Who are these women who start strong and end as the weak support of the male hero? Rey is undergoing a stereotypical Hero’s Journey. The comparisons the article makes between Rey and Luke are well made.
Do you really believe that Batman or Sherlock Holmes is “a male character who is good at everything he does, never loses, always has things go his way, and is beloved by everyone apart from obvious villains” (I’ll give you James Bond and I don’t watch new Dr. Who, so you may be right on the Doctor, but wasn’t the first Doctor, at least, a bit of a dick?)
Look, this is a extremely safe movie made by a corporation that needs to recoup it’s $4 billion investment. Anyone that expects anything more than that is delusional. On facebook I’ve been unfriended and blocked by people because I think Rey is a Mary Sue and an un-realistic character. Thats the level of disconnect between the die hard star wars fans and everyone else.
For me, Mad Max Fury Road, InterStellar and The Martian are much more interesting movies and worthy of much more discussion. See you in the threads about those. 
Richard Rahl is the ultimate “do everything right” protagonist.
Mad Mad(I mean Max) and Martian were great movies. Interstellar was OK. Anyway, why leave here to discuss those? We probably have threads on all of them.
And who in the world is that?
When people directly ask why only girls get called “Mary Sue”? I mean, if you knew the answer, why ask the question?
I’ve heard it used outside that direct context but I don’t care enough to debate the point.
Interestingly, I had to Google “Richard Rahl”, but if you Google “Richard Rahl Gary Stu” you get quite a bit of hits calling Rahl a Gary Stu… so yes, I guess that fits the same way ;).
Here’s a reddit thread where he’s listed as the top response to “Best Example of a Mary Sue / Gary Stu”:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/2id7yx/best_examples_of_gary_stumary_sue_characters_in/
Because in my experience rational discussion of Star Wars movies is impossible. The latest tactic is that Star Wars fans will accuse you of being sexist if you think Rey is a unrealistic character because you are “disempowering women”.
Sorry Aliens, Terminator 2 and Fury Road had good strong and believable female leads. Rey is a completely unbelievable mary sue, and the same would be true if she was male, then she would be a Gary Stu.
Presumably he has at least some degree of training in melee combat, since we see another stormtrooper attack him with a cortosis-weave shock-baton.
Luke Skywalker.
I was thinking neither was actually inexperienced with melee combat, albeit not with a lightsabre.
Rey we are show was brought up fighting - presumably with that staff of hers: we are shown her beating up some thugs trying to steal that droid. Finn was a professional soldier.
Unconvincing. At the end of the first movie, Luke’s use of the force consisted of deflecting a few stunner blasts from a robot training ball and doing a perfect shot in his X-Wing. A far cry from basically mastering commanding someone else with the force, resisting a trained force user from entering into your mind, and overriding a trained force user when both wanted to get the same item. Apples and oranges.
By the end of Force Awakens, Rey is as powerful in her use of the force as Luke is at the end of Empire.
(also Luke is really, really whiny)
No, this is bullshit. Luke is incompetent with the light saber in the first film and we see him being trained in several montages in both a new hope and empire, then he’s a bad ass in Jedi. Rey has ZERO training and is able to both convince a storm trooper to release her and battle a trained fighter (Kylo) with zero training.
Everyone that keeps saying she is the same as Luke is either lying or has completely forgotten the original trilogy.
For certain values of “beloved,” yes. They may not have as many sexy ladies falling into their beds as Bond does (although Batman has had a fair amount of romantic success over the years), but pretty much everyone respects them and their abilities. Holmes can’t go a day without someone bursting into his rooms in a flurry of exclamation points, proclaiming that he is the one man in all Europe who can help them. Even people who don’t care for Batman’s methods respect his skill as a detective, and want him on their side when the fighting comes. Holmes unerringly figures out who his clients are and what they do, where they grew up, and what the name of their beloved childhood pet was, just by glancing at their watch chains, and rarely do we see a case he can’t solve. Meanwhile, Batman easily takes out opponents way above his weight class, and can famously beat anyone “if he’s prepared.”
I’m exaggerating a little, but I think the point remains that we just don’t react to hyper-competent male characters the way that we seem to to female characters who have the same skills. People may say that the male characters are unrealistic, but they generally just shrug, note that it’s not a realistic genre, and move on. Only when it’s a woman doing the unrealistic things does it get labelled as somehow bad writing.
As for The Doctor, yes, at one point he was fallible, but that was a long time ago.
There are differences. Luke grew up as a farmboy who had, presumably, never fought anyone hand-to-hand. Rey, we are shown, grew up fighting various ruffians with that staff of hers in the crapsack world she was abandoned on; that she survived demonstrates she was good at it. So it makes sense she would pick up fighting hand-to-hand combat easier.
In this movie, we are shown that Rey basically learns about the force by imitating stuff done to her by Han Solo Jr. Luke did not have that option.
How many folks call Ripley from Alien a “Mary Sue”? or Katniss Everdeen?
Making this into a it’s just because Rey is a female doesn’t hold water. There is something more than just she’s a female hero involved here. FWIW, both Batman and Holmes can be massive assholes. Are they ridiculously skilled? Of course, but do they have obvious flaws? Yep. That’s what takes them out of Gary Stu territory.
Nope. Aliens, Terminator 2, Fury Road. Strong female leads that were good at their jobs but no one accused them of being unrealistic Mary Sues. This criticism is unique to Rey and is deserved.
But he’s good at lots of other stuff: he, not the sneaky guy, comes up with the plan to act like prison guards escorting a manacled Chewbacca to [del]Leia’s[/del] his cell block; and, one “I’m Luke Skywalker, and I’m here to rescue you” later, he rope-line-swings her to safety before taking aim at TIE fighters for the first time on the Falcon and shooting them down so easily that Han Frickin’ Solo warns him against getting cocky. And then he pulls off the million-to-one shot when flying an X-Wing for the first time.
(And, weirdly, him learning in like a minute how to parry blast after blast after blast with his eyes closed is a skill he never even winds up using for the rest of the movie; it’s just there to show us that The Force Is Strong In This One, so we’ll accept that he can perform whatever feat he winds up needing to pull off next.)
In the original script when Rey tricked the storm trooper to let her go she was supposed to say “and make my drink shaken, not stirred” 
Not to mention shooting down a half dozen or so of the Empire’s finest in the battle over the Death Star. Not sure what part of being a moisture farmer teaches you how to become a fighter ace in your first engagement.