ST The Development Of The Sequel Trilogy

I expected Han and Leia to want Ben redeemed and welcome him into Jedi heaven no matter what he did. It is certainly no stretch for a parent to be that forgiving—if it were one of my sons I would certainly react that way.

But it still makes no sense for Rey to care about Kylo being redeemed or make any effort towards it. She is not Han. She is not Leia. She is not a family member of Kylo’s at all. She is not a long-lost friend. She had never heard of him until the day he murdered his father, attacked her friends, and knocked her unconscious and tortured her.

And if TLJ or the ST as a whole does not intend for Rey to be an actual character, just an insert “new Jedi/Kylo’s redeemer” who does not need an actual personality or motivations—that is a massive problem, almost as much of a problem as TLJ or the ST as a whole intending her to be a vapid brainless person who falls in love with Kylo at first sight, thinks the torture is hot, and succumbs her entire identity to being his groupie afterwards.

 

I just want to point out that LFL themselves sort of showed why any non-Skywalker version of Rey required a hell of a lot more work than any version of her related to the family - because you’d have to compensate for the extra focus Kylo is naturally going to get as a Skywalker.

If Kylo being a Skywalker matters at all in a determinative way (“we have to feature him as the deuteragonist over Finn,” “he has to be redeemed,” “audience’s must see him as inherently desirable”), than you’re immediately giving that legacy a greater value than any “ubiquitous Jedi” would have, whether they knew Ben when he was young, were related to any other time-honored family like the Kenobis or Palpatines, or anything else.

I’m sure there *are* audience and creators who could ignore Kylo having Han and Leia for his parents - people for whom the legacy means nothing for their expectations, who would be completely okay with Ben Solo dying evil and ending the family story that way... But I think it’s also abundantly clear they’re either a minority of the larger audience, or sort of a inelastic part of the fanbase compared to other, more demanding parts of fan base - that they could be counted on to watch a story where the family’s legacy *does* matter, whereas their counterparts could not be counted on to watch it when it *doesn’t* matter.

And it’s pretty clear that most of LFL, most of TLJ’s fanbase, and even a good chunk of TROS’s audience simply felt that Kylo automatically mattered more than Rey, and that him getting a redemption mattered more than Rey having a story at all - not to mention how Kylo replacing Finn doesn’t even seem to be up for debate to most Ben Solo fans...

So you’d pretty much always have had to either just make Rey a Skywalker or dedicate huge swathes of time to making sure that Rey matters more than Kylo, and basically make the entire trilogy something like a treatise on why Ben Solo’s familial ties shouldn't matter.

 

I also think Kylo replaced Finn, with the excuse of ‘shifting the focus’. And keeping Finn in a coma for two hours would have been better than waking him up and having the script make immature jokes at his expense.

What would have been even better? Developing Finn’s role as a former stormtrooper by having him use his skills to help the Resistance. Even better than that—have a side story about him planning/leading a stormtrooper rebellion, one that replaces the Canto Bight side story (even though I liked Canto Bight’s commentary on late-stage capitalism).

Instead all we got for Finn was ‘Lol he’s nekkid! Lol he got busted in a casino for a parking ticket! lol dude is so dumb that he doesn’t even know that slavery is bad!’

 

LFL themselves also clearly wanted the record to show that they considered Kylo to have replaced Finn by TROS with their “for your consideration” sheets listing Driver as their Best Actor option over Boyega - even though for the third movie in a row, Boyega had more screentime, and even though for the third movie in a row, Driver had not one but *two* actors ahead of him in screentime.

And that’s an official publication by LFL - and it doesn’t follow the pattern from TFA (Boyega gets second most screentime, got designated as the main male actor) or TLJ (Hamill gets second most screentime, got designated as the main male actor). Hamill replacing Boyega in TLJ also comes off as a lot more defendable from a concept standpoint, since Luke is a former main character...

...But even in TLJ, it’s clear that much of the story is purpose-made to try and replace Finn with Kylo as Rey’s main “screen partner” through what are primarily cheap tactics, shortcuts, and bad writing that impacts many actors in poor ways:

- The Force Skype is mostly a shortcut to force Rey and Kylo scenes of exist, which wouldn’t be a bad idea if they weren’t written so Ridley has to basically carry an inherently sexist story that Driver got more of the credit for. The story also deliberately keeps Rey and Finn from saying anything to each other even after they reunite, and devalues Finn for Rey as well.

- Boyega spends most of TLJ with what amounts to a badly characterized “hit piece” trying to retcon Finn’s growth and heroism into a cowardly obsession with Rey he “needs” to get over - and, like Poe, gets a badly written story that seems to argue that the regular dudes should sit still and do nothing rather than try to be escapist heroes.

- KMT is a wonderful actress, but she’s been cast in a thankless role that seems to exist primarily to A) be a Not-Rey love interest for Finn, and worse, B) to be a deliberately underwhelming, unexciting “unpopular girl,” possibly to make sure that Finn’s story stays boring - see: Johnson himself noting he didn’t want to write a more ambitious story.

And overall, there’s just a string feeling that TLJ is expending energy trying to undermine Finn, rather than try and actually build up Kylo, which would have still allowed Finn’s story to a e some ambition.

 

Conspiracy theories you mean; just using “conspiracies” would actually be you agreeing with the theory, and we both know that ain’t the case!

But I also just object to your general claim - TFA set a bar that TLJ was trying to demean, make fun, of, and lower as much as possible, from main character to background character screwing up. TROS, in contrast, is mostly a case of being a clear B-plot doing very little that it sounds like LFL tried to discourage, but still had a positive impact on the film’s (still lame, mind you) plot... and left him with the Force, which we both know leaves him in a more important spot going forward than TLJ tried to trap him in. Finn vs Phasma is mocked more than anything else, while Finn storming the Star Destroyer is mostly just shrugged at... but I’ve seen how you negatively react to people pointing out the natural progression from TROS is Finn as Rey’s partner in rebuilding the Jedi, so I suspect we’re both coming at this from opposing biases.

And you’ve already heard multiple times what Finn “learned”/started off with in TFA before - and I know, because I wrote a bunch of them , and I think specifically in reply to you once or twice. Finn comes back because of the Hosnian System blowing up, showing he learned to focus and be motivated by the bigger picture, and he starts the film as a slave soldier, so he’s not some hopelessly naive fool. TLJ had to go out of its way to find ways to write him as stupidly as it did - and had to directly contradict his background and previous arc to do so.

And let’s not pretend like Finn’s TLJ plot “had a lot of thought put into it,” because I don’t need to laugh that hard.

Johnson constantly uses knocking the characters out as a cheap and easy scene transition (as @DarkGingerJedi pointed out), it shares the same “I made new stupid stuff up for the military plot just so I could subvert it later with another new stupid plot point” problem as Poe’s story, it primary plot points involve illegal parking, trusting a stranger Johnson doesn’t even both to give a name too, and being found out because a trash can makes a poor disguise for BB-8... and Johnson himself has even talked about how he cancelled other, more interesting ideas because he didn’t want to write them.

 

You really want to have fun? Think about everyone who loses consciousness in this trilogy, and how stupid they all act.

Leia and Poe gets knocked out and think Holdo’s plan is smart when they wake up.

Luke got knocked out during the hut incident and woke up with a different personality.

Rey got knocked out via Force-Push-Into-Tree in TFA, and now she thinks Ben Solo is a thing and forgot what happened to Han.

And Kylo’s just so stupid he probably had a history of head trauma long before TFA begins.

 

Perfect. Rey getting knocked out in TFA explains her behavior in TLJ. And her getting knocked out at the end of TROS explains her behavior when she wakes up.

 

You act as though it’s a zero sum game for audience attention and coolness, and as though it wasn’t obvious that Rey was the “The Luke” back in TFA when *all* the characters were more popular, or that the PT didn’t successfully feature two Jedi as the main characters...

Fact of the matter is that Finn was a better, actually functional deuteragonist to Rey - Finn fans didn’t mind him being the secondary character to her because he could still have an awesome story alongside her, while she seems to have objectively been received better paired with him than paired with Kylo/Ben... who LFL clearly *did* feel could only benefit if stuff for other character were taken away.

Finn was “doing his own thing” while paired with Rey in TFA, and both those character surprised LFL with how popular they were - even though, yes, both characters split Luke, Han and Leia elements between each other while bringing new things. Hell, they obviously could have carried on with that, and had Finn be the love interest, or start a clone rebellion, or discover he had the Force earlier and get trained during the film series, or any one of a hundred things...

...Unless, as I feel you’ve sort of made clear even if you’ve talked around it, you want Kylo to be the deuteragonist *as is* and realize that Finn and Rey having good stories while Kylo remains static would obviously overshadow (a naturally lesser and anemic version of) him.

I mean, we can’t pretend that TLJ tried to write Rey as “The Luke” at all - it was too busy trying to write the actual Luke as “The Luke: Pretentious Edition” and treat Kylo like he was “The Anakin: Emo Edition.”

And yeah, it’s not like Finn fans would be like “Oh, I hate Finn being a Jedi because it means Rey has to outshine him - there can be only one special character!”...

...Because they’re not TLJ!Ben Solo fans.

 

Judging from Abrams previous work, there probably are plenty of deleted and alternate scenes, but unlikely to be massive narrative changes; he tends to shoot a full shooting script, and then in editing just cut it down to what he thinks makes for the best pace.

I seriously doubt there’d be anything akin to the Snyder Cut. The most likely narrative differences would be minor; maybe the biggest would just be an alternate take where Rey doesn’t kiss Kylo/Ben, and where Finn is explicitly revealed to have the Force.