Mary Sues and Marty Stus aren’t really hated, they’re whined about. People love to complain. And when it comes to Maries (because really there’s hardly ever any complaining about Marties) the biggest source of complaints is the men rights goobs who just don’t like it when a woman plays something other than a damsel in distress. I don’t know why, I like female action stars, I like taught women flinging themselves around the screen in tight/tattered clothes, but apparently some people find that challenging to their manhood.
The fact of the matter is most American action heroes have no flaws and no defeats. That’s how we like them. We want shallow movies filled with morally simple heroes facing just enough challenge for us to pretend the end is in doubt, only for them to easily win in the end. Pretty much the only thing American movies audiences like more than shallow movies is COMPLAINING about how much American movie audiences like shallow movies. That’s why these movies make hundreds of millions of dollars while everybody claims to hate them. Don’t listen to the voices, listen to the dollars, we LOVE those movies.
Rey gets out of prison because Ren is an idiot. I’m sure Padmes decoy could fly a ship. Again, in SW ships are cars. Everybody in a Bond movie can drive, everybody in an SW movie can fly a ship.
Propaganda doesn’t work when it’s subtle. You can’t actually get the masses to hate a group unless you actually tell them to hate that group. All the “stand in” and “intendeds” in the world accomplish nothing if you’re the only one that knows about it. And Geobbels propaganda worked because he DID compare Jews to rats. They came right out and directly, no equivocation, no subtlety, blamed Jews for everything. That’s effective propaganda. The whole “maybe Ceasar is really Geuvara” (which honestly I laughed at when I read that, it’s just stupid, yeah Ceasar was in the jungle, at that point the parallels end since the humans weren’t really in charge anymore, there were more apes, and the apes were living a more comfortable life). And anybody playing Metal Gear for political messages is... well they aren’t anything, because they don’t exist.
Maybe Luke is that, but it’s definitely not deniable that Rey is even MORE of that since there was literally no logical reason for her to even do a lot of the stuff she had done, since she wasn’t even AWARE of the Force beforehand (and for the record, no, starships are NOTHING like Cars. If anything, they’re closer to fighter jets, transport planes and/or naval vessels. The closest Star Wars has to actual cars in terms of role are land/air speeders).
As far as female action heroes, I have little problem with female action heroes as long as they actually HAVE a fairly logical/plausible reason for pulling off the things they do (in fact, two of my favorite characters, for lack of a better term, are Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Misty from Pokémon, two girls who happen to be badasses. I guess Samus Aran also counts). I wouldn’t like it if guys pulled off implausible things for no real reason either.
As far as complaints, the complaints should have been proportionate to the dollars (ie, the higher the complaints the lower the box office turnout/success).
As far as propaganda, actually, that’s NOT how propaganda works except under the most shallow aspects, since the entire POINT of propaganda is to use deception. If the propaganda bluntly tells you to hate or love a group, you do a bad job. Hitler found that out the hard way when he meddled with the development of The Eternal Jew where he explicitly compared the Jews to Rats in the most blatant manner, which resulted in it being made into a box office bomb. TVTropes can elaborate on this bit here:
“The Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude (”The Eternal Jew”) was envisioned by Joseph Goebbels as an understated and subtle (well, by Nazi propaganda standards) demonstrations of the “evils” of Jewry. Goebbels believed that the best propaganda was primarily entertainment and not obviously propaganda. Hitler disagreed and demanded more polemical material, including laughably crude (even for Nazis) comparisons of Jews to rats. It was a box-office flop, and some viewers fainted at the crudity. Unfortunately, Goebbels would get his way with the much more effective and successful Jud Suss.”
And for the record, even Khrushchev made it pretty clear that they need to rely on deception regarding propaganda if they are to sell their message. I believe he mentioned that if they tried to blatantly tell people to become Communists, they’ll reject it, but if they do it incrementally enough, America will eventually wake up to find out they are Communists.
Peace Walker made the Che love completely obvious, BTW, and if anything, they hid that Che was a monster, as you can see and hear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYtK3d2ydk Completely left out the fact that, for example, he had been one of the major reasons why the Cuban Missile Crisis got as bad as it did. And we players are forced to accept it whether we liked it or not, especially when Kojima also hid that little tidbit during development for the game and did not reveal it until AFTER the game was released and we bought it. The game version of “you have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it”, in other words.