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19/7/26 - Mary Sues

I didn't write in my feed yesterday because I went to a small local trivia night with an Australiana theme. There was a costume contest, and the winners were a couple on my table who did the most authentic and awesome Kim and Kel costumes imaginable. She had a blonde wig with tight ringlets, and he spent ages combing and waxing the front of his hair. After they won, somebody came to our table to congratulate them, and to admit when he first saw 'Kel' come in, he wondered if he was just a guy with a really honest fashion style living his best life.
For any non-Australians reading this, I envy the google discoveries you are about to make.

I feel like a lot of people have the wrong idea about the Mary Sue trope. For those of you unfamiliar with the trope, I'll just dump a quote from wikipedia here because I couldn't put it any better.
A Mary Sue is a type of fictional character, usually a young woman, who is perceived as unrealistically free of weaknesses or character flaws, or as serving a wish-fulfillment role for the author.
If you read any articles or discussions about Mary Sues you'll often see a list of common features and tropes associated with them, such as antagonists being unreasonably... erm antagonistic toward them, 'good' characters automatically warming toward them and going out of their way to help them even when it doesn't make sense, their never failing at anything, and generally not having any character flaws.
The problem with this is that people seem to treat the character type as just a list of traits to tick off. I've seen many discussions online trying to argue for this or that character's status as a Mary Sue, or trying to defend a character against accusations of Mary Suedom, which just rattle off a bunch of checkpoints and make their case based on how many Mary Sue points this character earns.
This I think misses the point - all those traits, such as being incurruptible, having a dark and troubled past, having inexplicable skills, being unbeatable and immune to failure - are just indirect indications or red flags. There are plenty of characters that have some or even all of these features, but they don't feel like a Mary Sue because of the rest of the plot and their role in it. Think of all the action movies, especially from the 80s and 90s, with seemingly invincible heroes with the personality of a plank of wood.
To me it's not an objective thing you can measure - you just have to decide based on vibes whether a character feels like a Mary Sue. And the vibe I'm talking about is that the Author seems somehow insecure about their character and needs to compensate for that insecurity, and often this is because the Author is themselves insecure about something and the character is a form of wish-fulfillment or self-insertion. But this is not always the case.
I've gone back and forth on whether Rey from the newer Star Wars films is a Mary Sue, and I think I've settled on the fact that she is. There are no end of justifications and excuses for the checklist of Rey's Mary Sue qualities, but all of that doesn't matter. To me it seems that J.J. Abrams felt insecure about taking on the franchise which is so beloved and whose characters are equally as beloved, and he felt pressure to create equally as timeless characters, in particular the lead. He perhaps had enough screenwriting experience to recognise the character problems, but only managed to hastily slap band-aids over them.