Haha, I know Dre! Just couldn’t help myself!
EDIT: But I do feel like Rey did fail quite a bit in TLJ. She failed to physically bring back Luke to the fight, and she failed to turn Kylo, which were her two main goals in this movie. They ended the movie with the whole Resistance fitting on the Falcon, and hope.
The thing for me is, that failure needs to have consequences for it to have an impact. For both of the failures you discussed, it made Luke and Kylo look bad and foolish in the end, not Rey.
As far as her powers go, I’m under the impression that the Force has literally awakened in the ST. I don’t think it is a static, non-changing energy field. Every Force-user in the ST, including Rey, are capable of powers we have never seen before until now, and I think the Force itself is playing a part in it, hence The Force Awakens. Could they have made it more nuanced or something? Sure, maybe, but it doesn’t ruin the movies for me. I’m satisfied with that and have moved on.
I’m aware of the idea, I just think it should have been developed more for it to work in the context of the larger saga.
DOUBLE EDIT: Also, I don’t feel like the end of the second act of every story has to pan out the same way. Maybe it isn’t compelling to you but it still compelling to me.
It doesn’t, but one of the issues here is, that she already beat Kylo at the end of the previous installment, and so she was already too overpowered in the eyes of many. Some humility would have gone a long way to make her more relatable. In stead she ended up standing towering over Luke.
In any case, I still generally like Rey as a character, mostly because of Daisy Ridley’s endearing performance, and I think the dynamic between Rey and Kylo is what really distinguishes the ST from the OT, and is TLJ’s greatest strength. However, I think the idea that Rey is overpowered is not without merit, and so the idea, that anyone who calls Rey a Mary Sue must be misogynist, because she obviously is not overpowered, as if it’s some immovable fact, is deeply flawed. I think the issue is debatable, and most people who use the term Mary Sue simply use it as a hyperbole to express their displeasure at the character, or to antagonize the opposition, and only a very small fraction of critics use it, because they are misogynist.