American Perspectives: 동이 is too much of a "Mary Sue"

What is a Mary Sue, you may ask?  A Mary Sue is a strong female lead who is flawlessly perfect in every way to the point that she's annoying.  A noticeable factor is that she's annoyingly virtuous, without a single bad bone in her body.  Some people say the criticism of the Mary Sue is misogynistic.  I wholeheartedly disagree.  I feel the Mary Sue reinforces misogyny by expecting women to be everything effortlessly and perfectly: Beautiful, virtuous, smart, warrior princess, great in bed.  While a man can get by on the bare minimum.  In the United States, at least.  So many of us American women are averse to the Mary Sue because she's a reinforcement of what we grew up with.  We're supposed to be virginal, yet at the same time, we're supposed to have sex with our husbands like experienced whores who've been doing it for years, but...we're not supposed to have the number of partners that would give us room to practice said skills.  I'm not saying it was implied anywhere that 동이 was an acrobat in the bedroom, but it is painfully obvious that she is unrealistically perfect in every way, which makes me want to barf. 동이 fits the Mary Sue label perfectly.

I really tried to like her.  I watched all 60 episodes, but for every awesomely intelligent thing she said or did, she'd make up for it (as we can't have her being threateningly smart) by doing at least three eyerolling idiotic things in the name of being virtuous.  And then acting like it made her feel so good, made me want to barf. Such as being too virtuous to want to be the queen, and pushing a rule stating that concubines can't be queen due to the screw up of one person.  In real life, that very rule had extremely disastrous, misogynistic consequences for women of the 조선 dynasty.  In real life, however, I'm not sure if 동이 was actually behind it, and from what I read, she sounded like someone who used virtue on a manipulative scale for her own personal gain.  Since the history was written by men, of course, there is going to be some blindness to female micro-aggressions.

Every woman has an internal ice princess.  Many of us have been raised to heavily suppress it.  So the more sweet, kind (and I hate that word, as it has turned into a weapon by people attempting to get women to continue to bow down and defer), and virtuous a woman is, the more suppressed her inner ice princess is.  What does this mean?  She has a ton of suppressed emotions that are on the verge of exploding in the worst possible way.  In the short term, it's handled by being severely passive aggressive and manipulative.  Which we read about in real life when she was conveniently crying her eyes out in front of the king, as a water maid, in front of him, about the deposition of the first queen.  How convenient, and how classic.  I speak from experience, as I have been raised in a mostly female household, and we were trained early to suppress our inner ice princesses.  So we learned to cut each other down by faking kindness, virtue, and innocence.  It's not good.  So when I see a character like 동이, she doesn't sit well with me.

The character I liked best was 장옥정.  She was unapologetically ambitious, much more interesting, and what you saw was what you got.