ST Rey & Kylo Ren in Episode IX

Wasn’t accidental in the slightest. It’s me being critical of her design. Her character design has many issues currently. I’ve criticized them before and will again.

 

100% this. You expressed it perfectly.

 

Excellent points. She simply doesn't behave like someone who's apparently been surviving on her skills.

She should've been bitter and angry at the world, not hopeful and friendly. Instead she's trusting Finn after five minutes and is all wide-eyed around Kylo, trusting him to turn good.

She has zero reason to try and save Kylo or help any strangers.

Poorly written character.

 

I’ve seen the ferile child/street kid turned assassin done many times much better than Rey and it starts primarily by showing them as far more socially awkward and hardened in a way that takes a very long time to let anyone in and trusts no one and does strange things that are socially out of the norm. Hell, even on Star Wars Resistance — a show aimed at kids — Synara has more of these kinds of traits than Rey.

The first time Rey smelled food on a ship that wasn’t a ration she should have ran to it to smell it. She should have had little social graces. Her vocabulary should have been smaller. She should be more skittish. If you walk up behind her she will strike you. They could have set her up as more angry making her more drawn to the dark sooner.

Her most contradictory traits don’t seem to add up and may never unless we get more info on her past that better explains them.

 

Yeah, it’s not fair to assume that just because someone enjoys a Star Wars film more than you do, that they don’t have critiques of it. Rey’s and most everyone else’s character design is emblematic of what I dislike about the ST. As you alluded to, it feels a bit like Nickelodeon in the GFFA. Potentially realistic characterizations are routinely punctured (sometimes irreparably) by baffling Saturday morning cartoon nonsense.

That said, I do think you’re missing the important difference between naïveté and ignorance. To whit, Rey’s ignorant of the Resistance vs. First Order conflict, and so she believes Finn could be a Resistance fighter (though it’s played too jokingly to be believable, but I digress). But as soon as the FO starts firing, she shows that she’s not naive at all. She makes quick decisions to escape, she tells Finn to let go of her hand (she doesn’t need him, and this is her home turf), she gets them to the Falcon, and she pilots them out of there. She’s a survivor, and not naive. She just doesn’t know a whole lot about anything outside the planet. Blame the Jakku public school system, not her naïveté.

 

Finn is clearly a person in distress when Rey meets him. He's drinking water from an animal trough and at the mercy of everyone else in the village, so it's reasonable for her to assume she'll get the truth out of him when she demands it. Any deception would be a huge risk for him. Kylo on the other hand is in a position of power throughout their interactions. He risks nothing by lying to her and actually has a lot to gain. So no, TFA does not set her up as naive.

 

Even if Rey wasn't already convinced of his sociopathy by his torture and murderous acts, her conversions with him in TLJ should have sealed the deal. He's not even lying to her about what a great person he secretly is if she would just look deeper. Rather, everything he says is confirmation that he's the monster he already appeared to be. That's not making Rey naive.. it's making her an idiot to prop up Kylo Ren.

ETA - To tie this into TROS, I think it's imperative that she shows zero trust in Kylo in this movie. If there is an alliance, it needs to be based on information she gathers on her own (not just taking Kylo's word for it), and she needs to take steps to protect herself from the inevitable Kylo betrayal that she should expect to happen based on her experiences thus far.

 

Naïveté
Gullibility.
Denial.
Optimism that something unlikely WILL ocur even as Luke and Maz State that it won’t...

They’re all interrelated when it comes to Rey. Depending on the moment one could perhaps lean more on one to describe the motivation than some of the others but they’re all bedfellows with one another in the end.

They made a super powered chosen one reminiscent of Anakin with a less clearly defined central weakness. These words, among other synonyms for each, are what we’re left with in terms of identifying her biggest weakness(es). She’s physically strong and powerful but what’s held her back and lead her astray has mostly been is in her mind.

VIII recognized that and focused on that and showed her learning from that and rejecting the offer to become empress of the galaxy and an easier path for the harder path fighting for the resistance. She stops waiting for others due to some (or all) of those traits above and becomes the hero the Resistance needs.

 

So a substantially worse Anakin, narratively.

 

I think that TFA set up her weaknesses to be a short temper and impatience. She's not really ever gullible because she's endowed with deep knowledge of the world around her. She trusts Han because she knows who he is, and believes the myth of Luke Skywalker could be true because she knows she's in the GFFA. Regarding denial about her orphanage, the problem with developing that into a weakness is that we never know the circumstances of how she arrived there. Is there a reason for her to believe someone will come back for her? We can't really answer that in the affirmative or negative, it's a mystery.

It's not until TLJ that she is endowed with naivete, gullibility, etc, and it's all in service of her "relationship" with Kylo.

 

Rey isn’t gullible until TLJ. She believed Finn’s lie because a) it made actual sense; b) she had no reason not to; and c) he saved her life.

Gullible is putting her life in the hands of her torturer. It’s not gullible to accept the veracity of something that has nothing to do with her that even bb8 accepted, who was part of the Resistance.

 

I think this debate rests almost entirely on a disagreement about whether or not Rey is inherently naive in the lead up to the Force Skyping. I don’t think she is. She’s ignorant of the Galaxy and has sympathy for those who are being preyed upon (as with BB8), but she’s also clearly street-wise, has a hard shell, and is not prone to being taken advantage of. Her “denial” seems to be more a form of coping in a rough environment (part of her hard shell/ facade), not naïveté. Quite the opposite, given her environment. Naïveté would lead her to actually believe her parents were coming back, as opposed to being in deep denial about it, and refusing to allow that vulnerability into her life. I see no evidence of naïveté in TFA, or even in TLJ, until she buys Kylo’s nonsense and ships herself in a box. The takeaway, for me, is that she’s doing something reckless and uncharacteristic for a guy (who she inexplicably thinks is a likely savior). And a toxic guy at that.

 

Finn was literally like “um, I mean... this is what we look like...”

Like... come on. It was ridiculous.

Equally ridiculous was not even considering the possibility that maybe those people who left her there might not be coming back.

And believing that maybe the torture you endured was maybe just wartime interrogation and that you might be able to have gotten through to this sicko because you’ve seen him stop and listen to your talks and concerns and insecurities and tell you that you’re not alone in this and take off his glove to hold your hand is also pretty naive and living in denial of who this guy is beyond these moments with you.

She developed a coping mechanism that despite how bleak things may seem... good times may be ahead and applied that to the wrong person in large part because an evil wizard connected her mind to his apprentice and deceived both into believing it was Force/fate bringing them together.

None of this matters as much as the fact that she has learned from this and prioritized the Resistance and rejected his offer and became the hero she was waiting for one of Luke or Ben to be.

That’s where she is now. She’s past her big weakness. VIII showed us her realizing how wrong she had been and moving past it and accepting that her power means the responsibility of protecting others with it.

TFA was a Force fluke for her of self protection. TLJ was the first time she used her powers for others as a hero and showed non Force users that she had these gifts.

@Bor Mullet , she has agency in these choices. It’s not like Kylo Ren tells her “I can change for you if you come here” and then she goes. The decision to believe that she has made progress here where others haven’t and the faith in the vision of Snoke dead and them fighting together is hers alone. If she’s deceived by anything it’s the vision but the Force has guided her thus far so it’s understandable. Her force back lead places for her and makes sense in retrospect. The whispers lead her to the saber and later the books.

That’s significant in this discussion. Throughout VIII she believes she’s the one with agency above both Luke and Ben. She purposefully withholds info from Luke. She takes the books. She assesses Kylo Ren without any promises from him of change and believes she has him figured out. Throughout VIII she thinks she has both Luke and Ben figured out and how to motivate both. She eventually gives up on Luke for Ben as the “someone who may come back.”

 

YES! And if she was that full of herself, after watching his dad fail the day before, wouldn't she just think she could save everyone without needing Kylo?

In the TFA novelization, Rey says she is not a slave. She's her own person, I believe "beholden to no one" might be the exact quotation. She is not a slave or anyone's property in TFA.

 

I hear you but here are 5 of my reasons Anakin and Kylo are different.
1. Anakin was a slave, did not grow up in privilege.
2. We got to see 2 and a half movies of Anakin being a hero, saving Obi Wan, and being loving towards Padme. He also tried to save her and his mother, while clearly taking things too far lol.
3. Anakin fought in the brutal Clone Wars, did not just go to Jedi Space camp and then whine about everything.
4. Anakin turned into one of the most feared and awesome villains in screen history.
5. Hayden let us see the charming side of Anakin to offset some of the whining and other questionable behavior. If that's what they were going for with Kylo it's either the writing or miscasting cause, no.
All that being said nothing excuses the things he did the second half of ROTS.

 

Rey with Finn: Believes that someone she has never seen commit even the slightest misdeed might be heroic

Rey with Kylo Ren: Believes that someone who she has only seen commit incredibly horrific deeds might be heroic

There's a pretty glaring difference there, don't you think?

 

Rey is allowed to have multiple ways of looking at things.

 

Can you or anyone point out to me the quote in TLJ that states “She is now the sole property of Unkar Plutt and must do whatever he says as all slaves do?”

Because I didn’t catch that part. In fact... I didn’t hear anything that wasn’t already known by the scene of her with Plutt watching the ship go. Was I the only one who didn’t take that to be Unkar Plutt philanthropy? That he wasn’t taking a child out of the kindness of his heart or as a daycare? That he probably gave something to have yet another child marooned by junkers for years of future scavenger work?

The moment ANY guardian has prioritized money of any kind for any purpose over the children they have left in child and family services (on Earth) or Plutt on Jakku they’ve sold that person out for that other need.

This focus on semantics is absurd to me. If Lucasfilm had truly intended for that line to reframe Rey’s upbringing as some gigantic reveal that changed all we knew about her then we’d have books on Jakku slavery and what that meant out by now.

 

But if Plutt, from what we know canonically about his character, handed over money for a child, what believable reason does he have for giving her her freedom? He could use her for labor, use her for scavenging and not pay as he pays everyone else, or to be blunt about it, sell her body and take the money. If he has owned her since childhood, he would have had plenty of time in the early years to do irreparable psychological damage and likely could have "broken" her, latent force powers or not.


ETA I think it far more likely that Plutt was given something to take Rey rather than paying for her.

 

JUNKERS: She’s really good at scavenging. All of the stuff we’ve brought you— That plasma generator we found? That was her! .She snuck right in there and grabbed it. We could leave her with you. We found a ship. It works. We are leaving. Finally.

PLUTT: Slavery is outlawed. I don’t pay for help.

JUNKERS: She’s 6. She has no other option and we taught her how to scavenge. She’ll work for you for years.

PLUTT: I’ll give you 20 if you leave her.

JUNKERS: 20? That’s absurd. Nothing more than drinking money on Canto Bight.

PLUTT: Slavery is outlawed. She’d be free to live or die.

JUNKERS: Nobdy here lives free. Least of all a child. She’ll more than pay for 20 over the course of her childhood.

PLUTT: 25 is my final offer.

JUNKERS: We’ll take it.

That’s not hard to imagine at all.