ST Rey Skywalker/Daisy Ridley Discussion Thread

Well that explains a lot.

 

Daisy Ridley really excelled it in TROS!

 

Even though I did not like some of the decisions made in ST, and haunted by the kiss Reylo never should have shared, I appreciate you for defending ST against all the odds. @Ender_and_Bean

 

Absolute nonsense if we’re supposed to think Kylo had it worse than Rey. That’s the upside down it’s so bonkers.

 

Yeah.... Rey had the way worse life than Kylo did. Abandoned and forced to raise herself. If anything, she had the back story of a villain and Kylo had the back story of a hero. Yet Kylo's the one who went Dark and she did not.

 

The point is not that Ben Solo had a harder life than Rey, but that he was targeted by Palpatine instead of her because he was available and she was not. If true, it is ironic since she was isolated in such a horrible place, but was protected by being hidden in this place while he had all kinds of advantages, but was exposed.

 

Houston, we have an empathy gap.

Rey was exposed to an insane amount of forces that could drive a person to the dark side. Manipulation isn’t the only path there. Kylo certainly whined about his lot in life and let that feed his dark side impulses. Rey chose not to go there. She has no reason to relate to Kylo at all on this front.

 

I was saying what the point the tweet was making. In this story, Ben Solo’s fall to the dark side was triggered by manipulation by Palpatine. It is a common theme in Star Wars. It happened to Anakin as well. A person’s fears, desires, etc. are manipulated. Rey endured isolated hardship and persevered. Ironically, that isolated hardship prevented her from being exposed to that kind of dark side manipulation.

 

Exactly.

Palpatine literally killed his own son and daughter (had Ochi do it actually) in search of his Granddaughter Rey, when he wasn’t able to locate Rey on Jakku he began his manipulation (through Snoke) of Ben Solo. Remember Ben didn’t turn until 6 years before TFA.

 

If the focus of the story is on how Rey feels like the lucky one compared to Kylo while the narrative ignores the facts of their upbringings, this is automatically an illegitimate premise. At that point, if that’s the story they wanted to tell, they needed to change their backstories to pass the laugh test.

While Ben was being manipulated, he had a loving family of force users to turn to. Somehow he made it through childhood without turning, so his childhood isn’t the part that is the focus. Meanwhile Rey was a child slave in figurative hell. If you’re ignoring that in this comparison, it’s a meaningless comparison.

 

Literally no one said any of that. I feel you are willfully disregarding what I said or what that tweet was pointing out.

 

I think you are willfully disregarding how the tweet ignores Rey’s horrific childhood and how easily that could turn someone to the dark side.

 

No I am not. The point the tweet makes is that Rey had a much worse life than Ben, but that terrible life strangely protected her from Palpatine’s machinations.

 

Yes you are. Having a terrible life itself can drive someone to the dark side. You have explicitly ignored that. As I already said, manipulation is not the only path to the dark side and it’s dishonest to have this discussion while pretending that it is.

 

Yep. One of the first rules of writing character motivations is to have them do things that are logical. My primary objection to Rey's motivations is that, from TLJ, they are mostly illogical; she is a victim of bad writing.

One of the things I reasonably assumed we'd get from Rey, from TLJ onwards, was her PTSD coming to the surface at key moments. Instead, she acted like a total idiot. Hard to take her seriously after that...

 

Great points made by all. I'm somewhat averse to saying Rey suffers from PTSD because I think that term is politically loaded, but I think it's true that TFA's purest expression (Rey's introduction) endows her with righteous grievance, an angry sense of fairness. She comes from a Hobbesian reflection of ANH's Tatooine that should be hostile to Kylo's elite inheritance. LFL wanted to make her the girl from the "wrong side of the tracks," but they were ultimately terrified of what kind of character that would result in, and detoured into other ideas.

Unfortunately, Abrams' and Johnson's liberal politics had to blame her grievances on psycho/sexual dysfunction, at least that's what Reylos would have us believe. The primal essence of her character (rooted in GL's elusive treatments) is that of a prophet, but Disney straightjackets her into the role of patient.

 

How is PTSD politically loaded? I don't understand... I've worked in mental health for more than 15 years, and I cannot imagine what else she would be more likely to suffer from. I mean, I can list depression, anxiety, some sort of personality disorder (perhaps avoidant, or even dependant,) the list goes on... but PTSD, definitely a likely IMHO.

 

Maybe I'm not understanding the terms (I'll defer to anyone who's educated in these fields) but I thought PTSD results from a singular or localized experience. It's not the kind of diagnosis that emerges from an entire life. What specific experience did Rey supposedly have which traumatized her before the start of TFA? Being a psuedo-slave? I don't see any evidence in the films where those experiences cause her to have panic attacks or emotional breakdowns or depression any other symptom of PTSD. She seems to have adjusted to that quite well actually.

The parents thing, what's weird is that the films want her to be an adult and a child at the same time. I don't think it really nuances the character so much as infantilizes her. She is self reliant, but also emotionally insecure? It's made weirder by the fact that Ridley is clearly a woman in her twenties. I guess I can see the intention there, but it's never convincing, there are conflicting agendas in the writing.

 

PTSD can come from a singular event or it can come from a series of events. Like any of us, I'm filling in the gaps in our knowledge of her experiences on Jakku, and I'm inclined to think she has suffered from long term brutalisation in her harsh existence. My problem with her characterisation is that she shows compassion in a situation where she would be more likely to be selfish for the sake of survival. It sort of works in TFA, but doesn't quite ring true for me; and I instinctively try to contextualise her experiences prior to those events, so I'm not just thinking here of what we see, but what we can speculate on.

When I've nursed adolescents who have grown up without love or affection, they often have very stunted communication involving extreme mood swings, tantrums and even stilted speech and a severely blunted affect; generally pretty poor social skills. I actually don't claim expertise in this field; I don't claim expertise in anything I do, but I do have quite a lot of experience of this.

Now, many people with PTSD who have otherwise normal living environments can seem fine on the surface, until certain things trigger their flashbacks; nightmares etc. To me, there's nothing normal about Rey's existence. Either way, even if one doesn't like a particular label ascribed to her, she is hardly going to come out of the experience 'undamaged'. One way or the other, I'm pretty disappointed with how they handled her mental state; not because I expect her to be a basket case necessarily (I'd expect her to be very self-reliant certainly), but I'd expect a more complex and intriguing character, reacting oddly or overreacting to certain situations.

 

I was never expecting to see Rey suffer from PTSD because she clearly wasn’t written with such in mind. In TFA she was written essentially with Luke’s ANH personality (too naïve and nice for her own good, almost like she was raised by a loving, sheltering family) despite having a villain’s backstory.

Rian Johnson just continued what JJ Abrams started. She’s always been a bit too simplistic shell of a character to ever feel like she could develop conditions comparable to the human experience.

 

Harsh. I understand your point, but SW never had incredibly realistic characters.

Luke in the OT maybe.

 

For me personally, a more believable depiction of Rey when we first meet her would have been someone who was more feral, if not necessarily 'animalistic', and more inclined to act then speak, sometimes violently. We see glimpses of this, but nothing overly convincing, such as when she fights off the thugs trying to steal BB-8. If then, she is to develop into your main protagonist, it needs to be done more gradually, with setbacks along the way. Instead, she's just showing us all how super-duper she is...

In a way, it could have been interesting to have a sort of wolf-child character using the Force in sudden and unexpected ways when she's angry, or even joyous about something; someone who trusts absolutely no one, but learns by degrees how to give a crap about others through seminal experiences along the way. Some folks may not have found it all that compelling, but I see no reason they couldn't have handled her very differently.