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The Mary Sue continues to be a problem in storytelling, only now it’s out of a sense of not wanting to making the female lead look bad so as not to come off sexist. The mistake here is trying to equate the Mary Sue to any MALE action hero, trying to prove that if he isn’t the Gary Stu then she can’t really be the Mary Sue.
Except that really doesn’t hold up to an actual comparison. It boils down to the struggle, It’s one thing to have an existing skill set when you start a story. I’ve often defended characters wrongly being called “two-dimensional” for already having a skill set, the story centering on how that skill set gets challenged. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger had to struggle when he was mowing down waves of bad guys, having to use his strength but also his quick thinking to reach his daughter, while said daughter was showing how clever she was even though her escape attempts kept failing. She still got a lot farther than I probably would have, and that’s when she wasn’t even old enough to drive. Or her portrayer hadn’t gone stark raving mad on the internet.
Literature Devil has a video that best demonstrates that indeed female heroes are not approached the same way as her male counterparts by taking Galadriel, or rather her Rings Of Power namesake, and going over how she isn’t being written the same way as a male character in her position, and how to make her character’s story into something that, while still counter to her depiction in Tolkien’s story like the rest of the show, she can actually come off as a more interesting character while keeping her a strong character. LD deconstructs everything wrong with her portrayal in this story, compares it to male heroes in other stories over the years in multiple genres, then does the real unthinkable by actually performing a reconstruction of the character. Yes, someone actually broke down a character to build them up better instead of just deconstructing and calling it a story. I think that’s the real shock here.
