A Pyrrhic Victory: a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantiamount to defeat.
(OOC)
I’ve been stuck in character for a long time and by a long time I mean I’ve been playing this character for years and it’s been kinda hard for me to take simpathy for the Alliance. I also might have an engraved since of loyalty to the Horde that has made the game fun. I think it pretty fun when people’s moral compasses are drawn to a faction. Both factions have morals, values, and rules you may or may not agree with. So, with that I feel more drawn to the Horde and with that biased kept in mind…
Is Jaina Proudmoore a Mary Sue that has been brute forcing her way past every opposition with little or no difficulty having no possible reason, background, or notable training on how she got that powerful in the first place.
This term has been thrown at me more than a few times and I’ve been watching a lot of videos on how to avoid writing like this.
I’ve played through the Jaina rescuer character arc and my faction biases might have kept me from ever feeling sorry for Jaina, and can only see her as terrorist posing as a hostage. Victimizing herself and believes that her actions are justified by circumstances that were beyond her control.
Now I haven’t grown up with the Alliance, I haven’t played through the entire leveling character arcs and even the boosted Nelf Hunter I have on the Alliance side is still RPing as a Belf spy, but does seem like she is NOW being written as needlessly overpowered?
I think Jaina has a tendency to be too-perfect and overpowered, yes.
However, the devs recognize that and try to deal with it by giving her flaws–like the hyper-emotionalism that drives her to contemplate genocide, to call for the Purge of Dalaran, etc.
The problem is the devs then tend to resolve those problems, as she grows to see the error in her ways, to learn once again that – of course – peace is the answer. And then we’re back to square one.
I think BfA’s move of taking the focus of her flaws away from VENGEANCE and more towards her complicated relationship with her extended family has done a lot to solve those problems, though. She feels more nuanced now and gets to give great lines like “IS HE THE BOMB?” that are simultaneously justified but also characteristic of that over-emotional side of her personality.
So as a personality / character? Nah. Do the devs rely on her amazing magical prowess to solve plot problems too often, especially at the expense of the Horde’s optics? Yeah. But that’s less Jaina and more just the writing. It could just as easily be Malfurion’s deity-level powers, but they decided to put an axe in his back.
I mean she is a very well read and gifted mage at the end of the day. I think she just happened to be at the right place at the right time a litttllleee too often to receive power ups (ToT). I wouldn’t say she’s a mary sue but she rides the line pretty close.
She is definitely very strong. But she can be overly emotional. And, in spite of her power, still fails at times. Something that brings her (at least under recently) a lot of guilt. I probably wouldn’t call her a mary sue.
What is a Mary Sue? A Mary Sue is a character written to be overly perfect, and so we need to ask ourselves, is Jaina overly perfect? Probably. but i dislike that term. I prefer the easier to define and associate Creators Pet, after all, Mary Sue was a parody of those types of characters in fan fic.
Jaina is a poorly written character, has been since Mist, but i feel creators pet is the proper word, as i don’t feel she is a self insert. In ToW and Mist of pandaria she rapidly flip flopped between 2 radically different opinions of the horde, and acted as a massive hypocrite all the while (Theramore and Dalaran are neutral despite the fact their governments give active aid to the alliance and at least theramore is willing to invade horde lands). She then did more flip flopping in warcrimes and legion. Finally, the biggest crime against her now is the fact she is to Omnipresent in the plot and to strong to allow tension to really form.
she definectly have flaws so i don’t that she is a mary sue, but sadly, she did suffered the bad writting, especially in the cata-mop era for the sake of faction conflict.
Why would a woman dedicated to peace randomly attack the horde?
To give motivation to the horde? who knows.
and then we have the problem of blizzard writting especific scenarios when they want something to happen, is not really because of the action of their characters, but rather just beacuse blizzard needed it to happen. (like the purge)
Like dalaran neutrality. What did blizzard needed for the plot? the shared hub for both factions, what do they do? make jaina be angry and quit, and then make the belfs beg to go back to the city that murdered them twice.
i think that if you play a belf then you do have a biased PoV. and that is fine.
i think that personality wise in bfa they did a good job with her, she struggles to not become like her father and now she has something for fight for again.
her arc has been about healing emotional wounds that almost have her consumed by vengeance.
As for the power, i don’t really care if she is goku or not.
that doesn’t matter if she has plot armor like the alliance or the horde, by example, no one expects the horde or alliance be deleted, i feel the same way with most faction characters. and after the arc they give her in bfa, she is not going anywhere.
Bold of Perfectia Dawnlight to call anyone a Mary Sue.
Besides, Jaina is one of the few characters who has actual flaws, and has paid for her mistakes. She’s had an actual character arc (polarizing as it may be), which is more than can be said for most of the Warcraft characters. Also, a character is not automatically a Mary Sue simply because they’re strong.
Jain’s got flaws, that is true, but i still think she has an ovrall negative affect on the narrative.
Baine is probably the purest sue in wow, as the authors try to portray him as flawless. Jaina still has a negative effect on the narrative, being over focused and to strong for the narrative to really hold it’s weight, and i do think she is very poorly written, with the whole flip flopping between betraying the horde and the hypocrisy the writers failed to see or address.
I’d address your point but I’d be repeating what Reallyhappy said, her redemption arc isn’t really much of a flaw when she’s everywhere doing everything perfectly in proportion to the other characters, this is especially asinine because it raises a lot of questions about her lack of action during critical moments in the past.
Well, yeah, that’s fair. Jaina can be categorized as a poorly written character subjectively. But while poorly written and Mary Sue aren’t mutually exclusive, I don’t really know that Jaina qualifies as a Sue. Writer’s pet at worst maybe… although I used to think that about Sylvanas, but now look what they’re doing to her.
I don’t think it is fair to call a character like Jaina, who has very obvious flaws (notably in how she handles her emotions), a Mary Sue. Yes, she is strong, and often ridiculously so, but so are many many other characters in the Warcraft universe. Jaina’s power has just been very visible lately because Blizz has been using it - as others have already pointed out - as clunky plot device.
Personally, I think it is much more apt to call a character like Thrall a Mary Sue.
I do think she is a writers pet at least for golden, but sue is pushing it. A lot of characters are only mary sues in the hands of specific writers, like Batman. The one WoW character i feel 100% comfortable calling a sue is Baine.
I don’t really think of Jaina as a Mary Sue because she trained to become a powerful mage her whole life once she went to Dalaran, and then didn’t she get a staff that made her stronger? I mean she wasn’t just all of a sudden amazingly powerful without any prior moments where she showed that she was strong and a capable mage. And as others have said she has flaws which kind of goes against being a Mary Sue.
To me, the perfect example of a Mary Sue is Rey in The Last Jedi (and arguably the end of The Force Awakens.) She is a character with no training whatsoever in the Force or how to use a lightsaber yet she can just magically flip around using a lightsaber and use the force like it’s nothing. Even Anakin, the “chosen one”, had to be trained. To me that makes her a Mary Sue.
Jaina is so powerful that she’s at the “Walking Deus Ex Machina” plot device threshold. Not quite Mary Sue, but so powerful that it takes a rather talented writer to use her without screwing it up.