Okay, I've been thinking about how best to improve The Force Awakens while still only minimally tweaking the actual plot, and I want to know what you fags think.
First let me address the elephant in the room that I'm not going to change- Rey's perceived "Mary Sue" nature. I find it annoying at times but not unbearable. Some of her traits have decent enough justifications, like her mechanic skillz- of course she's going to know her way around a space-wrench when her day job on Jakku is taking spaceships apart for scrap. Her flying is much harder to accept but that's just one strike. Then the big one, her force aptitude, could still be explained in a number of acceptable ways- she's Luke's daughter, she's a jedi yougling who had her memory altered, she was possessed by the force ghost of Obi-wan Kenobi, whatever. They can still salvage that. They could've (and should've) toned her down a good bit but ultimately she's not any less believable than a backwoods farmboy piloting a military fighter for the first time single-handedly destroying a cutting-edge space station with one shot.
My biggest issue, then, is not with Rey but with the First Order. They're Imperial knock-offs, posers on a galactic scale. And as a concept I actually like that. They could go some fun places with that. But it doesn't make sense for them with their resources to have a superweapon like that.The empire built the death star but with virtually infinite money; I'm expected to believe these fags built something a thousand times better on a shoestring budget? There's an easy way around that, of course- they found it. Darth Snookie doesn't real, he's just the holocron of an ancient sith master. Or maybe he is real he's just really old, or found some ancient sith textbook or something. He tells the First Order about this long-forgotten sith superweapon that they fix up and adopt.
Second is Phasma's betrayal and the fact that Starkiller base was so lightly defended, so let's kill two birds with one stone there. Instead of just a planetary shield, there's also a gravity well to keep ships from entering from hyperspace. The plan is for Han Solo to get past the gravity well flying the Millennium Falcon, because if there's one situation where a SW character is allowed to be Mary Sue as fuck, it's Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon. There he and Finn capture Phasma as in canon, but instead of the shield she deactivates the gravity well, and only because she knows doing so would trigger a fleet-wide alarm. The Resistance sends both fighters and capital ships, the plan being for the fighters (X-wings AND Y-wings, because you don't send just dogfighters on a fucking bombing mission) to pass through the shield (which blocks capital ships and orbital bombardment but not the small fighters) and destroy the shield generator, so the capital ships could blast the fuck out of the thermal oscillator from space. But because of Phasma's alert, the First Order navy is waiting when they arrive. Epic space battle ensues.
A few fighters still get through and the attack on the shield generator goes mostly the same as the thermal oscillator in canon, but Poe is re-routed to lead the assault on the First Order flagship to break the navy's ranks long enough for the Resistance capital ships to bomb the actual thermal oscillator once the shield is down. That way he gets his own glory for that while Han and Chewie bomb the shield generator from the inside.
All that happens, Resistance wins yadda yadda but the First Order puts up one hell of a fight.
Thoughts?