She finds a family with Finn, Leia and the Resistance. She becomes a part of something bigger than herself.

But there is this Force that has awoken inside of her which they cannot understand.

She then finds someone who does understand. Someone who is like her. Someone who knows what she’s going through because he feels it too. Ben Solo.

They’re not so different from each other. They’re both incredibly powerful with the Force. They both need to move on from the past and embrace the people they are meant to be. They are equals in every sense of the word.

It is then revealed that they’re a ‘Dyad in the Force’. Two halves of one soul. Bonded for life. A connection that transcends space and time.

Rey found a family in the Reisistance but once the war was over, I can only assume they disbanded when there was no longer anything to fight for. She loved them, and she had a home with them, but they didn’t know the real her. She needs that intimate connection with someone and they couldn’t be that for her.

There was only one person who could. Ben, the other half of her soul. And he died. He gave his life for her.

And in the end, she ended up exactly where she began, alone on a desert planet. But the difference is she did find a family and her belonging. But now it was all gone.

Before, she didn’t know any different. She’d been alone almost her entire life and had no comprehension of what family or belonging felt like. But now she does and she has to live with the loss of what she once had.

I want to touch upon something that has been bugging me ever since I saw the movie. Beware, I’m not inventing the wheel here, and I’m also terribly sleep-deprived. I’m just expressing some thoughts that I wanted to share.

So, did you notice that basically all the Reylo scenes up until the one where Rey stabs Kylo and then heals him feel... off? Especially the way Rey acts? 

Were you as detached and alienated from her like I was, going so far as to ask yourself who this character even was?

Well, I gave this some thought.

I think that with the partial retconning of TLJ and the subsequent regression in the story, they shafted Rey in all kinds of ways, but especially when it comes to our ability to understand her actions and emphasise with her, most notably in the scenes when she is angry and/or fighting Kylo (ergo: in conflict).

Rey is a very passionate character, quick to anger. One article about her that I read (I’ll provide the link when I find it) described her as “deliciously feral”, which I think sums it up perfectly. Rey is somewhat unhinged, she reacts quickly and often in a heated fashion.

The thing is: whenever we see Rey being hostile and/or fighting in TFA and TLJ, we are provided a reason why. We get a narrative justification for her anger/violence/attacks, and it always comes from a place of compassion, a sense of justice or a place of pain/hurt relating to her past.

She attacks Kylo in TFA because he killed Han. She snarks at him in TLJ for that very same reason, and later on, after having changed her mind about him, she attacks Luke because he tried to kill him. (And then she just ships herself to him in the mail - an icon. We stan.)

But the bottom line here is:

We always get to see why Rey is angry, and what drives her to violence. We get a justification within the narrative. Her actions make sense.

But in TROS, this does no longer apply. Especially when it comes to Kylo. Because story-wise, we are beyond the fighting. Beyond the dueling. We are at the ‘reaching out, trying to find a balance and solving our conflict with words’ stage.

But since they basically ignore this whole narrative from TLJ, their dynamic is reverted to their TFA animosity. At least up until the scene where Rey heals Ben (after almost killing him, mind you!!), when it’s just randomly picked up again as if the first hour of the movie didn’t happen.

This is why Rey feels so off when she is interacting with Kylo in those scenes up until the stabbing. There is no reason provided by the narrative as to why she is so hostile to him. We expect her to act differently because we all saw TLJ. Sure, there is gonna be conflict, but not this lightsaber fight nonsense.

Their conflict at that point is not physical, it is emotional, and it should’ve been tackled as such in dialogue.

But since it wasn’t, and they just had Rey lash out at Kylo as if this was the ending of TFA, her hostility and aggressiveness come off as... well, just that. Hostility and aggressiveness. 

There is no reason, no explanation, no plausible rationalisation, and subsequently no possibility for us to relate to or understand Rey.

I don’t know why they did this.

Maybe they wanted to convey the idea that this was her ~palpatine darkness~ manifesting and making her lash out. (As if her real darkness, the one we see in TFA and TLJ, i. e. her pain and anger that stem from her abandonment issues, her loneliness, her struggle with her own identity, were not enough.)

1. Laurie and Jo : if you don’t acknoweldge it, it won’t happen

Talking with @fairychamber I came to think about the scene in Little Women, between Jo and Laurie on the sofa with Laurie flirting with Jo and Jo using the rough pillow as a shield. I love this scene and I realized it hasn't been much adaptated in movies. I think the mini serie has it but not exactly (I'm not sure).

But I think this scene is a great scene for Jo and Laurie, a great summary and metaphor of their relationship. Jo using the pillow to reject him with subtlety and by doing so refusing to acknowledge that he IS flirting with her. Because as long as she doesn't reject him directly,  there is no acknowledgement, no commitment. The more I think about it the more I love the tension of this scene (I'd love to find more characters dynamics or scenes like that).

She can deny and doesn’t have to admit that their relationship has changed and that Laurie is flirting with her. That’s why she is so afraid of him proposing because if he does she can’t delay and deny it anymore, she’d have to face it.

In the pillow scene, she is using a pillow to keep him away, she is using a family convention (this pillow means no one goes near Jo) but Laurie who knows it doesn’t respect it, he transgresses that family convention. And he has to, in order to step up and alter his relationship with Jo. He wants to go beyond family innocent and childish love so he oversteps the conventions and try to give their relation a new direction.

There is a lot if indirect communication : Laurie’s flirt is an indirect and implicit communication and Jo’s use of the pillow is full on implicit. Jo’s strategy is to remain on the level of the pillow’s implicit so she never has to reach the flirtatious implicite, because as long as she doesn’t acknoweldge it, it won’t happen. 

N.B. I saw a video on how similar the proposal scenes in Little women of Jo and Laurie and the mini serie Anne of Green Gables with Megan Follows between Anne and Gilbert. Both heroines saw it coming but by fear of losing their current relationship and because they still hadn’t find themselves yet (Jo still felt like she didn’t fit in and Anne wanted to live her dreams and confront her illusions of a fanciful and romantic life) - and for many other reasons, like the fact that Jo don’t love Laurie and Anne didn’t know she loved Gilbert at that moment. They need to grow and are not ready yet. Like any fairy tale, the heroine has to grow before she is ready for love (Bruno Bettelhein on The Uses of enchantment sees the sleeps in Sleeping beauty and Snow white for exemple as a metaphor of the heroine hiding from love and maturity until she is ready).

This fear of confronting a romantic relationship heavily reminds me of Rey from Star wars.

2. Rey and Ben :  Ben scarier than Kylo ? Or Rey facing love/hate

Actually it’s the same with Rey and Ben : as long as she can deny it she doesn’t have to face it. That’s what the TLJ novelization suggests by :

“He advanced on Rey, the ignited lightsaber held loosely in one hand. But there was no threat in his approach. Somehow, suddenly, that scared her even more.” - TLJ novelization

I read it a few months ago, HOW DID I MISS how reylo it is ?

This is set right after the throne room scene, Rey and Kylo have fought the Praetorian guards, and are left by themselves. Kylo walks towards Rey, and then comes this quote.

In the context of only TLJ and TFA, it is still very reylo, because it assumes in a very paradoxal way that Rey is more afraid of a harmless Kylo than of a threating one, that she is more scared by Ben than by Kylo. Why ? Of course because she is more afraid of love, of her and Ben’s feelings, and because letting her rage go at Kylo, only fighting is much more easier for her.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it ?....like their whole dynamic in TROS ?

YES. Now in the context of TROS, this quote from the TLJ novel sheds light on TROS and specificaly on TROS’s Rey. I was confused by TROS’s Rey at first, and for a long time, but I like to think that this quote actually sums up her behaviour toward Ben. Each of their encounter is Ben trying to speak to her and Rey starting a fight. (Many great metas explain it very well)  

The TROS novelization is very useful too : especially the Pasaana scene where Kylo’s ship go straight towards Rey and she destroys it, almost killing him. I was wondering : did they really try to kill each other ? what were they, each of them, thinking ? The novel is very interesting on this point :

“Rey turned off her lightsaber. She hoped he was dead. No, she didn’t. She hoped...she didn’t know what she hoped.” - TROS novelization

Unlike fairy tale maiden, Rey can’t get into a protective and regressive sleep to protect herself from an adult relationship she is not yet ready for. She is confused : she wants him dead and away so she would be safe, but ....she doesn’t really of course. She is forced to face it more that she is ready for, thus the confused feelings and intentions. That’s probably how Sleeping beauty or Snow white would feel if they couldn’t stay away from the difficulty the prince is presenting to them : would they be running away but still coming back to the ball every evening like Cinderella ?

3. The non-magical form of the sleep in fairy tales : denial

So Rey’s character relies on another form of hibernation or sleep : in TROS she is overly violent. She pushs Ben away and she can because he is still Kylo Ren but also she can’t because except on Pasaana he usually just want to talk...Of course, like the TLJ novelization shows, him talking is much more scary for Rey than fighting him. Because if he talks to her he does get to her, he reaches her. And as many great metas on tumblr have said, she is much more afraid of this intimacy. While she tries to put herself into hibernation, he keeps trying to get to her. The only solution left is to maintain a distance and forge a wall of violence : this is Rey’s form of “Jo’s rough pillow”.

For those two characters, Rey and Jo, who can’t put themselves into a magical and protective sleep, not listening is the best way to stay away. Jo and Rey prevent Ben and Laurie to say their love and to reach to them, because they refuse to listen. If they don’t listen, they can’t be reached : this way they refuse to acknowledge the boys declaration of love. They build a wall (of violence to interrumpt the communication like Rey, or a physical and symbolical wall made of a pillow full of implicit familial codes like Jo) to mimic the magic sleep. And it works (but only for a time in both cases) because both Rey and Jo deviate the communication as Ben and Laurie try to start it :

Ben wants to talk as a neutral party (not ally not enemy) / Laurie flirts

Rey remains on the enemy relation / Jo uses indirect familial codes to keep him away (but it works less)

It’s about who will control the direction the conversation is taking : Rey wins because they end up fighting and not talking, but Jo doesn’t because Laurie simply ignores the indirect codes. Ben accepts to stop talking but Laurie doesn’t and Jo can’t make him stop because it would mean admitting that he is flirting. It’s important to notice that Ben is less direct that Laurie, even he doesn’t directly speaks or acts in a flirty way, he is only stage 1 : not being mortal enemies. Laurie is already stage 2 (appreciating each others, being friends) and tries to reach stage 3 (romantic relationship), so he can allow himself to be more directly flirtatious.

Why did it work less with Jo ? When we think about it, what Jo really does is using a family convention to stop a flirt, so in the end, she already has lost because Laurie makes her transpose something family-related to react to something love-related. Both of them know what the other one is doing, but they mutally agree to pretend like Jo is just acting on a familial basis, even tho they both know that she reacts to a love declaration. Just reacting to love is already playing the love game. In this implicit agreement we see the premices of Laurie’s eventual declaration of love : Jo had already lost.

I just love how Rey embodies the way abused children react to love and affection?

Like adressing that Rey’s reaction to Ben are way more realistic that the ones he has to Finn and Poe is important because hey: When you are an abused child as she is and what you learned from childhood was being in a constant state of inminent danger, stress and anxiety it really hurts to turn down that survival mood.

Rey understands and feels comfortable with danger and stress. Bad things feel comfortable to her. But love? Devotion? No, no stay away. That sends her running away. She is afraid of being loved and wanted and good. Thats why Rian Johnson puts her in a situation where she needs to interact, because that makes her uncomfortable. Thats why she is okay with savin Ben Solo and bring her to the resistance but she is not okay with resisting him passionately gazing at her. Explicitly desiring her? No. And the thing is she wants him as much but feeling good and accepting intimacy that you care about is so scary when the norm is just to run away for it.

It has been said a lot how afraid she is of how much she loves him and thats a reality because she knows that caring on Jakku is weakness. It gets you killed it gets you hurt.

I dont mean to undervalue Rey’s relationship with Finn but that was a friendship that bloomed naturally almost without Rey actively wanting it. Actually its the kind of friendship that happens because one of them is just too good of a friend (Aka bless Finn’s patient heart) and the other kinda sticks. Basically how most introverts make friends?

If we look at the Rey resurrection scene (and I did: Part 1, 2, 3), we will see that the scene doesn’t work. It doesn’t work on an emotional level, it doesn’t add anything to the story thematically, it doesn’t add anything to the character arcs.

Can we get rid of it?

Yes. We simply make a cut from the end of the battle to the moment where Rey sits alone and sad, and the movie won’t change.

Just imagine that — our main heroine, died and returned to the realm of the living and it doesn’t affect her, us, or the story.

Wait, wait, wait! It does affect Reylo and Ben’s redemption, you might say. It was all made for them!

But is it true?

Reylo

Before we dive into that discussion, I must emphasize it’s not about my relationship to Reylo (I’m not the biggest fan, but I consume their content), or about how bad Reylo is (it simply is not bad — if you don’t like it, don’t read it).

Leaving aside all personal preferences, headcanons, and extended materials (especially extended materials, fuck extended materials), and let’s try to look only on what they gave us in the movie.

If we do that we’ll find out that what went wrong, went wrong not because of the shipping, or toxic fans.

It’s about fear, bad writing, and bad corporate decisions.

Fear of fans

Why did they kiss? Because some fans wanted it.

Why didn’t they stay together? Because other fans didn’t want it.

Why did Ben Solo help Rey? Because some fans wanted redemption for him.

Why did he die? Because others wanted him to pay for his deeds.

All these decisions came not from the story logic, they came from Twitter, Reddit, and hashtags. They came from cancel culture. From shippers and antis.

But more than anything they came from deep paralyzing fear to upset any group of fans, so they won’t pay more money.

There is no bad ship only bad writing

Rey and Ben/Kylo kissed because they were in love!11!

But that simply not what they showed us on screen.

Once again, I do not oppose the idea of them being in love. I’m simply saying that for the better part of TROS that wasn’t what we saw.

Quick recap: In all of their interactions they were fighting. And we are not talking about playful banter or sexually charged fight, at least not from her side. Damn, she even mortally wounded him minutes before his ‘turn’.

It could have been a story about, enemies to lovers, or the power of love if the writers had made an effort to do so. They hadn’t!

On top of my head, they could have moved that fatal wound and Rey healing him scene to the beginning of the movie (or better to the end of tlj, but we all know they didn’t plan it ahead). That way it’d give time to both of them time to think about implications of that actions and connect it to save what we love vs kill what we hate.

Or they could have added the Holy Grail of enemies to lovers — “they were forced to work together”

Or a dozen of other options.

It’s not about love.

Like it or not, TROS and the whole ST was not about love.

To further prove that point we can look at what happened after they kissed. Well, nothing. As I said at the beginning, it doesn’t influence the plot. It was never mentioned again. We don’t see Rey griefing, she doesn’t give a speech. Nothing occurred to indicated that there was something between them at all.

But I don’t believe that writers were incompetent idiots.

They knew what they were doing. They showed us exactly what they were told to show us, and exactly as vaguely as they were told to.

Bad decisions shall be avoided of all costs

And it all leads us to a very simple explanation — we got a very badly written story because someone important decided that they didn’t want to decide.

So here comes the infamous technique — Blink and you’ll miss it

If you stick with something, you will make someone angry. But if you cram everything in one story, changing your decisions multiple times it’d be fine, right?

Right?

Wrong.

There is no fan who liked the whole movie, and it holds true to this scene.

Yes, reylo fans enjoyed the kiss but were left devastated with Ben’s death.

Anti-reylos hated the kiss but liked that it didn’t last.

And everyone else, who are the majority of fans, were left puzzled with that mess of a movie.

Instead of the conclusion

I’ve asked around, and most of my pro-reylo friends told me that they’d gladly exchange the kiss for Ben to leave (or even not showing his death on screen), while most of my casual fans friends said that they’d be okay with the love story if it was well-written, and made sense for the character.

Those absurd takes betray the fact that what they’re really uncomfortable with isn’t Ben’s behavior per se, but the DIRECTION it pulls Rey’s character towards.

To them, Rey was peak perfection in TFA, when she met Finn: a self-contained wholesome character with no blemishes, no margin for growth, no challenges to face to become a better person and a better hero. Even her behavior towards Finn, after 5 seconds of perfunctory suspicion, was instant adoration. Why ask for more, when you already have the heroine where you want her to be in the first act of the first movie? Why give her an arc at all, when she’s already reached her full potential? Whatever comes after such perfection is a downgrade, a threat to her self-containedness, rather than an opportunity to grow. 

Okay. So, I promised you guys a TROS review, and it’s coming, I promise… except I’ll be making two “spin-off posts” about specific issues just in order to clear up some stuff, mainly because in my mind, those issues are important.

First post is going to be, of course, about Rey’s parentage.

So. After TFA, it would have been possible for Rey to have been the kid of “someone”. However, TLJ made it impossible to do so, unless you’d have some serious, bullshit retconning going on – which is exactly what happened.

I know this is a VERY controversial thing to say at this point, but post-TFA, Rey Palpatine “could” have been possible. Okay, maybe not have her be Palpatine’s granddaughter, but more of a descendant of his.

This said, I “tried” making an origin story for Rey Palpatine that “works” for the purposes of this meta, on a hypothetical basis, while making it consistent with canon (something JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio clearly couldn’t be bothered to do, LMAO). I had plotholes no matter what. I do think I could have eventually found something with a little bit of brainstorming, but truth is, IT’S HARD, and a lot of exposition would have been for novels/comics only.

From a thematic perspective, though? It wouldn’t have been a bad idea. For this to work, though, you would have needed to go on full-blown Romeo and Juliet mode with sprinkles of Anastasia, though. I mean, The Lion King 2 did something similar, so why the fuck not. Because, yeah, Ben Solo, the grandson of Darth Vader, son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, the last prince of Alderaan, who falls in love with the last Imperial princess Rey Palpatine while they’re on opposite sides of the war but not the ones you’d think of is the stuff of fairy tales and star-crossed romances, except this one would have a happy ending and brought peace to the galaxy.

Truth be told, I still really enjoy fanfics who go for that story and find a way to make it work in canonverse or in AUs – because it’s genuinely fun. But in canon itself, as I point out earlier… it’s not easy.

So, we have Rian Johnson who said he made a list of potential origins for Rey while he was working on TLJ’s script. You bet Rey Palpatine was on that list. However, he came to the conclusion that Rey Nobody was the best way to go, and whatdyaknow, he made the right call.

Why? Rey Nobody requires minimal exposition. Storytelling-wise, you don’t have a lot of brainstorming to do, and it’s easy to have Ben revealing it, and easy to present it as a repressed memory of Rey’s. On a thematic level, that puts Rey on the same level as Jane Eyre or the main character from Rebecca: she’s a nobody from nowhere who is thrown into a family drama, and since she’s the glitch in the matrix, she must stop the story from becoming a tragedy.

See? Simple. You got your easy exposition, you got your thematic coherence, and you got the literary call-backs.

So, JJ and Terrio decided to retcon this shit because, as they said, they thought it was boring. I think Colin Trevorrow probably thought it was boring too, because I have my reasons to think a lot of TROS is from him (but more on that in my main review). But thing is, it’s not it’s “boring”, it’s literally that they didn’t know what the fuck to do with Rey. No, more than that, they don’t understand her, and frankly, they can’t be bothered to do so. She’s an empty vessel they can toy with at their ease, and in the process, turn her in a Mary-Sue. Because yes, TROS!Rey was a Mary-Sue, whereas TFA/TLJ!Rey was not. So, what I say above regarding Rey might be a bomb for some, considering how people are (understandably) defensive when it comes to that statement. I promise I will elaborate more about it in the main review, once again.

So, with the lineage aspect addressed, it’s time to talk about Rey’s parents themselves.

It’s hilarious how HARD JJ and Terrio tried to make Kylo’s explanation work – because as much as they butchered the shit out of him, they said: “Well he’s a bad liar, right? Gotta keep that in mind.”

Although, I don’t think it was a case of them being concerned with Kylo’s characterization – they’re not that graceful. They had to figure out QUICK why the hell Kylo wouldn’t have known Rey was a Palpatine from the get-go, because the Force is a great DNA test and shit, and I guess that’s how Palps located Ben’s Mighty Skywalker Blood™. Except that still doesn’t work because Palps couldn’t even locate his own goddamn granddaughter, but I digress.

Seriously, why would Kylo lie to Rey about her being a nobody instead of her being a Palpatine? It makes no sense, because if you’re going to roll with the theory Kylo just wants UNLIMITED POWAH, the Palpatine princess is not only a great asset (since marrying her legitimizes your claim to the throne in the eyes of the Imperial Remnants, I mean, that’s literally why Henry VII married Elizabeth of York), it’s also the one argument she needs to hear in order to sway her to your side. So I guess JJ and Terrio’s one shared brain cell kinda flicked a bit at that moment.

This said, getting the Palpatine princess on his side is clearly Kylo’s intention in TROS (which, again, makes no sense with what was set up in TLJ but that’s something I’m keeping for another post), except they trip all over themselves by having Kylo say he didn’t lie to Rey in TLJ. Except…

So, what Ben said in TLJ was the following:

Her parents sold her for drinking money.

They’re dead and buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere on Jakku.

Rey is related to no one.

Here’s what Ben reveals to Rey in TROS:

Her parents sold her for her protection.

They died on another planet, while being hunted down by a guy working for Palpatine and instructed to bring Rey back to them.

Rey’s dad is a Palpatine and Rey’s mom is Villanelle (nah, for real: the actress who plays Rey’s mom is Jodie Comer).

So, um, yeah, it’s the EXACT opposite of what Ben said in TLJ. Just say Palps was fucking with Ben’s mind-reading or Rey’s memories instead, JJ. Not that “Oh Ben was telling the truth, but he didn’t have the whole story”, because that’s not it.

For the latter, once again, it would have been feasible: the one thing, for me, that was possible to be added was that Rey had killed her parents accidentally, by having their ship to leave Jakku crash down with the Force: that’s what made her Force powers go dormant for all those years and provoked her trauma. It would also make sense that Ben would willfully not bring that back to her memories, because she’d understandably not be able to cope with the truth, which is often what happens to a lot of trauma victims. THAT was the theory I had pre-TROS, because that’s the only answer I could come up with when it came to JJ saying that there was more to Rey’s past. I guess I expected JJ to be, like, actually able to write, lmao.

I even wonder if that was actually in the cards, considering we see Rey in TROS bringing down a transport that supposedly has Chewie in it… but I guess they deemed that to be “too dark” for their heroine. Except the bullshit that comes instead is actually… much worse.

To make things simple, I’ll just take the above points and develop them.

Rey’s parents sold her for her protection.

Okay, so, Rey’s parents need to hide her to make sure Palps doesn’t get his hands on her. Fair enough. This said, why did it have to be Jakku and not, like, ANYWHERE ELSE? Especially that Palpatine had interest in Jakku at some point and that maybe having Rey anywhere close to that place would not be a good idea?

But let’s play the game and say that Jakku is the only place they can hide her because… I don’t know, it’s hard to find someone there with the Force. Whatever. Even then, why the fuck would they think Unkar Plutt is a proper guardian for a tiny little girl? You know they could have walked a few miles more and found a nice old man who likes the Light Side of the Force and the Jedi and all that shit called Lor San Tekka? Hey, why not even try to find a guy like Luke Skywalker who’s like, a Jedi and shit, and have him take care of their little girl and protect her? 

Even then, why the hell doesn’t Rey’s mom stay with her daughter? Her husband is the Palpatine, not her. All Rey’s mom has to do is find a nicer hiding place for her and Rey somewhere on Jakku, like, not Niima Outpost (again, Tuanul is just a few miles away), and just let Dad hide somewhere else. He’s a grownass man, he can take care of himself and he just has to hide on Nar Shaadaa or some shit. Fuck, why don’t all three of them hide on Nar Shaadaa? Or in the Coruscant undercity? ANYWHERE ELSE?

Also, wouldn’t Plutt clearly see two desperate parents as a business opportunity? Like, if you want to do a Les Misérables comparison here, he wouldn’t “buy” Rey from them, he’d try to get money for them à la Thénardier with Fantine. Except Rey’s parents make Fantine look like frigging Einstein because at least she had the excuse of thinking Madame Thénardier would take good care of Cosette since Éponine and Azelma seemed well-cared for.  

Again, a creepy-looking alien who exploits the outpost’s inhabitants for portions in exchange for junk, who asks you to pay him to take care of your kid should be a big fucking red flag – unless you want to involve blackmail, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

Seriously, why the hell would Rey’s parents even ACCEPT money that comes from selling their own child? Were they really that desperate? Fuck, even if I had no other way of getting off Jakku, I wouldn’t even THINK of using money that comes from selling my own child. Any parent who’d even CONSIDER doing that is automatically a godawful parent in my book. Shame on you. And shame on JJ for trying to make me buy them as saints, because THEY’RE NOT, JUST BY THAT SINGLE ACTION.

They died on another planet, while being hunted down by a guy working for Palpatine and instructed to bring Rey back to them.

I didn’t notice it until Jenny Nicholson pointed it out in her TROS review, because it SOMEHOW completely escaped my notice, but… Rey’s mom saying Rey is DEFINITELY NOT on Jakku is like the worst fucking lie I’ve ever seen in a film because it’s so hilariously bad. Congratulations, Space Villanelle, may you be forever remembered for this line.

Also, it’s stupid af that Oshi (that’s his name, right? Can’t be bothered to Google it, might just call him Barney the Bounty Hunter from now on) just kills Rey’s parents, because HE’S EVUL MUAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA, because he literally creates a dead end for himself. He still has no fucking clue where Rey is, and he just killed off his only leads. CONGRATULATIONS BARNEY THE BOUNTY HUNTER, YOU SUCK AT YOUR JOB.

Rey’s dad is a Palpatine and Rey’s mom is Villanelle.

So, Rey’s dad looks like he’s in his early thirties at most, right? Maybe a little younger than Luke and Leia, then. So, unless he got frozen in carbonite at some point, that means Palpatine fucked at some point while looking like this:

Anyway, I sure hope Sly Moore was Grandma Palpatine because she’s pretty much the only person who’d be game to smash raisin ass. Which leaves me with extremely disturbing pictures of Palps and Sly having sex, so I’ll spare you the more graphic details of my twisted mind that’s screaming for an end to this misery. 

I sure hope having Rey’s mom as Jodie Comer isn’t a clue that we’ll get spin-offs with those two (GOD PLEASE NO), but while I crack jokes about how Rey’s mom is Villanelle and Palpadad kinda looks like Ramsay Bolton… I find it fucking hilarious they dressed Rey’s mom in BLUE. LIKE, SEE? SEE? SHE’S IN BLUE, LIKE THE VIRGIN MARY, BECAUSE REY IS SPACE JESUS!!!! GET IT??? GETIT???? PLEASE TELL ME YA GET IT, OKAY???? *gross sobbing* I knew we should have had Rey born in a manger, that would have made the artistic intentions clear *wipes tear*

^ EXACTLY. 

More importance was given to her burying the sabers of the previous heroes than to her creating her own one, which is perfectly fitting for a movie that is more concerned with proving its main protagonist worthy of the old guard’s legacy, than with completing her growth as a heroine in her own right. 

Also perfectly encapsulated by her big hero moment, which doesn’t consist in an active choice, in an existential victory born out of compassion as opposed to a flat display of power (see: Luke in rotj), but in her being the perfect vessel to be imbued by the spirits of the old jedi, and wielding not one but two old hero sabers in front of her, not to destroy, not to protect, not to save, no, just to bounce Palpatine’s power back to its source. It’s neither aggression nor compassion. Just passivity. She doesn’t win thanks to her inner power, she wins because she finally proves herself worthy of the good legacy. Her big existential victory? Choosing the name Skywalker (as opposed to Palpatine, a name that meant nothing to her for two movies and that doesn’t in any way mirror any actual struggle with any inner darkness. It’s literally just a name and some force lightning she shot once without any permanent consequences for anyone).