No Stupid Questions

I'll give you a better Gary Stu example - Superman. The guy was originally designed to be all-perfect, all-knowing, all-seeing and incredibly strong with a reinforced moral system for good. He has to always be the one saving the day, he's got the looks and that ran for a very long time. Up until the 90s did we get ballsy writers to actually kill him off temporarily, but even then he came back shortly after renewed.

Quite frankly, I don't like Superman that much for that reason. Sure he's been going through different arcs in the past 30 - 40 years that challenges his mystique but I can't care enough for him to even feel slightly in favor of him.

Batman is more of my level. Sure, he has his fair deal of plot armor, but his origin has always been that he was just a guy who has a lot of wealth and wears a bat suit while wielding lots of technology at his disposal. He can still get his ass kicked, he can still be succumbed to everything a normal human would suffer with and isn't too afraid to admit that he's human who would need help from more capably powerful heroes.

Light becomes a megalomaniacal psychopath, he can hardly be called a gary stu

I've had thoughts about this for a while, and my conclusion is that the problem with Mary Sues isn't what people actually say it is. Most of the time it's an inaccurate attempt to describe a frustration with poor writing. How much sexism depends on the person generally.

The problem with characters that are hyper competent, likable to everyone in the text, perfect in every way, is that we're somewhat hardwired to hate those people. Jealousy, finding them boring, hating them for the effect they have on the story, whatever you like. Characters like that are often even specifically used as villains for that reason.

The way to balance hyper competence is with some genuinely huge flaws. Light is an egomaniac who is constantly nearly being caught out. Iron man is a narcissist with a huge drinking problem and emotionally unstable. Superman is a huge dork with confidence issues. Spiderman is lower class.

There's a kind of karmic balance that's struck, therefore it works better in people's minds for a number of reasons. It helps humanize them, it better matches people's lived experience, it makes the character pop.

Here we get to the main problem: Writers are phenomenally bad at writing women. It's cultural at this point. Women are rarely if ever depicted with internal struggles, ideals, or even flaws beyond superficial ones. If they lack that depth to achieve the aforementioned karmic balance, they can't become well rounded characters. You essentially nailed on a power fantasy to a wooden board. I would argue that weakness is where the huge systemic sexism comes in, but I digress.

Case in point, my understanding is in the new superman movie his cousin shows up, pretty much the same power set, and she's just a huge mess. I've not seen an iota of Mary Sue accusation about that character, because she's balanced in that way. Wonder woman might be a better example as a main character, because she has concrete flaws, and they actively have consequences in the story. Her inability to navigate the world and it's rules is both a blessing and a curse for her, and the story reflects that. Harley Quinn gets away with so much, but people don't mind because she's a nutcase.

Something like Rey, not only does she not really have flaws, she barely has a character. It's not entirely one dimensional, but poor Daisy ain't got much to work with here. Because the story is suggesting we should like and root for her, but not giving us much to actually humanize or relate to her, we tend to reject that mentally, and it often bothers us that the story insists that she's the real deal. Contrast that to Kylo, who's on the same level, but a hot mess who can't keep his cosplay straight, and he's considered to be the best part of the sequels by many.

Korra from LoK is a slightly different case, where the character has flaws, but the story often fails to honour their consequences. If she's constantly screwing up, but never really being punished for it, if feels fake, like the story is cheating, and people hate that as well. I personally think it might also have something to do with how the show structures her emotional growth through the series, but I don't want to get down that rabbit hole.

I think there's an ease of writing men that comes with practice, as a society. Just like stories have the heroes journey, artists have colour theory, and character writers can write flawed men. There's a whole world of good male characters to draw inspiration from, and most writers can't tell when a women character doesn't work because we're frankly not used to them yet. As such, Gary Stus are honestly easier to spot, and don't tend to survive the editing process I imagine.

Others have good answers, but I wanted to add something that's overlapping with this topic, especially since you mentioned anime.

I've watched quite a bit of anime since college when my friends got me into it. Recently I've been showing some anime to my mom based on things I like and which I think she would like. She commented that she thinks anime seems to have a lot of women in it.

To some extent this is skewed by my selection of shows for her, but it got me thinking. At least from my own personal experience, there do seem to be a lot more women in anime than you see in western media. There are many shows with female protagonists or all female cast and even the ones with a male protagonist frequently feature a prominent supporting cast of women.

While they do tend to get over-sexualized, there are plenty of shows where that isn't the case and even when they do get objectified, there are a lot of them in strong or at least traditionally non-feminine roles. This is a medium where magical girls, battle maids, lady knights, female professionals and leaders are fairly well worn tropes. There are also definitely a lot of them that could be described as Mary Sues because they are just super powerful/competent at whatever they do.

At least from what I have personally observed, I haven't seen nearly as much misogynist complaining about the prominence of women in these roles. But maybe that's just the discussion sites that I visit. I also haven't really done any kind of rigorous counting of shows with predominantly female casts, but they do seem to make up A LOT of the shows I have watched and enjoyed. So maybe this observation is just the result of a bias in my own viewing habits.

idk. I'd be curious to see what others have observed and thought about this. Maybe I'm way off base.

Tony Stark is also a barely functioning alcoholic, and a lot of people complained that the MCU skipped over that.

I think you're misunderstanding the premise of a Mary Sue/Gary Stu character. A big part of definition is that they are almost entirely without flaw, and are generally (although not always) meant to be an author's self-insert. Light and Tony Stark for example, are both intelligent but also stubborn, arogant, privileged assholes who are practically defined by their flaws. Superman could be considered a Gary Stu, esspecially in some of the earlier and simpler iterations but he's honestly such a simple character in general that his lack of flaws doesn't stand out.

The examples that do come to mind are Kirito from Sword Art Online, some versions of Batman, or Butcher from The Boys comics specifically. These are characters that are portrayed as unambiguously good, near perfect men who win every conflict are uniquely capable of solving every problem. Kirito is almost universally disliked, Batman depends a lot on the iteration but generally isn't well-liked as a character, and I've heard nothing positive about The Boys comics (although its less popular in general).

As for why there is more criticism of Mary Sues, I think its not directly because people are harsher on female characters (not that they aren't) so much as because they're more common, esspecially in popular culture. Writing fiction is more cultural acceptable for young girls than young guys, so you end up with more amateur writers writing Mary Sues. In professional projects (notably often led by men due to industry sexism), it tends to be a matter of design-by-committee where they pick a man as a lead to match the male majority, and just throw in a token strong woman as an afterthought.

Now, not every character or show has to be relatable. Peter Parker works because he’s an everyman; however, the opposite can also be true, and people like fantasy escapism. That’s why soap operas about wealthy people or sitcoms about financially stable families are popular, because it’s a form of escapism this goes for Mary Sues and Gary Stus too.

I think a big distinction here is where the enjoyment comes from. You can have a story with a Mary Sue/Gary Stu that is still enjoyable, but generally that specific character adds nothing to the story themselves. For example, if you enjoy Sword Art Online, its for the setting, or the action, or the self-insert-fantasy. Its not for Kirito, and any time you put any focus on him, the story gets weaker. Compare that to, for example, Light, who has meaningful moral complexity despite his unmatched abilities, or Saitama, who despite his infinite power is made relatable through his struggles of daily life. The problem with Mary Sues/Gary Stus isn't their power or self-insert nature, its the focus on a character who is flat, incapable of growth, and/or trivializes any plot.

I don’t think Mary Sue or Gary Stu characters are intrinsically bad. Provided that the work is honest about it.

I prefer characters who have realistic strengths and weaknesses, and who face credible tests in the plot, which they aren’t guaranteed to pass. I like characters who fail from time to time.

I do sometimes want some escapism and such, so I’m glad Mary Sue and Gary Stu types still exist.

Who?

I have a hypothesis people seek out in fiction what is missing in their life. If everything is going well, people seek out cathartic drama. If everything is going poorly, they seek out cathartic resolution. Part of why people are so into things like comic book stories is how they usually have a clearly defined villain, problem, and solution, while much of our world right now doesn't feel like there are any solutions to the problems, or the solutions are so complex people can't understand them, or even the solutions seem like problems in themselves.