If a Mary Sue is a ridiculously perfect character, and a Gary Stu is the male version of a Mary Sue…
…then would the elves you can’t argue with be Fairy Sues?
I admit, the smug alien annoys me too, but it’s even worse in case of the smug future human, i.e. a Star Trek:TNG character pontificating on how backward us 20th-century (at the time) types were. “Oh, those poor, unenlightened savages, with their money and greed and racism… Fortunately, we’ve evolved beyond such petty concerns…”
Semi-related, I’ve lately been giving some thought to Star Trek: Enterprise and realizing I may have sold the show a bit short even with the ill-conceived Temporal Cold War" and “Xindi” plotlines. There was quite a lot of potential in it, though I’d’ve ended the “Augments” story arc somewhat differently:
The Augments do something particularly sadistic and egregious and are chortling about their superiority when T’Pol stands up and walks toward them, very grim and angry. The leader Augment, Malik, sneers at her and gives a nod to one of his guys, who steps forward and throws a punch at her. She casually catches his fist and with a hard blow of the heel of her hand, breaks his arm in a fully blatant “that boy’s got too many corners!” kind of way. He screams, falls, she advances and other Augments attack her. She takes punches but shrugs them off and just massacres them in the furiously methodical manner that tanks assume when rolling over human skulls - no martial arts, no wire-fighting, just sledgehammer punches punctuated with screams of fury and Vulcan nerve pinches that lead to the audible snapping of collarbones. She catches the leader, injures him, and gives a brief speech about Vulcan went through this same “augment” phase thousands of years earlier and how it made them even more aggressive and warlike and put them on the verge of self-extinction when the prophet Surak showed them the price they’d have to pay to survive - strict emotional control. Logic isn’t something the Vulcans embrace for the hell of it, nor just to annoy humans, despite the egocentric way they take offense. This Augment, who assumed he was the inevitable conqueror of the Universe, needed a harsh reminder that the Universe has seen his kind before and has a way of self-correcting such as him out of existence. Nothing he can do or even imagine doing hasn’t been done before.
Archer and/or Tucker try to stop her, but she shrugs them off and kills the Augment, and I mean really kills him, savagely brutal, and runs a violent emotional spectrum from fury to laughter to tears as she pounds the Augment’s lifeless body, eventually stopping to look at her shaking injured exhausted hands, marked in red and green stripes that show his blood and her own. She spends a week in isolation and meditation and an unease lasting the rest of the series (or at least the rest of the season) develops between her and the human crew members, especially Tucker - they’d started to treat her and view her as one of them, but she is not one of them. She, and by extension her entire species, is but one of the mysterious dangers humans will have to deal with and adapt to as they try to establish themselves in the universe, a universe that will very casually and mercilessly destroy the arrogant and careless. For her part, T’Pol must pull herself together - she’d started to think of the humans as her peers but they are not her peers. Dealing with them, trying to equate herself to them, exposes her to the risk of unraveling the tenuous grip she has on her self-control, such control having shown itself necessary to the survival of her species.
It’s now impossible for Archer and Tucker (and the audience) to ignore that though she looks somewhat human, she is an alien being, with an alien culture and an alien history, one so violent that the savageries humans talk about (and even boast about) seem trivial by comparison. A late conversation in the episode is between Archer and Tucker, with the former having quickly read up about Vulcan’s various pre-Surak wars and commenting that there’s always someone better than you, and always someone worse, and humans have to tread lightly. The final scene is (as I believe it was in the actual episode) Arik Soong thinking that perhaps it’s time to abandon biology - the future is cybernetics. He hasn’t learned. Humans never really will.
Characters that are smug annoy me. Characters that are demonstrably scary get my respect.