary Sue at all.

>The fight ends with Shaak throwing herself on his blade.

>He lost against Shaak Ti.

didn't she throw herself into the pitt? And IIRC Shaak Ti did beat Galen.

She did. She scored him 3 times before his potential took over and gave him the win

"On her last three words, she struck three blows that each partially found their mark. The first burned a sizzling line down the apprentice’s left shoulder. The second scored diagonally across his chest. The third would have skewered his right eye had he not held her back at the last minute with a desperate telekinetic block that stopped her lightsaber barely a millimeter from his skin. He could feel his eyelashes and eyebrows burning. The right side of his sight was entirely blue.
She gasped and staggered backward. Her lightsaber and her gaze dropped. A full half meter of red blade emerged from her stomach, then the rest came free with a hiss.
He backed away, shocked by how close he had come to death and how lucky he had been to defeat her. He had raised his lightsaber by reflex. She had, in the desperation of her final assault, practically thrown herself on the blade. Perhaps she had meant for the two of them to defeat each other at the same time."

Yeah, apparently I was right.

How were you right lol?

Your claim:

He still lost against Shaak Ti.

The events of TFU:

She gasped and staggered backward. Her lightsaber and her gaze dropped. A full half meter of red blade emerged from her stomach, then the rest came free with a hiss.

He backed away, shocked by how close he had come to death and how lucky he had been to defeat her. He had raised his lightsaber by reflex. She had, in the desperation of her final assault, practically thrown herself on the blade. Perhaps she had meant for the two of them to defeat each other at the same time.

The fight ended with a lightsaber through her stomach and SK completing his mission. How you can claim he lost is beyond me.

Yeah, I guess I expressed myself in a wrong way. What I meant was he was losing against Ti and only won because of some stupid writing and pure luck.

Yeah Ti was better, SK didn't even know what he was doing when he won.

@HellfireUnit

Yeah, I guess I expressed myself in a wrong way. What I meant was he was losing against Ti and only won because of some stupid writing and pure luck.

The fact that Ti put herself in such a vulnerable position when fighting Galen in order for him to get lucky in the first place doesn't give me the impression she is the superior combatant. It's made clear in the novel she was on the verge of desperation and close to losing hence why she tried such a risky gambit. If she really was superior she wouldn't have practically thrown herself on his blade when trying to end the fight.

DoA wrote:I mean.. at least Marek being uber powerful makes sense. He had one of the highest potentials in the mythos, and was trained harshly by Vader since childhood.

Baney Stu with just a few months of training was making lightning storms, busting temples, and ragdolling Sith Lords

@LSDMB U gotta look at this

The answer is still no.

DC77 (Reborn) wrote:The answer is still no.

DoA wrote:I mean.. at least Marek being uber powerful makes sense. He had one of the highest potentials in the mythos, and was trained harshly by Vader since childhood.

Baney Stu with just a few months of training was making lightning storms, busting temples, and ragdolling Sith Lords

Well here's the thing. Being a gary stu/mary sue is more about just power. It's also about a lack of conflict, a lack of the power being earned, a lack of having to overcome serious adversity.

I'll give you an example. Take Thor and Captain Marvel. Both pretty powerful right? The difference between them is that Thor proved himself worthy (literally). In his first movie his flaws were on display, his arrogance and irresponsibility, and were actually treated by the narrative as flaws, and he had to suffer the adversity of losing his power, and he was forced come to terms with his flaws and evolve as a person. Through his willingness to sacrifice himself to protect others, he proved himself worth of his power, both in terms of the plot element, but also in a narrative sense as a character we have reason to root for as an audience. 

Captain Marvel by contrast definitely has some personality flaws, but they are never treated by the movie as personality flaws, and at the end of the day her grand growth as a character isn't her realizing she has internal character flaws, it's the realization that everyone else is an asshole. And she doesn't have to sacrifice anything in either her solo movie or endgame, she just kinda powers through everything with no need to ever make the difficult decisions. And yet she's heralded as the most powerful hero and presented in Endgame in a position of moral authority whenever she interacts with the other characters despite not earning it in the same way most of the other characters have.

With a villain obviously it's a bit different than a hero, however Bane isn't just showered with success in POD, he works for it and suffers setbacks along the way. Once he realized he was responsible for his father's death, he began to lose his ability to draw on the Force because of his psychological issues, got humiliated by Sirak, and got ostracized by the other masters and students becoming an outcast at the academy. He basically hit rock bottom. And then after he defeated Sirak and got into an argument with Qordis he set out for the Valley of the Dark Lords, confident he would find true power there, and he was disappointed by failure in that regard and returned to the academy in a state of exhaustion and starvation. Later on when he meets with Githany on Ambria he underestimates her subterfuge and winds up poisoned and nearly dies from it. And throughout the rest of his Sith career in both Rule of Two and Dynasty of Evil he isn't displayed absent any serious level of adversity.
(I might also add that it was two years of training rather than "a few months," if you want to criticize Bane as a character at least know your shit man)

Obviously a villain doesn't cultivate virtue or wisdom in the same way a hero does, their development of the evil counterpart of character growth and enlightenment is a bit different. And with Bane we get to see him grow and piece together his ideology bit by bit as he learns from a variety of examples and sources, struggles with certain philosophical Sith dilemmas, and as his ideology and understanding of the nature of the Dark Side comes together, we see his power mount as well. We see the lessons he learned from his early life on Apatros and how they lead him to join the Sith and embrace a philosophy of strength, we see him lose faith in the masters at the academy when he is ostracized and turns towards the teachings of the archives and furthermore when Qordis attempts to ban him from the archives to play his little politics games, we see him recognize the flaws of the ancient orders in both his studies of the past and as the flaws the brotherhood set out to correct (albeit in a flawed way). We see him go from hitting rock bottom over the guilt of having killed his father and Fohargh, to regaining his vigor yet still hesitating to kill Sirak even after brutally besting him, to finally being willing to kill him. We see him derive insight from both Kas'im's story of how he killed his master to test if he had surpassed him and Revan's own advice on not taking more than one apprentice to avoid getting mobbed by underlings, and from all of this we see the culmination of his philosophy of the Rule of Two.

Darth Bane's relationship with the Dark Side of the Force is something that we can buy as something intimate, an integral part of his character, because it has been properly developed and displayed as such. And for a villain in a narrative sense, that's something that makes him worthy of his power on a thematic level. It grants him a genuinely earned gravitas.

Darth Bane isn't a gary stu because he faces a level of adversity and experiences a level of genuine character development that makes his power feel earned.

Azronger wrote:Is Starkiller overpowered? Obviously. He had the Force potential to surpass Palpatine, and his actualized power is great enough to move Star Destroyers and atomize frigates among other ridiculous feats, and he beats Darth Vader in both games. This isn't a question, really.

Is he overpowered relative to what's shown in the movies? Sure. But is he overpowered relative to the other characters in the game? Not really - he is frequently challenged by other Force users who themselves do massive feats, and he's weaker than Vader for most of the first game (and always weaker than Palpatine).

Is his ludicrous power level unexplained, though? Well, in my opinion, yes and no. Starkiller was designed to be a powerhouse to facilitate fun gameplay, so there is technically a purpose for his power that was meant to be there from the very beginning, without which the game would not be the same experience. However, this is an out-of-universe explanation. As for an in-universe explanation, well, there isn't one, really. He was the child of two random, unremarkable Jedi Knights, and for no reason was an uber prodigy capable of the above and then some. Personally, I'd lean towards no.

I guess there's no reason why a prodigy couldn't just rise out of raw statistics, though it seems odd because there wasn't really one of that level in like the tens of thousands of years prior. That in-universe plausibility question doesn't change the fact that it seems artificial and forced OOU though.