*spoilers*

I didn’t really want to wade into the culture wars with my inaugural post, but it’s going to be somewhat inevitable to completely avoid the fighting, so I might as well get my feet wet now. But I’m approaching the culture wars more as a battle royal than a team sport, I’ll be taking shots at both sides, though not with the intention of ultimately occupying the field. I’m just a humble pilgrim passing through.

I thought that this subject would be a good place to start because it’s not that serious and acts as sort of a touchstone that reveals where you stand on a lot of issues. It’s a subject that you hear about all the time even to this day, even if you really don’t want to anymore, and I’m sure anyone reading this blog has an opinion on it.

I don’t know if anyone has explained this already like I’m about to. It’s possible, I haven’t made a study of it. There’s countless YouTube videos about this series, and countless subreddits, so it might even be likely, but I personally haven’t seen anyone approach the topic quite like this, although I’m sure I’m not the only one who can.

And I don’t know if people who claim Rey is a Mary Sue already know this, and just simply ignore it because they are making a rhetorical statement by calling her one, or because they’ve called her one for so long that now it’s almost like part of their creed. I don’t know. Maybe they’re not really trying to get it right. I think it’s still a relevant topic though. Disney has even announced they are doing a movie with Rey again.

Our discussion will focus only on the first movie though, because that’s where Rey first got stuck with this reputation.

So here we go.

First of all, it’s always a good idea to define some terms, so what is a Mary Sue?

I’m not really sure how to cite to AI (I take a stab at it down below), but the AI definition offered by my Brave web browser is actually pretty good, “A Mary Sue is a character in a story who is unrealistically flawless, often portrayed as perfect, and lacks depth or complexity. The character is typically the protagonist or main character, and their abilities, skills, and experiences are exaggerated or unrealistic. The term ‘Mary Sue’ is often used to criticize a character who is perceived as being too idealized, lacking in flaws, or overly perfect.”

Wikipedia adds that it’s a character “who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains”.

These definitions are more or less correct, but let’s also say what a Mary Sue is not: it’s not a product of misogyny. It’s not sexist. It’s not the patriarchy trying to maintain its dominance. It can be used as such, but isn’t automatically. It’s one of the first things they discuss in writing workshops about character development. A Mary Sue can be a male character and is often used to describe one. In fact, the Mary Sue I personally dislike the most is a young male character. I won’t say who he is because one of my rules is not to bash people’s work, but I will say he comes from a very successful I.P.

Some people, the types who are afraid of gendered language, use the term “Gary Stu” to refer to male Mary Sues. I find this unnecessary in the same way that I find it unnecessary to refer to people as “fishers” instead of “fishermen” regardless of their biological sex. So I just use Mary Sue for everyone. But it does go to show that even for these folks there is such a thing as a male Mary Sue.

Also, it is important to note that not all Mary Sues are unlikable. It’s not absolutely fatal to your story to have your protagonist be a Mary Sue. Superman is a Mary Sue and he’s pretty likable. He’s not absolutely perfect, in the sense that although he can run faster than a speeding bullet and leap over buildings in a single bound, he still gets a little tongue tied around Lois Lane. So even though he’s a super man, men who aren’t super can still relate to him. But he is still pretty much a Mary Sue.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, who Rey was obviously inspired by, is also a Mary Sue and I like her a lot. Nausicaa is by far Miyazaki’s best work, better than anything he won an Oscar for, and his protagonist is a complete Mary Sue.

And not everyone agrees on which characters are Mary Sues, such as myself disliking that very successful character I alluded to above. Evidently, a lot of people do not think he is a Mary Sue. Or maybe they do but still find a way to like him.

So there is some complexity around this character type, which, much like life, contains contradictions.

Which brings us back to Rey, because in spite of what a lot of people say, she’s not a Mary Sue.

She just looks like it. And that’s where the confusion comes from.

To explain this seeming contradiction let’s start with the title of the movie: The Force Awakens. One of the ways of titling a story is just to say who the story is about. So Oliver Twist is about Oliver Twist, and Hamlet is about Hamlet, and Anne of Green Gables is about Anne of Green Gables. Pretty basic, right? Rambo is about Rambo.

What might not be so obvious is that’s actually what they did here, they used the name of the protagonist in the title, which is the Force. Rey is not the protagonist of the story. She is just the main character and viewpoint character who has been caught up in things beyond her control. Her real, I suppose, heroism, is just in trying to ride the wave. Because evidently the Force can’t do everything itself, and that’s been true since Star Wars began. Obviously.

So Rey comes across as being a Mary Sue at times because the wave she is riding is kind of a tsunami. It’s none other than the will of the Force against the growing power of the Dark Side. But you don’t really see the wave because it’s invisible, and that’s the problem.

But you can detect it if you look closely, so what follows is a description of how the force protags during the story. Because it’s important to this inquiry to differentiate between who is responsible for what. (However, this is pretty long, so if you’re familiar with the movie you might want to just skim it until we get down to just above the picture of Dark Rey below.)

In the beginning sequence, the Force does something to Finn. We don’t know what exactly, but evidently it breaks his combat conditioning, or devotion to the First Order, or whatever you want to call it, which is why he doesn’t follow orders to shoot the civilians. We know this isn’t Finn doing it of his own accord because Kylo Ren looks at him when this happens, and not in a familiar way. Why? Later we learn that Kylo Ren has felt an awakening in the Force, evidently not knowing what it meant, but we are meant to believe he felt it then, when he was staring at Finn. We know this because they don’t need to tell him what stormtrooper helps Poe escape, Ren already knows, the one from the village. And Phasma, the stormtrooper captain, says that this was Finn’s first offence.

Rey has nothing to do with this. That’s the Force. What’s more, while we’re still in the first act, although this isn’t actually portrayed but implied, the Force sends BB-8, who is carrying a map to Luke Skywalker, the last Jedi, to a person who just so happens to be of an age and a power that Luke can train in the use of it. Namely Rey. Then, the Force brings Poe and Finn back to Jakku, in a way, because they’re going back for the map to Luke Skywalker, one of the remaining Force wielders. Maybe the only remaining Force wielder (non-Sith). That’s what makes him important. It’s not his sunny disposition. So it’s still the Force that the plot is rotating around, and that’s the sign of the protagonist. They’re not going back for Rey.

It’s the Force who causes the big beast of burden thing (a happabore evidently) that’s drinking in the trough alongside Finn to nudge him towards the commotion in the tents where Unkar Plutt’s men are trying to steal BB-8. You’re supposed to pick up on that, although on first viewing you might miss it.

That brings him into contact with Rey. And for what would otherwise be a very strange reason, from that moment on Finn acts as her protector. Or tries to. Why? Because the Force needs her alive. It needs her to get to Luke Skywalker and learn how to use it. To defeat the Dark Side and bring back balance. (That’s the only explanation for Finn’s behavior. I mean, he’s obviously attracted to her but she’s his number one concern from the moment they meet. This is the Force’s choice.)

And a stormtrooper is a good choice because Finn’s one of them. He knows how to get past the First Order, as is actually portrayed in the story when he tells Rey to fly low in the Millennium Falcon to confuse the TIE fighter tracking and to hide in the smuggler cavity and turn on poisonous gas because the stormtrooper masks don’t filter out toxins, only smoke. He’s kind of the perfect choice to help her get away from the First Order/Dark Side, considering he’s one of them. He knows how to fight also. And it even helps when they first start shooting at them that Finn believes, truly, that they are after him and that’s the reason they are shooting at them, when it’s really BB-8 that they are after. It’s better from the Force’s perspective for Rey not to think BB-8 is this dangerous, that it’s Finn, the “resistance fighter” (which is also important), who’s the trouble. Rey’s not exactly a softy. She very well might think BB-8 is more trouble than he’s worth if TIE fighters are shooting at him.

And that would be a problem. Because the Force needs to keep Rey and BB-8 together so that she can find the map. And we know the Force wants to do this because later when Kylo Ren is reading Rey’s mind he tells her he sees the island she’s been dreaming of, which ironically is actually where Luke is located although Ren doesn’t grasp that fact. It’s the Force that put that vision there and considering the time line here Rey must have been having this vision of the island long before the events of the story take place. I think Ren even says something like that. You dream of an island. The Force has been trying to get her there before we ever meet her.

And after they get away from Jakku, just when Rey tells Finn she needs to get back, separating her from BB-8 and the map because he would stay with Finn, the “resistance fighter”, the Force sends her Han Solo. Of all the people in the galaxy, Luke’s brother in law. And it’s he that takes her to the location of Anakin’s lightsaber, which bends time and space communicating with her somehow, which awakens something dormant in her, as evidenced by Obi-Wan’s voice saying at the end of the womb-vision thing that these are her first steps.

None of this is really Rey’s doing. She might not have gotten away from the First Order on Jakku without Finn. In fact, probably wouldn’t have. She might be able to handle herself against Unkar Plutt’s toughs, but she isn’t getting away from TIE fighters. As evidenced by the fact that she is running from them as fast as she can. So she’s not really “overpowered” in the way that she is often portrayed as being and that would make her a Mary Sue.

Outside of Maz Kanata’s cantina, she loses to Ren in the forest on her own. Pretty easily. She evidently doesn’t know as much about blasters as she thinks.

It’s the Force that comes to her rescue, or at least, begins to manifest inside her after her encounter with the lightsaber, when she is trying to resist Ren’s Jedi Mind Trick in the interrogation chamber. She uses it, but unknowingly. She doesn’t “summon” the Force to her aid. She’s confronted by it and I think we are meant to believe that it nudges her in the same way it nudged the happabore back on Jakku, although that might not be a flattering comparison. I’m just saying, it’s not until she actually feels Ren using the Force on her that she realizes she can use it too. That’s not her first tactic. And she doesn’t even realize what she did.

But she does realize something, because later, while she’s still tied to the slat or whatever that thing is, the vertical plank in the interrogation chamber, she tries to use Ren’s Jedi Mind Trick on her stormtrooper guard. Unsuccessfully at first. Although she does make it work the second time.

That might seem very Mary Sueish, she’s already using Jedi Mind Tricks ten minutes after first using the Force, but what saves it from being so is that she has no idea what she’s doing and knows it. She doesn’t take credit for it. When Finn asks her later how she escaped she says she doesn’t know, like she is as surprised as he is. She doesn’t say something like, because “I’m Rey and I’m awesome”, or something like that. And yes, there are actually recent examples of young female characters (and male for that matter), more recent than Rey by about ten years, who do respond like that when they first start having “powers”. I could name them but it violates one of my rules. (And a real Mary Sue would say something like that, or have something like that said about them. The Mary Sue I dislike would have had both.)

The Force is helping her. And why not? Luke has checked out. Who is left? The Jedi are gone. We are meant to believe that there are no more Force wielders who can stand up to the First Order and the Dark Side. So the Force has “awakened” and is now taking direct action, as active as it can, in the drama.

It’s the Force that allows Rey to defeat Ren in the final battle. She’s losing on her own. She’s backing up at every step until she’s standing on the precipice and has nowhere else to go. It’s not until Ren offers to be her teacher in the “Force” that she hears the word and remembers to try and use it, exactly like Luke did when his teacher reminded him. And that’s when the tables turn, the Force has tagged into the ring, and it doesn’t go well for Ren from that moment on. (Incidentally, this is an example of what Jack Bickham talks about in his book Scene and Structure, in Chapter 12, when he’s referring to the “gimmick” that interrupts a scene. I never particularly liked that word because I don’t think it is right, but I’m bringing it up because the interrupting scene, he says, usually comes out of “the hidden story” {one of the three that actually exists in any story}. And that’s exactly what we’ve been discussing. The Force is in the hidden part of the story, and that caused some problems in understanding. It’s its own mini scene because for a moment Rey’s actual struggle is to harness the Force, not fight Kylo Ren.)

It’s easy to see why that might seem like Rey is a Mary Sue, though, especially if you’re not paying attention or seeing it for the first time. She just defeated the “Master of the Knights of Ren” in single combat with a lightsaber less than a day after first using the Force. But that’s just surface level thinking. It’s just at first blush. Ren could have killed her, first of all, but didn’t. He was overconfident. If he had gone in there knowing how strong she was, she’d probably be dead regardless of her strength. If he even intended to kill her in the first place. Which he didn’t. And why not? Probably because she had just demonstrated, again, how much potential she had in the Force by stealing Anakin’s lightsaber away from him. That’s why he offers to be her teacher and doesn’t just shove her into the void.

Anyway, this turned out longer than I had thought, but there are a couple more points to make.

To the Wikipedia point about being inexplicably competent across a broad range of domains, Rey is so good with machines because that’s evidently a trait shared by people who are strong in the Force. Anakin Skywalker and Luke were both mechanically inclined. (That actually might be part of the point of Star Wars, but that’s a different discussion, and this has gone on long enough). She knows how to scavenge Star Destroyers. She knows how to fix BB-8’s antenna. When she is giving lessons to Han Solo about how to fly his own ship, the “Compressor” moments, that might seem very Mary Sue, but I think it’s consistent with other characters in the series who were not Mary Sues. And it’s also consistent with an older Han Solo who might be missing a few steps.

And it’s not like she’s perfect in this regard either, she does press the wrong fuses to let the Rathtars escape.

Furthermore, a Mary Sue would never have fallen for Finn’s deception. Her female intuition, or her superior instincts that she’s more in touch with or something, would have clued her in to the fact that Finn was not a resistance fighter, even with the Force taking a hand. But she is taken completely by surprise. And it’s not like she didn’t have any clues. And we are meant to pick up on the fact that she had clues. Han sees through it at light speed. That’s sort of the opposite of what you’d expect with a Mary Sue.

And Rey doesn’t finish the movie by taking up the sword against tyranny or something like that. In fact, the final shot of the movie is her passing off the sword to someone else, pleadingly, an action that says that she can’t do this by herself.

But I don’t know if any of that matters if you don’t pick up on the dynamic between Rey and the Force. If you think it’s all her than you very well might come to the conclusion that she’s a Mary Sue. It was kind of a precarious writing choice to make the protagonist something without corporeal form, almost like the ocean from Moana. And I think that people could be forgiven for thinking Rey is responsible for everything that happens and is therefore a Mary Sue, even though she isn’t, because of this choice. I’m not saying it’s a bad choice, just a precarious one that, obviously, caused some confusion.

And all of the above is not meant to discount Rey’s contribution to the outcome. She had a role to play and she didn’t bail out when she could have. She does run away from Maz’s cantina on Takodana, but she turns around and starts fighting when the stormtroopers arrive.

At this point, you might still say, okay, I believe you, she isn’t a Mary Sue, but who cares? I still don’t like her. She’s not a well developed character.

Well, I’m not going to tell anyone what to like, and frankly, I also think they missed some opportunities with Rey later on, especially when it comes to Dark Side Rey, who we don’t meet until far too late and don’t get enough of. I mean, if you’re going to have her flirt with the Dark Side the whole time, at least let us see what she’s like once it’s seduced her. (On a side note, this is one of the strengths the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera has over the stage musical, in that we actually get a glimpse of what Christine would be like with the Phantom during The Point of No Return number. They changed how they played that scene for the movie version and it makes for a huge improvement. That might seem like a random comparison but Star Wars is space opera.)

So I would agree there were some issues with her development, although I think on the whole they’ve been rather exaggerated.

But what I really think might help to understand Rey is to consider what type of character she actually is, at least in the first movie, now that we agree that she isn’t a Mary Sue.

And that would be what’s called The Fair Unknown.

Our good friend Mr. AI who works for the Brave browser gets it right again, damn him. He defines The Fair Unknown thusly:

“{the fair unknown} refers to a character, often a knight or a hero… The Fair Unknown is often depicted as a hero who is:

• Unaware of their true identity or noble lineage
• Raised in isolation or obscurity
• Destined for greatness or a heroic quest
• Possesses natural abilities or talents that set them apart (emphasis mine)
• Often has a connection to King Arthur’s court or the Round Table

The fair unknown symbolizes the idea that true greatness can be achieved through humility, innocence, and a lack of knowledge of one’s own potential. This theme also explores the idea of the ‘noble savage,’ where a person’s natural abilities and character are more important than their social status or upbringing.” (Oddly, when I came back and tried to screenshot this definition, it had changed, and nothing I could do would get it back. That’s what you get for using AI I guess. But trust me, this is what it said when I first typed in the search.)

I’m not sure about the “noble savage” part, and not because it’s a politically incorrect topic in literature these days. I could really care less about that and we are going to discuss at length down the road the character of the “Native Girl”. I do think The Force Awakens and the rest of the trilogy does indeed explore the idea that a person’s natural abilities and character are more important than their social status or upbringing, I just wouldn’t connect that with the idea of the noble savage. The noble savage is kind of condescending, and I don’t think that like Percival from Arthurian legend was considered a “savage”.

Although they do continually refer to Rey as a “scavenger”, and she’s a Fair Unknown.

Anyway, I’m not totally onboard with that part.

But the rest of it is good. It does come from Arthurian cycles, where some good looking kid comes out of the Hills of Tennessee or something and shows up at court and starts besting knights. That’s what Percival did.

Hopefully, it’s kind of obvious how Rey fits the bill because I really don’t want to march through it like I did above with the Mary Sue definition, but I will just point out a couple things.

One, Rey is “fair”. Meaning young and attractive. (And this actually might explain why they cast Daisy Ridley as Rey when they never really leaned into her attractiveness. She’s beautiful because she’s The Fair Unknown. And that’s it.) There is also the meaning of “fair” in that they’re worthy.

And also, we are dealing with knights here. Luke is a Jedi Knight. Kylo Ren is Master of the Knights of Ren. When Rey finally ends her quest, it’s at the Jedi temple, basically their original court, and hands the last surviving member of that court a saber.

And in the end, Rey says that she loved Ben, not Kylo Ren, which underscores the theme of humility. (And ironically is supposed to be a trait of knighthood, but that’s an aside).

The thing about The Fair Unknown, is that their sort of naivety about the world is kind of their strength. They’re not supposed to really grow out of it during the quest. They remain the same.

So if you’re reacting negatively to this character, maybe it’s not because she’s written poorly, it’s just because this ancient character type offends your modern day story sensibilities. And maybe you got it mixed up on some level with the Mary Sue, for a kind of double whammy.

But while the Mary Sue is more often than not just annoying, The Fair Unknown, while maybe frustrating to Moderns that they succeed upon arrival, at least stands for some idea outside of their own greatness–that anyone can be a hero. And that’s a valid proposition. The story doesn’t always have to be about Gawain.

And it can be a good lesson for the knights. (I think in The Wheel of Time there is a little anecdote that Lan uses about some famous swordsman who was bested only once, by a farmer with a staff.)

And I’m pretty sure that comports with the rest of the trilogy.