Why was Kylo’s shirtless scene necessary? I’m still puzzled. Rey’s reaction was odd to it. It’s the reaction I’d have if I did a video conference with my boss and he was shirtless. I’d be mainly confused. Was Daisy supposed to have another reaction? I don’t want to waste time or money on the tlj novelization where it might be explained further so interested in your thoughts.

Here’s the relevant part of the novelization, from Chapter 21:

I can see why reylows want to say this is Rey being overwhelmed with attraction at Kylo because of course they would, but it can just as easily be interpreted as discomfort. Taken together with the way Daisy acted Rey’s reaction on screen and the totality of the story, to me it reads clearly as her being thrown off balance and discomfited.

Rey’s discomfort is the point here. Kylo refusing to cover himself despite her request is his way of setting the tone of the conversation, purposefully disregarding her and taking control of the interaction. Even if we say for the sake of argument that she felt attracted at the sight of him, she still requested that he put something on in a situation where she can’t avoid interacting with him and he simply ignored her.

It’s like Lyndon B. Johnson taking a dump with the bathroom door open while members of his staff were outside; a deliberate show of power by violating personal boundaries, intended to humiliate and dominate. I mean I guess we should be happy the Force Bond didn’t catch Kylo on the can, but to me it would have been about as sexual.

This domination move is immediately followed by an even more significant one where he changes the conversation from Rey’s questions about his father to turning it back against her, deliberately upsetting her by invoking her greatest and most central trauma. This threw her off balance and made her easier to manipulate.

So that is how I read the shirtless scene. It’s not presented as sexual or romantic. It’s part and parcel of Kylo Ren’s continuing efforts to control Rey, and it was ugly on every level–intentionally so, I believe.

Re: Rey has already seen what a handsome man looks like: in the novel, in Rey’s internal monologue when she tells Finn she’s never met a Resistance fighter before, in her head she reflects on how now that she’s gotten a good look at him, he’s quite… We don’t get to hear the rest of that thought because they have to run but I’m pretty sure that’s the exact word she was going to use.

That’s when she pledged to end the First Order once and for all, because they interrupted her ogle session of the dreamiest dude she had ever seen.

Remember that post you made about Kylo being a handsome villain as something new and fresh for the franchise? I just saw a reylo say that Kylo’s not a villain because he’s not ugly.

Oh yes, that’s been their line for a loooong time. They claimed that when Kylo removed in the interrogation scene and showed a normal, non-disfigured face (handsome to them, I guess), that showed he wasn’t a villain. It would take a while to unpack the layers of ableism and missing the whole damned point in that line of thought. Reylow meta is truly another level of hell.

Rey agrees with me, by the way. In the TFA novelization she doesn’t see him as handsome but unexpectedly ordinary-looking. I mean she has already Seen the face of Finn at this point, folks, she knows what a handsome man looks like.

The last anon said about women being look as sex toys is not surprising but also very irrataded disgusted. Bc similar goes to Natalie Portman, back then when she film sw she received a fan Mail and it said sexual uncomfortable things to her and that was a shock when I read that but anyway. It’s best that Daisy won’t return to social media maybe never.

I mean Natalie’s very first fan mail as a child (after Léon, which… yeah) was evidently a male “fan’s” graphic fantasy of raping her, not that it would have made later such instances of sexual harassment easier. I think Daisy leaving was the right choice, too, though it’s sad and unfair because social media can be a powerful tool and it’s not right for women to be driven off it by harassment.

I went to block the Sovereign empress new account but couldn’t find anything. I think she deleted as soon as people new who she was.

The blog exists: if you try to access it logged out you are told it’s a logged-in only blog. She used code to hide it from people she blocked, and she evidently moved her entire block list over to the new blog. So this means she has blocked you, not that the blog is not there. She has deliberately interacted before with people she had blocked–this happened to me when my own block came undone due to the second to last time she deleted and remade–so it’s still a good idea to block her back.

I just remembered Ackbar is dead and screw Rian Johnson for mentioning his death offhand. Was it so hard to have Ackbar in the shot when the bridge was blown open? But I disagree with Ackbar replacing Holdo. A guy named Ackbar doing a suicide run has unfortunate implications.

I agree, in fact I don’t think Ackbar should have been in TLJ at all if RJ wasn’t going to do anything meaningful with him. Then Ackbar and Lando could have met in IX and reminisced about the Battle of Endor. Y’know, the battle where Lando defied the order to retreat and destroyed the second Death Star. Because bosses aren’t perfect gods or something.

Would Han, Chewie, and Lando show up in your Episode VII?

I’ve been thinking about that. Outwardly Han would be similar to his Bloodline self, running charity races, maybe teaching pilots, with a legitimate business on the side. Unlike Bloodline he is also deep in the Coruscant social web, both legitimate and less legitimate, in support of Leia’s agenda. He serves as an unofficial spymaster for Leia, basically, in contrast to Poe who has an official rank though Poe’s work may also be frequently off the books. Han could be Leia’s channel to the underground of Republic space and beyond, where she might turn when she can’t get things done through legitimate channels–which is a lot of the time, with the Senate so deadlocked. Leia would not be unlike Vader in this regard, recognizing that she needs to rule and use not only the Republic’s daytime life but its buried night realms as well, its criminal and illegal elements. If personal principles and Republic protocol don’t allow her to get too deeply involved, well, that’s where Han comes in.

That’s a long prelude to saying Han is likely to be the man to turn to when the Republic’s system quickly starts to fail and careens toward war. When Rey helps Finn and his surviving crew escape the Republic military, they obviously can’t ask the authorities for help. Enter Han, who helps them disappear into the back streets of Coruscant with the hope that they can smuggle Finn in to testify before the Senate and avert a war. Alas, Ben’s attempt to rescue Leia causes chaos and death, Leia is forced to go on the run, and war breaks out in earnest.

As for Lando, I was thinking he could play a role in the war or rather the attempt to stop it and find out the truth. Han could contact him to get a ship for Finn and Rey, and Bespin’s security forces could cover Leia’s retreat from Republic space. Maybe in a later pivotal scene Lando’s fleet approaches the evenly-matched Republic and Mandalorian forces, with some suspense which side he would join–but instead he gets between them and orders them to stop firing at each other.

I’d like to see Chewie not solely at Han’s side but at Kashyyk leading his own life as a leader with his own family. Ben and Leia could flee there to seek refuge, and maybe this is where the nature of the threat becomes clear–a group of ex-Republic and ex-Empire officers had been kidnapping children, mainly Mandalorian, to pit Mandalore and the Republic against each other. This could also be where Ben decides this group makes sense and he will join them because the Republic is irretrievably broken. Chewie and Leia would try to stop him but Ben seriously wounds Chewie, saying he didn’t want to. He has had enough of the Republic and thinks the only way forward is to destroy it. He tells his mother that he loves her and she will understand someday.

Do you like Rey?

Sure! I had trouble pinnig down her character for a long time, but after writing a big meta about her (link), which is something I always wanted to do, I think I have a much better idea of what makes her tick and find her story enjoyable. Her story has not always been handled well and I find fandom’s default reading of her as a sweet all-good angel boring as hell, but it is possible to find a more interesting character in the text and that’s who I like.

Hey I’ve always wondered, if you were in charge of the Sequels, how would you have done it? Would you of continued the story or would you have taken Finn, Rey, and Poe on an entirely different adventure and left the Empire Vs Rebels storyline stay with the OT?

I would not have repeated the OT’s central conflict quite so blatantly, mostly because unlike JJ I had no idea that it could sell, much less be a record-breaking hit 😂 My vision of the ST would probably have been a more PT-like affair, but about the struggle of building a New Republic in contrast to the ending of the Old.

A brief summary because I ended up writing a monstrosity under the cut: Poe’s adventures as a New Republic pilot and spy reporting to Leia the Republic Chancellor, a more gradual deprogramming process for Finn who is a kidnapped Mandalorian child soldier and the main antagonist for the whole first movie, Rey as a world-weary space scavenger looking for her family. Ben Solo starts out as a powerful but arrogant Jedi whose outsized pride and understandable resentments lead him over three movies to become the Big Bad while Finn goes in the opposite direction, reclaiming his heritage and fighting back against the organization that stole him as a child.

I’d have made Poe an officer in the New Republic (which is his actual background in the ST, of course) leading a mission given him by Chancellor/First Senator Leia Organa to investigate a disturbance in Mandalorian space. The NR and the Mandalorians are negotiating peace and trade treaties, but the Mandalorians are distracted by raids on their outlying settlements and, most disturbingly, their children being stolen. They blame the Republic, or at least its inability to reign in the chaos in their space which they believe simply pushed the raiders and slavers into Mandalore space. The Mandalorians also bitterly remember how clones of one of their warriors were used as slave soldiers by the old Republic. Some even suspect the Republic is trying to build another Mandalorian army. Leia wants to stop these raids, but it’s not easy gaining a skittish Senate’s support for missions outside Republic space. Poe has to find the smoking gun on these raiders to bring the Senate around. Along the way he is helped by Master Luke Skywalker and his apprentice, Jedi Knight Ben Solo, who ends up coming along with his old friend and rival (and implied old flame, depending on how much I can get away with).

Poe ends up being captured, however, just as he and Ben are nearing the raiders’ base. Poe kills one of the raiders that he took as a Mandalorian pirate and then is taken down by one of the dead man’s fellows–another seeming Mandalorian who fights with devastating effectiveness and ejects Ben into space before taking Poe prisoner. This is Finn. Poe escapes later when Ben, who had saved himself with the Force, comes back to save him, seething with wounded pride–something he has quite a lot of–that he was bested and almost killed by a non-Force user. He, Ben Solo, Master Skywalker’s finest student! A Skywalker by blood! He vows that there will be a rematch.

Poe and Ben have escaped, but are far from home free. The ship they stole to escape is damaged in pursuit and they hide from pursuers in a debris field, occasionally bickering, and several scavengers come upon them only to squabble among themselves over salvage rights. The winner is a tough young woman who arrived in a cloaked ship before blasting everyone else away–Rey, who’s a lot like Valkyrie from Thor: Ragnarok and is played by Devery Jacobs the way God intended. Ben and Poe instead convince her to help them out and they’ll give her anything she likes. What she really wants is to find her family, in search of whom she’s been traveling ever since she got off the junkyard planet Jakku. Poe promises the full support of the Republic for her search.

According to the information Poe had managed to extract from the ship’s databanks it turns out that someone is building an army with stolen children and, what’s more, this started decades ago. They appear to be remnants of the Empire. The mysterious warrior Finn may have been one of the first wave that was taken, judging by his age. Poe and the others need to take this information to the Senate and Mandalore, but are slowed by Finn’s dogged pursuit before Rey sets a clever trap and they take him and his crew prisoner. Finn fully expects to be tortured and killed, and is angry at the death of his friend Slip at Poe’s hands. Finn refuses to divulge anything but Poe and the others can tell just from the way he talks about the Republic that he was heavily indoctrinated his whole life. He is honorable, however–he asks that Poe spare his crew and that they execute just Finn himself as an example. Rey thinks Finn is a lost cause, which stance Ben is inclined to side with, but Poe tries to get Finn into the reality-based community which mostly has the effect of making Finn defensive. More than actual facts, however, Finn is confused at how well he and his crew are treated. On the one hand he suspects a trick, obviously, but the first seeds of doubt are planted.

Finn, however, is far from naive–he has extensive knowledge of galactic politics and military and makes some sharp critiques of the Republic’s incompetence and injustices, and his arguments actually have an effect on both Poe and Ben. Ben has seen the pressures his mother is under trying to run the Republic, how self-serving and cowardly the Senators are. Finn’s argument that only a strong central leadership backed up with credible threats of force can make the galaxy governable resonates in particular with Ben. This will be the start of Ben’s own fall as he is increasingly consumed with the thought that only he can right the ship of the galactic state.

Meanwhile Rey finds latent memories coming back from snatches of Finn’s conversation and the way he fights. Could he hold the key to finding her family? Was she a stolen child soldier like he was? She also respects Finn, and he her, for their respective skills. She doesn’t have a bone to pick in this fight and there’s no personal enmity between them. She thinks she might have liked him if he weren’t a brainwashed stiff. Scratch that, maybe she likes him nonetheless. Their interactions are increasingly filled with banter and borderline flirting.

At the end of it all Poe’s party bring the information and the prisoners to Republic space, but it is too late–the Mandalorians have invaded Republic space. They have decided that if the Republic will not keep the order they will do it themselves. Leia calls for a measured response, but the Senate quickly overrules her and actually issues a vote of no-confidence, then arrests her as a Mandalorian collaborator and would-be dictator. The situation escalates to war and Ben seethes at what happened to his mother. He runs off to rescue Leia and enlists Poe’s help. The Republic military takes in Finn and his crew and brutalize one of them when they resist, showing that Finn is in danger of much worse treatment than he was with Poe. Rey sneaks after Finn’s prisoner transport, unwilling to lose this possible lead to her family. End first movie.

They casted a dark skinned black woman to IX! I’m so excited (please, JJ, make your best in her character!). Kelly Marie Tran, Mark and Carrie will be in the movie too (“using previously unreleased footage shot of Carrie for Star Wars: The Force Awakens”)

Welcome, Naomi Ackie! Hmm, a woman with a British accent and dark hair–must be another of KK’s picks. 😂 Given her age I’m guessing she is the mysterious Caro?