#no incredible traumas outside of the standard Jedi ones | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

emperorren · 6 years

Note

Why do you think we don't really get much insight into Rey's true thoughts and feelings in TLJ (especially after the throne room)? She's the protagonist but it feels like she lacks a lot of transparency compared to Kylo for instance.

I think we have a lot of insight about Rey’s thoughts and feelings in TLJ. She’s a very guarded person and I think she’s way better than Kylo at holding her emotions back, but TLJ does a good job at breaking her walls; a good two thirds of the movie are told about her pov, actually. Her feelings of loneliness, fear of growing up/facing the truth, disappointment in her mentor figures, inability to think of herself as inherently important are front and center, and they shape the narrative. She alters the course of this story not because of external incidents of stuff “happening” to her, but because she starts asking questions and connecting the dots and the only reason she does is because it’s a way to make sense of her trauma. If we don’t see her verbalizing those thoughts and feelings, it’s precisely because she’s the pov character, and like you never describe to yourself your own image in the mirror, you also rarely monologue out loud about your feelings, you know? Unless you have someone to talk with of those feelings, which Rey doesn’t for the whole first act because she doesn’t trust either Luke or Kylo. Then she starts opening up to Kylo, and we finally see her talking about herself. (side note, a lot of her reaction to Ben being “betrayed” by Luke is about herself, and her own trauma and feelings of abandonment and lowkey rage at their deadbeat parents. A lot of Rey’s interactions with Kylo in general are about herself, and the other way around. Rey and Kylo are really two halves of a protagonist, with equal narrative weight, and they work as each other’s mirror… and interviewer, each forcing the other to reveal how they feel).

The third act is where I agree with you. In the part between the proposal and the lifting rocks scene she acts like a standard action heroine and it’s completely disconnected from her experiences up to that point, and, as I said in the tags to one of my recent reblogs, it’s one of my major qualms with the movie. We never see how Rey feels about the (presumably) crushing failure of her relationship with Kylo until the very last moments when the force bond activates again, and it’s really frustrating, especially because the whole movie had been told from her pov up to that point, and yet after the throne room scene she basically… disappears from the narrative altogether only to show up later in the Falcon, shooting at things and looking completely unaffected by what just happened, and it’s… jarring.

To be honest, it seems a lot like crowd pleasing to me, in the sense that in that moment Rian needed Rey to be a plucky heroine shooting at things and doing the whole “whoo-hoo” Han Solo thing at Chewie, because the star wars audience expects this kind of scenes to happen in a star wars movie, and so he wrote her like that. I do think there’s validity to the interpretation that she, like Kylo with his anger, basically reverts to her usual *plucky heroine* script because that’s the way she copes with things, and right now she has no time to dwell on what happened anyway, but I’m not 100% sure that’s the authorial intent here. It may not be that deep.

There’s also the fact that, after having been intensely about each other for two thirds of the movie, it’s time for Rey and Kylo’s storylines to diverge and for them to interact with the other main characters outside of the strange bond they have and despite the deep feelings they have developed for each other. So in that moment, the angst about each other has to be set aside for a while, for them to focus on their other relationships. With Kylo, it works because there’s the highly anticipated (and powerfully built-up) showdown with Luke. It’s actually another big climatic moment for him, and one that gives additional insight on his personality, past trauma and current state of mind. It doesn’t work so well for Rey, whose individual stakes after the throne room battle have suddenly deflated, and are now lower than ever—even though this is supposed to be, on paper, a hugely climatic action sequence for her. Sure, she’s worried about her friends, yadda yadda. But you know they’re all going to be okay in the end, and it’s almost like Rey knows too, on a meta level, which is why she’s suddenly so chipper. There’s no real tension on her side of things.

Honestly I’m incredibly tempted to read her whole gig on the Falcon as a purely meta commentary on how these action sequences are shallow and pretty stupid and tend to tell you nothing on a character-thematic level, but I doubt that was the intention, even considering how brave and deliberate the film is in subverting tropes. More like it’s an instance of Rian not having the material time to show Rey coping with what happened + needing to lighten up the mood in her storyline in order to prepare her for her jedi-ex-machina moment and reuniting with her friends. Or, just sloppy writing.

tl;dr; though I found ways to contextualize it and make it work in my mind for Rey’s character, I think it’s one of the things that should have been done much better.

#anon #asks #*#rey*#tlj*#/////#//#tlj criticism

8 notes · View notes