SuaveSocialist said:
No, she is not. There is just too much evidence against it.
In TLJ, Snoke was playing her the whole time, spanked the side of her head with her own weapon, ripped Resistance secrets from her mind and left her at Kylo’s mercy. Kylo then had to save her because she was having trouble with one member of Snoke’s Honour Guard (the rest were chopped down by Kylo himself).
TLJ was punctuated with her failings. She almost fell to the Dark Side during her first formal lesson in Force Training, needed a lightsaber to beat an old man armed with a stick even though he had closed himself off from the Force, and she was such a disappointment to Luke that Yoda had to talk him into re-joining the fight. Her efforts to pull Kylo back to the Light resulted in him choosing the Dark, and despite having a head start on him, was the last person to show up at Helm’s Deep, too late to even participate in the battle, let alone turn the tide. None of this would have played out as it did had she been a Mary Sue.
All she accomplished was the opening of two doors: moved some rocks to get a handful of soldiers out of a cave, and then let them onto a spaceship. Of all the heroes in the movie, she was the least accomplished. She had nothing to do with the bombing of a Dreadnought (a class of ship the Resistance had never managed to destroy before), the infiltration or destruction of Snoke’s warship, or even the Resistance’s Hail-Mary sprint to Helm’s Deep.
Hell, the movie even said that she wasn’t anyone special. Had the Force not chosen her to be a balancing agent for Kylo, she’d still be trading scrap for food and fending people off with a stick. Even as a pilot she isn’t noteworthy.
While Han Shot down Darth Vadar’s Custom TIE, (despite being a petty criminal against an ace pilot combat veteran), evaded a squadron of enemy starfighters in an asteroid field dogfight, blew up the Death Star 2.0 and aced the timing for a hyperspace jump through an impenetrable forcefield...
Rey barely got the Falcon off the ground, required help from a trained soldier who was specifically familiar with the enemy’s equipment and tactics to barely evade/defeat them in familiar territory. Even Luke did better in his first combat flight, blowing up the Death Star as the sole survivor whereas every Rebel combat veteran was shot out of the sky like it was a matter of routine. (And they were all killed before Obi-Wan had to remind Luke to use the Force).
If you’re going to lower the bar so much for her to fit your idea of a Mary Sue, the number of others clearing that hurdle would be so numerous that the entire concept would lose its special status among things worth complaining about.
She fits into the Chosen One archetype a lot better than the Mary Sue concept.
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Couple of nitpicks regarding your memory of the original trilogy: Han didn't "shoot down" Darth Vader's custom TIE. He shot down one of Darth Vader's wingmen. Vader's other wingman flew into Vader's TIE which crippled it and sent it spiraling away from the battle. By the way, Han Solo wasn't some petty criminal out of his league against combat veterans. He was a seasoned smuggler and expert pilot in his own right. Also, Han Solo didn't blow up the 2nd Death Star. He brought the shields down on Endor so that Lando Calrissian and Nien Numb could lead a squadron of X-Wing to destroy it.
Luke was not the sole survivor of the first Death Star battle. I don't know if any other X-Wings fought in the battle that didn't make Death Star trench runs. But for sure, one of Luke's wingmen, Wedge, pulls out of the trench and survived to participate in the 2nd Death Star battle. (This never made sense to me, because he claims that he is leaving because his guns are jammed. But, the TIEs are behind them, not in front, so his guns are useless anyway. His sole purpose in the trench is draw fire away from Luke, and he instead he flees. I always thought it was cowardly and wished that someone in the Expanded Universe would walk up to him and punch him in the face for painting 2 Death Stars on his X-Wing taking credit for both kills, but I digress!) Also, it's established in the film that Luke piloted a T-16 Skyhopper on Tattoine (he plays with a model of it early in the film), and that he has experience bullseye targets (womprats) that are no bigger than 2 meters in size. The fact that Obi Wan coaches him through his Death Star killing shot is bigger proof against him being a Mary Sue than for.
