It just hit me that Mayfeld had better character development than Finn?

[BeastieRunner]

At the risk of being off-topic ...



I thought you guys would appreciate this one.

[K. Jones]

Such a grim concept and thread topic. It's so true though. There's a few caveats I think I'd like to get into ... "IN STORY". We all know why Mayfeld had better development than Finn in the real world, and it's good writing and being a supporting role character in a story ... that matters. Or I mean, matters more. Feels more impactful and explores more angles.

Within universe though I think a little bit of it can be played with. Finn is still young. Youth comes with a certain naivety and also, frankly, a degree of being boring. Uninteresting. Unformed. Underdeveloped, like, as a person. Age, and even a short half-decade of disillusionment compared to one bad mission, hitting someone who was a veteran spec ops fighter rather than a fresh-faced grunt, is going to yield different results. Mayfeld has simply had more time to become an interesting person, where for Finn it starts out so much simpler and more cut and dry, and his extroversion-emotions are because he's more exuberantly young, less calloused, hasn't had to live with the guilt or pain as long. Mayfeld is old enough that he actually had time to become an interesting guy PRIOR to becoming disillusioned with the people he worked for.

Continuing on that, looking from TFA to TLJ, it's like five minutes later and the only person Finn actually knows took off on a mythic quest and the second person he's ever met is accusing him of being a coward or deserter when he hasn't even enlisted in her army. Canto Bight tangent notwithstanding, his story does at least continue to be about shedding naivety.

By TROS they really did him dirty by essentially having nothing to do and denying that pitch of leading a revolution. It's a total bummer and I really feel for Boyega. Just meeting others like him is "nice". I don't feel like he had to have "inspired" them to do it to have meaning or matter to the story. But pulling some kind of Dominion War Cardassian Flip at the end on Coruscant and putting him up against Hux would have been excellent.

Anyhoo, just like everything else it's the old "The Writing and the Execution" comparison that we'll all be drawing for years and years to come.

[godisawesome]

And o still fell like the issue is far more TLJ’s fault than anything else.

Johnson and LFL wanted Finn demoted, and they did so by denigrating him, and LFL weren’t going to let Abrams and Boyega fix the character in a the film they were almost commissioning specifically to prostitution the entire trilogy to Ben Solo for.