As everyone is talking about Mary sues right now again, Do you think rey winning against Kylo in TFA Was a Mary Sue trait or not? Many defenders & many who use the term take this scene ALWAYS as an example for why/why Not characters like rey are a Mary sue. You could also say It should prove Kylo's Instability after killing his own father & Not rey's Power.
I mean, I don't think its a scene which demonstrates in itself if Rey is a mary sue...on paper.
Its the context and execution which does.
Long time ago I once defended this scene and Rey herself against such accusation simply because I thought Kylo getting defeated was natural since he is already grievously wounded and no matter how much he fuels himself on pain, after a certain point he was naturally bound to fall down anyway. A person fighting back just expediated the process. You would also find rylos themselves defending Rey's skills here by many theories and suppositions which is not unreasonable, However
Her good fighting abilities with a specialized weapon is attributed to her force bond with Kylo where like old EU it has ability of the two bonded to share knowledge and skills
Her win is then not egregious compared to Finn who doesn't have force bond level up and is said to be not that skilled compared to Rey
I think most people still do not buy this anyway and for good reason
In the end force bond theory may have been confirmed but its ability to share knowledge and skills are not and NEVER have been confirmed in canon( no do not bother with Visual Dictionary or novel, those do not even matter to them!) . In fact the out of movie writers and storyboard people even insist Rey is just NATURALLY that talented. Can beat people with a weapon that requires years to master! It is never contested otherwise in the movies itself. Rey doesn't look gobsmacked in her ability to fight with fire stick suddenly and continues to remain unimpressed for next ones.
It also looks terrible especially since it came in heels of Finn's defeat. He may not be experienced fighter but he is still a stormtrooper aka the figures who were on same level as that spinny guy at the start of the movie. We can surmise they know how to fight with lots of things even if they are not expert. They then proceed to choreograph him like he never knows what direction he has to run....
So in the that whole sequences banks on depreciating the skills a stormtrooper can have and inflating the skills of a street fighter who never used anything beyond a melee stick.
This combined with the way the scene is choreographed- Rey is not escaping and/or winning against Kylo based on maneuvers that someone with a melee weapon wielding, somewhat has an ungainly control over a dangerous sword can have. They have her a one-on-one , man-o-man fight with Kylo, which is ASININE choreography decision to make! They could have chosen to execute it another way but JJ wanted to show off Rey fighting right from the first movie, unlike Luke or Anakin who did it in second or third movie where they could feasibly fight like that( and still get defeated and had to resort to other ways to escape). But nah, someone was too out of control with glee to show off their self insert....
I have seen people defend it anyway because "its a love story! none of this is important" and frankly it just shows they have conceded defeat because even if its a love story, the overall genre is an action movie with sci-fi, samurai action tone one. Fights, and clashes have meaning, none of this is or should be pointless, just like in erotica no sex scene can be pointless to the plot and what it says about the character.
In the end the fight scene in starkiller base matters and they fucked it up. The way they executed the fight was emblem of the underlying writing mentality , it just belied that red flag. The people complaining about that scene of Rey being Mary Sue are just clumsily reacting to it.
So I would say TLDR right complain, wrong term. Its just a badly choreographed fight. REALLY BADLY choreographed fight beside technical execution.
