Board Thread:Manga/@comment-27321453-20190508212248/@comment-24407809-20190509042927

RuneLai wrote: Tdfern14 wrote:

Penguinluver1431 wrote: -If Pieck getting her hand cut off and nearly dying before transforming isn't proof that Isayama will potentially kill somewhat decent characters (Pieck) just to keep garbage Mary Sues running around (Gabi), I don't know what is. Do you even know what a Mary Sue is, because I keep hearing that a lot in other media in Movies & TV shows, frankly its overused. Mary Sues are supposed to be self-insert wish fulfillment characters. They're often exceptionally good at what they do and solve everyone's problems.

Gabi is none of that. (If anything, she creates problems.) I do think Isayama likes her as a character, she's the Eren perspective but as someone who grew up within Marley, but I'm pretty sure he is not living vicariously through her. As expected of Rune! Exactly right! The definition of a Mary Sue is "an idealized and seemingly perfect fictional character" who can "usually perform better at tasks than should be possible given the amount of training or experience, and usually are able through some means to upstage the main protagonist of an established fictional setting, such as by saving the hero."

With this in mind, I would say that Gabi is actually a subversion of the Mary Sue trope. Whereas Mary Sues are characters who are impossibly good at tasks that they have no training for, Gabi is a character who was introduced as being at the top of her class in the Warrior Cadets who has utterly failed at everything she has tried to do since the battle of Liberio. The last thing she was successful at was blowing up the armored transport in For Slava, and since then it has been one failure after another. She boarded the zeppelin to kill Eren but only succeeded in killing one soldier, and then had to be saved from being shot by Falco. She managed to escape her jail cell, but then got utterly lost and had to be rescued and taken care of by the Blouse family. She was completely inept at doing farm work while living with the Blouses, and when she tried to get help from Niccolo she had to be saved from him by Falco. Then she had to be saved again from Kaya by Mikasa and Mr. Blouse. Then she had to be saved from Eren by Pieck.

Gabi is so incredibly inept that it's almost comical. Her entire character arc during this final arc revolves around being completely humbled by the fact that she can't do anything right, and keeps getting the ideology that she grew up with (all Eldians are evil) proved wrong the all of the good Eldians living on Paradis.