Haha okay!

Soooo the Rey=Mary Sue thing really is a… sore spot for me because it is so clearly gendered sexist and baseless criticism. She’s no more overpowered than Luke, and she has an arc. Firstly let me discuss her arc, and then the definition I’m using of a Mary Sue, and how Rey doesn’t come close to fitting that definition. 

Rey has flaws that matter for her and for the story–she’s angry, all the time. She lashes out at Finn, at Kylo (she did not have to scar his face, that’s clear), at Luke. She’s traumatized by her abandonment and the idea that Luke could do something so wrong to his nephew he was supposed to love–it triggers her and she flips out, running away to naively try to save Kylo. Because Rey has always tried to be enough, honing all her skills, doing what she can, but it wasn’t enough for her parents. She’s deeply afraid of worthlessness and a lack of love, specifically. Rey’s unable to let go of the past/of the hope her parents will return and that keeps her in a desert, leads to her being abducted, and she clings to the first people she meets who show her kindness. 

When she goes to meet Kylo, like I said above, she wants to save him. But she can’t. It’s not a lacking quality in her that can’t save him; it’s that at this point he isn’t ready to save himself (and he will in IX, I’m sure, but right now he made the wrong choice). That’s why her moment in the throne room with Kylo was so powerful–she and Kylo love each other, but she refuses to be with him even though all she’s ever wanted is for someone to come for her, because she at this point knows that what he wants to do is wrong, and she can’t do that. Rey at the start of TFA almost certainly would have gone with him. She’s learning to expand her world from Rey living on Jakku waiting for her parents, to the entire galaxy which she might have to play an instrumental role in saving. 

Anyways. All that to say: Rey has an arc. Now let’s talk about the concept of Mary Sues, and I’ll give an example of a character I do think of as a Mary Sue from a manga. 

When I think about “Mary Sues” (a term I inherently don’t like because it’s often used as sexist criticism), I think it’s important to keep in mind that the definition varies widely. Generally it’s seen as a self-insert character, an overpowered character, a perfect flawless character, and a character everyone loves for no discernible reason, but the reality is characters can have one or so of these traits and not necessarily fit what I consider to be a Mary Sue. 

I consider a Mary Sue character not so much something that comes down to character traits, but comes down to their framing and what their role is within the story. Like you can have a character that everyone revolves themselves around, but if it’s framed as a negative thing (think Mikasa with Eren in Attack on Titan, though does anyone think Eren is a Mary Sue? He’s not lol) then it isn’t necessarily what makes a character a Mary Sue. You can have a character who is largely flawless but whom the others don’t revolve around, like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (Rey has more flaws than he did). You can have an OP character like Junko Enoshima but if they have flaws they aren’t a Mary Sue. Self-insert is hard to prove anyways, and tbh, we all write ourselves into characters, so eff that definition. Kind of the perfect example of someone who is a reader insert though, and also OP, the world revolves around them, and doesn’t really have flaws is Twilight’s Bella Swan.

Actually, Bella is one of three characters ever I’ve called a Mary Sue. I’m hesitant to use it because of it being a somewhat loaded term. That being said if I do feel it applies I will use it, like for Bella. One of the others is James Bond (but he works for the kind of story he’s in), and the other I’ll discuss below.

Continuing on the topic of defining a Mary Sue, I like this video’s definition of Mary Sue and its role in the story, and agree with it, from about 3:20-6:00. Here’s the best quotes from it (if you watch the full thing, they actually do discuss Star Wars!):

The Mary Sue is the center of attention at the expense of basically everything else… The Mary Sue is the center of everything, and that’s not really going to be a compelling read, no matter how interesting her character is… It takes more than a cartoonishly traumatic backstory and a laundry list of positive traits to make a character compelling. Now to be clear, there are stories with a character at their center where the character isn’t a Mary Sue. The distinction is that a Mary Sue warps the way the world works around them. Glorifying the Sue is prioritized over maintaining the established characterizations or the straight-up rules of reality. A hero might be the center of the story, but they won’t be the only important character.

A Mary Sue isn’t a character; they’re the artifact of an overly-centralized story. … That’s what a Mary Sue is. Not just the center of the universe, but everything in the universe. Everything has to lead back to the Sue. In any situation where that’s not true, you don’t have a Mary Sue… the Sue-ness is built on the fact that the story is sacrificed to make the character look good.

That’s literally not at all what happens with Rey.

Now to discuss an anime/manga character I think exemplifies this almost to a freaky degree of accuracy. I know most people won’t like this but it is something I don’t want to argue about as I firmly believe it.

Kaneki Ken of Tokyo Ghoul, post OEK.

I think Kaneki was an incredibly well-written complex character up until around then, and then basically turned into exactly what you see described above in the video. So many of these excellent, complex characters–Mutsuki’s arc, Hinami’s arc, Touka’s arc, Saiko’s possibility of an arc, Hide’s possibility of an arc, Urie’s arc, Ayato’s arc, Tsukiyama’s arc–all came back to their relationship with Kaneki. Forget them working through their own established in-universe issues: they became defined increasingly only by their relationships with Kaneki. I mean the entire world came together to save Kaneki after a century of conflict but didn’t do that for Rize, whom the narrative endorsed the death of in the exact same circumstance as Kaneki was saved from because… Kaneki felt like he needed to kill her. The themes of “live, even if it’s not stylish,” the complexity of the communication, empathy, building a new world–these were all sacrificed to make Kaneki’s journey work. Touka being someone who confronted Kaneki and called him out on his bullshit–a defining trait of why their ship was so beautiful in part one, even if the way she did it was flawed–was erased. Tsukiyama’s growing resentment with Kaneki pre-Dragon was forgotten. The Q’s struggles with Kaneki as a father figure went nowhere. 

And before people are like “but he’s the main character!” Sure, but this isn’t the case for Luke Skywalker, Monster’s Tenma, HxH’s Gon Freecss, SnK’s Eren Jaeger, Noragami’s Yato or Hiyori, nor even for BNHA’s Deku. So it isn’t a trait typical of MC’s.

Anyways, rant over. But let’s bring it back to Rey. Finn in TLJ does start out orbiting around his desire to be with Rey again. However, what I like about this is that the story shows us that this desire, while we love where it came from and don’t think of it as a terrible thing, is a narrow-minded mindset. Like Rey, Finn’s world is expanding. His worldview via his adventures with Rose and his budding relationship with Rose show him that Rey is a vital, important part of his world, but she is not his sole world. And he has others, too. 

But legitimately no one else orbits around her. Kylo won’t change for her. Luke refuses to train her and when he does he never shows her any kind of affection. Leia treats Rey no differently than she treats the others. Poe like just met her. Rose hasn’t even met her and she wasn’t gushing over this mysterious girl with the force and hero-worshipping her. She was gushing over Finn. Poe, Holdo, Leia, Rose–they all had arcs that had nothing at all to do with Rey. Luke’s didn’t have much to do with her either, to be honest. It was more about him overcoming his own failure not via Rey, as you might have gone into the story expecting, but instead by facing the nephew he hurt and the sister he hurt. 

The story’s themes affect Rey just like everyone else. She fails in TLJ, because everyone fails, but she is able to go on as a part of something greater than herself. 

So yeah hahaha. Sorry, that was very long. But Rey is the epitome of Not a Mary Sue.