After months of angry fanboys complaining that Rey’s excellent piloting abilities and Force powers made her the worst kind of Mary Sue and the worst Star Wars lead, Daisy Ridley herself finally called them out with her usual grace and polish. While on MTV News’ Happy Sad Confused podcast, she said that she “just didn’t get” the Mary Sue claims, “because it wasn’t true.”
Ridley went on to say, “The Mary Sue thing in itself is sexist because it’s a name of a woman, and everyone was saying that Luke had exactly the same thing. I think Rey is incredibly vulnerable, and nothing she’s doing is for the greater good. She’s just doing what she thinks is the right thing. And she doesn’t want to do some of it, but she feels compelled to do it. So for me, I was just confused.”
Female fans shared Ridley’s confusion during the post-“Force Awakens” rush to criticize and tear down Rey’s character. Farm boy Luke could make a one-in-a-million shot to destroy the Death Star after most of his piloting experience came from shooting womp rats on Tatooine, and nine-year-old Anakin somehow could destroy a Trade Federation space station with only a single pod race under his belt. Neither had a great deal of training before they had their Big Damn Hero moments. Was Rey expected to go through a whole training montage between being captured and escaping in order to pick up a lightsaber, especially one that specifically was calling to her? Rey grew up in an environment where she had to fight to survive, and where she could easily pick up some piloting and ship knowledge. Unlike Luke and Anakin, who were immediate excellent pilots with minimal training, Rey has the background necessary to show off her skills when the time calls for it.
Ridley pointing out the similarities between Rey and Luke is an important point. Luke has never been called a Mary Sue, or rather a Gary Stu, despite being the pinnacle of wish fulfillment character. The lowly farm boy who suddenly finds out he has a destiny to save the galaxy? What part of that isn’t wish fulfillment? And it’s not just Luke who meets a lot of the Mary Sue criteria. Nearly every popular male Chosen One character, from Harry Potter to Neo, could fit that mold. Yet these characters are never spoken about in the same derisive tone that Rey and her fellow female heroes are.
The criticism has already seeped into the upcoming “Rogue One,” as Lucasfilm continues to add badass women to their lineup of characters. Jyn Erso has already been labelled a Mary Sue, according to those who frequent Youtube comment sections. Her leadership skills and troubled backstory mean she just serves as wish fulfillment, they say, making her a bad character. Never mind that Jyn’s closest counterpart in the franchise, Han Solo, is also a rogue with a heart of gold. Yet no one is screeching “Gary Stu!” at the mention of Han’s upcoming solo movie.
Perhaps the reason both are being attacked is simply because they are female heroes who don’t subscribe to the rules of being a female in the genre. No one questions when Chosen Ones or unlikely heroes are men, but the second the roles are flipped, the Internet cries havoc and lets slip the trolls of war. After all, the web is a wretched hive of scum and villainy that rivals a Mos Eisley cantina. You can hardly expect these types of fans to be nice about two women serving as major players in a franchise that famously shoved it’s original leading lady into a gold bikini.
To be fair, Rey and Jyn are wish fulfillment characters in a way. I know I’ve been waiting for female heroes who aren’t defined by gendered violence or by gender at all. Neither of them are victimized for being women. Neither are subjected to sexual violence, nor is that a reason for their backstories. Both of them simply exist as women and are allowed to be heroes in their own right, without the usual baggage male writers go through to make their heroines “vulnerable.” It might be different for others, but for me, both of these characters are fulfilling dreams I’ve had about Star Wars heroines since I first watched the original trilogy.
But just because these heroines do fill some wish fulfillment boxes, it doesn’t make them bad characters. Rey is a charming, well-rounded, and engaging character who captured audiences’ hearts, and Jyn is set to do the same. So instead of putting down these characters as Mary Sues, let’s just retire the term completely. It is a relic of a more dated time when any attempt at creating a female lead in the vein of popular male characters was shut down and derided. Nowadays, with more and more strong women taking the lead in franchises and television shows, it has been reduced to an epithet tossed around in an attempt to bring down feminist media.
Rey and Jyn are hardly the first to be slapped with the Mary Sue label, so let’s make them some of the last. It’s time to retire the sexist undermining of female heroes who do not exist solely for the male gaze and instead let them simply exist as characters in the same way we let their male counterparts.
