Why Wonder Woman is not a Mary Sue Like Rey

Wonder Woman is not shown to be some kind of emotional powerhouse that doesn't need anybody and is a totally "independent woman." On the contrary, her love for Steve makes her extremely vulnerable emotionally. The loss of Steve is a life-changing experience for her. She still grieves for the man she loved 100 years later. She doesn't walk around like she doesn't need men and saying "I am woman, hear me roar."

The movie overall is about as least feminist as I ever would've imagined we would see in the current political climate. There is no way that Patty Jenkins is a modern feminist who buys into the current "wave" of feminism, whatever it might be. She isn't anti-men, anti-sex, anti-violence-in-media, anti-glamour, etc. She is simply pro-equality, believing women should have the opportunity to compete on the same playing field as men and playing by the same rules. Before feminism was mucked up with one unrelated political agenda after another attaching to it like barnacles, this simple, clear and fair ideal was all it meant. Jenkins has created a movie that embodies that fairness and in the process shows that she understands women better than the feminists do.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? SHE TOTALLY IS! She ended World War I by herself, are you kidding me? They literally had her end World War I!

Give me a break.

That is great to hear. I always like it when they make strong female characters who are not made strong by putting men down. I heard this was not the slightest bit anti-male which is an excellent achievement considering the current climate.
Glad to see people not making movies about males vs females and just focusing on making them great through a great story and acting.

Rey excels in her competencies: She can pilot, she's good with electronics, she knows how to fight, and despite her early memories being blocked by trauma, she is still a Force user who was trained as a child.... trained by Luke. That last part is the foundation of her entire life: Jedi training during youth. After that, she had to fend for herself for basically two decades.

Rey still has her failures, too. She got scared and got captured after wandering away from Maz's castle (lol that had autocorrected to Mao). She also took her time during the last Kylo fight before finally deciding to use some actual combat, instead of trying the same lightsaber attack over and over (seriously, she looks like she panicked and forgot what she knows, she keeps trying to do the same forward thrust and Kylo just brushes it off every time).

She isn't made to look good at the expense of Finn, because Finn is exactly who he needs to be: He was raised as a child soldier and has had limited experiences. He mostly knows how to help construct a base, and the basics of how to be a Stormtrooper (though he didn't have any length of experience in that field, since his first mission was his last).

Finn has no experience in the world. He has grown up within an insular militaristic organization where he only needed to be qualified for one job, then he trained for a new one and quickly had a moral quandary against actually being a trooper. I'd bet a huge chunk of his First Order training was more propaganda and obedience conditioning than anything else.

LASTLY on Finn, if you think Rey would only be realistic if all males in the story were more competent than her, and she was not superior to any of them, then that is just insipid. Poe is certainly VERY competent --- Does Poe ALSO "male bash" by being made to look better in contrast to Finn? No, you'd never say something like that, because Poe and Finn are both male, so it doesn't matter.

Seeing the sexism yet?

Kylo, similarly, is exactly who he needs to be based on his character. He also had to be injured and even more emotionally fragmented in order to eventually stop beating Rey during the lightsaber fight, AND Rey had to overcome him by concentrating on the light side of the Force. Plus, she got the upper hand at the end, but didn't actually defeat him, as the fight was ended by the terrain.

Plus, there are so many "Marty" Stu's who have never been complained about, overly-competent male characters who are just accepted and even celebrated. Many of these male characters have historically been paired with "damsels in distress" that they must save, yet I doubt you would care about them being made to look good by contrasting them against a female character who does nothing.

But you wouldn't care about that, because the character is male. Males in movies can be overly-competent all they want, apparently.