IS REY A MARY SUE?

In response to "Is Rey From The Last Jedi A Mary Sue And Is It Sexist To Think She Is? [Storycraft]" by Matthew Kadish.

Ayyyy, it's Rey- The Mary Sue herself. Also what is going on with her hair? Girl needs some dry shampoo or something.

I thought the “Is Rey [...] a Mary Sue?” article was very interesting. I’m certainly not a die-hard, well-versed Star Wars fan but I did pick up on some of the things that Matthew Kadish points out in his article. I definitely agree whole-heartedly with his assessment of her.

Mary Sue as described by fanzine Menagerie:

"Mary Sue stories — the adventures of the youngest and smartest ever person to graduate from the academy and ever get a commission at such a tender age. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm-wrestling. [...] She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship."

Some examples of things that stuck out to me (despite the fact that I don’t really remember the movies very well and Rey didn’t strike me as a very memorable character) were the parts where Rey knew how to swim despite living her whole life on a desert island and when she struggled to use the Force to lift a small rock in “The Last Jedi,” but then easily lifts a whole mountainside of rocks to save the Resistance at the end of the movie. Obviously, I wasn’t that invested in the movie, but despite this I still had a lingering suspicion that Rey was too good to be true (and therefore, boring) when I left the theater.

Why I Dislike Them

I dislike Mary Sue and Gary Stu characters A LOT. Whenever I write characters I always try to make sure they have realistic flaws and obstacles to overcome- flaws and obstacles that require time, effort, and character transformation to overcome. I think male characters that have everything handed to them are so mind-numbingly boring (like, yawwwn, we’ve been there, done that. Can we move on?) and I am such an advocate for strong female characters that when Mary Sue characters are introduced it just seems like a giant step backward for women. We already expect women to be perfect. It’s time for female characters to represent the truth- which is, duh, we’re not.

Tris Prior from Divergent is Just the Worst

"Insert annoying Tris quote. She's probably whining about something. I'll go back and find the book and add one later. Maybe."

An example of a character I think is soooo overrated and definitively a Mary Sue is Tris Prior from the Divergent Series. I was required to read the book in high school and I was so bored and annoyed by the main character that I wanted to claw my eyes out by the end of the first book. Tris is always described as a “plain” girl with a body like a prepubescent boy, yet somehow she manages to win the heart of Mr. Hottie “Four” (which is a weird name). She decides to join Dauntless on a whim, despite growing up in the grey-clad land of boring Abnegation and then gets pummeled by all the bigger, more ruthless initiates. She cries the whole book, and then has the audacity to make a statement somewhere in the middle about how she isn’t a crybaby (like, sweetie, what?). And then she somehow makes it through the initiation process, despite being a weak, scrawny crybaby??? And to add to it all, at the end of the series she dies. Tris was the first character I thought of when Kadish quoted Menagerie’s statement about Mary Sue’s: “She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.”

In Conclusion

I don’t think Mary Sue’s are very helpful and should be used VERY sparingly. I understand the argument that they allow the audience to project themselves onto the character, but I don’t think this is a very good argument. Mary Sue’s just aren’t interesting or worth emotional investment, as Kadish proves in his article. Mary Sue characters are detrimental to audiences because they don’t teach audiences how to overcome obstacles, especially female audiences looking for strong female characters to look up to.