Please, no more Mary Sues

Well Luke did actually train to be a pilot and would've already been in the academy if not for his uncle. That's a little more than a few trips up in a ship i.e. Rey.






Yes... that. Actually there's nothing in the film that says it was a few days training with Yoda. No onscreen time frame is given. And according to the novelization of TESB it's a few weeks, not a few days. On top of that he utterly failed. He had a sparse few shining moments against Vader. But if you pay attention to the dialogue Vader didn't take him seriously, allowing for some of that.... "Perhaps you're not as strong as the Emperor thought." Rey gets 5 seconds of meditation against Kylo and instantly opens up a can of Jedi woop a$$.

Just sayin'.

you did not properly think this through again, did you? Tip for life: Do.

The following is a quote I saved from Reddit years ago, I don't remember the user but he/she summoned up my exact feelings about Rey in episode 7:

"My problem with Rey is not "UGH WHY IS THIS WOMAN GOOD AT THINGS".

My problem is "why is this scavenger who's lived basically alone on a desert planet since she was very little able to fly and fix the Falcon better than Han or Chewie, able to shoot almost perfectly accurately with a pistol from 100 meters despite having never used one before, able to use Jedi mind tricks and other significant Force techniques without even a moment of training, able to reverse Kylo Ren's mind probe on the first try, and able to fight with a lightsaber and defeat someone with far more experience than her who just kicked Finn's ass when he tried to same?"

The only time she ever fails at or even struggles with anything after she meets BB-8 is when Kylo Ren captures her on Takodana with his Force stasis ability. The fact that this is the ONLY time she fails makes it look like pure narrative contrivance to try and work Starkiller Base into a movie it doesn't fucking belong in to begin with.

People trying to defend her keep trying to say "oh, Luke and Anakin were Mary Sues too, you're just sexist" -- NO THEY WEREN'T. Luke and Anakin both have to put actual EFFORT into overcoming the obstacles before them, and had clear limitations and a penchant for relying on their friends and allies to get them through their struggles.

Throughout the saga, Luke's constantly getting in over his head, rushing recklessly into situations without planning fully and needing other people to dig him out. Luke's an uncommonly talented pilot thanks to his Force sensitivity and his years of bullseyeing womp rats in his T-16 back home, but there are multiple times at Yavin where he'd have been toast if the other X-Wings hadn't covered him, and the only reason Han was able to save him at the last minute was because he got lucky and was the last fighter Vader tried to pick off, and it certainly didn't keep him from being shot down on Hoth or crashing into the swamp on Dagobah. By the time of ESB, Luke's very strong in the Force and has had a few years to practice with his lightsaber, but that hardly stops him from getting fucked up by a wampa, almost frozen to death, and then getting his shit totally pushed in by Vader. By the time of ROTJ, Luke's almost a fully trained Jedi -- which is incredible in itself, considering he's only been at this four years; while padawans of the old Order were usually knighted in their early 20s, even Anakin had at least a decade of training before being knighthood -- but he only uses his first mind trick now, on Bib Fortuna, and the whole plan goes to shit when he discovers Jabba is not so vulnerable, with only the fact that R2 has his lightsaber allowing him to salvage the plan and save the day, NOT TO MENTION the fact that even though he just barely manages to defeat Vader, he still can't possibly stand against the Emperor alone.

Even though Luke is clearly gifted, his gifts only go so far, and each one has an explanation for HOW and WHY he has it. He's still able to fail, and in fact does so CONSTANTLY. It's thanks to his friends and his own perseverance that he's able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Anakin is a marginally better candidate for Suedom due to the fact that he's building droids and podracers at the age of 9, not to mention being literally the Chosen One, but his skill with fixing things is explained by the fact that he's worked in a junk shop his whole life. He's an astonishingly gifted pilot when it comes to podracing, but even then has never even FINISHED a race before that fateful Boonta Eve, and as soon as he's in an unfamiliar N-1 Starfighter, he's completely restrained by the autopilot, and once he manages to turn it off he loses control of the fighter, gets shot, and crash-lands in the droid control ship's hangar, skidding to a halt near the main reactor by luck. Even then, everything's overheated, and the droids close in, but at the last minute the ship cools off enough to power back up. Fiddling with the controls, he accidentally blows up the reactor and flies right the hell back out of there. He doesn't shoot down a single fighter or even attempt a stunt more complicated than a simple roll ("I'll try spinning! That's a good trick! AAAAAH!!" By the start of the Clone Wars, he's incredibly strong with the Force and a talented swordsman, but surrenders as soon his lightsaber is destroyed by machinery in the droid factory, and loses an arm to the enormously more experience Count Dooku while fighting with borrowed sabers, not to mention struggling immensely (and failing) against his crippling fear of loss and abandonment. By the end of the war, his power and skill has become so great that he can defeat Dooku in single combat, but the tragic flaw of his fears and ambitions brings him to his highest and lowest point, and even with the dark side at his back he still falls before his old master.

Anakin still fucks up constantly, gets into situations way beyond his abilities, and has clear explanations for why he has the skills that he has. He's rather more fortunate than Luke tends to be, considering that ESB for Luke was just the entire galaxy beating the shit out of him for two and a half hours, but even so, there are clear explanations for HOW those fortunate circumstances came to be.

Rey hops into the Falcon's pilot seat and, after a clumsy takeoff, is immediately pulling off stunts that would make the Blue Angels think twice. She also knows all the inner workings of the ship for no apparent reason, and knows them better than Han or Chewie, considering that she's able to fix the thing that breaks as soon as they jump to hyperspace before Han has even figured out what broke. She's handed a blaster despite having never apparently used one and, after missing her first shot, gets one-shot-one-kill hits on every other stormtrooper who enters her line of sight. Anakin's lightsaber calls to her for no apparent reason, screaming like an infant to summon her even though no lightsaber has ever done anything like that before in canon OR Legends. She not only resists but reverses Kylo Ren's mind probe on the first try in the torture chamber, reading his thoughts though he tried to read hers. She successfully employs a Jedi mind trick despite having never used the Force before. She defeats Kylo Ren, who has a great deal more experience than she does, despite having never used a lightsaber before. And somehow the story contrives for her to be the only human to go meet Luke even though the entire Resistance has been looking for him the whole movie and his sister now honestly has nothing better to do, since nearly the entire First Order seems to have just been obliterated and it's not like she has any other family to spend time with anymore.

Rey is constantly privileged by circumstance at every turn and never has to work or struggle for any of her successes once the story gets started. The last time she failed at something she was trying to sell scrap to that fatass for rations and didn't get the price she wanted, and then only because the fatass wanted to twist her arm to get her to sell him BB-8, not because of any sort of mistake she made. Her capture happens only because Kylo Ren whips out a Force stasis ability he never uses on anyone at any other point in the movie and immediately declares her equally as important as the droid, even though capturing the droid would have given them an instantly accessible map without having to rip it out of someone's memories first. Everything that ever goes wrong for her is exclusively because other people in the story decide they want to give her a hard time and the plot decides to let them. She has no personal failures or character flaws to speak of.

I honestly think she's JJ Abrams' own self-insert character and The Force Awakens is a slightly modified version of a fanfic he probably wrote when he was like 12. She's a girl because Abrams hoped that would be enough of a change to throw us off the scent and get us to ignore the fact that the writing is abysmal."

I think the PT is the only one that got it right. A 9 year slave with the time, resources, and capabilities to be a 3PO-building, multi-lingual Nascar driver. The only person of his species that can podrace, let alone his age. He can also charm older chicks with his sweet angel pickup lines, win space battles in ships he's never flown before on accident, and is completely selfless on top of it. What a guy.

In fact, he's such a swell guy that we'll have to make him a completely different character in the sequels to explain his turn to the dark side.

Are you from an alternate reality where everyone loved 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker? Cuz we didn't really like it either when Anakin came off as a mary sue. 
And yet when compared to Rey, Anakin is average.
AND even then, you're ignoring a lot of Anakin's mitigating context. He's made to be the Chosen One, which while cheap and lazy, explains a lotta stuff. He spent his whole life working in a junkshop, and combine that with his mechanical genius. Podracing? Yeah, but again, Chosen One. Charm chicks? Blame that on Lucas being shit at romance. Win space battles? Yeah but for fucks sake, other pilots were with him dying in his place and R2D2 did most of the flying. He never shot down anything. When Anakin tried spinning he nearly fucked up, and by dumb luck he landed inside the hangar. Selfless? Well he had a good mother, it probably came from her.
Where does Rey get her own selflessness? Abandoned by her parents, treated like shit by Unkar, and treated as competition by every other scavenger. No one to teach her morals. By all accounts, Rey should be selfish and distrustful. She should've traded BB-8 for all that food in a heartbeat, but no, she decides to be selfless and risk starving for a fucking machine she barely knows. A machine that is no different than every other machine she's ever traded for food.

I'd rather just let you step in it for hilarious comedy, like Jar Jar.