A little while ago on Twitter, I posted a thread in response to a claim that Rey—the main character of the Star Wars sequel trilogy—is a Mary Sue. Since I decided to leave Twitter, I thought it would be worthwhile to repost what I wrote here, edited to fit the blog better.
A little recent history, in case you were fortunate enough to miss The Discourse™: Shortly after the release of The Force Awakens, it became trendy call Rey a “Mary Sue.” The reasons most commonly given were that she knew too much right off the bat, picked up too many new skills too quickly, had no significant flaws or shortcomings, and generally encountered few barriers to success. Pushback against this idea centered on its double-standard towards men and women and Rey’s position as a welcoming presence for women in the Star Wars fandom and as a pop culture icon.
The Last Jedi saw a resurgence of the trend, capitalizing on her Force connection to Kylo Ren, her standoffish relationship with Luke… basically, any time she was on screen, someone was howling online about her being a Mary Sue. The Rise of Skywalker also led to the Mary Sue idea coming back around, though it was overshadowed by the polarizing nature of the movie and the fact that, as the third and final installment of a trilogy, Rey being powerful was a given.
With all that in mind, when the topic came up yet again on social media, I wanted to weigh in. Specifically, I thought it was important to demonstrate how Rey is not and cannot be a Mary Sue, by the most common and broadly applicable definition. For those who are curious, I’m not a rookie when it comes to fanfiction: I wrote more than half a million words of fanfic back in the day, and I can safely say that’s less than half my total output. (Which is still far short of a lot of the heavyweights, but still.) I’ve earned my stripes in fandom’s trenches.
There’s also another issue at hand, with the very existence of and continued use of the term, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to start with what, exactly, a Mary Sue is.
Defining “Mary Sue.”
For all you may have heard it mentioned in The Discourse™, the term “Mary Sue” doesn’t have a strong definition. TV Tropes has a good breakdown of the whole thing, from its history to its many distinct and sometimes mutually-exclusive definitions. To summarize, the term comes from classical Star Trek fandom to describe a character common in fanfic of the time: someone (usually female) who immediately wins everyone’s respect and admiration without working for it, demonstrates an easy mastery over her own obstacles, and solves everyone else’s problems.
In essence, a Mary Sue steals the spotlight and doesn’t let it go. She becomes a story tumor, seizing all the other plot threads and character development in order to sustain her own importance and centrality. This has the effect of draining the life and purpose out of the rest of the cast and the ongoing narrative.
There are plenty of variations, and over the years additional qualifiers have been suggested, such as standout physical features (like an unusual hair/eye color) or a unique name, but that’s all just window dressing on the core concept. Because I’m looking for a definition that can be broadly applied, I think we need to distill the nature of the Mary Sue character into a few key traits. Humbly, I suggest:
- The Mary Sue comes into the story already equipped to solve everyone’s problems. Equipped as in intellectually, philosophically, emotionally—not necessarily physically. As per the character Mary Sue from A Trekkie’s Tale, she requires no growth or character development to start “fixing” the other characters, but she still needs a job on the Enterprise in order to do so… which she already has by the time the story starts.
- There are no meaningful obstacles to the Mary Sue accomplishing her tasks. She never suffers setbacks either internally, from other characters being resistant to her efforts or from her own self-doubt, or externally, from the villain’s efforts or complications due to the setting. We never see Mary Sue fail, nor is there any believable risk of failure. The original Mary Sue easily won the hearts of both Kirk and Spock with barely a word. When she had to break out of prison she already had both the hairpin and the knowledge of how to pick the lock. Sure, she was captured in the first place, but that was simply a contrivance for her to be alone with the main characters. There was no consequence for it.
- The Mary Sue supplants the other important characters. This one’s a bit of a holdover from the concept’s fanfic origins, since the term was coined in response to original characters taking the place of canonical characters, but it’s still foundational to the Mary Sue. Not only does she outshine all the other characters even at their narratively-assigned tasks (she’s a better captain than Kirk, for example) but they are at worst ambivalent about being sidelined, if not actively applauding her for it.
Those three criteria all demonstrate the trouble with a Mary Sue. She cannot touch the story without it becoming all about her.
These points also illustrate the key ways in which a Mary Sue undermines the narrative structure and central tension present in any kind of story. Importantly, all three criteria need to be present in a character: if Mary Sue needed to spend time learning her skills in the story, if she lacked the tools required to break out of prison, if Kirk had rejected her romantic overtures, the story would have been more compelling. If you have a character who doesn’t exhibit all of these traits, or even any of them, she cannot be a Mary Sue.
It should also go without saying that these traits can apply to men, too, thus the existence of the term “Gary Stu.” But we’ll touch on the double-standard aspect of that later. For now, let’s address the main thrust of this article.
Rey is not a Mary Sue.
Accepting the above definitions, Rey cannot be a Mary Sue. Not only does she not exhibit any of these traits, it all comes down to a single scene in The Force Awakens, during which she displays traits that are the exact opposite of being a Mary Sue.
That scene? The one in which Han Solo is killed.
The key part of this scene is the fact that Han Solo, a character of great importance to Rey as a mentor and father figure, gets killed in front of her, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
To repeat for effect: Rey does not save Han Solo.
Let’s break down why this proves Rey isn’t a Mary Sue.
1. Rey has no means to solve the problem.
As is established several times in the movie, Rey is effectively an orphan. She has only vague memories of being left behind on Jakku, and as far as we can tell remembers nothing of what it was like to be part of a family.
The conflict between Han Solo and Kylo Ren is based in their family dynamics, the kind of complexities that only people who have had lengthy interactions with a parent or child can understand. While it’s stated that Rey sees Han Solo as a father figure (by Kylo Ren, no less) and so clearly has at least an instinctual understanding of the family dynamic, there’s a history between Han Solo and Kylo Ren that makes the problem between them theirs to solve alone.
There’s also the fact that Rey has no knowledge of Han Solo and Kylo Ren’s conflict. She’s given a brief insight when Kylo Ren assures her that Han would have disappointed her as a father, but Kylo doesn’t immediately launch into a detailed explanation of his daddy issues. We, as the audience, know the rough extent of the problem, but Rey is almost completely ignorant aside from one flippant comment.
Because Rey lacks understanding in that scene—of families generally and of Han Solo and Kylo Ren’s conflict specifically—she lacks any tool which might allow her to solve it. If she were a Mary Sue, she would have convinced Kylo Ren to abandon his enmity for Han Solo, effectively derailing Kylo Ren’s character development.
But you might be thinking, “Hey, doesn’t she have that blaster Han gave her? That would be a solution!” Well…
2. Rey is separated from the problem.
It’s true. Shooting Kylo Ren would be a way to solve the problem, but Rey has a serious obstacle standing in her way: distance.
Han gave her a blaster pistol, which we see her use to tepid effect a couple of times before. We only actually see her shoot somebody with it once, and immediately before doing so she a.) forgets to turn off the safety, and b.) misses her first shot. She’s much more proven as a melee combatant.
There’s another factor here, too. It’s pretty clear that Han is standing between them and Kylo, so even if Rey’s blaster could reliably hit a target that far away, she’d have to basically shoot through Han to hit Kylo. Even then, she’s witnessed him deflect blaster bolts with his lightsaber before, so she would have no reason to believe it would work.
Now, she does have a rifle in this scene, and she does shoot stormtroopers, but they’re directly beneath her. It’s pretty clear that, for Rey, the blaster is a worthless solution.
Chewie does shoot Kylo, but he’s closer and can only do it after Han is dead and no longer blocking the shot. And, to top it off, he lands a non-fatal hit. (Plenty of people have speculated about Chewie intentionally aiming to wound rather than kill, but this post is about Rey.)
So that’s two reasons Rey can’t just solve the problem for Han and Kylo. On their own, I feel like they’re enough to disprove the idea that Rey is a Mary Sue, but there’s another reason worth considering from a narrative position.
3. Rey is not a part of the problem.
Watch that scene again and ask yourself: how significant is Rey here? Why is she in the scene? She’s not an active participant, because she and Finn are too far away to do anything but observe. Her purpose in the scene is to receive motivation for later. She needs a reason to want to kill the villain when they fight, and now she has a very believable motivation to do so.
And yes, Mary Sues can and often do have scenes like this to provide motivation. But the critical detail here is Rey’s absolute lack of impact on the scene, even indirectly.
The entire conflict between Han Solo and Kylo Ren is about Kylo’s fall to the dark side and Snoke’s intentions. Rey isn’t mentioned a single time. She’s not even the reason either of them is in the room: Han came to blow stuff up, and Kylo came to kill his father. She doesn’t come up in their conversation at all. Hell, I’m comfortable staking out the position that neither of them even realized she was in the room with them.
That is why Rey cannot be a Mary Sue. A Mary Sue steals the spotlight whole-hog: when she’s there, it’s all about her; when she’s not, it’s still all about her. Other characters aren’t allowed to have conflicts or plot threads that don’t include her in some way. It’s true that Rey is indirectly responsible for Han Solo being put in a position to get killed by Kylo Ren, since he came to rescue her, but she didn’t have anything to do with their meeting. It was Leia, in fact, who was the motivator.
There is plenty of evidence elsewhere in the film, but to me this scene is conclusive: Rey is not at the center for the whole story. Maybe she is for most of the story, but that’s understandable. She’s the main character. But to be a Mary Sue requires taking over the stories of everyone around her, which clearly doesn’t happen.
So Rey cannot be a Mary Sue.
Looking at the big picture.
All right, so if we accept that Rey doesn’t meet the requirements for being a Mary Sue, where is all of this criticism of her character coming from? There are a few specific examples often thrown around, namely her untrained use of a Jedi mind trick and her lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren, in which her critics maintain she demonstrates a lack of meaningful setbacks.
There are ways to address those situations within the narrative itself. For the mind trick, we already know that Rey has been exposed to the Force. The lightsaber gave her a vivid and disturbing vision, Maz Kanata explained how to reach out and feel it instinctively, and then Kylo Ren gave her a couple personal demonstrations when he froze her in place and tried (with limited success) to read her thoughts. Her resistance to the latter is clearly surprising to both of them, but it’s certainly encouraging to Rey. It’s not a real stretch to imagine her turning that feeling around on her guard, since she’s already experienced how the Force can affect a person’s mind.
Explaining her proficiency with the lightsaber is even easier. We see throughout the film her ability to wield her staff effectively. We also know that Kylo Ren was ordered to bring Rey to Snoke alive and presumably in one piece, and that he was grievously wounded by Chewbacca earlier. (Remember what Chewie’s bowcaster did to literally everyone else it hit in the movie? If Ren weren’t so powerful, he’d have been reduced to a greasy smear on the catwalk.)
So Rey was going all-out while Kylo was fighting with a handicap. Plus, the fight only turned in Rey’s favor when she reached out to the Force and started using it against Kylo. All of that makes sense within the structure of the narrative, but I’d forgive you for missing it on your first viewing. This movie’s not great about foreshadowing, probably because it was trying to pack in such an action-heavy plot. I, personally, dislike the lack of quiet scenes between the characters. Quiet scenes let the audience breathe and give us a glimpse into what these people are like when they’re not running for their lives. A New Hope had so many of them largely due to budget constraints, and I think The Force Awakens suffers more for their loss.
And that, I think, is what’s really at the core of a lot of these complaints: criticism about the pacing of the movie that’s been misplaced on the main heroine. Rey is simply a competent character, no more or less so than any other action hero. But the cues that inform her competence are reduced to significant looks and musical stings, rather than being allowed to form organically as we get to know the character.
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge another factor at play here.
The Mary Sue vs. the power fantasy.
Mary Sue is a sexist term.
There’s plenty of research and discussion to back this up—some of the most popular examples come from Mythcreants, Lydia Schoch, and SYFY WIRE—but it comes down to the double standard between male and female characters.
In general, when male characters exhibit the traits of a Mary Sue, they’re simply written off as a “power fantasy,” a trite but ultimately harmless archetype that exists for the sole purpose of propping up a certain group of people. This can come in many forms, but usually the character is a white, straight male who is socially marginalized (as opposed to culturally marginalized) but then gets to show great aptitude and talent without much in the way of training.
The most relevant example is Luke Skywalker, from Star Wars: A New Hope. He lives on a backwater planet and has dreams of adventure, but he’s a farmer. He only leaves once the people anchoring him there—his aunt and uncle—are dead, not out of a sense of obligation to do the right thing. He joins a galactic rebellion without really meaning to, fights his way out of a giant space station with only a handful of friends, and then flies in the mission to destroy said space station, landing the killing blow due to a combination of his amazing flying and his supernatural powers.
Sound familiar? The hits don’t track exactly to Rey, but they’re close enough. Rey gets swept up in adventure that pulls her away from her nowhere planet, only letting go after she gets confirmation that her parents aren’t coming back for her. She joins a galactic resistance and has to fight her way out of a planet-sized base with only a few allies. She then takes down the Big Bad in a duel because of a combination of her amazing fighting skills and her supernatural powers.
The only real difference is in how these things are foreshadowed. Because of the limitations on the special effects and the budget at the time, Luke’s abilities are mostly talked about (his skill as a pilot) and rarely shown. Because of repeated statements like “I understand you’ve become quite the pilot yourself” and “I’m not such a bad pilot myself,” we’re ready to accept that he’s a good pilot. Additionally, we get to see him learning how to use the Force when he faces off against the training remote while blinded—we’re initially led to believe it’s foreshadowing for using his lightsaber, but it’s really about learning to trust in the Force.
The foreshadowing in A New Hope is laid on thick. Believe it or not, though, in The Force Awakens we get the same amount of foreshadowing for Rey. It’s just handled differently, through visual cues rather than dialogue. She’s already been established as a survivor—keen to recognize useful technology when in the crashed Star Destroyer, fearless when rescuing BB-8 from Teedo, and an intuitive pilot when helping Finn escape—so it’s not a stretch to recognize her growth as she goes out into the galaxy.
(My personal criticism is that the visual cues come during action scenes when it’s easy to overlook them, rather than from quiet moments that don’t require a lot of special effects work. Again, it’s a pacing problem.)
Really, the seemingly biggest difference comes down to masters. Luke had Obi-Wan and Yoda throughout A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Rey, however, is shown as learning without a master: Han is a reluctant teacher at best in The Force Awakens, and Luke outright rejects her in The Last Jedi. Even Leia’s mentorship arc is focused on Poe Dameron, relegating her to a supportive role for Rey.
But that’s beside the fact. The real difference is in their perceived genders: Luke is a man, and therefore his story of becoming a hero is a power fantasy at worst, and a fairy tale at best. Rey, meanwhile, is called a Mary Sue and described as being unrealistically competent just because she’s a woman.
How to move forward.
I think, in general, the term “Mary Sue” needs to be retired from fandom’s lexicon. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of story masquerading as literary criticism. As a standard, it’s applied unevenly and is used to target stories written by women, people of color, and generally marginalized people.
Who am I to say this? I’ve already established my fanfic credentials, but in case it needs to be made explicit: I’m a cisgender straight white male. People like me didn’t invent the term Mary Sue, but we made it what it is, which is sexist and dismissive. Hell, back in the day, I used it myself. I like to imagine that I did it with a certain amount of restraint and recognition of its subjectivity, but the reality is that it was as damaging a term back then as it is now. We just didn’t have the same level of discourse for people like me to recognize it.
So I’m putting forward the idea that we need to stop using it. If you need to discuss how a character might be hogging the spotlight or being unrealistically competent, call it what it is: a power fantasy.
But also recognize that just because the straight white male power fantasy has been played out, that’s not true for other representations. Women, people of color, transgender and non-binary people deserve to see themselves as powerful, too. There’s a strong desire for those kinds of stories, and we have literally no foot to stand on when it comes to calling out those kinds of characters.
I’m happy to say that interest in this subject has died down considerably in the last few years. It seems to have receded faster after the release of The Last Jedi than it did after The Force Awakens, and even faster following The Rise of Skywalker. Hopefully it won’t come up again, but just in case I decided to head off this topic.
So if you see anyone bring it up, point them to this post. I’m willing to litigate this issue for as long as it takes.
Update, 12/5: Apparently there’s some idiot named Joshua Lisec on Twitter who decided to reopen this can of worms. He makes a point of emphasizing “likability” as a trait for Mary Sues, which I didn’t include in my own analysis because it’s incredibly subjective both inside the narrative and outside of it with readers. For example, Joshua claims Rey has no personality, but I disagree. I think she’s guarded, having obviously been burned before yet still maintains her good heart. That’s why she’s willing to intervene to help BB-8 at the start of the movie, though she limits her initial help to helping the droid reach Niima Outpost. That tells me a lot about who she is.
Note that Joshua also ignores a lot of the details I discussed above, such as Rey’s combat and piloting skills honed from her years in the Jakku desert, forced to rely on herself. He claims that Rey starts her arc “already completed,” yet we see her fail multiple times over the movie and grow stronger for it. Even worse, he’s trying to co-opt the notion of Mary Sue into a feminist screed without acknowledging that the term itself is misogynistic and used to silence women.
In fact, which characters does he exclusively target using his definitions? That’s right: women.
You can read through his whole thread using the link above if you want to, but I don’t recommend it. He hasn’t offered any original thinking on the topic at all.
