Prey Critics Don't Seem To Know What A Mary Sue Is

thegamer.com:

Prey, Hulu's new Predator prequel, has been subject to all the usual criticisms leveled against mainstream action movies with a female lead. Most saliently, its protagonist Naru — a Comanche woman who seeks to prove herself as a hunter by killing the extraterrestrial baddy stalking the Great Plains of 1719 — has been accused of being a ‘Mary Sue’.

If you’ve spent any amount of time on nerd-dominated corners of the internet in the last decade, it shouldn’t be surprising that the scarlet letter which has been applied to previous action heroines like Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, Daisy Ridley’s Rey, and Maisie Williams’ Arya Stark, would also be applied to the female lead in a big new action movie. What may be surprising is how fundamentally incapable online neckbeards are of learning the definition of the term they’re hurling, and, more generally, understanding the basics of storytelling.

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To borrow a phrase from noted Rey critic, screenwriter, and accused rapist Max Landis, a Mary Sue is a character who is “too good at stuff.” The term has a complicated history, though, as it was initially coined by two women, Paula Smith and Sharon Ferraro, editors of the Star Trek fanzine Menagerie in the ‘70s. Smith and Ferraro used the term to describe a kind of too-perfect self-insert character that they frequently saw in their submissions. Given that Star Trek’s fan base skewed female, so did these protagonists. In response, Smith authored a parody story for the zine’s second issue starring a character called Mary Sue who epitomized the trope’s most common traits.

But, as time went by, the term was weaponized against the mere existence of strong female characters.

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