Originally Posted by
godisawesome
Would you mind giving an opinion on Kylo, then?
Because to me, that’s always the big problem that the ST wound up with; at various times, it tried to do something new with Kylo, wanted Rey to stand on her own, but also wanted the Skywalkers to have a happy ending... and the way TLJ introduced the former two ideas made them liabilities to the last one, *and to each other,* and when TROS tried modifying the situation and goals, it wound up still having conflict between goals, because what it did honor from TLJ simply made Kylo, Rey, and the Skywalkers all part of one sinking ship of contradictions.
If the idea of a legacy hero is fan fiction-y, than Kylo is the first and biggest culprit even over Rey; at least she had two films operating as something different, while he was just always “pouty Skywalker grandkid/angsty anti-hero/mass murderer” and *nothing* more.
As long as Kylo was being treated as a special “Skywalker Protagonist,” than Rey would end up in his shadow to some extent.
I can see why it might work... but that's literally just the Skywalker story swapping out a redemption for the Nazi grandpa with killing the Nazi grandpa.
Which for me, just means that it’s an inferior version of the Skywalker story, with one major fatal flaw that arguably makes it bad.
You could tell pretty much the exact same story with a TROS retcon of Rey being a Skywalker as TROS did with the retcon of Rey being a Palpatine for her; the only real change you’d need to make for her story would be to keep Kylo as the villain, give him some dialogue dogging on Luke and his failure to restart the Jedi or act as billions died, and simply have him insist that Vader and he are the real legacy of the family she must accept. The redundancy that is Kylo Ren makes any differentiation with the Palpatine family moot.
And a huge part of the problem is TLJ reconfiguring Rey to be reliant on Kylo for some of her purpose in the story, which is something TROS kept, even if it didn’t do so the way people thought it would - he still gets elevated to her co-lead and she has to share the spotlight of the final confrontation with him.
She can’t “be her own person” in a story where Ben Solo gets special treatment and is her co-lead, because people are just going to focus on the character who brings to a close a 9-film storyline featuring a single family... especially when the middle film made her a spectator and supporting cast member to their story and then banished her from the finale confrontation when her lack of connection to them.
But the big thing not involving Rey, or the way that Kylo became a cancer on her story and just flat out poison to Finn and Kylo’s parents’ story, is this:
Let me be clear; I don’t think the complaint is really about the line as in bloodline. It’s the line as in “the family story:” we’ve followed the family of Han, Luke, Leia, Anakin, and Padme across six films before the ST, and we had a finale to that story that people liked or even loved in ROTJ- they can bitch and moan about Ewoks, but Anakin’s redemption and Luke ending the story with a sister and future brother-in-law was certainly a “sweet” element to the “bittersweet” ending ROTJ kind of had that made the OT have extra resonance.
And now the ST says, “Wait! That’s not how the story ends! Han and Leia’s kid grows up to be a mass murdering tool for Palpatine like Anakin, except he’s boring and pretty, so the girl who he mentally assaulted in a metaphor for rape needs him to show up for... some bullshit reason, or something, and then he died. Oh, and the the way he became a hero at the end was we sacrificed all three of the OT leads to justify a five minute monosyllabic turn.”
Understand: the second TFA had Han and Leia’s baby boy walk on screen and order a mass murder, their was an inequity in Disney’s Star Wars regarding the OT’s happy ending. And once Kylo murdered Han, he was no longer a character who could be used to fix it. They needed some other Skywalker to patch up the hole and return a happy ending to the story so that the family drama had resonance and not just shallow blockbuster appeal.
But without making Rey a Skywalker, the Skywalkers were kind of “damned” and condemned, and TLJ and then TROS basically burned the bridges for a lot of possible developments and with little to show for it afterwards. There *are* people who want to see the adventures of Luke Skywalker between trilogies... but nowhere near as many as their could be, because his post-ROTJ career and life are one big abject failure where his greatest triumph goes largely undone. And the same thing happened with Han and Leia.
Once Carrie Fisher died, there was no real way to use a Rey who wasn’t a Solo or Skywalker by birth to fix the story - you couldn’t use screentime to build a familial relationship in the story.
There’s not a single thing that the ST did that couldn’t have been done infinitely better with Rey as a Skywalker or Solo, even with a last minute reveal.