lj-writes:

I don’t get why people think Finn both being a military leader and having the Force is somehow strange for Star Wars. After all, we have a rather outsized example of this already.

It’s not just the combination of Force and military abilities either, but also the characters’ story positions. Finn being the “war” part of the triad gives him the position Leia should
have occupied in the OT, the character with ties to both the military
and the Force who embodies what the war is about: The human face of the
Empire’s atrocities, the survivor who chose to fight. Leia should have
been the central figure of the war and not Han’s plus-one on what
were essentially his plots and missions.

Done right Leia would have been
more like Katniss in The Hunger Games, damaged and traumatized from her
experiences, inspiring by her story and example. RO tried to shoehorn
Jynn into Katniss’s Mockingjay role except it never worked because Jynn
didn’t have the representative story. Obviously the Mockingjay figures
were Cassian and the Jedhans (Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze), but yet again SW
shied away from giving center stage to victims of wide-scale atrocities.
It shied away again with Finn in TLJ.

This refusal to have central Mockingjay figures, I believe, reflects SW’s basic ambivalence as a franchise that is more comfortable with destined saviors than with exploited and destroyed peoples saving themselves. Maybe that comes of SW being a USAmerican franchise dealing with fascism, the contradiction of a country that is fundamentally fascistic and imperialistic trying to tell itself a story of being antifascist and anti-imperialist. America can’t face the full implication of truly upending its fascist underpinnings, in fiction as in reality. Instead the brutal form of fascism is replaced by the “soft” fascism of worshipping benign supermen.

Then along comes JJ Abrams, someone in a position to know the contradictions and falsity in the story America tells about itself. He shows the New Republic’s compromise with fascism destroying it morally as well as physically, a year ahead of the 2016 election. He shows how the worship of the Skywalkers as the chosen line gave us Kylo Ren. He gives us Finn, one of the First Order’s victims, as a strong and central figure.

Finn in IX could be the character that Leia could have been–the one who ties it all together, the military plot and the Force plot, the story of war with the story of spirituality and morality. He could be the character that embodies both the evil of the First Order and the determination, on a personal, visceral level, to fight it. He could be the character that brings audiences face to face with what it means when people who are considered expendable in the quest for greatness stand up and fight back. He could solve the Star Wars dilemma and finally break the vicious cycle of destruction the galaxy far, far away has become trapped in. I certainly hope so.

(Spun off from a discussion with @fuckyeahrebelfinn [link])

#and this is exactly why I believed Finn and Rey’s seperation in TLJ could’ve been brilliant#bc Leia should’ve been the character to introduce Finn to this role in the ST#but then RJ…. whatever the fuck#now that one movie was wasted I’m afraid we can’t get into the politics of this the way we should have

That speculation was not baseless at all, given that John was saying in July 2017 that Finn would be in “another form of training” alongside Leia (link). This is so wildly out of line with what we saw in TLJ that I have to wonder if John was led to believe TLJ was going to be a different movie altogether. Or maybe it’s the way his answer was edited and the “alongside General Leia” comment wasn’t meant to go together with the training comment at all. It’s still really weird and yeah, either way a big opportunity was lost to have Finn interact with and learn from Leia.