If the person who designed the character is female, then it isn't a feminized ideal self-injection, it's just an ideal self-injection.
Or maybe it's not a self-injection of any kind. You don't have the psychic ability to read what the writer was thinking -- especially when you haven't even bothered to do the research to find out who wrote the movie. You're just jumping to "self-injection" because you've decided (or been convinced by others on the Internet) to use the buzzword "Mary Sue" for the character and that's part of the definition. But here's a rather effective article by Charlie Jane Anders pointing out what a useless criticism that's become. (EDIT: And here's Peter David's post on the topic. He's perhaps being a little too narrow in his definition, but the point is still worth considering.)
Why is it you can't make specific criticisms about a female character without being accused of not liking strong female characters?
That's a spurious question. The problem is that some criticisms are more valid than others. Your criticism was based on lack of information, both about the creative process for this movie and about J.J. Abrams's career record, and it's always valid to criticize an uninformed conclusion. More important, you were not criticizing the character; you were criticizing the person you assumed to be the creator of that character, which is an entirely different matter. A character is not a real person, but a writer is, and it's unfair to make assumptions about another person's motivations or integrity. Especially when you don't even know who's actually responsible for the decisions you're criticizing. It's never fair to blame one person for a different person's choices. None of that has anything to do with gender; it's just about getting your facts straight and being fair.
Still, there is a gender issue here, because you unthinkingly defaulted to the assumption that the creator of a movie character must be male, and that very default is the root of the problem. The reason so many writers have trouble writing female characters effectively is because they're socially conditioned to assume that male is the baseline setting for everything and consider females to be an exception to the norm.
Rey doesn't have any character flaws, and I'd make the same criticism for a male character.
Did Luke have many character flaws? To quote Anders's article:
Just as most of The Force Awakens is pretty explicitly patterned on A New Hope, Rey is basically this movie’s answer to Luke Skywalker. Luke touches a lightsaber for the first time about 45 minutes into A New Hope, and is using the Force pretty brilliantly by the end of the movie.
Joss Wheadon has lots of strong female characters and none of them are Mary Sues.
You can certainly find plenty of people online who consider River Tam or Echo a Mary Sue. No doubt the same goes for other Whedon characters. The problem with "Mary Sue" is that it has no agreed-upon definition except "a female character I don't like." So you can find instances of just about any female character (and, yes, a fair number of male characters) being called a Mary Sue. That's why the term has outlived its usefulness.
Here's what I said in response to Anders's initial post on Facebook this morning before she expanded it into her io9 piece:
The term "Mary Sue" has been broadened to the point of uselessness. People forget that it doesn't actually mean a guest character who dominates a story (something that was actually routine in '60s TV) or a character who's really good at what they do -- it refers specifically to a character of that type *done badly,* a character that the author alleges is wonderful but fails to give any genuinely worthwhile qualities to. E.g. a character who's supposed to be a strategic genius but never actually makes a clever move, or a character who's alleged to be irresistibly charismatic but never says or does anything interesting. So it's missing the point to use it for a character who actually succeeds at being hypercompetent.
The thing is, fiction has always been full of hypercompetent, idealized characters -- Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Odysseus, you name it. You may or may not like that type of character, but it's a far older and broader character type than the Mary Sue. A Mary Sue is a particular subset of it, a badly done example that's purely a wish-fulfillment exercise by the author. The mistake you're making -- one that too many people make because of the overuse of the "Mary Sue" meme -- is confusing the subset with the set, assuming that all hypercompetent characters are like that.
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