I felt so sorry for Rey in TLJ. She’s stuck following around two messed-up men trying to cajole them to step up, one of whom murdered her father figure before her eyes and then turns around to use her abandonment issues to hurt her. She isn’t even given space to grieve Han properly or process her own trauma at Ren’s hands except through the unhealthy process of trauma bonding, where she tries desperately to believe the person who hurt her is actually on her side. She isn’t even shown spending time with Chewie whom she actually likes and who shares her grief. She was constantly missing Finn, and he was on her mind even while she was about to risk her life on a reckless plan. Her reunion with Finn was the first time she looked genuinely happy in the movie, and that’s really sad for someone who is so optimistic and hopeful. I guess RJ was trying to set up that contrast but mostly I just felt sad for her.
I need to call this post out because this is just some straight up delusional shit.
First of all Ruin Johnson himself confirmed that Kylo manipulatived Rey so that he could be in a position to kill Snoke. This plan had been going on since Kylo smashed his helmet. Since then Kylo wanted Snoke dead.
Second of all Rey is not serving a system that made her wait 15 years. Seriously do these people even watch the same movies?! Rey was left on Jakku! It’s not apart of the New Republic and it’s in the middle of nowhere! It’s like blaming the America for getting abandoned in a uncharted island.
Third of all Kylo isn’t asking her to stop a corrupt government, he’s asking Rey to join a fascist Organization that just committed mass genocide a few days ago! What are you idiots smoking?!
Kylo’s belief system at the end of the last Jedi is that The New Republic, The Resistance, Jedi, Sith, and HIS FAMILY need to die. He is proposing no only to continue Snoke’s work, but cause even more death and destruction than his old master would’ve. Kylo is talking about finishing up what Vader started aka becoming the Empire of the galaxy.
Rey, who had literally just heard from Snoke that Kylo had walked her into a trap and the entire time she had the idea that Kylo had light in him, was all Snoke and Kylo manipulating her. She’s literally realizing that her dad mentor was right and knew all along what would happen if Rey trusted Kylo. She is begging Kylo to not kill anymore people, to just go home to his mom and end this war that he continues to make worse.
Kylo screams at Rey, turning everything on her. He attacks her weakness, her family, information he knows from her that’s her weakness and can break her so she hopefully can lose her resolve.
Kylo exploits her biggest fear, her biggest insecurity, lying to Rey that in the end of the day she never mattered to her family and that she was nothing to anyone.
Rey is absolutely broken by this. She hadn’t been this defeated since she was preparing to die next to Finn in TFA. Seriously she had just been told that she is completely nothing, she comes from nothing. That her parents didn’t care about her and she was sold for drinking money. Kylo realized her moral compass wouldn’t allow her to break, so he’s breaking her spirit instead.
After literally breaking Rey’s spirit down, Kylo tells her to join him. Like I said above, he is asking Rey to join a genocidal, fascist organization and help him kill her father mentor, the man who she cares for and who saved her life from him! And countless billions more. This is as far from romantic as can be. It’s sadistic.
Even Ruin Johnson said himself this was pure manipulation and Rey realized it right here. Every word he had said was wrong. She needed to get off this ship.
What was his reaction?
He tries to kill her!
This isn’t the face of someone in love. Rey is realizing that if she doesn’t get to the Resistance soon, everyone she loves will die. She’s fighting for her life and the Resistance.
What did Kylo do after?
Kylo lies that Rey killed Snoke and goes down to Crait and tries to kill everyone, personally ordering his men to Kill Rey.
One of Kylo’s last lines in the movie is promising Luke that after he kills him, he’s going to Kill Rey.
Kylo is literally the villain at this point and these crazy shippers need to stop acting like Rey is just sleeping on a good man like Kylo. No, Rey is trying to stay away from a literal mass murder who’s trying to conquer the Galaxy and kill everyone.
my god, the delusion of that post. there’s no compassion for Rey here. Kylo just wants someone on his side. He thinks he can turn her to his ideology of rage and burning the past, but when she doesn’t bite he turns cold. Tries to break her down enough that she can be manipulated.
And it does break her, not in the way he thinks though. She is broken not because she’s nothing, but because this person she trusted, that she thought could be saved is someone she was completely wrong about. “Please don’t go this way” is her desperately hoping that this isn’t playing out the way it is.
For the first time, Rey believed in someone. She let herself trust someone after YEARS of only trusting herself. And you know why? Because when she was all alone, when she expected nothing at all, Han, Chewie, and Finn came back for her. Finn, runaway stormtrooper, who she had only just met, came back for her.Despite all his fears he ran straight into the fire, defying all his own self-preservation instincts for Rey. And so she had thought Ben was like Finn. Scared but someone worth believing in.
Or maybe she had thought Ben was like her. Alone, in desperate need of someone to reach out and show him they cared, to show him he was worth the risk. And she thought she could be that. She thought she could be his Finn. But she was wrong. Kylo isn’t changing for her. He isn’t changing for anyone.
She isn’t his hero.
And when he shows just how little he cares for her, how cruel he can be to her, she is completely crushed.
Omg the thought that she wanted to be Finn to someone as lonely as she was… 😭 I think Han was a big part of this, too–she was grieving him and wanted to believe he hadn’t died in vain. If TFA was the story of Rey and Finn uplifting each other with love and friendship, guided by Han and Leia’s caring and Luke’s example, TLJ was the story of both of them realizing not everyone is worthy of trust, with authority figures failed and fallen.
Also I gotta lmao @ the idea that it’s not abusive if the abuser has feeeeeelings and genuinely believes what they’re saying. Guess what? Abusers are people. There are abusers who are completely cynical puppet masters who don’t believe a word that comes out of their own mouths, but they’re not the only type of abusers. The majority of abusers IME actually do believe their own bs, if only because they need to keep their self concept of being moral people while controlling and using their victims.
It’s fucking disturbing, that’s what it is, the way they jump down everyone’s throats screaming that a neo-Nazi analogue is a) no such thing, b) a poor dear who isn’t responsible for any of his atrocities uwu and, scariest of all, c) justified in everything he does because it’s war, baby. The new SW fandom is like a mirror turned darkly on the state of the world.
And they obscure (often vehemently deny) that the point of Rey’s story arc is that the hero of the ST is not a white guy. She doesn’t believe it herself, she’s hinging her value to the the Resistance by her ability to bring them a white guy with Skywalker blood to save the day.
Though it can be argued that the final standoff of Crait undercuts it, Rey comes to see that she is the hero of her own story. Not Luke, and certainly not Kylo. She actually is the real protagonist (along with Finn and his butchered but parallel arc). There won’t be a bait and switch where the white guy is the real protagonist after all.
And yet, so much fan commentary says otherwise, desperately insisting that the ST is all about Kylo and Rey and Finn are supporting players in his story. It’s hard enough to see good in TLJ, but the TLJ “version” that many fans are pushing is so bad it makes Disney look incompetent, sexist, and racist. All because all half the fandom cares about is an over-dramatic white guy with flowy hair.
I don’t think the standoff on Crait undercuts that theme, since after all it was about Luke sacrificing himself–or simply disappearing, who knows–for the remnants of the Resistance, and for the new generation of heroes. The framing might have been all off but whole of TLJ was about undermining the idea that the Skywalkers are the heroes, or at least heavily questioning what the Skywalker legacy is actually about. The Skywalker men’s legacy is tarnished; to the extent anything positive exists about the legacy, like Padmé’s conviction in democracy, Leia Organa’s armed resistance, and Luke’s commitment to the Force, the inheritors to that legacy are Rey, Finn, and Poe, together with the Resistance members like Rose and Connix while Luke has failed and Kylo has fallen.
I mean am I all sorts of furious about the way it was handled, YES. It did not have to be done in a way that villified and destroyed one of the most iconic heroes of all time, and Leia’s sidelining is especially egregious. The mishandling of Finn, Rey, Rose, and Poe has been hashed out so exensively, I don’t need to repeat it here.
Nevertheless, if you look past the bungled execution to what the movie was trying to do, it is ridiculous to think the Skywalkers-by-blood are still the heroes. That’s the idea TLJ subverted, to the extent it subverted anything.
People with common sense: Crosstagging is not cool
Rey/los:
an AnTi tHreAtEnEd mE
The casual sense of entitlement and playing the victim I just….
Because Rey isn’t a self insert.
To Reylows she clearly is…
I’ve written the first draft of my meta about Rey’s arc in the context of SW history, and it’s 3.5K words long. I always felt bad about not writing much about her on her own apart from Finn, but thanks to @jewishcomeradebot I think I’ve finally got a handle on her character and enough understanding to analyze her. Finn is still an important part ofthe story because duh, but it’s primarily about Rey and I like that.
Continuing off the idea of Rey deciding not to be a Jedi and how that might affect Episode IX.
Rey might be a Force user but she’s no soldier and not really a fighter either. She a survivor. She’ll fight if she has to but generally avoids to.
Finn seems to have committed himself to the cause at the end of TLJ and they need someone like Rey, they need a Force user who will fight to counter Kylo (and possibly the Knights of Ren, but who knows about these douches). On the other hand I don’t think he’d ever want to push Rey, or anyone, into something they don’t want to do. He’s been violated like that for too many years himself.
Still it would be an ongoing point of contention between them and the source of many an argument. Could you just imagine one of them ending in Rey looking Finn in the eye and saying, “well, you have that power too. I’ve sensed it in you. You do it.” And then shoving the ancient Jedi text into his arms and storming off.
Finn standing there with the old books in his arms not knowing what to think. He’s never seen himself as a Jedi, not realized what the things he sensed were and being a little bit scared because boy this is huge, but at the same time this needs doing.
So he does it. He reads the books and meticulously rebuilds the lightsaber, using the broken crystal from the old one.
Rey being supportive because it removes a burden from her she didn’t want and takes away a task she feels she couldn’t do, but at the same time feeling guilty for shoving this on Finn.
I love this, because one of the things I hate about Rey’s story is that she seems to have a role foisted on her that she doesn’t seem particularly into. I dislike that her story consists of her being an errand girl to save the universe, unsupported by her own inner drive. She’s a lot like Anakin that way, actually–extremely talented capable, but doing things because he was told to when all he really wanted was to love and be loved. Anakin would have had a much happier ending if he’d put his foot down and said “no” to the demands on him, not that this would have been easy when he started on his path as a child and almost all his relationships and his very identity revolved around being a Jedi. Rey is not nearly so constrained, and in fact it’s Finn who had similar social and psychological constraints as a Stormtrooper before he had the incredibly courage to leave behind everything he ever knew.
I don’t understand the people who say that Kylo would have worked better if he had been a random, I really don’t. Kylo’s connection to the Skywalker bloodline, along with the lack of clear motive for his actions, is the entire point.
See, he’s a Nazi.
Okay, so technically he’s an allegory for a neo-Nazi in a space fantasy setting, but given that this hellsite has a distinct difficulty with complex concepts I’ll keep it simple. He’s a Nazi.
Why did Nazis do what they did? Why do neo-Nazis do what they do?
If you peel away all the embellishments and propaganda it comes right down to this: they see themselves as having a special legacy, a special bloodline to protect and they have a right to do so because they feel they’ve been chosen.
JJ has said that the early concept of Jedikiller only started working when they made him connected to the Skywalker bloodline, to the chosen family in Star Wars.
Kylo’s motivation, like that of all Nazis, is that he’s doing this because he belongs to the chosen people and thus have a right to rule. Not because he’s qualified, but because he belongs to the destined people.
No it’s not deep or complex, but it was never meant to be. Kylo is an antagonist and one JJ always meant to emulate a neo-Nazi. Giving him complex motivation would have detracted from this and, like with the real life equivalent, made it possible to justify what he’s doing because he has X, Y, Z motivation. Instead JJ gave him the most basic motivation of Nazis, he’s right because he’s chosen and because he has the strength to do what he does.
It’s not glorious. It’s pathetic, sad and ultimately someone who’s irredeemable. Not because he couldn’t choose differently than he does but because it’s not a motivation that makes anyone want to see him redeemed.
Of course, even people who sees Kylo as a villain and antagonist have a really hard time accepting him being a Nazi, so maybe this view isn’t really that surprising.
I mean the actor himself told us that Kylo Ren is an elitist (link), it’s not that deep people.
[Adam Driver] refuses to see his character as bratty. “There is a little bit of an
elitist, royalty thing going on,” he says, reminding us that the
character’s estranged mom is “the princess. I think he’s aware of maybe
the privilege.”
Cass Sunstein has criticized TLJ in part because Kylo didn’t fall due to losing a loved one (link), but maybe that’s because… Kylo is no Anakin… and is not nearly as sympathetic?
Mr. Dark Side, Kylo Ren, does have a bit of a struggle, and in that
sense, Johnson maintains continuity with Lucas’s vision. But in this
movie, at least, the struggle turns out to be a head fake. Because
Kylo’s descent doesn’t have the precipitating cause of Anakin’s – the
loss of loved ones – and because we don’t see Kylo suppressing the
better angels of his nature, the film doesn’t come anywhere close to the
depths of Lucas’s films.
If anyone is positioned as the new Anakin–but with a happy ending–it’s Rey, in struggling with the loss of loved ones, or at least her idea of them, and also in resisting manipulation by her would-be abusive mentor Kylo where Anakin fell to Palpatine’s manipulation. It’s interesting that Sunstein couldn’t recognize this story when it manifested in a female character, though to be sure it’s a common enough blind spot and RJ didn’t make it easy for anyone.
Precisely.
People, not just Cass here, are obsessed with having Kylo be the next Vader/Anakin, but he isn’t. Not to mention they’re even more obsessed with the reason why he fell to the Dark Side than they are with Rey’s parentage.
But let me ask you something. Did we know why Anakin fell in the OT? No, we didn’t, because the reason for it wasn’t relevant to Luke for whom Vader was a foil.
Is it relevant to Finn or to Rey why Kylo fell? So far we’ve been given not a single reason why this information should be relevant to either of them, so I don’t get why people are so upset about not knowing.
Except as yet another case of prioritizing the white guy over the two actual leads in the ST. Kylo’s motives for turning to the Dark are no more interesting or relevant to the narrative than Vader’s were in the OT. It’s not a plot hole, it’s not a flaw in the storytelling, it’s intentional. Only the parts of Kylo and his actions that are pertinent to Finn and Rey are relevant to the story, and unless someone can come up with a good reason why either of them should remotely care about it it’s going to remain irrelevant.
All too true. (You and @lj-writes are killin it with the meta lately).
It’s funny, too, because Rey’s “nobody” revelation effectively removes the possibility that he fell because of a lost loved one. The Rey Solo theory revolves around a Solo family tragedy before Kylo’s fall (Leia implies in TFA that the family was dealing with something that led to sending him to Luke, which is open to interpretation but fit with the loss of another child). Rey was taken and believed to be dead, throwing the family into turmoil and pushing a grieving Ben toward the Dark Side. The Rey Solo theory doesn’t always attribute Rey’s disappearance to Kylo’s fall, but when it does it gives Kylo a sympathetic reason to embrace the darkness. (The death of Anakin Solo was a turning point for Jacen Solo/Darth Caedus in the EU, so it isn’t hard to get onboard with the idea that Rey was a combination of Anakin and Jaina Solo.)
Rey being nobody shatters that. Fandom rejoiced because it meant they could get together and have Pure Force Babies (something the narrative has never suggested was a goal of Kylo’s even with his Nazi mindset), but it gives him no reason to be like he is other than toxic entitlement based on bloodline.
(They’ll say the reason is Snoke’s supposed brainwashing, but that ignores the fact that the ST remains firmly about choices.)
Yes. It’s important not to ignore the fact that Kylo’s entitlement stems from his lineage. He is the only Star Wars villain (iirc) who’s actual ideology aligns with Nazism, where others wore it as an “evil” aesthetic. Sure, the Empire and FO are human supremacists, but Kylo represents white supremacy in a much more tangible way.
When he confronts Rey and Finn on the crumbling Starkiller Base, it’s almost heavy-handed, but for the fact that most of the audience didn’t see it. A volatile white man holding on to his flickering “birthright,” demanding a woman and Black man return the power (Luke’s saber) that he believes belongs to him.
That’s not subtlety. Nor is the scene where Kylo orders the slaughter of the villagers. Especially when Finn was very clearly put into the position of a soldier “just following orders” (the Nuremberg Defense), but chose to disobey.
Fans remove Kylo’s culpability because he didn’t pull the trigger, but do we consider the Nazis who issued the orders but didn’t kill firsthand less culpable? FUCK NO.
So people can hem and haw about how it’s wrong to say Kylo is a Nazi/white supremacist parallel, but it’s in the narrative, especially under JJ’s watch.
You right, JJ isn’t remotely subtle. He never was and in this case the only way he could have been less subtle about would be to name them Nazis and give the characters names such as Adolf and Hermann.
And no there’s never been a quite this obvious Nazi analogy in Star Wars before. The Empire was simply about might makes right and the rule of the strongest, in many ways it was simply generic fascism with some Nazi aesthetics on top to make it look cooler.
The whole “preserving/claiming a birthright/legacy” is a new theme for a Dark Side character. Or rather, it is Kylo’s own fucked up version of the past and his birthright he’s trying to claim. Just as with real life Nazis it’s not actually their past, culture and people they’re trying to claim and protect, it’s their own private, revised, fucked up version of it they’re on about.
As a lot of people have pointed out his words to Vader’s helmet doesn’t make any sense because what Vader really wanted was to protect his family. But I’ll posit that they’re not supposed to make sense in the historical context of the universe because it’s not even Vader/Anakin’s legacy Kylo is trying to protect or claim, it’s his own revised, fucked up version of it.
Yes Rey Solo or I’d argue even Rey Skywalker could have given Kylo a sympathetic motive for turning to the Dark Side, but as things stand he doesn’t have.
More than that, TFA does everything it can to make Kylo look unsympathetic and paint him in a negative light without making him completely one dimensional.
Like this is a universe where the space Nazis after being defeated fucked off to “space Argentina” but rather than just lay low and die out they get right back at it becoming proud space neo-Nazis.
One organization that was an important the Nazi Germany was Hitlerjugend. It was a paramilitary organization of which membership was mandatory for all German boys between the age of 6 and 18. It was meant to not only teach them proper Nazi values and ideals, but also turn them into good soldiers.
In a universe such as the present Star Wars one where the in-universe Nazis fucked off and restarted the in-universe version of Hitlerjugend would absolutely be an important thing too.
Does it sound familiar? Do we know of a character who had grown up under such conditions?
Indeed we do.
Another thing.
Ideologies and organizations such as the (vague) one the First Order espouses is supposed to attract people who feels disenfranchised, are economically disadvantaged and/or have a great need to belong to someone or some place and struggles with their identity.
Do we know of such a character in the story?
Well, look at that.
But it isn’t Finn or Rey who turns to the First Order, though they should have every single reason to. No, the one who embraces it is this asshole:
Ben Solo. Raised with just about every single privileged know. Loving parents, financial secure, erudite and educated. He is the one who embraces the First Order, because his own fucked up, revised version of his “legacy” entitles him too.
Or so he thinks.
Which leads me back to the beginning of all of this.
JJ stripped Kylo of all ideological motivation to make it impossible to use that to excuse or defend his actions. In creating Finn and Rey as the characters he did, JJ also undermines every personal motivation Kylo could use to make himself look good.
The last two years have been something of an experience watching fandom trying to justify Kylo’s actions and argue that he’s actually, deep down good, when everything in the narrative told us the opposite. Even TLJ could justify his actions, instead it just ran avoidance tactics on the topic never addressing it. Even Rian knew that in a story where Finn and Rey exists, where Kylo has no ideological convictions beyond claiming his birthright, it isn’t possible to make him look sympathetic.
On a closing note. The whole “pure Force babies” thing always made me want to thrown up. Do these people realize who and what they sound as spouting that shit. I’ve hears actual Nazis be more circumspect in their phrasing than these people.
If you had asked me a year or two ago if they were aware or not, I’d have said they weren’t. Now I’m no where near as sure that these people aren’t 100% aware of who and what they sound as saying that shit. I’m wondering if they think they’re cool doing that.
The part about the FO attracting disenfranchised people like Rey is 100% canonical and intentional. That’s one of the FO’s schticks, positioning themselves as the great hope for those who are underprivileged and desperate. Not only that, there are at least two high-ranking FO characters–Gallius Rax and The Cardinal–who are actually from Jakku and trapped in poverty until the FO picked them up and gave them opportunities. Though not from Jakku, Phasma in her novel was similarly from a poverty-stricken, constantly warring post-apocalyptic world. I have pointed out before that the FO thrived in part due to the Republic’s failure to provide economic justice (link).
Also, your analysis reveals more clearly why Kylostans have gone the path of either arguing he’s brainwashed or justifying his actions. JJ purposefully took away the traditional ideological or emotional “justifications” for the character’s actions, forcing Kylostans to either show their ass and say his actions are inherently right/understandable or fall back on saying his character is essentially a puppet.
I remember when I delved deep into Reylow meta and came out of it a committed anti, one of the first things I noticed and an early turn-off was how distinctly fascistic the rhetoric sounded, like Kylo believes in the rule of the strong over the weak (that’s accurate) and Rey is powerful (uh-huh) and that makes them a perfect match (what?!). (Link) The Force Baby shit only upped that impression, and really that was never what SW was about. Both Anakin and Leia married non-Force users, and Luke as far as we know never had children at all in this continuity. The fact that a subset of fans think SW is/should be about Force eugenics in contrast to everything it’s actually stood foris seriously disturbing. Idk why people seriously think JJ wou do that.
Or: How TLJ is RotS averted far more than RotJ subverted
At
the end of The Force Awakens we watched Finn and Rey both stand up to Kylo Ren for each other, effectively saving each other and
themselves from the Master of the Knights of Ren. When Rey was knocked
out Finn took up the lightsaber; when Finn was injured, Rey woke up to
his screams and snatched the lightsaber from Ren to defend Finn and
herself.
This dynamic takes place again in the climax of The
Last Jedi, except Finn and Rey were not in the same scene like they were
during the dueling sequence in TFA. in TLJ, though kept apart until
their heartwarming reunion hug, they saved each other through the
choices they made and what each meant to the other.
The A-plot of
TLJ has been called a subversion of Return of the Jedi, for good reason.
Rey attempts to bring Kylo Ren back to the light in scenes that are
some very direct callbacks to Luke and Vader in RotJ, except
Kylo Ren, unlike Vader, refuses Rey’s plea and rises to the position of Big Bad
instead.
TLJ is only primarily a subversion of RotJ if you focus
on Rey and Ren, however. If you broaden the focus to Rey, Finn, and Ren
and the dynamics between them, it is the tragic ending of Revenge of the
Sith averted.
In fact, seeing TLJ as RotS averted subverts
the very idea that Kylo Ren was ever Anakin to Rey’s Luke: Rather he is
Palpatine, and Finn and Rey parallel Padmé and Anakin respectively, except
they each avoided destruction and enslavement. Rey, in no small part due
to Ren’s manipulation, saw him as a tortured soul who could be
redeemed. In fact he was a master manipulator who was drawing her
in for his own gain.
Rey’s lack of genre savviness, based on
a mistaken character reading, almost led to her meeting Anakin’s fate
as the subservient apprentice to an abusive master. Instead, she was
able to avoid it because of the love between her and Finn. In turn, Finn
and the Resistance avoided destruction in part because Rey did not turn
on Finn as Kylo wanted and as Anakin turned on Padmé.
The similarities between Finn/Padmé and
Rey/Anakin, and also their story together, have been commented on enough
times, recently in posts like @jewishcomeradebot’s (link with my addition).
What I have not seen discussed is the similarities of their dynamics to
Kylo Ren/Palpatine, the man who manipulated a powerful younger Force
user under the guise of friendship only to use them to grasp l power,
and tried to take his rival out of the picture for good.
Put
simply, Finn is Ren’s opponent and rival, much as Padmé was Palpatine’s
opponent and rival. They share a common background and know each other, have opposing convictions and goals, and work against each other. Rey on the other
hand, is someone Ren wants to turn and make his apprentice, much as
Anakin was targeted and groomed by Palpatine. The tragedy in RotS was that Palpatine achieved his goal
of defeating Padmé and making Anakin his apprentice. The happy ending in
TLJ is that Finn and Rey escaped that fate.
How did Finn and
Rey avoid the tragedy that was Padmé and Anakin’s story? On Rey’s side,
it was because she knew Kylo Ren was full of bantha poo-doo (and also
was poo-doo himself) when he told her she was nothing except to him. She
had incontrovertible proof that this wasn’t true, no matter how he
might twist the knife in the wound of her abandonment, no matter how
alone and desperate she felt by his design.
She knew because
Finn had come back for her to Starkiller Base. He had returned to the
very heart of the nightmares that he was ready to flee to the ends of
the galaxy to run from, and he very nearly paid the ultimate price for
it–for her. She knew that Han had thought of her as a daughter and that Leia
and the Resistance loved her. The love she had been filled up with
since she left Jakku, with Finn and his sacrifice for her at the center of it all,
anchored her and prevented her from being swept onto the shoals of Kylo
Ren’s deceit.
On Finn’s side,
he avoided total defeat and death in large part due to Rose’s and later
Luke’s intervention, but even their help would have meant little in the long run if Rey had turned against him and the Resistance as Anakin had turned against Padmé and all
she stood for. Where Anakin and later Kylo himself had committed mass
murders at their masters’ behest, Rey refused to stand by and let her
friends be slaughtered and joined forces with them. Where Palpatine had
triumphed by turning Anakin against Padmé, Rey was steadfast in her
loyalty to Finn, and Kylo failed to tear their bond apart. Their love
proved stronger than his violence in TFA and his wiles in TLJ.
The
culmination of TLJ, then, repeats that of TFA with Finn and Rey saving
each other through the strength of their love. The duels in TFA were
just between Finn, Rey, and Kylo with a personal, even claustrophobic
feel. Only Finn’s life and Rey’s freedom were in suspense since the
destruction of Starkiller Base was already imminent. In TLJ the stakes
are even larger, with more people involved and the future of the
Resistance–and by extension, the galaxy–in the balance.
Incidentally,
seeing TLJ as RotS averted and Ren as a so-far unsuccessful Palpatine
means there is no need for Ren to have an understandable motivation. As @jewishcomeradebot has pointed out (link),
Vader’s motivation for falling to the Dark Side is completely opaque in
the OT. Luke, the actual protagonist, had no reason to know or care
about Vader’s reasons. I would like to add that the PT explored Anakin’s
internal life, but that was because Anakin was the protagonist of that
series. Kylo Ren is not a protagonist, he has been and remains the main
antagonist. The motivation behind his fall is irrelevant to Finn and
Rey. It may be that there is no reason other than his belief that he is
superior to others and is entitled to power, much like Palpatine.
Where
does Finn and Rey’s story go from here? With the pretension of TLJ
being the new RotJ dispensed with and the tragedy of RotS avoided for
the moment, SW is on entirely new ground. The ends of both preceding
trilogies were teased but subverted or averted. There is no precedent to
guide us now.
One constant in the ST, however, is the strength of
the bond between Finn and Rey. Both the ST movies so far ended with
that bond both reaffirmed and acting as a powerful force (maybe even
Force) for good in the lives of our protagonists and the ongoing war. To
carry this motif forward Finn and Rey’s love could be tested even more,
with still larger stakes–the outcome of the entire war.
On Rey’s
side, one interesting dilemma would be whether she can accept the risk
of losing Finn in order to honor his conviction. This was a test that
Anakin had failed in regard to Padmé, to both their destruction. Rather
than stand with Padmé Anakin turned against everything she believed in,
and the desire to control her to avoid losing her overwhelmed his love for her. We know that
Rey, like Anakin, wanted nothing more than a sense of belonging and
attachment and she found that with Finn. Now that Finn, like Padmé
before him, found a cause bigger than the two of them, can Rey honor
that cause even if it might mean she cannot be with the only person who came
back for her? What is love? is it
holding on to the beloved no matter what? Or does it lie in accepting
change if it may come, and accepting the beloved’s free will even if it means parting with them?
On Finn’s side, his story has been about freedom and the
ever-expanding awareness that he cannot be free by himself. From the first he needed another person, Poe, to escape the First Order. After losing Poe he sought freedom for himself as he continued running, unexpectedly picking up a comrade that he became more and more attached to. This attachment grew to the extent that it overrode his original goal–he
found that his individual freedom meant little if Rey was suffering. Then, in
late TFA and TLJ, the Resistance and a larger awareness of the galaxy were enfolded
in his circle. In the next movie the galaxy itself, including possibly the Stormtroopers in forced servitude, is likely to be included
in his fight.
With his circle of moral obligation expanding so much, can Finn remember to think about himself and his closest relationships? This was something actively discouraged in him in the First Order as selfish and inconsequential, and after his arc in TLJ his earlier conditioning may lead to his falling into the same habit of self-effacement, though for an opposing cause. Is it selfish to think of his beloved when the universe is at stake? Can he bring himself to think he deserves to love and to be loved? Does true freedom exclude considerations of love, or is freedom only complete with love? Rose gave one answer at the end of TLJ, that freedom can only be won through love, and certainly Rey avoiding servitude through love is a case for that assertion as well. This conclusion is likely to be tested, though, as the fight intensifies and the demands of the war grow harsher.
Where Rey’s continuing story seems to be about the nature of love with implications for freedom, Finn’s appears to be about the nature of freedom with implications for love. Resolving this continuing arc will hopefully lead to a satisfactory conclusion of the sequel trilogy and the story of Finn and Rey.
L.J.'s Obsessions 