Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: esplin on July 05, 2009, 12:44:27 AM
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http://animorphsforum.com/forum/index.php/topic,3385.0.html
That thread got me thinking, is tobias a marry sue?
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What makes you think that Russell? Personally I don't see any of them as a Mary Sue type character.
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Actually, it's more correct to say Canon sue, if any canon character is a Sue. Tobias is the Woobie.
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What is a Mary Sue character by the way. Someone who is too perfect? I don't think one who is too perfect gets trapped as a hawk...
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Hes an anti-sue, she tried SOOO hard to give him flaws.
So now he has like over nine thousaaaaaaaaaaaand dddd flaws.
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Hes an anti-sue, she tried SOOO hard to give him flaws.
So now he has like over nine thousaaaaaaaaaaaand dddd flaws.
I agree. He's pretty close to the least mary-sue like character in the entire series. Nothing EVER works out for him.
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But it still makes his character not so great to me.
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But it still makes his character not so great to me.
True. He's kinda one-dimensional. You pretty much know what to expect.
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He's kind of the Shinji Ikari of the animorphs. But more likeable.
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I just dont find tobias likable at all because hes so flawed and unfortunate.
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Yeah, KA tried a little too hard to make him the subject of everyone's pity
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I like Tobias.
The only canon sue is Cassie.
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True, but its like she made the opposite of cassie. Which is still annoying.
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So now he has like over nine thousaaaaaaaaaaaand dddd flaws.
Nah. He's just a whiney emo kid.
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Either way its lame
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Tobias is the inverse of Cassie. Its true. I just realized how unfortunate he was, and how fortunate Cassie was. The universe just loved to prove Tobias wrong, but the universe had no problem being Cassie's b!tch.
Hmm. i wonder, did these two even get along well? They had little interaction throughout the series, which is interesting....
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I don't know, I like Tobias. Soz, I just pity him. Plus, he seems like a nice kid who was probably in the bathroom when the luck got handed out :)
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I think they got along pretty well, except that Tobias ate fresh meat instead of Human food. I think Cassie was bothered by his feelings towards life being the same as any predator.
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Before I came on RAF I never had a problem with Tobias. But now I've seen all the love for him it makes me not like him so much.
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Wait. You like him less because people around here like him more? Sounds like "It's popular, so it sucks".
Actually, I've found that he's more angsty than I remembered. Maybe it's just all the people calling him a wangsty emo hawk.
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hmm never saw that but yeah he is the other pole compared to Cassie. But i think it was very intentional and don't truly think they can be considered as a sue . well maybe Cassie a little but that is only because she is almost always right about stuff. well sort of. But that is what makes teh books great they have characters who are opposites of each other being friends. Or more than Freinds. I mean there is teh Cassie/Rachel (Plain / Fashion), Marco/Jake (Funny / Serious), Cassie/Tobias (Flawless / Flawed) , Jake/Tobias (Normal Everyday Family / Totally messed up family )
The characters are all like that and get along in their differences i think that is what its all about.
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Actually, I've found that he's more angsty than I remembered. Maybe it's just all the people calling him a wangsty emo hawk.
I agree. I never really thought of him as emo, just kinda messed up and lost (sorry if that's the definition of emo, I'm kind of out of the loop). And you would be too, if you had to kill every day to survive, and your dad was an alien who you'd watched die, and no one ever really loved you, and the one girl that did was killed... you get my point :)
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i never really liked either of them....tobias and cassie that is, i just never really "latched on" to their books, felt their books were boring, like it felt Cassie was always QQ THE ANIMALS OH NOES!!!!!! and Tobias was like MY LIFE SUCKS :( NOBODY LOVES ME, IMA FREAK blah blah blah.....whereas marcos where funny, some parts hilarious and also like hella serious, where he morphs into the mountain goat to kill his mum and jake has to hold him down, as gay as it sounds my heart was breaking for him, you know what i mean? and ax's are funny, like slapstick humour is funny, you can expect whats coming with him, which most people would say is boring but i donno i like it, and jakes and rachels where like pew pew action packed, i donno im sure tobias's and cassie's had cool pew pew moments, but i never saw em cause i guess my eyes where covered with the thoughts i had of cassie and tobias and just thought that way so couldnt really get the full throttleness out of their books, maybe i should go read them again.....with an open mind
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He's probably my least favorite of the six, but I can see why he's there.
Just, personally, his self-pity and excuse-making bothered me. Sure, he's had a messed-up background, but I do think a lot of the BS he went through post-Elfangor (torture and loss of Rachel aside) was by choice.
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Hmn, interesting thread! FINALLY people take interest in this board when I happen to be online. :D
I don't see Tobias as a Sue or even as a serious anti-Sue... I see him as "realistic" representation of what a person with his background would do in reaction to his set of circumstances.
I also see him as a definite Woobie, but that's not where I'm planning to go with this. *chuckle*
Anyway... suppose you're the kid who gets swirlied in school and has his one pair of nice new shoes boloed over the power lines next to his aunt's apartment... nobody cares about you, as far as you know. Life, as a rule, sucks eggs.
Then aliens arrive, suddenly you're all world-saving, you have a purpose, and you're IMPORTANT to somebody...
...and then almost as soon as it starts, you're trapped in the body of a CHICKEN-HAWK, for pity's sake, and are pretty much out of the fight for good, as far as you know.
Then, just as soon as you let yourself get used to being said chicken-hawk, some puppet-master dood lets you get your old body back... but with a catch to it.
And now, just to make things more complicated, you fell in love with the Most Perfect Person Ever (not really... and thank God for it, or this thread would be about Rachel instead), so every time you morph human, there's this whole stigma and massive decision-making-moment, yada yada.
I dunno' 'bout you, but given those circumstances, yeah, I might be a little bit emo and angsty.
Add to it the torture and the admittedly VERY Sue-ish realization that my Da was a dead alien prince... well, I think it'd be way more Sue-ish if Tobias WASN'T effed-up severely.
I mean, if K.A. wrote him with ANYTHING like a happy ending, the intense unrealism of that would be...
well, it'd be just a bit appalling, I think.
Sad to say it, but I prefer miserable-Tobias to any other Tobias. Even dead-Tobias would just add to his Sue status, unfortunately.
*shrug* Well, there's my twenty cents. Make of it what you will. :)
Future reference: Ax is my current favourite. The only characters who were NEVER my favourites were Cassie (oy vey) and Marco (he thinks too much like me, so I don't trust him).
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You know, it just occured to me that if Cassie died, it would be a case of Too Good for this Sinful Earth.
And I wish Tobias had found happiness with Rachel, just as I wish Rachel had survived. They were my friends, and I want my friends to be happy.
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I guess one's opinion of Tobias hinges on whether you actually believe being trapped as a red-tail was intentional, or unavoidable.
Personally, whether conscious decision or not, I see it as the former.
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He's probably my least favorite of the six, but I can see why he's there.
Just, personally, his self-pity and excuse-making bothered me. Sure, he's had a messed-up background, but I do think a lot of the BS he went through post-Elfangor (torture and loss of Rachel aside) was by choice.
I agree with this guy.
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I mean, would Rachel or Jake have turned out the same way if they'd grown up with Tobias' ****ty homelife? I don't believe they would.
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I do agree that the vast majority of his post-construction-site problems (actually, the construction site itself, too) were his own doing.
...I don't really see him trapping himself as a hawk. Now that he has a chance to BE SOMETHING, he's not about to give that up so easily, and in the Yeerk Pool Complex itself, it's suicide.
He's a survivor, as a rule.
Seems to me that many of his problems originate from his desire to prove himself... not really to Jake, though there is a minor hero-worship thing there... but to himself, primarily, and also to Elfangor, who (inexplicably, to Tobias' opinion) saw something worthy in him.
And honestly, whichever of the characters had died, there would've been Mary-Sue criticism for it, and it would still have been more realistic than ALL of them surviving the war.
In my opinion, Ax or Marco would have been more believable deaths than Rachel, but both were too valuable as characters to sacrifice them, even at that point in the story.
Rachel is wreckless, but she is wreckless CONSISTENTLY.
Marco and Ax both have notable inconsistencies, and the right circumstances could have given them the chance to be stupid-and-then-dead in a short order.
*chuckle* Sorry, I'm looking at this from a reads-too-much-so-everything-is-cliche point of view, not a these-characters-are-my-friends point of view.
I bawled my eyes out when Rachel died.
Then I re-read it and bawled again, three days in a row.
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All of them being alive in the end is no less unrealistic than all of them being alive up until the end. If she really wanted realism, she should have tried a lot harder.
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I think Tobias is realistic, just annoying.
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I don't think that Tobias is a Mary Sue (or a Gary Stu, rather). He is irritating at times, but he has also had quite the rough life. Not an unrealistically rough life, but still rough. The only bit that is a little Mary Sue-ish is the whole being the son of Elfangor thing. I mean, it's a bit cliche....but that's it, IMO.
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Rachel is wreckless, but she is wreckless CONSISTENTLY.
Falsehood.
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Support your claim.
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You people really need to read the books, y'know? Why is it that because Rachel takes a more direct approach with things it automatically means she doesn't think things through? That she's some type of unstable aggressive maniac?
She's never portrayed that way by Katherine & Michael. Some of the ghost-writers got a little carried away with it, but she's not half as reckless or single minded as the fandom paints her to be.
Oh, and "reckless".
Support provided. *bows, smirks*
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This is a tobias thread....
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*chuckle* Sorry, I'm looking at this from a reads-too-much-so-everything-is-cliche point of view, not a these-characters-are-my-friends point of view.
I bawled my eyes out when Rachel died.
Then I re-read it and bawled again, three days in a row.
awww me too ...especially with what happend to Ax. I was all NO NO NO NOOOO that can't be part of the story .
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After reading through this whole thread, I have just this comment to say:
Well, while K.A. worked to make Tobias flawed, and thus hopefully not a Mary Sue, that sometimes MAKES a Mary Sue. Tobias is a little different, but if you made a character who had EVERYTHING wrong with him/her to the point that everybody had to feel sorry for him/her, that's hitting Mary Sue. I think Tobias, because he was able to conquer it, doesn't fall under that.
I'm finding Cassie really annoying, though.
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I think the fact that life threw all this bull at Tobias: no 'rents, uncle and aunt hate him, bullies picked on him, trapped as a hawk, tortured, hawk loves Rambo Barbie, having to eat wildlife. The thing that really made me love Tobias, is that all throughout it, he stayed in the fight. He never just sulked off in a corner and died. He was always there to help. He always made an effort. He always kept going. Emo kids wallow in self pity and hate the world, Tobias never did that, sure there were times were he felt sorry for himself, but he never gave up. He played the hand that was dealt to him. And I think he played it admirably.
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You people really need to read the books, y'know? Why is it that because Rachel takes a more direct approach with things it automatically means she doesn't think things through? That she's some type of unstable aggressive maniac?
She's never portrayed that way by Katherine & Michael. Some of the ghost-writers got a little carried away with it, but she's not half as reckless or single minded as the fandom paints her to be.
Oh, and "reckless".
Support provided. *bows, smirks*
nope
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Tobias is a deeply complex character. I do not think his abilities are completly down to earth however I think his amazing abilities come from his will alone to defeat the yeerks.
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Spartan 281 I think you hit the nail right on the head. Everything you just said is why Tobias always was my favorite character.
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Tobias is a deeply complex character. I do not think his abilities are completly down to earth however I think his amazing abilities come from his will alone to defeat the yeerks.
>not completely down to earth
Is that a pun I see?
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You guys have really good points. I still think Tobias is the most overrated character though.
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Support provided. *bows, smirks*
nope
Yeah, that wasn't support, that was a whiny excuse, and a personal perspective that can be viewed differently by others.
No infallable proof shown.
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He always does that. Its best just to skip over his post and read the one below it.
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Very true. I often have to do that as to not turn into a rage and hunt him down. ;D
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I see the point as to how he could be seen that way. It's also been said that Cassie's a Mary Sue character. (AniJen was that you or another LJer? I know you said other things that I won't go into 'cause it'd carry us more off topic)
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It was a thread on here a while of back that I may have referenced. I don't remember lol
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I think they all had Mary Sue qualities. They were six against 600,000,000,000,000 after all.
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They were far smarter than any 13-16 year olds in the world. defeating the whole yeerk empire WTF.
the whole adults are useless thing really bugs me
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Useless, yes. What could they have done? They couldn't morph. They had jobs and status. Kids can fade into crowds better.
Also, parents are more close-minded than kids. It would take a long time before they not only accepted all of the mind-bending truths shown to them by the Ellimist and Crayak.
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if the series involved fairies yes, but i think most adults would learn to accept aliens. For instance if I saw an alien after initial 'it is a hoax' i would accept and I am legally an adult in most countries except Saudi Arabia.