Some Thoughts on Rey and TROS
Dec. 25th, 2019 03:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorI'd like to now give some of my thoughts about Rey in TROS.
Rey's arc was probably the most fun for me. Did much of it make any sense? Not really. But it made the experience enjoyable for me. We get to see her use Force lightning, pull at a space freighter in the sky, and do Force healing, all interesting Force abilities that I greatly enjoyed seeing from her. And I've spoken before about how if she was related to anyone we know, I would want it to be Palpatine (even if this turning out to be the case took me entirely by surprise). So while thematically I prefer her not being related to anyone known, from a self-indulgent perspective I enjoyed that turn of events. There could have been much better lines for the scenes where Rey confronts Palpatine, but I've come to expect terrible dialogue from Star Wars, so I didn't really fret over that deficiency. Plus this gives me loads of AU ideas for tacky Palpatine family drama.
One of my favorite scenes is where she heals the snake creature. I also really liked her return to Ahch-To. I was amused when she literally burned Kylo's TIE thing to the ground on arriving there. The great thing about this scene for me was that it helped me reconcile Luke's motivations and behavior in TLJ emotionally. For anyone who already accepted it, that kind of thing probably seems unnecessary, but for me it was a pivotal connector for the two films. Perhaps Luke knew she was Palpatine's granddaughter the moment she arrived, and so compounding his feelings of failure training Kylo, he's now presented with this task of training Palpatine's descendant with the implicit 'oh, but make sure she doesn't fall to the Dark Side or everything will be 100 times worse than it already is and it will be *all your fault*'. And so he just loses it, lol. I can also see from this how he might have originally made the decision to go become a hermit on depression island because it made so much sense to me how Rey might have come to the same conclusion he did, that her powers were doing more harm than good.
The scene where Rey inadvertantly destroys the freighter is one I have a number of thoughts on. There are some things I like about this scene, and some I don't. There are also some things that make me feel ambivalent about this scene. One interpretation that I don't like is that it's Rey's inherent Dark Side coming through via evil Sith genetics or whatnot. People are not genetically good or evil, and one of my main criticisms of Kylo's arc is that it I feel it tries to rely too much on some muddled idea of 'genetic destiny'. Anyway, back to the significance of the freighter's destruction. For me I see it through the lens of a friendly fire situation, which is something that I think can understandably be immensely traumatizing. This was why I could see Rey trying to leave her friends, because at this point, she feels they are better off without her. This is a direct parallel of what happened with Luke after his failure to train Kylo Ren as a Jedi, and I just really got it. I also agreed with Luke when he said 'no, I was wrong and you should go back' but I understood her actions emotionally. I felt ambivalent about the lack of any real consequences for the frieghter destruction for Rey. It didn't affect my opinion of how she might feel about it, that kind of thing could easily cause PTSD even if it didn't actually have the consequences she originally thought it did, but it made the movie feel like it was really blunting down the consequences of war. And while I extremely did not want Chewie to die from the perspective of being attached to him as a character, I felt his survival nonetheless cheapened this pivotal scene. But anyway, this is one of the few scenes in the movie that I feel really have much of any thematic significance that can be extracted.
The Rey vs evil Rey fight scene was fun. I loved Evil Rey's lightsaber, and her teeth!
I was highly amused by the ending because while I understand it's meant to be heartwarming when she says she's a Skywalker, what was going through my head for Rey's immediate thoughts was 'No way I'm going to say I'm a Palpatine!'
Anyway, those are my thoughts on Rey in TROS.
Rey's arc was probably the most fun for me. Did much of it make any sense? Not really. But it made the experience enjoyable for me. We get to see her use Force lightning, pull at a space freighter in the sky, and do Force healing, all interesting Force abilities that I greatly enjoyed seeing from her. And I've spoken before about how if she was related to anyone we know, I would want it to be Palpatine (even if this turning out to be the case took me entirely by surprise). So while thematically I prefer her not being related to anyone known, from a self-indulgent perspective I enjoyed that turn of events. There could have been much better lines for the scenes where Rey confronts Palpatine, but I've come to expect terrible dialogue from Star Wars, so I didn't really fret over that deficiency. Plus this gives me loads of AU ideas for tacky Palpatine family drama.
One of my favorite scenes is where she heals the snake creature. I also really liked her return to Ahch-To. I was amused when she literally burned Kylo's TIE thing to the ground on arriving there. The great thing about this scene for me was that it helped me reconcile Luke's motivations and behavior in TLJ emotionally. For anyone who already accepted it, that kind of thing probably seems unnecessary, but for me it was a pivotal connector for the two films. Perhaps Luke knew she was Palpatine's granddaughter the moment she arrived, and so compounding his feelings of failure training Kylo, he's now presented with this task of training Palpatine's descendant with the implicit 'oh, but make sure she doesn't fall to the Dark Side or everything will be 100 times worse than it already is and it will be *all your fault*'. And so he just loses it, lol. I can also see from this how he might have originally made the decision to go become a hermit on depression island because it made so much sense to me how Rey might have come to the same conclusion he did, that her powers were doing more harm than good.
The scene where Rey inadvertantly destroys the freighter is one I have a number of thoughts on. There are some things I like about this scene, and some I don't. There are also some things that make me feel ambivalent about this scene. One interpretation that I don't like is that it's Rey's inherent Dark Side coming through via evil Sith genetics or whatnot. People are not genetically good or evil, and one of my main criticisms of Kylo's arc is that it I feel it tries to rely too much on some muddled idea of 'genetic destiny'. Anyway, back to the significance of the freighter's destruction. For me I see it through the lens of a friendly fire situation, which is something that I think can understandably be immensely traumatizing. This was why I could see Rey trying to leave her friends, because at this point, she feels they are better off without her. This is a direct parallel of what happened with Luke after his failure to train Kylo Ren as a Jedi, and I just really got it. I also agreed with Luke when he said 'no, I was wrong and you should go back' but I understood her actions emotionally. I felt ambivalent about the lack of any real consequences for the frieghter destruction for Rey. It didn't affect my opinion of how she might feel about it, that kind of thing could easily cause PTSD even if it didn't actually have the consequences she originally thought it did, but it made the movie feel like it was really blunting down the consequences of war. And while I extremely did not want Chewie to die from the perspective of being attached to him as a character, I felt his survival nonetheless cheapened this pivotal scene. But anyway, this is one of the few scenes in the movie that I feel really have much of any thematic significance that can be extracted.
The Rey vs evil Rey fight scene was fun. I loved Evil Rey's lightsaber, and her teeth!
I was highly amused by the ending because while I understand it's meant to be heartwarming when she says she's a Skywalker, what was going through my head for Rey's immediate thoughts was 'No way I'm going to say I'm a Palpatine!'
Anyway, those are my thoughts on Rey in TROS.