I think it’s possible. With JJ at the wheel, I don’t think either Finn or Rey will have an endgame romance with anyone else, but I think it’s possible that it ends like the first Pacific Rim, where Mako and Raleigh were together, but there’s no kiss or overt proof of romance.
I hated the ambiguity of Mako/Raleigh in PR, because it called to mind the ‘90s Hollywood movies starring Chow Yun Fat and Jet Li, where they could be heroes, but they couldn’t kiss the girl (not just the white girl – Jet Li’s kiss with Aaliyah in Romeo Must Die was cut because it made test audiences uncomfortable. Romeo Must Die was a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet, but test audience didn’t like the idea of a Chinese Romeo and a Black Juliet kissing). Or, more directly, Will Smith iRobot and I am Legend.
I think it’s more likely that Finn and Rey get a “safe” ambiguous ending together than an ending that shoots down Finnrey completely. I do think that would be cowardly. I don’t think it’s something JJ is afraid of – he unapologetically brought Spuhura to the screen even though it was an unpopular move with fans, including a huge number of passionate Spirk shippers. But, of course, JJ won’t have the last word.
The first two trilogies ended with hope for the future far more than romance. Both ended with Luke and Leia, and I think Luke and Leia will have a place in the ending of ix. The hope for the future, though, is Finn and Rey. It’s more important to me that Finn’s importance is made clear than anything else.
I’m rooting for an onscreen kiss but if they go with a strong and intimate friendship I won’t be broken up about it, just annoyed that Lucasfilm are being cowards in 20fucking19. I’ll just take John’s going to bat for Finnrey as canon confirmation, another reason I doubt Finnrose or Damerey would happen even if explicit Finnrey doesn’t. Daisy also shot down Damerey almost as hard as Reylow anyway. It would be even better if we get post-IX materials mentioning/featuring a Finnrey romance and children, since the franchise seems less gun-shy away from the big screen.
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.
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.
L.J.'s Obsessions 