Hal 9000 said:
EDIT: For the record, Anakin in TPM comes close to being a Mary Sue.
I was also thinking about that. There are still a few deep differences:
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Anakin is said to be some kind of a chosen one, strong with the Force, and we see him that way ("you must have Jedi reflexes“) although he’s far from perfection (”let’s hope you finish the race this time"); we don’t know anything tangible about Rey in the entire movie. Each time someone seems to know something about her (Maz, Luke, Leia, Snoke, Kylo) we never learn what it is;
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Anakin saves the day by pure luck: I don’t like that but he does save the Gungans thanks to luck and skill at piloting; Rey is just good, even her mistakes happen to save everyone;
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and, I think this is the most important thing: Anakin is conflicted. He’s a slave, he leaves his mother, he has no father and loses the only one besides his mother who cared and believed in him (Qui-Gon), and he willingly endangers his own life to help complete strangers. And he is not the main protagonist (which is also important: he becomes the main protagonist but he is not when the film begins); Rey has no conflict, she is passive the entire movie and never takes any strong decision, she blames Finn for being shot at by troopers, she does not want to help BB-8 any further, she refuses a job offer because she just wants to stay the same (“I need to go back”), she does not take the saber, she does not listen to Maz, she is constantly refusing the call for adventure: she has no inner story, no inner journey. She does not even try to understand the Force, the Force comes directly to her! To sum up: she does not do shit to earn anything, she does not struggle except when she’s forced to.
I don’t like TPM, but there is a pattern of monomyth in it, which is totally absent in TFA. Had Anakin been a girl and Rey been a guy I would say the same thing. Anakin was a dreamer for a better life (it’s in TPM, we don’t need to watch AOTC or ROTS to understand that), Luke was a dreamer too (again, it’s contained in ANH, we don’t need TESB and ROTJ to understand that), Rey just wants to wait her relatives on a shitty desert planet (TFA fails at giving something to the character, VIII and IX will have to fix a blatant issue).
So yeah, Rey is the worse main character of the entire saga: not interesting, no tangible backstory, no conflict, nothing. I’m amazed Kasdan wrote this character and Kennedy thought it was good enough. They really should have postponed TFA for another year in order to finish the writing. If some of you don’t see that, I understand why you would rank TFA higher than ANH: you like Star Wars only because of action stuff and dude wearing masks.
My advice: if you want strong and passionate female leads, watch Hayao Miyazaki movies, watch James Cameron flicks, watch Fury Road.