Is Rey´s overpowered character the main reason why the sequels are bad?

[inisideguy]

The ST relied heavily on the OT characters for its sucess. People wanted to see TFA because it was the first SW movie in 10 years and they wanted to see where the story of the OT cast went. They wanted to see TLJ to find out what happened to Luke and how he would interact with the new cast. Most of the theories relied on the OT and even PT as well: Is Snoke Mace Windu? Is Rey a Kenobi or Skywalker? Had the ST been set some 70 years after the OT without the OT cast, it would have been far less sucessful.

This is confirmed by the box office:




































































TFA: 2 Billion
TLJ: 1.4 Billion
TROS 1 Billion

TPM 950 Million (before all the 3d reruns)
AOTC 650 Million
ROTS: 850 Million

While interest into the ST kept declining steadily - corresponding to the treatment of the OT cast - the last installment of the PT trilogy was nearly as sucessfull as the first one, because the people wanted to see how the story ended. Something completely absent from the ST because people didnt care about the new cast/characters.

I think pointing to the box office decline is valid in many respects. I would be a devils advocate though and say all the Star Wars film trilogys had a drop in box office after their first movies.

[Iron_Legion87]

Talent without training means NOTHING - Luke Skywalker

You mean the Luke that had 3 YEARS of self training, then two weeks of training with Yoda and then got slaughtered by a Vader who was at 50%? This "Jedi Master" Luke?

I will never get how people will try to find stupid excuses for Rey beeing OP as **** with 0 or very little training, yet Luke that did much more than her and was weaker than her is considered "OP"...

I get all that and like I mentioned before I am not crazy about the Disney trilogy but I do like Force Awakens, Rouge One, and of course Mandolorian. I still prefer the OG and Prequel movies. Yes, I am aware of who Luke is and what he has done ( he is awesome no one is questioning that). While yes, I would have liked to have seen Rey get more training like Luke did, but her being VERY STRONG in the force and being related to Palpatine was a decent enough explanation for why she the way she is. It's not great but the movies have way bigger issues to say that Rey being " OP" and being the main reason they weren't good. Disney should have had a strong idea of how they wanted the trilogy to play out. It was a mistake to tap three different directors each with their own ideas for the films.

I am not as hardcore as some ( I wasn't born when the OG trilogy was hot in theaters) and my first introduction to Star Wars was Episode 1 back in 1999. So I guess I am more forgiving of certain things that others. But I do think some of the hate for Rey comes from that toxic fanboy crowd that feels Rey is just some social justice "woke" thing.

[GOLGO 13]

Talent without training means NOTHING - Luke Skywalker

You mean the Luke that had 3 YEARS of self training, then two weeks of training with Yoda and then got slaughtered by a Vader who was at 50%? This "Jedi Master" Luke?

I will never get how people will try to find stupid excuses for Rey beeing OP as **** with 0 or very little training, yet Luke that did much more than her and was weaker than her is considered "OP"...

Rey is the best EVER!!!

Rey has absolutely no reason for being an expert on flying a starship, after all, she was stuck on a desert planet for 15+ years. She's naturally gifted, of course!

Rey can fix an old space ship all by herself as well. Rey is just that smart, that's why!

Rey has exceptional skills with a lightsaber. In the end of TFA Rey is able to defeat Kylo Ren in a duel, after never holding a weapon of the sort before. So yeah, Rey, a rookie was able to defeat a highly trained ex-jedi who was able to destroy a Jedi temple. Rey is lucky that's why!

Nevermind that there is no possible explanation for why Rey can do all this. Even Luke had troubles the first time he used a lightsaber. In Star Wars we remember him getting shot by the training drone when he practicing with the lightsaber. And even when he uses it in Empire, he’s not the most skilled, and still falls victim to Vader. How is it possible?

Well, because Rey is the bestest EVER!!!!

[DrNewGod]

...You mean the Luke that had 3 YEARS of self training, then two weeks of training with Yoda and then got slaughtered by a Vader who was at 50%? This "Jedi Master" Luke?...

Has the span of time between Luke's arrival on and departure from Dogobah ever been canonically established? Or that of the span between the Millennium Falcon's evacuation from Hoth and Luke's arrival at Bespin's Cloud City?

We saw relatively brief slices of time, but particularly with Luke's training, it seemed to me that some additional time elapsed between Yoda's revelation and the incident at the cave, and between the incident at the cave and Luke's vision of Bespin. Could well have been a few weeks total, or it could have been a really lengthy span in each case. His abilities seemed considerably more advanced on Bespin than they had on Hoth.

I have the same question about how long the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan took in ANH. Luke may have had more training than the films explicitly showed. In any case, he still had more than Rey, and was still getting his nuts kicked in on the regular until RotJ.

[Moon Ronin]

The ST relied heavily on the OT characters for its sucess. People wanted to see TFA because it was the first SW movie in 10 years and they wanted to see where the story of the OT cast went. They wanted to see TLJ to find out what happened to Luke and how he would interact with the new cast. Most of the theories relied on the OT and even PT as well: Is Snoke Mace Windu? Is Rey a Kenobi or Skywalker? Had the ST been set some 70 years after the OT without the OT cast, it would have been far less sucessful.

This is confirmed by the box office:

TFA: 2 Billion
TLJ: 1.4 Billion
TROS 1 Billion

TPM 950 Million (before all the 3d reruns)
AOTC 650 Million
ROTS: 850 Million

While interest into the ST kept declining steadily - corresponding to the treatment of the OT cast - the last installment of the PT trilogy was nearly as sucessfull as the first one, because the people wanted to see how the story ended. Something completely absent from the ST because people didnt care about the new cast/characters.

I will agree to an extent, as after The Last Jedi I no longer cared about the new characters any more. I think that The Force Awakes was a "safe" way to introduce a new trilogy using familiar imagery, some times too familiar yes but to say it left people uninterested is not entirely true. I personally (like many others) went in to The Last Jedi with great interest of; Who was Rey?, Who or what was Snoke?, is Finn Force sensitive?, Why has Luke been MIA? Are the Knights of Ren Sith or something else? By the end of the movie I was disappointed in each and every one of those to a point I seriously though about not going to see the final instalment. JJ's "mystery box" was a good staring off point it but it was not a get way to end it, but seemed like after The Last Jedi and Lucasfilm's parting ways with Colin Trevorrow the way they did... it didn't seem like anyone really wanted the job.

[godisawesome]

Absolutely wrong. The sucess of TFA was solely based on the fact that it was the first SW movie in a decade and that it was a continuation of the OT with many people eagre to find out what happened to their beloved characters. It was a very weak entry beeing basically ANH reheated in a microwave and no one really cared about the new cast. Oscar Isaac is basically missing for half the movie - he is nothing more than a secondary character. Gwendoline Christie is a tertiary character as is Gleeson. Driver, Ridley and Boyega were basically no names before TFA and their acting is nothing special. Ridleys acting is actually sub standard.

Again the 2 Billion sucess had nothing to do with the new cast or the movie itself and the new cast was NEVER popular.



The ST started weak with TFA, with an unlikable protagonist that was OP as ****. I agree that TLJ could have saved and repaired much - unfortunately it went into the opposite direction. However this should not distract from the fact that in retrospect TFA was an extremely weak entry that started the spiral into failure. Had TFA been a better movie - Johnson would have been unable to **** everything up in TLJ.

I think you’re utterly wrong about the new character not having any appeal.

Ridley, Boyega, and Driver all won awards for TFA, and all built up big enough fanbases for the characters they played that two of those fanbases got pissed at TLJ for fucking it up, and the third - Kylo’s - got split between fans of Driver playing a bad guy and fans of Kylo’s hair willing to sacrifice everything else in the films to make that hair belong to the male lead.

Boyega’s got backup in people pissed at LFL for what happened after TFA. Ridley noted her character lost popularity after TLJ.

Those characters had and still have fans. And it sure as hell asn’t because fo the messages fo those characters.

TFA had legs, not just a great opening weekend, as the other two films had. You don’t get legs unless people like the main characters... and Han was a supporting character in TFA; a very well used supporting character, but a supporting character nevertheless.

[Celestialbeyonder]

I think pointing to the box office decline is valid in many respects. I would be a devils advocate though and say all the Star Wars film trilogys had a drop in box office after their first movies.

I used the box office since others have used it for sw - however it is a very poor indicator to measure how "good" a movie is or how popular or if people liked it/it has many fans. Just look at Transformers - the First movie had the lowest box office even though it was the "best" one (most tolerable) the second, third and fourth movies were abysmal - yet the box office continued to grow. And absolutely no one can argue that the box office continued to grow because of the good characters the TF franchise had....

[Celestialbeyonder]

Nevermind that there is no possible explanation for why Rey can do all this.

In the supposed original JJ script there was: Luke was channeling his force abilities into Rey, boosting her abilities. In TLJ any attempt at explanation was dropped entirely. Rey just went from below youngling level to high Jedi Knight/low Jedi Master level within a week or so with practically no training at all. Thats why it is so infuriating if people like WebLurker and other Rey fanatics deny her OP ness and Marey Sueness and claim that Anakin/Luke were worse. Which is simply ridiculous.

[Celestialbeyonder]

Has the span of time between Luke's arrival on and departure from Dogobah ever been canonically established? Or that of the span between the Millennium Falcon's evacuation from Hoth and Luke's arrival at Bespin's Cloud City?

Not really. TESB could take place over 2 weeks or 2 months for all we know. We do not know how long it took the MF to get from the Hoth to the Bespin System - neither do we know how long the MF crew was on Bespin before Luke arrived. Personally I think it was somewhere around a month for the entire movie. Substracting the few days on Hoth, the travel time from Hoth to Dagobah and from Dagobah to Bespin and the last final day on Bespin, Luke could have been 3 weeks on Dagobah. Which is a decent amount of training to improve the abilities of someone who allready had years of self training/knowledge/suspisions on how force abilites work. Yet far to few training to beat a more experienced foe.

I have the same question about how long the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan took in ANH. Luke may have had more training than the films explicitly showed.

This one is a little easier. Anything between half a day and a week max. Most likely 2 days, which is enough time for at least a dozen hours of instructions.

[Celestialbeyonder]

I think you’re utterly wrong about the new character not having any appeal. Ridley, Boyega, and Driver all won awards for TFA, and all built up big enough fanbases for the characters they played

Steven Universe has shown: EVERY show/character no matter how bad will get a fanbase nowadays, especially if its characters of the right "kind" that attract the woke croud. So thats not an achievement.

Those characters had and still have fans. And it sure as hell asn’t because fo the messages fo those characters.

For the first part - see above. For the second one yes it is.

TFA had legs, not just a great opening weekend, as the other two films had. You don’t get legs unless people like the main characters... and Han was a supporting character in TFA; a very well used supporting character, but a supporting character nevertheless.

TFA had "legs" because it was the first SW movie in a decade, it relied heavily on the OT cast and people wanted to know what had become of the OT cast. Had TFA killed of not only Han but Luke and Leia, the second and third movie would have performed as well as Solo a Star Wars Story. Thats how bad the new characters were.

Seriously the bad guys have not one single memorable character and not much screen time either: Phasma, Canady, Pryde, Hux and the Knights of Ren are hardly in the movies and a joke half of the time. So is the hacker guy from TLJ whos name I cant even remember. Snoke was pretty interesting before he got killed in the most WTF way possible and Kylo is a whiney little bitch. I cringe half the time when I have to watch him.

Characters like General Grievous, Count Dooku, Admiral Piett and Jabba are far more memorable/better despite not getting much screen time either. Hell the Tactical Droids from the Clone Wars are better and more memorable villains.

The good guys in the ST are a little better - but not by much: Maz Kanata is a stupid joke/plot device. Admiral Pink hair is another joke. So is Rose. That leaves the "big three":

Poe is missing for half of the first movie, in the next two movies he is a bland wannabe Han Solo with half the charisma.
Fin is a comedy device - a non CGI Jar Jar Binks - allthough Binks was more memorable and funnier
Rey is an OP Marey Sue Deus Ex Machina with 0 personality or motivation. She has 0 character development or progression.

Ki Adi Mundi was a more memorable good guy than these people.

The best scene to exemplify this is the scene where C-3PO is about to lose his memory and he says something like: "With my friends". Half the cinema exploded with laughter. After three movies C-3PO doesnt know these people - we as an audience dont know these people. They are just bland, lifless characters in a world with contradicting world building. For all the hate the prequels get - they are infinetly better - as are their characters.

Snoke had the most potential, they should have concentrated on him. In this regard I agree with you: It was TLJ where things really fell apart. They were unstable as early as TFA though,

[TheConstantineDoctor]

I mean for me, what killed those movies was a combination of the fact that Rey was overpowered ,yes. And that she could not make me care. I mean I fought other misogynistic fans who were like "she's a girl, she's gonna be horrible, she cant be the main character." I was always, "let's see what happens." I could give a hoot less whether your male or female, long as the movie/tv show entertains me. I went and see SWFU in theatres and was just, dissatisfied. All of them left me that way. I think her lack of identification with the fans really hurt her. That's just me though.

[Aahz]

I would disagree with the term "solely". It's not like people spent 2 years after comparing theories of who Snoke and Rey were. Or that the second installment of the trilogy didn't make over a billion $$$ becasue people wanted to see where it was going, right?

IIRC the reaction to TFA was kind of mixed there were some Fans in "Rey is a Mary Sue ans TFA was a poor Fanfic version of ANH"-camp, and some where still caught up in the Hype about having a new Star Wars Movies and came up with wild Theories about how the next to movies would explain all plot holes and Mystery Boxes of TFA.

And after TLJ a good part of the second group turned when they realised, that there wasn't a big plan that would explain all that.

[OopsIdiditagain]

No, moving back to cliche is the main reason the sequels fell off. Making her a Palpatine went against her original character arc and overall theme of the sequel series. The whole point of the Last Jedi was to show that anyone can be a great Jedi, despite their heritage. It was supposed to show that the force wasn't biased towards certain families, it's a force of nature. Rey's "heroes journey" was coming to terms with the fact that her parents weren't great Jedi masters and she was just an orphan. Then Rise of the Skywalker went and contradicted all of this. I really don't understand why they felt the need to give Rey a connection to the Skywalker family drama, they already had Kylo for that. Rey being overpowered from the jump is ok because the force is a soft power system.

[OopsIdiditagain]

I mean for me, what killed those movies was a combination of the fact that Rey was overpowered ,yes. And that she could not make me care. I mean I fought other misogynistic fans who were like "she's a girl, she's gonna be horrible, she cant be the main character." I was always, "let's see what happens." I could give a hoot less whether your male or female, long as the movie/tv show entertains me. I went and see SWFU in theatres and was just, dissatisfied. All of them left me that way. I think her lack of identification with the fans really hurt her. That's just me though.

Honestly, the bolded is what I didn't like about Rey. She was so painfully boring in the Force Awakens.

[Triniking1234]

Rey is the best EVER!!!

Rey has absolutely no reason for being an expert on flying a starship, after all, she was stuck on a desert planet for 15+ years. She's naturally gifted, of course!

Rey can fix an old space ship all by herself as well. Rey is just that smart, that's why!

Rey has exceptional skills with a lightsaber. In the end of TFA Rey is able to defeat Kylo Ren in a duel, after never holding a weapon of the sort before. So yeah, Rey, a rookie was able to defeat a highly trained ex-jedi who was able to destroy a Jedi temple. Rey is lucky that's why!

Nevermind that there is no possible explanation for why Rey can do all this. Even Luke had troubles the first time he used a lightsaber. In Star Wars we remember him getting shot by the training drone when he practicing with the lightsaber. And even when he uses it in Empire, he’s not the most skilled, and still falls victim to Vader. How is it possible?

Well, because Rey is the bestest EVER!!!!

Don't forget using the mind trick without any knowledge of it. That one had me bawling.