What went wrong with Rey's character?

[Jackalope89]

The Force Awakens, while there are a few issues I do have with how she's set up, is overall, solid. Then, we come to the main issue of no overlapping story made. For as flawed as the Prequels were, they at least had that going (as messy as those got at times). Whatever positive set up the sequel trilogy had set up in Force Awakens, was gone by the second film, to say nothing of the third.

Rey and Finn both got screwed over as characters.

[Vegeta]

Part of Rey's problem is that she makes all the other characters in the story superfluous. People say "Luke learns the Force in his first film so he must be a Mary Sue too!" But Luke always needs the help of his friends in the story. In the first film alone, Obi-Wan teaches him about the Force but also saves his life from the Sandpeople, Walrus Man, and then sacrifices himself on the Death Star. Leia sends the droids away with the stolen plans, stands up to Tarkin and Vader's interrogation and salvaged Luke's botched rescue attempt by leading them down the garbage chute. Han Solo is the ship pilot and also saves Luke from Vader during the trench run. Every character gets an opportunity to shine.

Rey on the other hand, never needs anyone. Han Solo is supposedly the mentor, but she already knows how to fly the Falcon and is even better at fixing the ship than him. He tries to explain how the blaster he gives her works and she dismisses him because she already knows. Han's only purpose in the film is to say to the audience "Hi, I'm your beloved scoundrel Han Solo, and I am giving the new character Rey a big thumbs up, so you should too!"

Finn has no purpose other than to scream "REEEEYYYY!!!" whenever she is not directly on screen. He doesn't have any talent he can contribute that she can't already do, and when he and Solo journey to rescue her from Starkiller Base it's pointed out that she already has rescued herself. He isn't even allowed to be the love interest, despite a moment in the first film where he specifically asks her if "she has a boyfriend." (Nobody asks that right off the bat unless they are attracted to the other person, you can't tell me he was only interested in telling her he thinks he is Force-sensitive. That is just rediculous.) Finn technically should be the "Luke" pov of our story, as he is the young naive figure taking "his first steps into a larger world" by leaving the First Order and seeing how the Galaxy actually operates, but that wouldn't subvert people's expectations I guess.

Luke doesn't even teach her the Force, he stops immediately during the first lesson because she is soooo powerful it "scares him." Luke is just there to look bad and thus make her look amazing in comparison. His one parting word of wisdom that the Force "isn't about lifting rocks" is completely debunked when she saves the Resistance by literally lifting a bunch of rocks. All she receives from Luke is a bunch of stolen jedi texts, his iconic lightsaber and X-Wing fighter. Luke's only purpose is to pass the torch and die.

Poe is the only hero who does get a role in the film and some character growth, and that is only because he spends most of his on screen time far away from Rey. Granted, his growth only occurred due to his constant screwing up, but at least it was something. However, by Rise of Skywalker he is just there to argue with Rey, like Han argued with Leia, but without the sexual heat lying underneath to drive it.

Every character (other than Poe's) role in the film is to tell us how great Rey is, whether it is following her around like a puppy (Finn) or by comparison (being a huge Jedi failure like Luke.) Even Leia despite having never met Rey, ignores longtime friend Chewbacca to give Rey a hug following Solo's death.

[Jokerz79]

In all honesty Rey isn't the Luke type character of TFA.

Thematically that is Finn like Luke he wants to escape his past Finn wants away from the 1st Order Luke wants off Tattoine.

Finn is the bumbling young lad who needs saved a few times.

Finn goes off to "save" the girl who does more saving than him.

He forms a Bond with the Roguish Pilot.

Rey is Obi-Wan. She lives alone on the desert planet and has no interest in getting involved at 1st. She does all the saving as I mentioned and is the main focus for the antagonist.

[godisawesome]

Part of Rey's problem is that she makes all the other characters in the story superfluous. People say "Luke learns the Force in his first film so he must be a Mary Sue too!" But Luke always needs the help of his friends in the story. In the first film alone, Obi-Wan teaches him about the Force but also saves his life from the Sandpeople, Walrus Man, and then sacrifices himself on the Death Star. Leia sends the droids away with the stolen plans, stands up to Tarkin and Vader's interrogation and salvaged Luke's botched rescue attempt by leading them down the garbage chute. Han Solo is the ship pilot and also saves Luke from Vader during the trench run. Every character gets an opportunity to shine.

Rey on the other hand, never needs anyone. Han Solo is supposedly the mentor, but she already knows how to fly the Falcon and is even better at fixing the ship than him. He tries to explain how the blaster he gives her works and she dismisses him because she already knows. Han's only purpose in the film is to say to the audience "Hi, I'm your beloved scoundrel Han Solo, and I am giving the new character Rey a big thumbs up, so you should too!"

Finn has no purpose other than to scream "REEEEYYYY!!!" whenever she is not directly on screen. He doesn't have any talent he can contribute that she can't already do, and when he and Solo journey to rescue her from Starkiller Base it's pointed out that she already has rescued herself. He isn't even allowed to be the love interest, despite a moment in the first film where he specifically asks her if "she has a boyfriend." (Nobody asks that right off the bat unless they are attracted to the other person, you can't tell me he was only interested in telling her he thinks he is Force-sensitive. That is just rediculous.) Finn technically should be the "Luke" pov of our story, as he is the young naive figure taking "his first steps into a larger world" by leaving the First Order and seeing how the Galaxy actually operates, but that wouldn't subvert people's expectations I guess.

Luke doesn't even teach her the Force, he stops immediately during the first lesson because she is soooo powerful it "scares him." Luke is just there to look bad and thus make her look amazing in comparison. His one parting word of wisdom that the Force "isn't about lifting rocks" is completely debunked when she saves the Resistance by literally lifting a bunch of rocks. All she receives from Luke is a bunch of stolen jedi texts, his iconic lightsaber and X-Wing fighter. Luke's only purpose is to pass the torch and die.

Poe is the only hero who does get a role in the film and some character growth, and that is only because he spends most of his on screen time far away from Rey. Granted, his growth only occurred due to his constant screwing up, but at least it was something. However, by Rise of Skywalker he is just there to argue with Rey, like Han argued with Leia, but without the sexual heat lying underneath to drive it.

Every character (other than Poe's) role in the film is to tell us how great Rey is, whether it is following her around like a puppy (Finn) or by comparison (being a huge Jedi failure like Luke.) Even Leia despite having never met Rey, ignores longtime friend Chewbacca to give Rey a hug following Solo's death.

I have to disagree tremendously when it comes ot TFa in practice and in concept, though I do agree on some aspects of TLJ havign that issue.... but their offset by TLJ making the character fundamentally unworkable as even a power fantasy.

Fundamentally, Rey desperately needs Finn and Chewie to actually defeat Kylo at the end of TFA, even with Kylo explicitly holding back and self-destructing the entire time, and Rey's ultimately almost useless when it comes to the entire Starkiller Base problem, where Finn and Han are the central figures in that story. Rey *is* presented as more physically capable than Finn before finding the Force, and does embrace some of the same power fantasy tropes Anakin and Luke had previously in their debut movies... but this is offset by her abandonment issues getting her in more trouble than Anakin and Luke got into, gets her flat out punked by Kylo twice, tortured and violated, and ultimately all she does to help the Starkiller Plot is help Finn open a door.

Finn's actually carrying most of the external plot before Han shows up, still does after Han shows up, and contributes more directly to saving and avenging billions of lives than Rey does; this is less a defense of Rey and more me just pointing out that Finn was emphatically not useless and actually quite effective in resolving most of the external conflicts of TFA - and again, that's before he's needed to protect Rey from Kylo when she gets punked the second time, and how his wounding and fighting of Kylo contributes to Rey's very close to failure victory.

Rey IS a power fantasy in TFA - but Rey's not making any of the other characters superflouous.

It's TLJ where her physical capabilities are raised even further to the point of making other characters superflous because the plot puts her in the position to resolve the main external conflicts through brute force and abandons even the slight handicap she *does* have in TFA compared to Kylo while denigrating and contemptuously dismissing Finn and the other "mortal" characters....

...But TLJ also denies her agency and makes her the not-funny, not-relatable counterpart to early Harley Quinn next to Kylo Ren's uncharismatic, boring, overly-serious and even more shallow Joker. She's given all this physical power (even compared to TFA) but no personality, no real personal motivation, no real empathy towards anyone other than Kylo, and what she does get with Kylo is to be his arm candy and enabler for no good reason.

TFA Rey is a power fantasy, but still suffers for her character flaws and is still a non-factor in the external conflicts until the very end, where the other characters still carry more than her, and has the type of likable, relatable personality that makes power fantasies work.

TLJ Rey is an example of the version of a Mary Sue who's not a self-insert power fantasy, but rather a somewhat misogynistic "brainless love interest" for the self-instert Gary Stu of Kylo.

[MASTER-OF-SUPRISE]

I think one of the biggest problems is that TLJ feels like it tore Luke down to build Rey up. Doing that is not going to go well for the character you’re trying to build up. Adding on to that is the Palpatine reveal which had literally no build up. A forced Reylo romance that really falls apart very fast if you think about it. There’s also the fact that she has no positive connection to Luke until after he died. This makes her claiming the Skywalker name come off as hollow and unearned.

Adding all these factors together is a pretty bad mix imo.

[godisawesome]

I think one of the biggest problems is that TLJ feels like it tore Luke down to build Rey up. Doing that is not going to go well for the character you’re trying to build up. Adding on to that is the Palpatine reveal which had literally no build up. A forced Reylo romance that really falls apart very fast if you think about it. There’s also the fact that she has no positive connection to Luke until after he died. This makes her claiming the Skywalker name come off as hollow and unearned.

Adding all these factors together is a pretty bad mix imo.

I still think that Luke was torn down far more for 1) Ben Solo’s sake and 2) for the sake of Rian Johnson lecturing the audience on why he finds escapism childish than it ever was about building Rey up; any positive comparison for her was, I believe strictly incidental in Rian Johnson’s writing of the story.

If he meant to big her up at all, then I think there would have been at least one actually useful training scene from Luke, or there would have been some attempt to give her some of her TFA agency and perspective, even if he was always going to pimp her out to Kylo. And, maybe more importantly, the film wouldn’t then insist on giving Luke, not Rey, the climax…

…and the film clearly does feel like it’s version of Luke, “revealed”/retconned to be a sad, self-centered, interchangeably pretentious “man pain” protagonist, can and should have more importance to the Galaxy and the ST’s conflict than Rey, Finn, Poe, or even Han from TFA.

Rey’s pretty clearly made into Kylo’s biggest tool for taking over the story; Johnson favoring Kylo then makes her seem modestly better off than Luke from the perspective of having a future and technically being a main character for more movies… but she’s nowhere near the climax, and it says something very depressing that Rey not only helps kill Snoke, but also apparently wakes up near a completely defenseless Kylo and thus could end the entire conflict… but Johnson completely skipped that part out of disinterest.

It's a bit of a Morton’s Fork - would you rather be:

- A beloved idealistic character reduced to a sad sack cynic in a pretentious story being beaten up by a kid and blamed for another being a sociopath, but still being the feature of the climax claimed to matter more than other characters?

Or…

- A new exciting character reduced to a sexist tool pimped out to make a Neo Nazi School,Shooter seem like a romantic lead, getting an action scene alongside him, and getting to beat down the old hero who “created” him… but then also be banished from mattering in the climax?

(For the record, I think Rey was definitely “shilled” more clearly in TFA, and a bit at the expense of Han, Finn, and Kylo… but that TFA shows why such cynical moves can work, since if you just restrain it and balance it out a bit by making sure the other characters still get good stuff and don't get rendered superfluous, you don’t do nearly as much damage to them as you get benefits to the new star. Rey was shown to know the engineering of the Falcon better than Han, and defeated Kylo when Finn got taken down… but the film still presented Han as a mentor character who knew more than her and Finn and was still quite capable and sneakier, and Finn both drives more of the immediate plot and Rey doesn’t beat Kylo with Kylo holding back while Chewie wounds him and Finn holds him off and wounds him again.

“Shilling” can work functionally if it’s done with restraint.)