I'm going to start with a rundown of who Mary Sue is, to give you context:
An observation was made, that Star Trek fan-fiction often featured unrealistically and story-ruiningly over-competent characters. The observer then made a parody of this fan-fic malaise, calling their main character Mary Sue - a 15.5 year old heroine that left all of the Star Trek protagonists in the shade.
And that's Mary Sue - a character that is, to put it in two words of unsurpassable succinctness - nauseatingly wonderful.
You might wonder what's wrong with a character being wonderful. Isn't that the point of a hero/heroine? That they're so wonderful that they save the day, and get the girl, and so on and on and on... Well, no. It isn't. Close, but no vaping pen.
What makes strong characters are not their strengths, but their weaknesses. A strong person in real life always makes the right choices, resists any corrupting temptations, and is so staggeringly vanilla that their only possible reward can be to have a library named after them when they're dead. This person in real life has a strong character, but in fiction, they have a weak character, because they're so boring. Even reading about them, you're probably having an attack of Vyvyan Basterd Syndrome, shouting "I'M BORED" at the nearest wall.
In order to make a fictional person interesting, you have to strengthen their character by giving them traits that, in a real person, would weaken their character. This is why the greatest characters in fiction, are the ones you'd least like to meet. Vyvyan Basterd, for example. Hannibal Lecter. The Sherriff Of Nottingham. Arnold Rimmer. James Bond. Even Lord Flashheart, who's depicted as a kind of Mary Sue within Blackadder's fiction, is the kind of guy you'd have nailed to the wall with a rolling pin within two minutes of his entrance to the room, because he'd be that UNBEARABLE.
All of this has led to the term 'Mary Sue' being used as an insult toward painfully over-competent characters in fictional works. Especially painfully over-competent female characters in fictional works, with alternatives like 'Marty Stu' being used for male characters. Inevitably, it has sometimes been used wrongly. Female supremacists are a population who can easily be relied upon to use words wrongly. Generations of them have strived to change the world, by writing stories about the world that aren't true. And as a result, the term 'Mary Sue' has become the subject of feminist hatred. Well, if they will keep putting Mary Sues in their stories, people will keep deriding them for putting Mary Sues in their stories, won't they. But they don't seem to understand that. Armed with deliberately-encouraged misunderstandings of the term, however, they've actually had success at persuading people to treat the term 'Mary Sue' as taboo.
Most recently, and most certainly receiving the ire of feminists, the name Mary Sue has been applied to the character of Rey, in the latest Star Wars
We must be clear, given the deliberate misunderstandings that frequently happen, that it does not matter whether a character 'has a backstory' (translation: excuse) for being nauseatingly wonderful, or whether another character in the same story is also nauseatingly wonderful. If a character fulfils the definition of being nauseatingly wonderful, then they are a Mary Sue. QED.
However...
Don't make the assumption that the use of Mary Sue characters is always bad. The story in which this kind of character's name originated, was a very short, but very amusing story, in parodying its now-eponymous phenomenon. And i can actually give an example of a really good story that deliberately employs a Mary Sue for entertainment's sake, and does it well. I've already mentioned Arnold Rimmer, and it's their fictional universe that we're going to now.
In one episode of Red Dwarf (Dimension Jump) a Mary Sue character jumps from one dimension to another, where they bump (quite literally) into the crew of Red Dwarf, aboard Starbug. Who are they? Ace Rimmer - a character deliberately made to be brilliant, like a hero of comic strip proportions, so that they would contrast with the 'normal' Rimmer. If you can call Arnold Rimmer 'normal' without wincing.
Arnold Rimmer, Rimmsy, Big Arn, or Duke, as he is never known, is a "gutless, spineless, gormless, directionless, neurotic, underachieving, snivelling, cowardly pile of smeg". And that's a description provided by his best friend in the whole universe! He's pompous, he's anally retentive, and is, in the words of Kryten, who cannot lie: "an overzealous, trumped up little squirt, and an incompetent vending machine repairman with a Napoloen Complex, who commanded as much respect and affection from his fellow crew members as Long John Silver's parrot".
The whole point of Ace Rimmer, was to provide as sharp a contrast to Arnold Rimmer as possible. In the context of the story, their extremity of wonderfulness was what made them so fantastically funny. As a regular character, they would be awful. As a serious character, they would be awful. But Mary Sue finds herself a place, in that episode of Red Dwarf, because characters as cartoon as her are apt material in an outright comedy. And let's face it - Star Wars just isn't that funny.
This mini-essay, suprisingly, was inspired by Thunderf00t. Not surprising on its own, but if you know Tf, you'll understand what was surprising about it.
P.S. The title is a reference to 'We Need To Talk About Kevin'. We didn't really need to talk about Mary Sue, but i hope you found it interesting and/or amusing anway :-D
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