SPACE CHOKE ME DADDY

31 Days of Adam Driver

Day 4 of 31: Favorite Character Adam has Played - Kylo Ren

Bonus

Her pov disappears completely from the narrative, and the little we’re shown of her looks like a regression to a caricature of her character, the Rey antis want to see, little rey of sunshine all big smiles and pew pew let’s kill these tie fighters Chewie! It’s no longer her, it’s a cartoon Rey from a toy commercial. No offense to toy commercials, but I call bullshit. 

And it’s not just that I wanted to see her heartbroken over Kylo. Only minutes before she had to face a soul shattering truth she’s been denying for 15 years—that her PARENTS, the people her entire life has been shaped around, not only dumped her like garbage but were dead all along. That she spent her entire childhood and adolescence waiting for dead people. But we see no trace of it in her behavior until the very last couple scenes with Kylo and Leia. No acknowledgement at all. The emotional depth we’ve seen for 2/3 of the movie is nowhere in sight.

I’ve embraced the interpretation that she was faking it because that’s how she’s used to cope with trauma, it makes sense with what we know of the character, but I think it gives too much credit to the writing, which in TLJ is often really rich and complex, but not *subtle*. Even if that was the authorial intent, it wasn’t conveyed well because, like I said, her pov disappears from the narrative. She’s not the focus in those scenes, so I doubt the writing was trying to make a /point/ about something deeper going on under the surface of her behavior.

We know the whole Crait sequence is almost entirely Kylo’s pov, right? Well, there’s no reason why the Plucky Resistance Poster Girl stint shouldn’t be told through the warping lens of Kylo’s unreliable narrative.

Not saying that she wasn’t actually there, shooting tie fighters and cheering in relief whenever she hit a target. Or that her mind wasn’t in tunnel vision mode to avoid thinking about what just happened and what she just uncovered from her past. But if her demeanor feels slightly off, and so dissonant from what we know she probably feels (because we’ve seen what she feels, in the proposal scene), then it’s probably the effect of Kylo’s unreliable pov. He’s angry at her, right now. He thinks she doesn’t care for him and never actually did; that none of the things he said had a real effect on her. That she turned on him to gleefully go back to the gang of traitors, murderers and thieves that she considers her friends with no regret whatsoever. 

Then it makes sense that Rey almost completely disappears from the narrative, and that the little we see of her is just a cartoonish version of the complex character we know she is. The whole thing is from Kylo’s pov, and Rey is currently his greatest blind spot. Her rejection took him off guard and hurt him so much that he just has no idea how to make sense of it, or her in general. He rationally knows she’s somewhere shooting things at him, but he fumbles to correctly guess her state of mind. So his mind, chronically plagued by negative thinking and paranoia, fills the blanks with what is actually very convenient to fuel his rage: Jedi Poster Girl, the traitor. Someone shallow and worth destroying.

Her view being Kylo’s POV never occurred to me although I always considered Crait a maddness played in Kylo’s mind. So, what you say makes perfectly sense.

Breathe. Just breathe. Now reach out. What do you see?

HE WOULD HE’S SO STUPID

But then ofc Rey would have to pull a Leia and be like ‘this dumb bitch, I love him sfm’ and pull him in for a kiss

Bonus points if Ben makes this face: