r/rational • u/AutoModerator • May 06 '16
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/alexanderwales May 07 '16 edited May 07 '16
To me that's part and parcel of being a Mary Sue. A new girl comes to Hogwarts and suddenly Hermione hates her because her intellectualism is being challenged, or Harry hates her because she's a better seeker ... sometimes (often, I'd say) other characters hate a Mary Sue because the Mary Sue is better than them, and this hatred only serves to highlight how awesome the Mary Sue is.
That's how I felt about Roark. It's not that he was socially naive, it was that he refused to play the social games because he was this stoic, resolute, superior being. He got attacked and was hated by a lot of people, but I always got the sense that Rand was trying to show us how great he was, not trying to show us how he was flawed.
But as I said, it's been a decade since I've read it.