Reflection and Analysis

Star Wars - Is Rey a Mary Sue?

I decided to work on a story focusing on Finn as the main character, but Rey is there, and--

It led to me looking up essays on whether she is a Mary Sue or not, and found an article called "Is Rey a Mary Sue" by Shanna Swendson, but what drew me into this article was her line, "My verdict is that she's no more a Mary Sue than Luke was in the original trilogy and less than Anakin was in the prequels," which to me screams, you don't actually understand what a Mary Sue is.

Now, there is a line at the beginning of her article where she says that a Mary Sue is a, "character who's too good to be true" which is accurate. Still, the writer ties this too closely to the character being "an author's self-insert" for which I wish to note that not all Mary Sues are self-inserts and all characters have some level of self-insertion. Still, what makes a character a self-insert is whether or not that is the direct purpose of said character and with a lot of Mary Sues, there is actually none of this direct purpose of self-inserting. Most don't even realize it is going on.

She's also claiming this is a character, "with whom the author identifies too closely to be able to write her objectively" to which there is no need to identify with the character or not, but it seems to be playing into this idea that we need to be able to identify ourselves in the characters, which isn't accurate, and that a character can be nothing like oneself to be a Mary Sue, that one doesn't need to identify with them for them to be a Mary Sue.

To which, if her previous post covered Mary Sues...

And from "What's A Mary Sue?"...

Of no surprise, this writer decided to define what a Mary Sue is because, "I was doing my Star Wars rewatch."

I'll give the writers props for noting the origin, but then she claims that, "'Mary Sue' came to be used as a general term for an obvious author self-insert character in fan fiction."

Except, no, it wasn't, per-say.

To be more exact, there were people out there who labeled any character they perceived as an author self-insert as a Mary Sue, to which there was a lot of pointing out that these characters weren't actually Mary Sues as well as pointing out that the characters they perceived as self-inserts weren't. In this, one should understand that these particular individuals shouldn't have been taken seriously, but what they did led to confusion regarding what a Mary Sue actually is.

She goes on to claim what a lot of Rey-stans claim, that "then it got overused to mean a female (almost always female) character who was at all skilled or liked."

Except it wasn't. Sure, there were a few out there who would use it this way, but they always got a lot of flack for doing this, and they were certainly not the majority in fandom. And I certainly do not want to hear this claim from someone who tries to argue that nobody was using the male version of the word when this argument--

Perhaps the writer does worse here by actually admitting that, "the vast majority of fan fiction was written by women, so the vast majority of author self-insert characters are female" while still trying to pretend there is some kind of sexist agenda going on. I guess they've got to admit, in 2023, that yes, this is where it started, yet the writer didn't bother bringing up the fact the term wasn't really used outside of fanfiction prior to Bella Swan and Twilight, let alone the fact there are still people who throw a fit if anything other than an OC gets labeled as a Mary Sue.

They also complain that, "the other reason is that until very recently (and often still), female characters in action-oriented fiction didn't get to do much."