ST Were you disappointed that Rey and Finn's relationship never became anything romantic?

Back on earth, there are plenty of drug addicts who are nice, good people. Who don't kill or do evil. Even the ones who ruin their own lives. Who are genuinely in a bad spot and need help. They don't all become evil space fascists. Those that do bad things, while on drugs, are blamed for their actions. We also tend to demonize the drugs too, and ban them, so that similar acts don't happen more often.

In the GFFA, in the movies, all dark siders are evil. They all commit evil. And they use the force in selfish unnatural ways to commit that evil. That's not the same thing as a drug. By saying they're evil because they're on a drug, means there's another answer as to why they're like this or do these things. Or some other explanation as to why they are evil, outside of their choice to be evil. Without that drug in them, they'd be good people. And I just don't think that's what the movies are telling us.

This is why I don't like the it's just a drug metaphor. Because it doesn't apply back home in the same way. Because it's way too complicated. When people on earth act evil, you wouldn't go around saying "there must be an evil drug in him, fueling him". Evil is not a drug. The dark side isn't a drug.

The evil characters in SW might be addicted to power. And keeping it. But you don't need the dark side for that to happen.

I saw your other post explaining how you still blame the addict if they commit crimes. And that's fine. I agree with that. I just think saying the dark side is a drug, is a poor metaphor for what we're dealing with here, because I think some people are looking to let the evil dark siders off the hook for their crimes. To make them sympathetic because they're not in control of their choices or actions. It's really just the D. Because they're just on a drug. And not really themselves. Anakin accepts that it's really him all along making the evil choices. He is Vader. Vader is not the result of an addition to a drug.

I never said Anakin was born evil I literally said these are evil people using the force in unnatural ways, using the dark side, to achieve their goals. By the end of ROTS, Anakin is evil. He didn't use the dark side of the force to kill Mace. Did he? No. He committed an evil act, and started liking that power. Palpatine isn't slipping him D pills trying to get him hooked. He wants to seduce him into choosing to be evil first. And then using all the power at his disposal now that he's evil and doesn't have to hold back from having unlimited power. They don't become evil after using the dark side, as if the dark side is just a drug that they constantly have to take in order to remain evil.

Um. No? They are evil because they want to be evil. Not because they're hooked the D. Not because the D is in the body making them do evil D things. They use the D because they're already evil. Because they made the choice to be evil. Just like the choice to be good. If the dark side was a drug, then Vader would have had to been weaned off it. Get it out of his system. slowly, maybe. He'd need rebab. Right? That's how drug addictions work, right? You have to stop using it, and then your body goes through withdrawals as the drug leaves your body. But as soon as Vader wants to do right again, BOOM, he does. Because it's a choice. Always has been. If it was a drug, he'd still have dark side drug in him after making the choice to do good.

See. This is where this metaphor falls apart. It's why I don't like it.

If the dark side is a drug, then the light side is too. Are you saying that as well? That the Force itself is a drug. Light siders keep it balance, only use it so often. Keep it check. Dark siders OD on it? Unlimited power baby. Is where this is going? Cuz I don't think I agree with that either.

First: I happy you've recovered. That's great. Second: Are dark siders dependent on the dark side to remain evil? Or to remain living? I don't think that's the case. I think they may use the dark side power to remain alive, much longer than they would without using those powers. Because that's part of the short term physical desire part. But I don't think they're chemically dependent on it.

 

You won't find that here!

 

There's still a good foundation for Finn and Rey to become something, so maybe in the future?

 

Maybe, but I struggle to care about that anymore. More than anything I want Finn to be developed into an actual character first, and for LF to use his background for something. I don't really give two ***** what he does with Rey.

 

But what about Rose?

 

Indeed. What TROS did to Rose was absolutely disgusting. They took a major supporting character with a clear romantic connection to one of the leads, deleted that entirely, and then relegated her to a featured extra, validating the bad faith complaints of a loud minority of toxic racists online.

They semi-replaced her with Jannah (John Boyega has said as much - they were playing their vibe as romantic) but that was poorly realised, like most of what's in TROS.

 

The way it goes in my head is that Rey teaches him the basics for a while (a story that can be largely skipped and only aluded to) then he has to take a personal journey away from Rey that has him confront his demons using his teachings and whatever he figures out on his own along the way. I'm even more confident now than ever that having Rey anywhere near him before he's a developed character will suck all the air out of any story with him in it.

I agree that more should've been done with Rose in TROS, but I find it both sad and funny that if you switch a few words around, this is the exact same **** TLJ did to TFA lol.

 

LOL what. No its not. Not even a little bit. Was Finn in TLJ for 76 seconds was he?

 

For the whole story, here are the ideas God, if He wills, has blessed me with:

Kylo Ren, in his kill the past policy, has decimated the first order, and instead begun to recruit force users for a dark side army. After discovering a holocron that Snoke had sent the Knights Of Ren after before the events of TLJ, he uncovers the truth that he is the Sithari, the ultimate final solution of the sith: The complete consuming of the force. With the force having been balanced in with the deaths of Vader and Palpatine, it makes the force more palpable than ever before, more vibrant than ever before. This will allow Kylo to use he heart of ancient sith tech called the Star Forge, to absorb the force in it's most palpable state. Luke saw this in his vision. Snoke was a manifestation of the dark side.

Finn has begun working with the resistance, but is frustrated with their inabilities and seeks to make a real difference. After hearing about the disbanding of the first order, he begins to think that maybe stormtroopers can be swayed to the resistance.

Poe struggles with the idea of the responsibility that will be put on him as leader, once Leia retires. Having been humbled in the last movie, he understands his inabilities now, and seeks to resolve them, with his self destructive tendencies and they tie into his past, with his parents having died when he was a child at the hands of imperial remnants, this building to him finding something to live for, when he and resistance rescues the children taken by Kylo to make his dark side army.

I think the character concept of TLJ can be continued, to me, with re-contextualizing the events. Like Rey was tempted to go to Kylo as the idea of disconnection was appealing to her. She'd been abandoned by her family, her ally had been hurt badly protecting her, the mentor she was looking to was killed. She almost fears connecting with people, as a fear of abandonment and a fear of them being lost. So, the idea of Kylo offering himself as someone whose disconnecting is an idea that seduces her, a desire to hide from her pain. Going forward in TROS, she's not connecting with people. She's trying to act on her own. Unwilling to accept help. Rey's arc is dealing with her lack of ability to connect with and trust people. In regards to this journey, Rey does discover that she is Luke's daughter, but is angry and hurt that he rejected her, then realizing herself that she thought having parents who were somebody would give them a good reason to have a abandoned her, like they were trying to protect her, but learning this, that her mom Mara Jade was sent away with her, because Luke feared for their safety (Mara Jade having been killed by Snoke, after she'd hid Rey with some resistance members, this compiling a reasoning for Luke's emotionally damaged state and why he reacted so aggressively when he sensed Snoke's influence on Kylo and what the plan for Kylo was), doesn't assuage those feelings of abandonment, anger, resentment and loneliness, those feelings of pain that she feels make it hard for her to truly connect with people, no matter how much they care for her. This search builds to her discovering other jedi across the universe who are still alive, like Ahsoka, Ezra Bridger and others.

Kylo, after the hut situation in TLJ, was sent by Snoke to kill Rey, with the Knights Of Ren. This was what Rey's vision in TFA was, in the rain. When Kylo discovered it was his cousin he was sent to kill, he resisted doing it, but instead wiped her memory and left her on Jakku. He sold the millenium falcon to the guy as well, on the condition that no one know he was there, as he was angered at himself sparing Rey, and was beginning to believe he had to cut ties with his past, starting with giving up the falcon that his dad had given him as a gift. Han lied about who took it.

That was the reason Lor San Tekka was there. He'd found Luke's daughter and thought that by informing Luke that she was alive, he may be driven to come back. But the First Order arrived before he could tell that to Poe.

Rose's arc is where the main stuff ties to: She lied to Finn about what happened to her and her sister. They were actually forced to build weapons for the the first order. Because of this, Rose has a sense of self loathing against herself. Her experience with first order weapons was how she knew Finn couldn't really damage the death star tech at the end of TLJ. Her and her sister helped build something that Kylo is going to use in his plan with the heart of the star forge. This drives her to try and do anything she can to stop it.

In the midst of this, the remnant of the first order, under the leadership of General Hux, has sought an anti force user mentality, seeing that to blame for their failure in the Empire and the First Order. This will build into a war between the First Order, Kylo's Dark Side Army and the Resistance, with Rey and the other jedi on the planet of Ach-To, where the Well Of Mortis, a conduit of the force, lies.

If a character is seen not important by the writers, or not useful for what they want to do in the story, with a prior story they may in theory think isn't strong, I'm not of the opinion that they, on their own, have to continue that. But, from a writing standpoint, I think they can retrofit the character, than phase her out a little, like I think they did.

 

A writer's independence is not the only consideration. It's absolutely not possible that no one involved didn't realise that in doing what they were doing - they were validating the harassment that sent KMT off of social media.

They knew it very well. They either didn't care, or did it deliberately because that was the kind of scum they were deliberately trying to court.

Of course, there's nothing requiring they continue a story. But that's not what happened. They took a character who had a prominent role in the previous film and made her basically an extra whose in the movie for barely a minute.

It's the equivalent of having Lando show up in ROTJ for a minute before he mumbles incoherently about having to look at reactor plans or something and leaves, never to contribute anything again.

It's especially galling given TROS' insistence on inserting dumb and unnecessary new characters in the final film where Rose was already not being utilised. There was no reason for Merry from Lord of the Rings to be in that movie at all. There was no reason for a penile-slug alien to be the mechanic (Rose is a mechanic!) on the Falcon at the start of the film.

 

Why should they let that influence them into doing more with the character, if that's why, than they may, in theory, want to do?

I think Lando isn't a weak character.

 

Because being seen to kowtow to racists is bad, and validating those trolls is worse than the non-existent harm being inflicted by their being 'influenced' to ensure a character from a previous film isn't discarded.

Their conjectural deep burning desire to ensure that Merry from Lord of the Rings should be in the movie doesn't matter if Kelly Marie Tran is being thrown under the bus for it.

 

100% in agreement here.
I loved Kelly's character, largely because she was so...ordinary. Not a Force sensitive, just a young woman who was brave, loyal and frankly had more common sense than any of them. Rose started off as an almost fanatical Resistance member and ended TLJ as someone who realised life was more important than glory or revenge. She had so much potential yet was practically erased in TROS.
Kelly had more to complain out of any of them yet behaved with a dignity and class some could learn from.
And yes....what the **** was the purpose of the slug when it so easily could have been Rose?

 

What’s the evidence though that Abrams was ‘kowtowing to racists’? It’s more likely that he just wanted to relegate a poorly drawn character. Of course, one could argue that he should have worked with the characters he already had, which I would agree with, however... if he did want to legitimately develop the Finn/stormtrooper element (which he developed badly anyway IMO), then putting Finn with Jannah makes Rose a redundant character. So his (Abrams) plan ultimately backfired, but it wasn’t because he was reacting to perceived audience backlash to Rose, it’s because the ST was badly conceived and developed.

 

He doesn't need to have been - the point I'm trying to make is that irrespective of whether he was simply uninterested in the character or actively malicious*, he and others at Lucasfilm simply had to have known how that would look, and they did it anyway. Intent matters little in the public perception.

*Abrams did himself no favours about being publically asked about Kelly Marie Tran and effusively praising her only to end up barely putting her in the movie.

The thing about TROS is that it somehow made me respect Colin Trevorrow more than Abrams. Trevorrow didn't relegate anyone. He clearly was interested in Rose and gave her a prominent role in the film that recognised she wasn't just some bit character (she really is more of a Lando given her position in the saga - i.e. major supporting character who came in at the middle) - and he did a stormtrooper rebellion with Finn anyway.

But yeah, the Finn/stormtrooper element in TROS is very badly developed. It's execution is just baffling. Instead of appealing to active duty FO troops to defect (something which was also in TLJ but sadly and IMO mistakenly deleted from the climax of the Phasma fight for pacing reasons) he just randomly runs into them by coincidence on a random planet who turn out to have been defecting stormtroopers, but who defected for reasons that had nothing to do with his example.

They also look absolutely terrible. Defecting stormtroopers is the most obvious cue for a bunch of awesome looking hardened soldiers wearing camoflaged and customised Stormtrooper armor. Action figure bonanza. Instead its just a bunch of boring horse-riding peasants whose costuming is so uninspired that you'd think they were just Kef Bir natives.

 

In the sense that it could be seen to be indulging such people by not doing it? I mean sure, except there wasn't some massive racist backlash going on about Finn/Rey at all at the time it was being written. These story and casting decisions were made well before this entire discourse entered the public consciousness. There was nothing for Johnson to be aware of.

It's - IMO - why DOTF has Rose in a major role and TROS doesn't - DOTF was being written by Trevorrow beofre TLJ came out - he was engaging with TLJ's script in good faith in the same way that Rian was engaging with TFA's script. Neither of them were exposed to or had regard to audience response to the film post-release.

TROS, however, was so exposed, and it's painfully obvious in so many of its decisions.

 

I think the only thing Abrams and Lucasfilm are duty bound to do is make the best film they can (not that I believe they came anywhere close to making the ‘best film’). And whilst I would have liked to have seen Rose given a bigger role in TROS, as a finger to bigots, I’m not sure filmmakers/directors have the luxury of choices like that... certainly not in terms of it being a higher priority than their own ideas etc.

Yes - give Trevorrow his dues... DotF at least seemed more consistent with the general themes and narrative of TFA and TLJ... and of course seemed more respectful of the characters. I also agree about Janna and the other defected Stormtroopers... there’s little substance in how there’re developed, what their objectives are etc. and from an aesthetic/costume basis, they are probably one of the blandest to ever feature in a SW film.

 

I'd be more generous about their own ideas if there was any rhyme or reason to them, but the fact that they even gave roles to people like Merry and Klaud the slug-alien which could've easily gone to Rose with very little fuss tells me that they just didn't give a crap. Like they honestly thought it was more important to have a pointless character like Beamont Kin in the movie than give KMT some more lines? It's baffling.