Female Character: *Everybody is immediately drawn to her for no discernible reason*
Female Character: *Extremely powerful compared to all of the other characters within the story; there’s no reason as to how she became so powerful*
Female Character: *For some reason is able to quickly pick up new skills in a period of time comparable to a genius; no explanation for this too.*
Female Character: *has virtually no weaknesses except she’s clumsy teehee :)*
Person: Isn’t this kind of a mary-sue?
Tumblr: why do misogynists like to invalidate strong female characters???????????
If we’re going to be fair here, the reason so many people get upset when a female character is called a Mary Sue is because that label is thrown around so haphazardly and so very often handed to characters who really don’t deserve to be labeled as such. The controversy of the term comes from its overuse and misuse.
The term can be used correctly, but it is too often misused by people who see a capable strong female character and have a gut instinct to burn the witch and return to their male hero power fantasy.
To quote @ladyloveandjustice
“So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly. They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.
God, what a Mary Sue.
I just described Batman.”
(Source: http://ladyloveandjustice.tumblr.com/post/13913540194/mary-sue-what-are-you-or-why-the-concept-of-sue/amp)
The problem isn’t that characters are unrealistic. Heroes often are unrealistic and it’s ok to criticize media.
However, female characters are criticized where male characters aren’t.
Everything in OP’s post could apply to Luke Skywalker (and definitely applies to Anakin) but those characters won’t be criticized the way Rey has been (even though everything Rey does in The Force Awakens is believable). We are more willingly to believe in a male chosen one who can just do amazing things because he’s the hero.
Boys can have wishfulment stories but girls can only have realistic stories.
^^^^
So, there’s this interesting thing where a certain degree of saturation in stories will train the audience to just accept stuff that’d normally strike them as bizarre or unrealistic, and move on without questioning it. It’s sort of like ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, except that phrasing doesn’t really encapsulate it precisely. It’s more like… commonality breeds acceptance.
For example, a humble young boy who rises to prominence and becomes a hero is such a standard piece of storytelling, that virtually no one ever sits down to watch a movie and actually goes ‘well, but, this is just a young farm lad - surely he can’t do a single thing to help stop the Forces of Evil!’ People in the movie might do that. But unless the audience is very, very young, or has somehow managed to avoid most books, movies, songs, comics, television shows, and oral traditions for the whole of their life, they’re going to sit down and think ‘ah yes, here’s our guy’.
Even though, in real life, it actually IS still pretty far-fetched for Ye Humble Village Lad to turn out to be the only thing standing between mankind and destruction.
The interesting thing, though, is that if you change enough elements of what is so common as to be thoughtlessly accepted, the image you present will no longer resemble the familiar narrative. Even if, below the surface, the other components are exactly the same.
This, along with the above-mentioned misogyny, is another contributing factor to the Mary Sue thing.
Because there are fewer female heroes who are just unabashed power fantasies, embodying unlikely rises to success or mastery of untold skills, if you take a very typical story that stars a dude and swap him out for a lady, the elements once rendered invisible by familiarity, are now noticeable again. The audience is jolted out of complacency, and begins to think more critically about what they’re being asked to believe. (You can accomplish the same thing with other demographics, too, i.e. putting characters of colour in roles typically given to white actors, or having LGBT+ characters with the same abundance as straight ones, and so on and so forth.)
So even people who like to think of themselves as totally fair and unprejudiced can end up enforcing double-standards in entertainment. Because if you don’t catch yourself, you will not even realize that you managed to sit through three Iron Man movies without ever questioning the premise of Tony Stark’s genius, but somehow Shuri in Black Panther just struck you as ‘unrealistic’.
