Female screenwriters consistently create ‘Mary Sue’ characters of their Fempowered female protagonists. Why? Because women simply ‘are’ and men must ‘become’.
Female writers have no frame of reference for the learned and earned process of male competence and the dominance hierarchies that result from it. Hypergamy prompts women to seek out ‘winners’, they don’t care how the man won, just that he won.
Characters like Rey or Captain Marvel are just women’s best attempts to write male heroes with vaginas. But they approach them in the way they see men, apex ‘winners’ with no idea of how they became winners.
Hypergamy doesn’t care about the process a man had to endure to become a winner - it can’t afford to because women’s reproductive viability is perishable. It doesn’t have the luxury of making bad investments on a man’s future potential; he needs to be a verified winner NOW.
So when a female writer attempts to create essentially a gender-swapped version of a male hero, that character is already an omnipotent superhero with powers and abilities that simply always existed. She is the way that writer perceives the male experience.
There is no archetypal ‘hero’s journey’ for that sex-switched character and is therefore unbelievable. She is the Mary Sue.
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