ST Rey & Kylo Ren in Episode IX

For the same reasons, though, I am baffled by how many fans actually liked and related to Anakin in AOTC and ROTS. Why? He’s a whiny, entitled, fascist-sympathizing douche who only cares about a couple people. He and Kylo are both deeply unlikable to me.

 

It's patently absurd that Rey thinks she can just change Kylo Ren. What? Because she saw the shape of his future, yet solid and clear. It's like...oh Luke saved Vader. That doesn't sound so hard. It's so unbelievably naive and ... over confident to an absolute degree. She basically does it because the movie expects someone to save Kylo, not because she's earned that knowledge, or emotional connection yet. It took Luke 3 movies to get to the point where he could think he had a shot at saving his conflicted father. But Rey just thinks she can after knowing about the Force, Luke, Kylo, and Snoke for all of 3 days.

It's like..I once saw a documentary on heart surgery and then the next day, deciding I could do the same on a person having a heart attack at a restaurant. It makes Luke and Vaders drama insignificant and silly.

 

@Bor Mullet Well, he was younger, like it has been said before. The thing is that he also aspired to greatness to be something good as that intent was slowly transformed into something that was destructive. It's a bit much to call him entitled as well since Anakin, by contrast was...you know...a slave....and was a member of the Republic's ranks in one of the bloodiest wars it ever fought...just saying.

 

@AhsokaSolo , you don’t know the line? It’s a single line spoken by Kylo Ren.



Which could quite as easily have been interpreted more as a “sold you out” as some kind of interpretation that she’s the physical property of Plutt. Or, it could be that he gave them money to leave her behind. Knowing she’d need to work for him if they did and believing that to be a wise investment given the low cost offered.

You seem very pleased by the Reddit headline of her not to be from Jakku but why? The image linked there doesn’t explicitly state that.



Abandoned can mean that the people she associated as her parents were on Jakku and left her there after years of time there. There’s nothing in that entry we didn’t already know. You also seem to be surprisingly excited by the usage of the word “marooned” here as though that somehow implies dropped off. It’s just another variation of what we already knew. It means isolated and left behind. Two things we knew of her already. That image is nothing and it’s been downvoted appropriately there as nothing of significance for that reason.

I don’t like the naïveté and delusion but it’s always been there. She’s been portrayed as someone who will go along with something if the thought is pleasant enough to her.



Han basically rolled his eyes here.

Max stopped just short of saying “Come on. You have to know these people are gone? Are you crazy?”



Who falls for such a lousy attempt at a lie? She came off like a 5 year old here.





Same Rey. Same hopeful naïveté. This is a big part of her character design.

Just that some are enjoyable to witness because they’re sweet and others involve the dark side & its villains exploiting that, which is meant to be more troubling and concerning.

 

Once again with the dumb and meaningless parallels. With Finn, he's both a person who she had never met before at that point and that entire scene is a statement of fact. She has never seen a Resistance fighter before. On the other hand, she has met someone who has attempted to kill Finn and tortured her. You're comparing a scene describing her supposed naïveté but don't consider how the context of each scene makes it actually different and a moot comparison.

 

That`s still a couple more than Kylo cares about.

There are several key differences between Anakin and Kylo to me. I could understand what motivates Anakin at the very least, what he thought and wanted. He tried saving his mother and didn`t actually shrug it off when someone killed her. That doesn`t mean his response wasn`t totally over the line but at least I can understand it. Kylo freaks out on computer consols or elevator walls but not upon the perceived death of his mother. I can not get that.

 

You said it was based on a vision. Kylo just vaguely read her mind here. It wasn’t based on a vision.

“Sold you for drinking money” =/= sold you out. It = Rey is a commodity that was valuable and her parents took advantage so they could afford alcohol. It’s very specific. Not a metaphor. But sure, let’s retcon it as that. JJ is doing it and I’m thrilled.

It literally saying “marooning her.” Here’s the first definition of that word on dictionary.com: “to put ashore on a desolate island or coast and leave to one's fate.” That’s the context for the word and 100% it’s how I interpret it.

I couldn’t care less what gets downvoted on reddit. A simple comment like “I don’t think Kylo is sympathetic” gets downvoted into oblivion over there.

I don’t think you’re supporting your premise at all. Rey trusts Finn because he explained his side in a way that made sense. Plus, he never hurt her. In fact, their history at that point was Rey hurting him exclusively. Then they ran for their lives saving each other together. This is an absurd false equivalence that I find totally irrational.

 

Plus, it says on the "unfamiliar wold of Jakku." That makes no sense if they've been living there for years.

 

I think that means she wasn't born on Jakku.

 

There are so many reasons this is obvious. One of them is Rey marking the days. This is a trope for people stranded on islands. They’re not from those islands. They’re counting the days on the island. Plus the ship is flying off world, not driving away to a different Jakku town to go to a bar. They’re leaving Rey on that planet, and Rey in TFA talks about how they’ll be back to that planet. Not her town. It was always obvious, and RJ didn’t notice or care, and JJ is fixing it.

 

There’s a fundamental difference between her naive initial encounter with Finn, and her encounters with Kylo in TLJ. Namely, Finn hadn’t tortured her, murdered one of her friends in cold blood, almost murdered another friend, and participated in the annihilation of an entire solar system.

The point being that Rey should not in any way be naive about Kylo in TLJ, because she has knowledge of the horrible things he’s done.

The way she behaves towards Kylo in TLJ, therefore, is not naive or ignorant. It’s simply...stupid. To me, it therefore hearkens back to old stereotypes about women. How they get uncharacteristically dumb and silly around guys they like, to the point of almost blindly overlooking deep flaws.

It’s uncomfortable and regressive, in my view. Though I don’t deny that one can legitimately interpret it differently, as you have.

 

Are you guys seriously trying to tell me with a straight face that you don’t think one of the most defining traits of Rey as a character through 2 films that they’ve played up multiple times is naïveté? You’re really going to dig in on that just to oppose me? Look, I can understand not wanting to see any kind of through line between her naïveté shown in VII and how it’s exploited later in VIII. Doing so would negate many of the narratives built up for over a year to attack VIII so I’m not expecting anyone who doesn’t see a through line between her earlier naïveté and her later naïveté to see one but I have a hard time believing anyone truly can look at these moments below and think they were written to showcase Rey and worldly and wise and free of naïveté.

Listen, the scenes speak for themselves as being purposefully designed to show this as one of her traits. All of these moments combine to paint the picture of someone who still has a lot to learn by design. People are constantly rolling their eyes around here. When she tells Luke what she saw when she touched hands he literally does that. Han does that.


And scenes of Maz literally implying she’s willingly been living a lie:

S

And you have a scene written like this that you honestly see in bad Nickelodeon teen comedies where kids get caught by an adult and make up a lie on the spot.



These are not moments meant to showcase her as someone without naïveté or to show her as worldly. They knew they wrote Rey to be a powerhouse physically so my guess is that they saw hopeful naïveté as her Achilles heel.

You can take objection all you want over the leap of naïveté and lack of worldliness shown in TFA to what she falls for in TLJ. I won’t debate the leap up as significant. I think that it is. But they’re both built off of her trait of naïveté that was established earlier.

 

Yes, because we all know hopeful naïveté is exactly the kind of character trait someone would have on a planet like Jakku.

 

LOL well said. The traits don't make sense for the characters. Rey shouldn't be naive, she should be smart like Han.
Finn shouldn't be funny and cowardly, he should be serious, confident and broody.

 

I’m saying with a straight face that Rey was introduced as street smart, the literal opposite of naive.

 

That makes your issue more with it conceptually than a refutation of its existence as a trait in her design.

Would I have chosen that as her big weakness? No.

It seems they did though.

 

Except they didn’t. She assaulted Finn without talking to him. Her first instinct was to sell bb8. She rejected Finn’s hand. She’s mad Finn got her mixed up in the galactic shooting.

Wanting to return to Jakku isn’t naive if she really was separated from her family by mistake as she said. It’s actually smart. It’s like how we teach kids that if they get lost on a hike, they should stay where they are and blow into their whistle. It’s too hard to find them if they keep moving.

 

She didn't seem to be on Han's level.

 

She’s a contradiction of traits. I’ve said that since TFA. Street smart and tough but capable of naïve wishful thinking if it’s pleasant enough. She’s Disney child homeless. Which means much of her design is unrealistic in comparison to how a real homeless, uneducated child turned grown up would be like. A little dirt makeup. An ability to fight. Then insta-trust he’s a hero and insta-friends for life hours later with a heard of gold to keep helping these strangers.

 

I get that DP, and have no interest in opposing you for its own sake. I like you, after all, and respect your argument. The problem is not in concept. I accept that Rey has a hopeful core. To the point of naivety, at times, though it strikes me more as ignorance/ being sheltered/ parochial, than naïveté. Indeed, most of the examples you are offering depend not so much on naïveté, as they do on ignorance. She had never seen a planet so green, she had never met a Resistance fighter, etc. That’s not the same as believing Kylo not only has good in him, but is also the only hope for the galaxy, and that if she just ships herself in a box to him, she’ll show him the light. Why? Simple. Because she wasn’t ignorant about Kylo. She was tortured by him, she watched him murder his father and paralyze her friend, and she knows he is a leader in the First Order - the organization that tried to kill her on Jakku and that blew up a solar system. So if you take away her ignorance about Kylo, why does she act the way she does?

You can’t just bluntly adhere to some monolithic and simplistic character trait like “naïveté” as you’re developing a character. She’s not a Dungeons and Dragons character with one core trait that doesn’t change. She’s a human being who’s supposed to evolve over time. Instead, in TLJ, she regresses. She’s naïve despite having first-hand knowledge that should prevent that naïveté. So she’s gone from parochial and ignorant of the wider world to...stupid.

Thankfully, and this is a saving grace for me (otherwise I would write the film off entirely), she rejects him and his offer on the Supremacy, and leaves him to perish with the ship. I just don’t think her head-scratching path to that moment was convincing.

And I still haven’t heard an answer for why Rey considered Kylo the only hope for the galaxy. That belief seems to be plucked out of the nether regions of the galaxy (or the writer), not the character of Rey.

 

No. She was on her level understanding Jakku. She wasn’t an interplanetary smuggler.

Insta friends after they saved each other’s lives.

I mean, your point makes more sense if you skip all the characterization, Sure.

 

Then the movies should have done a better job at showing us the consequences of that naiveté character failing. TFA is a little better, but she gets out of every situation her naiveté lands her in. TLJ is much worse, showing that even when she's wrong, she doesn't really learn from it, nor deal with the impact of her choices. Rey closing the door on Kylo might be a very subtle indication that she's 'getting wiser', but the movie doesn't actually say that her naiveté about Kylo is wrong. If anything it indicates that shes' correct, she just needs to wait around for Kylo to grow up too.

And as Talos mentions, a girl dropped off on world like Jakku, learning to survive on her own since she was 6, shouldn't have any naiveté about how the world works, or how scummy people can be. She may not be familiar with different places and different cultures, but trusting people shouldn't be an automatic for her. If anything, Rey should be the last person who thinks Kylo Ren should be redeemed. If anything, the OT people should be begging her to see it their way, and she should be way more reluctant to see the good in him. Almost as if, that was some sort of...character arc for our street smarts, abandoned young hero.

 

Probably the best accidental critique of the character I've ever read, couldn't have said it better myself.

 

I agree. She’s street smart from the start in TFA (as her encounters with various Jakku denizens show), not naive. People are conflating “ignorant of the wider world” with naive. She simply doesn’t know much at all about Jedi and the Resistance and green planets and all that. But she’s a tough survivor that won’t be taken advantage of. Until...she gets in a box and ships herself to her torturer.