Poll: Should Rey have *just* been a “real” Skywalker?

[godisawesome]

It's specifically because we already had that particular trope in the story that made it feel like fanfiction, not the actual plot device itself. You do it once and it's a tantalizing twist, but you do it again after that and it just feels like you're over compensating.

And yet they’d already done it again, with Kylo.

And it had worked in TFA with Kylo because they “remixed” the formula - TFA had Kylo positioned as the inverse of Vader, as a self-interested son who murders his father to secure his dark side choices. Rey could easily and probably *should* have been an inverse of Luke - a daughter of a heroic character who’s reconnection with him actually causes more friction between them and derived her to the dark side and away from him. To be honest, that idea sounds more intriguing and rewarding to me right off the bat, because you’re tying Rey into the Skywalker Story, and making her a mirror character for Luke *and* Kylo... while still having a good foundation for a new character and personality from TFA ... which TLJ dropped (more on that in a moment.)

And it’s not like TLJ wasn’t going to *keep* replaying tropes and twists with Kylo throughout its run time... it just did it in a way that made it a liability to Rey, wasn’t as good as TFA’s replay, and was just less thought out overall.

Kylo was getting treated to a replay of the ROTJ story that only made sense for him, and actually damaged Rey as a character along the way since she didn’t have anything resembling the soundness of Luke’s story and was stuck acting as a plot tool for Kylo’s story instead while simultaneously acting as just an audience stand-in for Luke’s story. The result was killing momentum for Rey and putting Kylo in what would be her place instead.

That’s why I would have applauded having Rey be revealed as a Skywalker in TROS; yes, it would have seemed like a hackneyed plot point, but it would have been a hackneyed plot point in favor of Rey over Kylo. TLJ’s story for her had been a hackneyed plot point already, but on in favor of Kylo over Rey, and TROS just used a hackneyed plot point that didn’t fix that.

And just so we’re clear, let me explain why, while I can see the appeal of the message and idea behind Rey Random, it became a hackneyed message to me:

Look, your'e arguing with the wrong guy; even though they telegraphed Rey was likely Luke's descendant. I actually love the scene of Rey's infinite "vision" expecting to see some answer that suposedly defines who she is, looking back at her. Yet all she sees is herself, looking back at herself, gong to infinity.
That ^ is my favorite scene in the whole sequel trilogy. It's powerful and a beautiful message. It's what it should be*.
Yet people act like Rey being a found nobody was some radical new paradigm shift in story
When the whole premise was already built off a random slave, found by chance in the desert. That's the main trope, It's not new either. A bunch of twitters saying it's new, or pretending it is, doesn't mean it is.

The cave scene in TLJ could have major power, and has a good message behind it in terms of looking to yourself for your identity...

...but the way TLJ plays it, it makes it an overwrought bit of melodrama that does nothing for Rey’s character, acts as a liability around Kylo and Luke, and ignores the solid foundation of characterization and identity that Rey has in TFA that could have been used for TLJ’s supposed lesson.

Rey in TFA was introduced as a tough, assertive survivor, rough around the edges and beautifully foiled by Kylo’s bratty, thin-skinned entitled brat, and complemented by Finn as a dynamic original character with comparative suffering to her.

You want Rey not being a Skywalker to move her to look inwards at herself? Than focus on that hardened survivor from TFA dealing with the aftermath of TFA and being her own person; she has a feud without Kylo that could very easily drive her to the dark side, a view of the Galaxy and the overall conflict that doesn’t really match up to Luke, and have her have a unique tutelage under Luke. You want her to stand in the “place” of a Skywalker? Than Kylo’s a foil that deconstructs the idea, and you make sure Rey totally supplants him in the family story; he’s already passed the “point of no return” by killing Han, has no method by which Rey could care about him believably, and he needs to be broken down and rejected from any elements of the expected, conventional “Skywalker story,” because that story has too much weight from too many people for him to even head fake with it around Rey. No, I don’t think its as interesting as Rey Skywalker because that idea has more weight for her and more security for the family storyline, but you could make this dubious idea work.

The problem is that TLJ did everything wrong with the idea.

TLJ downplays and dismisses Rey’s hardened survivor elements in order to have her sympathize with Kylo and to keep her from getting more assertive earlier with Luke, or just recognize that Kylo’s just a threat, and nothing more. It subsumed her in both Luke’s mopey man-pain and in Kylo’s mopey man-pain, totally ignoring how she could be tempted to the dark side against Kylo and how she really should have been trained by Luke. And the end result of undercutting her story, under serving her character arc, and ignoring her characterization where convenient for worshipping Kylo and fixating on Luke instead of her? Making a moment that’s supposed to be a false lead - Kylo telling her she’s nothing and that she has no place in the story - *true* instead; when Kylo makes her say she’s not a Skywalker, she gets demoted by the story so that Kylo and Luke’s story take center stage over her.

Episode IX, even if it did a good job telling her own story, like Colin Trevorrow’s Duel of the Fates script wanted to with “Rey Solana”, was always going to have some problems. Trevorrow’s story was basically constructing a whole new plot for Rey, because TLJ had both killed off her TFA story in most ways and because TLJ didn’t really give her much fo a story itself. And I think it seemed to do a pretty good job at that, all things considered... it was just always going to be kind of a weak ending to the Skywalker Saga, and leave her underserved compared to Anakin and Luke because neither f them had a second movie that displaced them as lead and did nothing with them. And you were still going to have the Skywalker Family story screwed over, because there was never any real way that Kylo could provide a good ending for them.

[MASTER-OF-SUPRISE]

Honestly I felt like the Rey random reveal didn't add anything worthwhile to the story. That said I see ways where it could have worked. The problem is in order for it to work IMO Luke and Rey actually have to bond. In TLJ it's pretty clear that Rey would have more success talking to a brick wall.

[godisawesome]

Honestly I felt like the Rey random reveal didn't add anything worthwhile to the story. That said I see ways where it could have worked. The problem is in order for it to work IMO Luke and Rey actually have to bond. In TLJ it's pretty clear that Rey would have more success talking to a brick wall.

I’d say you need Rey and Luke to bond... and you need to treat Kylo killing Han as a genuine point-of-no-retrun. Kylo getting any sympathy after that when Rey isn’t a Skywalker pretty much immediately asserted him as “The Skywalker” of the ST, which overshadows Rey because, frankly, we’ve actually already seen dozens of “Random” heroes in the series... but there’s only one Skywalker family, with a multi-film soap opera focused on them.

Kylo *had* to keep being used for Rey’s benefit as the main villain and antagonist if they enacted her to be Random and for it to mean something... and that usefulness would almost have to be restricted to being a negative reinforcement of Skywalker family fans. Give him an inch, and it’s going to be taken as a mile, because the family story is too big.

Don’t believe me? Look at what happened to Finn in TLJ and TROS; once Rey was definitively decided as not being a Skywalker, Lucasfilm immediately subsumed Finn’s importance and place in the story to Kylo because Kylo was a Skywalker. Heck, Rey wound up partially subsumed by Kylo as well Because they wanted her to favor his heritage, and even Kylo’s characterization and purpose wound up being subsumed by his heritage. There is a direct correlation between Finn, Rey, and Kylo all having lackluster storylines post-TFA with Rey not being a Skywalker: it’s all just a ripple effect from Lucasfilm identifying Kylo as the only new Skywalker and immediately over investing in *that*.

They never really bought in or cared about the characters of Rey, Kylo, or Finn. They viewed them strictly as abstract IPs. And as it turns out, they saw disproportionate value in Kylo as the Skywalker character than they did in Rey as the female main hero or Finn as *anything.*

[K. Jones]

You're arguing with the wrong guy; I'm fine with the Rey could have been nobody narrative, even though they telegraphed Rey was likely Luke's descendant, they almost had no choice but to flip it (which became just as predictable).
Still, I actually love the scene of Rey's infinite "vision"; expecting to see some answer that suposedly defines who she is, looking back at her. Yet all she sees is herself, looking back at herself, gong to infinity.
That ^ is my favorite scene in the whole sequel trilogy. It's powerful and a beautiful message. It's what it should be*.
My split is with those pretending like Rey being a found nobody was some surprising or radical new paradigm shift in story
When the whole premise was already built off a random slave, found by chance in the desert. That's the main trope already built on, It's not new either. A bunch of twitters pretending it is new or saying it's new to them cause it's Rey now, doesn't mean it actually is new.

It's like the whole let's have a "grey Jedi" who walks both paths supposed "new" idea.
...What?
Did you even see the first films?

The whole premise is Luke doesn't follow the Jedi dogma- you must complete your training, no, his instinct is to save his friends, even though it leads to his failure, it leaves him with the most symbolic lesson, he wears it on his "hand".- You must kill him or we've lost, no he doesn't do that either, and doesn't become a slave to the Emperor and fear like his father did either.
How and why does he achieve this?!
**He creates and walks his own path, accepts his vision, recognized and no longer afraid accepts both halves of himself. Who came before doesn't and won't define him.
It's his own choices that do that. And by recognizing and doing so, transforms who he is, and with that act transforms (and saves) those around him (his father who had been hopelessly lost, seeing an act he could never do).
Again he did this by choosing and walking his own path- between the two halves/sides he recognizes as part of himself.
That grey path, was the story of Luke.
It's not new either. It just didn't have an easy tweet label, and giving it one now, with a bunch of fan articles agreeing with themselves, claiming it's some potential radical new spin, doesn't mean it's "new" either. It's not, why pretend it is?

Ooh that's interesting. It maybe hadn't occurred to my consciousness that Luke is a gray Jedi the whole time. He totally is to some extent and that's going to color things for me.

It's an interesting paradigm because Star Wars iconography, imagery, and myth is all like "LIGHT!" ... "DARK!" ... MY GOD! The polarity. But Lucas is constantly trying to hammer home the point when he talks about it (Filoni, now) that we all have free will and it's all choice and we all have the potential for both, constantly. It's like ... it almost defeats the point. Like, the point about people being people who make choices is basically overshadowed or invisible because of all the iconography, even though it's the whole point of the story.

Darth Vader is evil. And irredeemable. But he's still capable of doing the right thing ... on purpose. If he chooses to, which he might if there's a flicker of hope that impossible someone who believes harder than he reasons, might believe in him. That's the whole plot by the end of the fidgeting of narrative by trilogy's end. The whole plot is that we're all Gray. Then the whole prequel plot becomes "The Jedi fall because none of them think they're Gray anymore except that they're all Gray, everyone is Gray, they're dogmatic and in utter denial of realism or logic. I believe the word is Righteous."

Palpatine is pretty much just an *******. Although from the rumor-mill, Lucas might have had a story in mind for him getting shattered and embittered by a woman at some point, too. But I digress.

Right.

That's interesting to me in the context of Rey because it means ostensibly that the Sequel Trilogy's message of "For the galaxy to move on we're going to need a Different Kind of Jedi" is redundant. That's pretty problematic. I do think there's merit to the notion that in his idealistic youth, Luke was definitely set to be "The Different Kind of Jedi" but you know, age and the real world and the fact that the Empire wasn't just Palpatine's evil magic but was actually people on planets who were like, "yeah, Palpatine, kind of a dick, but you know, Make The Galaxy Great Again" and keep them Chiss aliens out of here" or whatever, Imperial holdouts, so and so, meant that the kind of hippie idealism was drained a bit and he did some radical stuff but got old and pretty disappointed when the next generation, his nephew joined a punk band and got really into anarchy and then kind of became a Neo-Nazi and he realized that the wheel just keeps on turning.

So is the expectation that breaking the wheel means "A Different Kind of Jedi" has to be like, a girl, not a guy?

Frankly if they'd textualized some of the cultural metatext it might have made for a better story. There's no reason not to have the real world politicking that results in the decisions they made actually be part of the story itself - Star Wars is definitely capable of reflecting the real world. They selected a female protagonist because it's timely in the "it's about time" kind of way. The white male character could be seen as an allegory for toxic male fandom, sure, or the patriarchy, or what-have-you. Whatever stripe you want to paint Kylo with allegorically, I think you could certainly categorize him as "Entitled as all hell". So perhaps his story could have benefited from him learning how not to be that. If the story is going to veer into Rey being a Palpatine, the ULTIMATE privilege is the ULTIMATE trap could have been a pretty great story as well. Like if you're going to play the Dynasty card ... and pretend like you're deconstructing tropes ... show your work.

You want to make Finn more interesting then? It's a freaking Empire. Play the Colonialism card. Play the Slavery card. He was abducted as a small child and press-ganged into military service. Finn is a slave. Play the god damn card.