MithrandirOlorin wrote:Every character is a Wish Fulfillment character, that is not Mary Sue means.
That might be true if you're using the term wish fulfillment in a trivial way, but again, that's beside the point I'm trying to make here. My point is that most people are trying to pin down sloppy writing when they use the term Mary Sue. Wish fulfillment, authorial insertion, characters that are just too perfect at everything, whatever term/concept you want to associate with a Mary Sue, those things aren't necessarily even bad, but they often are associated with low level writing.
Here's a contrast-
Konstantin Levin from Anna Karenina and Pierre Bezukhov from War and Peace are both based on Tolstoy himself to some degree. Yet they both work beautifully as characters in two of the greatest novels ever written. If you wanted to call it "authorial insertion", well, it worked out pretty well.
Ariadne Oliver is a character in about a half-dozen Agatha Christie novels, mostly in her later Poirot novels. The character is clearly Christie's avatar and voiced a lot of her frustrations with writing detective fiction, being a celebrity, and in having to deal with Poirot himself as a fictional detective. A small appearance or two, a Hitchcockian cameo, that would have been fine, but I found the character and her level of involvement in those stories to be way too self-indulgent and a sign that Christie could publish whatever she wanted rather than putting effort into crafting really tight mysteries like her early to mid work.
With Rey, her being so great at piloting and defeating Sith with next to no experience or training doesn't jive with her backstory, Star Wars lore, or make a lot of dramatic sense. I feel like there's an element of pandering with her character. She was great at everything not because it made sense for the story, but because they wanted to make a popular character who could succeed the old trio.
The owls are not what they seem.
