In Defense Of Rey Skywalker
[plaintext: In Defense Of Rey Skywalker]
I finished Rise of Skywalker, which means yes, I saw the Rey Skywalker scene, and I have to say…
THAT’S what pissed you guys (dedicated Sequel haters) off so much???
“Oh but Rey is a Palpatine” The whole message is that blood doesn’t make a family, and evil isn’t inherited (which is. Kinda broken with Kylo, but still). Yeah it can be kinda… weird when you think about it, that the Skywalker family was all killed and a Palpatine took the name, but the point is that she’s not a Palpatine anymore.
“But Rey didn’t deserve it” You know what? Before watching the sequels, I thought Rey was going to be the most annoying, frustrating, horribly written character ever, and an insult to everything Star Wars was about. That’s what the memes seemed to suggest, at least.
But she’s not. Honestly I can think of three main flaws she has, especially in this movie.
First is learning stuff unusually fast, and yeah it can kinda feel unnatural, especially compared to Luke’s arc. But people also considered Luke the weak and pathetic one who couldn’t do anything, for a very long time, and I don’t even think that’s fully gone away, so obviously they didn’t want to repeat that. Also, she is the grandchild of a super powerful Sith, obviously she’s going to pick up on Force stuff quickly? Lastly, Anakin is also super powerful and nobody cares. (I fully believe that if Clone Wars Anakin were a woman, they’d call her a Mary Sue too.)
Second is being kind of a typical sci-fi/fantasy protagonist, which… so is Luke, so that’s not even her flaw, or a flaw in my opinion.
Third is the worst one, and the only one that’s actually a problem… yeah. The Reylo kiss. but it’s more Kylo’s writing that caused it, he’s irredeemably evil and makes it clear he is, but then he isn’t, and because they made it so clear he’s just plain evil, it makes Rey look dumb and Kylo look wishy-washy when he just turns good. Also it made Kylo’s redemption look like it took two seconds. And of course, they don’t make him actually redeem himself for all the horrible things he did, they honestly seem to have forgotten about it (like Ventress and Bo-Katan) so it looks weird, and Rey by extension looks weird for going along with it. But that’s not Rey’s fault, it’s her writing. Again, why can everyone accept that a character who’s a man wasn’t horrible, he was just written badly, and that’s what fanfiction is for… but a woman character being written badly is just awful and deserves all the hate instead of the writers.
The only other “flaws” I can think of are eclipsing Finn’s plotline (could he at least have gotten to tell her that thing he was going to tell her?) which is just racism on the writers’ part tbh, and being in the mess of a trilogy plot-wise that was the Sequel Trilogy. Neither of which are her fault. Again.
So there’s really no reason Rey should get the hate instead of the writing. Except for the fact that she’s a woman, and when a woman character is a little offputting or badly written, she deserves to be hated apparently.
