Child prodigy/Quick Learners: How to do and not to do them. · 3:37pm Jan 25th, 2018
Hello everyone, Evowizard here. I wanted to let you all in on something I've been thinking about since The Last Jedi. (By the way, I hate that movie. just wanted to let you all know that.) It was the character of Rey herself and there is an aspect of her that I think really needs to be addressed.
As we are all aware, in fantasy shows and movies, and sometimes with other media, we have rather young people acquiring or having been born with certain skills. In most cases, said character has to struggle to control, master, or even use said abilities to any real extent. This allows the audience to more sympathize with the characters. To watch them grow and triumph over their difficulties. This leads to a sense of satisfaction as we watch characters we have grown to really care about achieve their goals or become strong enough to defeat the villains.
That being said, there are also examples young individuals who are, without a doubt, prodigies. They have immense power, skills, or other such abilities that allow them to triumph much easier then your regular hero or heroine. They can learn magic at accelerated rated or even learn spells that most magi can't learn. They can quickly and almost effortlessly pilot star ships or other such aircraft. They can do all sorts of things that most other people would have a hard time doing in any sort of time, yet they accomplish that.
The problem with prodigies is very clear. We don't get to spend much time with them growing, if they have to grow at all. It is over relatively quickly or the growth happened in the past/off screen. It can be infuriating, boring, and can lose the interest of the viewers. However, there is a right and wrong way to do that. That is why I will be comparing two examples of this trope:
Rey from the Star Wars Movies
And Mozart from Amadeus
Now you might be curious as to why I use these examples. They are from two completely different genres, right? Well the thing is with character archetypes is that they can be applied to pretty much all genres. Oh yes, every genre has their own blend of tropes but overall, they share a lot in common. Both Rey and Mozart fit the type of prodigies perfectly. Yet I would consider Mozart to be the better example on how to do this well.
Specialty: The thing with most prodigies is that they specialize in usually one thing. You see this in a lot of shonen where a rival with be this formidable foe that grew up with immense strength, magic, or some other combative ability that allows them to do what they can. This is alright because it's more or less a rounded specialty.
When we look at Mozart, he can pretty much effortlessly create the most beautiful of pieces. He can perform even whilest not looking and does so flawlessly. He is a natural when it comes to music. Everything else? No. With everything else, Mozart is a regular if not extremely flawed person. That's why he's engaging. For all his strengths, he has equally and even immense problems in other areas in his life, such as his social life, spending, and etc. This offsets his prodigal abilities and allows the audience to more connect or at least understand with his character as he does indeed suffer for these flaws despite his big successes.
Rey on the other hand has no one set specialty. She is a great mechanic. She can easily pilot a starship and even fix it on par or better then Han. His own ship mind you. She skilled with a lightsaber and quickly and without much of any effort, can master force abilities that we didn't see Luke accomplish until his final movie of his own trilogy. Rey's problem is that she has far too many prodigal abilities without any great flaws to counter them. When writing a character like this, you need to give them a weakness. Some sort of other ability or emotional aspect that drags them down. I mean, at first they at least had the whole parents thing and that seemed like a start but that's more or less discarded in The Last Jedi and wasn't even brought up at all until the 'truth' came up. So really, she didn't suffer that much at all and the weaknesses she did explicitly have did not in any way match up with her apparent strengths.
History and Reasoning For Abilities:
With prodigal characters, the reason why they are so good at what they do must be explored to some degree or at least have a history. We the audience must know why the characters can do what they do or we can't really connect with them. If we don't understand them, they can't be nearly as effective as they should be.
Now with Mozart in Amadeus we don't explore his past as more we explore his present character, although it is touched upon by the main character of the movie. The point however is that Mozart was in fact a real person and we can look through history as to why he was this way. Mozart was brought up in a upper class home with a esteemed musician father. Said father noted his talent and honed it, forcing his son to spend his youth playing and playing and learning about music. Mozart has a clear and definite reason as to why he is so specialized and good with music, while also showcasing how he developed his flaws the way he did.
Rey is not a historical character. She has no previous instances in the Star Wars universe, at least to my knowledge but I very much doubt she was a part of it beforehand. So she has no prior history for the audience to learn about and if there is, it is not at all touched upon or explored in these films. We are not shown or even told how Rey was able to learn all the things she did and get so good at them. There is no exploration of her abilities or reasoning. She is just is that good. The training she receives? Extremely minimal and we don't witness much of it at all. She just, more or less, has the abilities or just gets them because she wants them. There is no history to her abilities. There is no real reason for why she is that good. She just is and that robs her character of any real agency in her life as well as robbing the audience a chance of identifying with her.
Role:
There is also another major aspect of prodigies that you often see in shows and movies. We see it plain as day with Mozart in the movie Amadeus.
Mozart is not the main character. In fact, he is the obstacle, the 'antagonist' of sorts to the main character Antonio Salieri. Antonio watches, envies, tries to move around Mozart and even plays a part in his demise. Mozart is not the focus and we learn about Mozart through Antonio. It is because of his prodigal aspects that he is not the main character here. Instead we follow someone who had to work for what he had for his whole life. We follow the underdog of the story. You can see this also in some anime where the prodigal rival eventually is defeated by the protagonist or the protagonist comes to the prodigal's level through training and time. Prodigal characters are hard to do as the main character unless they have great flaws that we the audience wish for them to better. Something that they can struggle with and move on with their lives.
Rey is not a side character. She is not an antagonist. Rey is one of the stars of the movie. One of the big goods. One of the leading members of the new Star Wars movie gang. She is not sidelined. She is a forefront member of the new trilogy. That is one of the major points of contention here. Because she is a prodigy. Because she has no great flaws. She can't work as a forefront character because she has no real major hurdles to pass through. What little hurdles she had were either already passed through without a lot of effort or complete wastes of time that may just be retconned in the new and last movie of her trilogy. She does not work because a prodigy is not the best character to make the main character. You can make a powerful protagonist or even an OP one. Look at One Punch Man for that, but if you did, you would see that there was a history to him. He had to work hard for his powers and his powers, while great, cost him what he wants most: excitement: a real battle. That is something he has to struggle while also being his own character.
Rey doesn't really have much to define her and it feels like what little could have been there is now gone. She is not Mozart. She is what I would call the bland prodigal hero. A character so good with little to hold them back that they can succeed no matter what. What? She didn't do so well against Snoke? Well he was taken out for her by Kylo. Oh yes, she is defeated on occasions but because of all her skills, she either gets out of them without a ton of effort or its taken care of by someone else. Mozart on the other hand had to struggle as the movie went on and his own vices and weaknesses took their toll until he died. He suffered for his weakness and prospered by his great strengths and thus felt more like a 3-dimensional and well-rounded character.
I just wanted to get this off my chest and I hope you all got something from this. I hope you all have a great day and until next time. 
Interesting
And note that in Mozart's case the writers could very easily have turned him into a Mary Sue by simply focusing on only the admirable aspects of his personality. Mozart was mostly a good man, but what makes the movie great is that it focused also on his flaws and how these helped bring about his downfall.
4781507
True, but much of Antonio's resentment was because the writer of such beautiful music was this rather flawed man drove him up a wall especially when he kept getting things he wanted. So the movie couldn't really happen as it did without focusing on his weaknesses as well as his strengths.
This is a great article. In a lot of ways a character's flaws are more interesting than their strengths.
F***ing brilliant my man. I think the thing that causes a lot of Sue like characters to get written in fiction is some writers are afraid that if they get their character flaws or shortcomings, the audience will either not like them or don't think that the author has it out for that character and is trying to bash them; something especially common in historical fiction as well as stories with very central protagonist.