Originally Posted by
godisawesome
Rey didn’t “earn” stuff in that she largely ends up simply accumulating familiar power, weapons, ships, names and etc., without having any story build-up to them.
But I still say that’s more the fault of TLJ not giving a rat’s ass about her and deliberately undercutting her for subversions’s sake so it could,focus more on Kylo, just as it deliberately demoted Finn. Rey has one movie where she’s quiet functional and capable as a protagonist (TFA), one movie that screws her over and subtracted what strengths she did have (TLJ), and one film trying to fix her, but not allowed to reject the cancerous relationship with Kylo and stuck trying to squeeze in two films worth of storytelling (TROS).
Its’ a fairly unique problem, because honestly, most continuous stories don’t have a second entry sabotage the first one so thoroughly.
It’d be like if Captain Marvel 2 opened and decided to have Carol start falling for Ronan the Accuser, dropped her characterization as a tough soldier in favor of a naive Ingenue, and had the final confrontation happen between a variation of the male Mar-Vell and Ronan after having Ronan tell a tears-eyed Carol she has no place in this story.