#the thing about being a Skywalker and drawing parallels between Rey and Luke and how being the son of Anakin was a big deal | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

knightotoc · 4 years

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Anakin Blogging:

What’s the right order to watch the SW movies? KnightOTOC Ranks the SW Movies Why Ahsoka’s S7 Lightsabers are Blue ”I cannot interfere” Sometimes I draw Buzz Lightyear Luke Father-son or brothers? My favorite part of Wookieepedia the Skywalker name Content between TPM and AotC Helmet: A Star Wars Story Rey Anakin parallel Fresh Salted Hunk from the Deli Devil’s Contract AU An Explanation Are gifs libel or slander? Higher Ground Blogging Lars Quell Name Game Anakin’s Ghost Bum Out Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) Mind-Blowing Organizational Tool The Reaction You Requested Brad Pitt Cameo Can’t Explain, I think it’s Love My 3 Fave Characters Ever Worth its Weight in Gold Dark Middle Chapters My Curse It’s outrageous, it’s unfair Facts and Opinions Would these items work instead? Space Cowboys Diegetic Opera Lady Minnesota Update High-Maintenance Boyfriends Ranked + Part 2 Reconnaissance! This Guy + Part 2 Mirror Universe Karen Do Ben-Hur Again! Young, Dumb, and Full of Midichlorians Happy Birthday! + Part 2 My Ani Cosplay Best Title Crawl in Star Wars Low Poly Ani Hayden Voice + Hayden and Natalie Voices

Love That Maul:

I’m not a Sith Maul’s will Jedi Maul AU + Part 2 Impress the Bridgers “I was hoping for Kenobi” Poor Evil Gay Men "There IS no ‘US!’” Memes for the Old Master Awkward Zelda is the Boy 🙏Manifesting🙏

Other Prequels Stuff:

You’re reckless, little one (Except Shmi) “That’s...why I’m here.” Padme 🤝 Destiel Sith Obi-Wan AU Yikes High Republic Thoughts Pink and Blue Wat Tambor Theory I’m a weirdo. I don’t fit in. Korkie! Actually I Want at Least 20 Prequels Discourse by Layer Rush Clovis Sideblog? My Evil Wife Ahsoka, Artorias, and Gerard Way Wait...We’re All Handmaidens!

I care about the Knights of Ren:

Illustrated Knights of Ren Headcanons The Baddest Boys of TRoS are Friends another Knight of Ren theory (with evidence) Avril of Ren Evil Monkey: Origins Poor Old TRoS Let’s split up, gang, and search for clues! vs Hux

Gay/Emo Shit About Han Solo

Solo is Sad, Too Solo 2 Solo Fandom the FOUNDATIONAL Rare Pair Han Feelings Chewie Feelings

Thinking about Mando:

Gallery review The Rise and Fall of Baby Yoda Coming at You from 2002 The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! Target Audience Mwahahahahaha + Meme + Part 2 Always Read the Comments Madeline just said “pooh pooh!” Warrior Gentleman Ouch, right in the niche! Yes he means ALL Mandalorians Put That Thing Back Where it Came From

Other Disney Star Wars Stuff:

Hierarchy of Needs + Part 2 Finnrey White Feminism Rogue Won LASaT Seriously Though, Where’s Ezra? Always Read the Comments, Bot Edition Cussin’ Anime Predictions My TFA Joke Revenge of the Jedi Promises, Promises

Gamer KnightOTOC:

Old Republic Wars Timeline Worth Fuckin Zeffo OTP YTTD = KotOR 2 Imaginary Sadness of Imaginary World + Part 2 Branching Paths Less Famous Sherlock Holmeses Hot Takes from my Kitten

Other Star Wars Stuff:

Last Thoughts Masterlist SW cartoons as meals I will never read this again My strongest Star Wars opinion Special Force Abilities Trek AU Top 11′s Balosar blogging Star Wars Writing Women Don’t bet against the house 20 Hot Takes Girls and Siths Vibing with Russ + Part 2 + Part 3 Powerpoint I’ve read approx. 10000 comics about this MY GIRL + AGAIN! + MY SON Ghostwritten by Cham Syndulla Mom Protagonists Dooku makes no damn sense...Compels me, though + Another List Starring Dooku A Daily Occurance + Part 2 + Part 3 Nostalgia and Ending a Franchise + Some Girls Planet Misandry Krayt’s Eye Color Continuity Small Companions Crossover #1 + Crossover #2

Catawampus from Star Wars:

Favorites Writing + Part 2 + Part 3 Senseless Violence MY ARM!!! Goodbye, Sheev Mashups for the faves Your SW Cameo Name Ahsoka’s suitors Ahsoka Fanart! My Mantra / My Better Mantra Fictionsonas SW Haters vs Trek Haters Darth Maul Prints They really are pretty useless Evolving Tastes The Gay Agenda Holorcon Boss Nass Kitty Balance in the Force KnightOTOC’s Official DNI There’s some good in...that! Ponchos: A Star Wars Story Fan edit of Maul vs Ahsoka Zabrak Padme Darth Hanna-Barbera It’s good, I like it Man After Midnight Snips protecting Skyguy Halloween cover of Battle of Heroes Come to the Dark Side... The Youngliest Youngling of Them All Hello, Sheev the OoOoOoOoOne! this looks better on mobile EU joke attempt (rough draft) Luke x Lando song! “Legacy Characters” Vivid Dream + Another One “Bill it to the Republic!” Maul and Ezra But They’re Cats Anakin vs Lancelot at Being Problematic Ongoing Poll grumble grumble Quinlan feelings Uncle Oni Blogging Part 1 - Part 2 Christmas OT3 How to Make ANY Sci-fi Good Subtweet How I’m Feeling So Intellectual Give in to your cringe! Prepositions Stretched Past their Limit Panicking Skywalker It’s called “art,” Kolara + Part 2 It’s no Seagulls, but still good My Favorite Trope + More Trope Stuff Underrated Joke imo My Demands! Spoonerism Wifeless Wife Guys 3 Guesses

#my thoughts

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gffa · 4 years

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I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH THIS CHARACTER SO MUCH, but I think rereading The Rise of Kylo Ren all at once, as well as the final issue, plus the Age of Resistance - Supreme Leader Snoke and Age of Resistance - Kylo Ren issues (and a bit of the TLJ novelization), have at least somewhat coalesced this character for me. The burning question with Ben Solo has always been: Why? Why did he not tell anyone about Snoke talking to him in this comic? Why didn’t he go to his mother, whom he knew still loved him? Why did he embrace the dark side? None of this had ever really been addressed in the canon itself, it was all down to speculation, but nothing I felt I could connect to what we were actually being given with any real solidity in the canon. And issue #4 definitely still feels a little wobbly to me, but I think it at least strung up some connective tissue for me. In rereading the first issue, I was back to: Why doesn’t Ben go to his mother? If he didn’t attack the school (which I’m not sure how clear it is what he did/didn’t have to do with it, if it truly was Snoke who did it, how much Ben was aware of it, how much of a hand he played in all of this, certainly it makes the timing of the destruction of the Temple INCREDIBLY coincidental if it was Snoke’s plan AND it was the night Luke and Ben fought), if he knows his parents love him (which Age of Resistance - Supreme Leader Snoke [x][x] shows that he does, he literally goes into the same cave as Luke did to show him his fears, the only thing in there is what he brought with him and he sees Luke saying he doesn’t want to fight, which means Ben knows this is true even if he doesn’t want to admit it[x], as well as the TLJ novelization has him knowing that his mother still loves him and he’s angry about it, as well as TFA itself has him not at all surprised that Han’s there to help him and bring him home, even in TLJ he’s snarling about how, oh, is Luke here to save his soul, say Luke forgives him?, which shows that he knows that Luke regrets it and cared about him)--anyway, I’m getting distracted, there’s a lot to go over! If he didn’t attack the school, if he didn’t want this, why did he run from Leia as much as anyone? In rereading the issue, there’s an interesting flashback that’s place right in the middle of the droid asking Ben where he wants to go, where he’s thinking about his mother and he hesitates. I didn’t really pay attention to the timing the first time because it felt like just a cool dramatic moment to show further flashbacks. But looking for the trends I know Soule is capable of and so often puts in his writing, it struck me that the flashback was specifically set on Luke yelling, “Ben, no!” and Luke in the ruins of the Temple and Ben saying, “I didn’t want this!” [x][x][x] Thus, I’m left to conclude that he didn’t go to her because he himself couldn’t face her, couldn’t look at all of this storm inside him and find a way out of it. And I think that’s the thing--in reading this issue all at once, it really jumped out at me that the central theme of this comic was about the path people choose in their lives. That there’s an undercurrent of a legacy to live up to, but that that’s just window dressing for a deeper issue--in that Ben Solo doesn’t know what his path is. On one side, he has a huge legacy to live up--the man he was named for, this larger than life great Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi, he never even met him, he hates the name he was given, Ben. He hates the name Solo as well, because it’s a made up name, it’s not real, it’s a lie. [x][x] This contradiction is fascinating, because he’s named through two different aspects--one, a legacy, and two, a chosen name. Ben Solo hates the legacy name just as much as he hates the name Han Solo created for himself! So the idea that he’s creating his real persona for himself, when he stops being a Jedi and goes to Snoke, is directly contradicted by how much he hates the chosen name, that he says it’s a lie. As if Kylo Ren isn’t a lie he’s hurtling himself towards, too. Neither of these really seem to be the true problem, for all that they’re genuine things that anger Ben. In the final issue, he does tell Tai, "Even my name isn't a choice. The dark side and the light side both claimed me for their own the moment I was born. Do you know how that feels? Whether it's Luke Skywalker or Snoke, neither one sees me as a person. I'm just a... legacy. Just a set of expectations." The thing is, Ben Solo is not a reliable narrator. He talks one minute about how the light and the dark are warring over him, even Ren comments on how he’s been fighting this every step of the way, you don’t really want to live in the shadow. “I am the shadow,” Ben replies.[x] He is trying so hard to shove himself onto some path, any path that he thinks will soothe him. The most emotional part of the issue (or at least one of them) is Tai’s pleading speech to him, the conversation that’s been threaded throughout the entire issue about how you choose your path. Choice is arguably the most important theme of Star Wars, and we see that very clearly in Tai’s conversations with him. Even in the previous issue, he tells Ben that he keeps himself locked up too tight, he’s not really being himself.[x] Ben’s recounting of who Voe is (the other important foil for Ben’s character in this comic) is woven together with how he thinks she never really learned to be herself, rather than measuring herself again him.[x] Ren, in their very first meeting, says, hey, you know there are other paths, right? [x] On Elphrona, Voe says he must face justice, and Ben shouts back, “You think I’m a murderer, Voe? Is that what you want me to be!?”[x] Tai’s big speech to him in the previous episode is all about, be who you are, which is another way of saying, “Find the path you’re supposed to be on.”[x] Tai’s words to Voe on Elphrona are also, “[Ben] thinks [the Knights of Ren] can help him find his true path.”[x] And of course, all of the above. Paths and choices and being who you truly are, that Ben Solo couldn’t figure out any of these things for himself. That he didn’t really want to be a Jedi (and that’s fine, it’s not the path for everyone) and we see, we see that he could have chosen otherwise, that Tai offers him a chance to actually walk away from all of it and just go help people, we see the hesitation there before Ren kills Tai and Ben makes his choice. Because he may not feel like he had any choices, but Tai showed that he absolutely did. Even when he truly falls into the dark--so completely that a multitude of people feel it, Leia, Snoke, Rey, Palpatine, they all sense it--it’s framed around the idea of, “I’m not anyone special, so I can do what I want.”

All of this coalesced for me into two things, especially once I added in other Ben Solo appearances in canon--this is someone who has no strong sense of self or the path he’s meant to be on, so he just sort of careens wildly from one bad choice to the next, each time hoping that it’ll feel like the right path, rather than doing the really hard work of looking inside himself and not just locking everything up into a little box. And, two, he is further trying to gain that sense of self through others. Even when he’s not fully aware of it, he keeps walking the same paths they do--like on Dagobah, when he goes into the same cave Luke did, to face his inner fears, he’s walking the same path his uncle did.[x] When he’s offered a choice, when Tai asks him to come back, if you want, you can absolutely read that glowy red backdrop as being similar to Anakin’s fight with Obi-Wan on Mustafar. And certainly, given that Soule was the one to write Darth Vader bleeding his kyber crystal, we can draw parallels between that and Kylo Ren bleeding his:

And that’s one of the things that the character keeps coming back to--and it’s a huge theme for Ben Solo, that he’s constantly being compared to Vader, by others and by himself. Sure, part of it is that I assume that’s just how bleeding a kyber crystal goes, but the parallels between Kylo and Vader (and thus between Anakin and Ben) do a lot to highlight the issues between them both, that we see TROKR’s visuals are echoing Dark Lord of the Sith’s scene, as Kylo is very defined by Vader in an out-of-universe meta way. But also within the universe, he keeps comparing himself to Vader and is compared to Vader by others, because that’s kind of the point, that it’s not just too much power in an unstable person (though, that, too) or that they were born evil (no, they weren’t), but that they both couldn’t really look at themselves or the choices set before them, to either actually commit to the path they were on or to find another one. That they both were still loved even after their fall. That they both had people pleading with them to make a better choice. "Leave [the mask]. I said leave it! You cannot hide behind a mask here. You cannot pretend to be Vader in this place,” Snoke says is Age of Resistance - Supreme Leader Snoke [x] “This is where I will succeed. ...where Vader failed,” says Kylo Ren in Age of Resistance - Kylo Ren. [x] “There’s too much Vader in him,” Han says in The Force Awakens. “A new Vader. Now I fear... I was mistaken. Take that ridiculous [mask] off,” Snoke says, not long before Kylo smashes the mask to pieces, in The Last Jedi. It’s contradicted by Kylo’s theme of, “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.” in TLJ, but it’s pretty par for the course with him, where he careens back and forth between one decision one moment and another the next, that he still has no idea what his true path is meant to be. So much of his character was patterned off of Darth Vader, both in universe and out of universe, it seems only fitting that he, like his grandfather before him, has no real sense of self or the willingness to look within himself to find what that path really is, whether it means actually committing to the Jedi path and understanding yourself and working to let go of your fears, or whether it’s finding a path away from the Jedi. And both of them felt like their power must be used for something. "[We're going to] some planet called Elphrona. All this way to find some old junk Master Luke will lock away in his temple and never use. [....] He's an amazing teacher, very strong. I've learned so much from him... but he never seems to want to let me use any of it."[x] Ultimately, at the end of it, it seems like Ben Solo was someone who didn’t really know what he wanted out of his life and so he kept looking for the thing that would finally make him feel like it was the right path, except he kept looking to those outside himself to figure that out, whether to reject what he thought they were making him into or to use them as a measuring stick to define himself, and the only sliver of it that he ever seemed to find was when he finally stopped trying to force everything to make sense and focused on someone else for what he could do for them, instead of himself.

#ben solo #comics #meta #reading comics: the rise of kylo ren #wednesday spoilers #long post

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dgcatanisiri · 3 years

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I’ll stand by this and die on this hill.

Whatever merits The Last Jedi has - and before you start debating me, I’m not saying it doesn’t have them, just that this outweighs them - it fails as a part of the ongoing narrative. It may be a fine standalone film, but as movie two of the Sequel Trilogy, movie eight of the Skywalker Saga, it fails to connect itself to the rest of the story, existing more in isolation than in concert. Rian Johnson’s Star Wars is VERY different from JJ Abrams’ Star Wars, a clash that makes it all too clear that Rise of Skywalker - and the Sequel Trilogy in general - was doomed to fail from the moment it was decided NOT to maintain the same writer across it.

It shifts gears, taking moments that were played for drama in the previous film (or films) and playing them for laughs.

It drops plot paths, with Rian Johnson explicitly saying that he didn’t use the Knights of Ren because they “didn’t fit” the story he was telling. Or the fact that, if the movie is taking place shortly after TFA, then where is ANY mention of Starkiller, the massive superweapon and installation that the Resistance just blew up?

It demotes Finn, the character who was the lead male of the last film, to a “comedic” c-plot that ends up going in a cul-de-sac, one that even the film’s defenders have said could have been cut and nothing be lost. And, in particular, this is noticeable because the plot of TFA moved BECAUSE of Finn - without Finn, Poe doesn’t escape, Rey doesn’t get off Jakku, the Resistance doesn’t go to Starkiller and destroy it. TFA hinged on Finn. TLJ treats him like a vestigial limb it can’t sever.

(No, really, based on what TFA establishes, FINN is the counterbalance to Kylo Ren - Kylo is a scion of a powerful line of Force users, Finn didn’t even have a NAME until TFA began, Kylo is the face of the First Order, Finn was a faceless stormtrooper, which is why the moment he first takes off his helmet means so much, Kylo was raised by heroes of the Republic and turned to the First Order, Finn was raised by the First Order and turns his back on it... The thematic parallels between them are ALL FUCKING OVER TFA! But TLJ wants him to go away, and there’s no chance for him to rebuild that plot momentum in Rise of Skywalker.)

Also on the level of connection to the previous film... Why the HELL is a coma patient stuffed in a storage closet, rather than the medbay with doctors monitoring him? And he’s then repeatedly tazed by Rose, which is again played for laughs. Finn’s injuries are played as a joke.

With Finn’s demotion, it elevates Kylo Ren, the villain, an explicit parallel to neo-natsees (because the Empire ALWAYS had its roots in natsee imagery, and the First Order is explicitly drawing on those, just like neo-natsees), into the lead male position.

Rey ends up reduced to his prize - over the course of TFA, her interactions with him were, in order, him rendering her unconscious and kidnapping her, torturing her, killing her mentor (his own father), and grievously wounding Finn, the first person in her life who came back for her, which was part of her driving characterization in the previous film. Her motivations are reduced to proving to Luke that she won’t be like Kylo Ren, and then trying to get someone she has no motivation to genuinely care about to redeem himself.

That “redemption,” I say again, is being offered by her after, again, she was kidnapped and tortured by him, she watched him kill Han Solo, who she saw as a paternal figure herself, and he put Finn, someone she’d already come to care for and who was the first person in her life to come back for her, in a coma. What motivation is there for her to TRY to redeem him? And if you want to say “Force Bond,” then that means that something is forged between her and Kylo, without her consent, that makes her care for him, actively manipulating her mind, and this just... happens.

The whole “Rey’s parents” thing is also a problem because it is ignoring HER reaction - it’s all about subverting the audience’s expectations, without caring about how she as a character responds. She never needed her parents to be a Kenobi, a Jinn, a Skywalker, whoever. They didn’t need to be somebody to the audience, they just were people she needed. Even the idea that they were drunks... They were the drunks who gave birth to her, who left her behind, and she wanted just to know why.

And why should anyone even believe that Kylo Ren would know that they’re just nobodies when it’s been like three days since they even met - none of his informants could have chased down any leads to the point of determining this in that time, if he even WAS looking for them. So by the same measure of “how does he know this?” is the question of “why should she believe him?”

It does not explain Luke’s change of character in near enough detail - this is a character who refused to kill DARTH VADER, his father, a man he barely knew, only really knowing him as the great boogeyman of the Empire, and yet I’m supposed to believe that he would actively attempt a premeditated murder of his own nephew, who he would have known all of said nephew’s life, for what he MIGHT do? There NEEDED more of points B and C to connect points A and D here.

Also on the subject of Luke, in the last movie, it was explicit - Luke had vanished and left a map behind. Why would you leave a map to a place you intend to run away to and be forgotten and die?

This movie, indeed, SHRANK the galaxy far, far away to ludicrous levels - the Resistance is in the fringes of the New Republic, yet Canto Bight, a major casino resort hub of war profiteering, is a casual jump away? Also, if the Resistance fleet couldn’t jump there, how can a small ship like Finn and Rose’s do that? Doesn’t the fleet need every vehicle and every drop of fuel? Rey’s gone after Luke, to a planet forgotten by the rest of the galaxy, her training pretty clearly taking place over days, at least, if not more. And yet simultaneously, the ticking clock of the Resistance’s fuel running out happens, and she still manages to arrive in the midst of their escape? This timeline is a goddam mess.

Rian Johnson explicitly said that he wanted Holdo to be flirtatious with Poe. And told the costume designer NOT to dress her in the uniform befitting an admiral. Right there, you lose me on Holdo being in the right during the mutiny - we have an existential threat to the Resistance, and she’s dressed like she’s going for drinks with Senators and apparently supposed to be flirting with Poe.

And I’m giving this its own bullet point - they actively changed the language of the film to try and frame her as more in the right. She was redubbed after the fact to have different dialogue and tone with Poe, while leaving his side of the conversation alone, seemingly to portray him more as a hotheaded maverick when what we’re seeing is him responding to the existential threat they are facing. I HAVE to address this, because they changed what the characters are reacting to after the fact to push a narrative of Poe being wrong, when he WAS acting in the Resistance’s best interests throughout.

Because his demotion is crap - the Original Trilogy showed the X-Wings and similar snubfighters having independent hyperdrive, there was no reason to keep the fleet there for the sake of recovering them based on the text of the film and the established technology of the setting. Leia could have jumped the fleet and let them rendezvous later. Keeping the fleet there? That was her blunder, not Poe’s.

Meanwhile the dreadnaught? That was a MAJOR target - It had over 200,000 First Order troops. For a group on the fringe, LIKE THE FIRST ORDER WAS IN TFA, that’s a major loss of personnel and material. And that slow-moving target of the dreadnaught was the kind of target those bombers should have been designed for. And if they were really so valuable that they were all lost against the dreadnaught and it was a major blow to the Resistance, those bombers should have been scrapped for parts long before. So, based on what the First Order was originally established as in TFA, Poe did the right thing. His problem is that TLJ CHANGED what the First Order was.

And, again, with the existential threat of the First Order on their tails, Poe, one of the Resistance’s best pilots AND the guy who blew up Starkiller, should have been on the list of people who deserved to be in the know of the plan - if you’re worried about traitors (which Holdo never actually SAYS), he’s pretty clearly not working for them. So she’s holding over the fact that he lost people on a mission against him, which... I’m sorry, but what the fuck with that, EVERY fighter pilot mission we have seen in the films has led to losses.

And when he does find out the plan - the plan that he asks her, three times, in private, in public, and at gunpoint, to even just tell him EXISTS, not even the details of - he’s completely accepting of it. So the whole conflict exists because she doesn’t talk to anyone about it.

Because, before anyone brings up “she has no responsibility to tell an underling her ideas,” she may not, but there was a chance, right before the mutiny went through, for her to defuse the situation entirely, since, as we see, once he knows the plan, he’s willing to go along with it. And it’s not like Poe was acting alone - there were others in the mutiny, including Connix, who we’d seen in charge of the evacuation, which gives the impression she has at least some position of authority. And she wasn’t filled in on Holdo’s plan either.

Holdo’s flaw is assuming that, because she is the named authority - explicitly the last link in the chain of command - that all the people under her command should just fall in line. But the Resistance was, like the First Order, reverted into the Rebellion for this movie - in TFA, it was not a military service but a volunteer militia of people who were acting in service specifically of one person, Leia Organa. Not Holdo. So when the whole damn organization formed to follow one person, and that one person is taken out of commission, it NEEDS someone willing to extend trust to take charge. Poe was doing that by wanting to hear her out. Holdo was failing to do that by not even bothering.

Yoda’s appearance is undeserved - this is the same Jedi who, if he’d had his way, would have refused Luke’s training in Empire Strikes Back because he was “too old,” even though that was always the plan, to train the Skywalker child, and, as shown by the prequels, was the embodiment of the Jedi Order’s hubris back in the days of the Old Republic. If anyone deserved to have that moment with Luke, it was Anakin, because Anakin was the embodiment of where the Jedi teachings and values had failed - when your prophesized “Chosen One” ends up being at odds with almost all your expectations of the “model” Jedi, the Force is probably trying to tell you something. But no, Yoda’s the fan favorite, so Yoda appears and undermines his own message of “failure, the greatest teacher is.” Yoda’s failures had as much to do with the fall of the Jedi as anyone else’s, and when he had the chance to learn from it, he was going to pass it up.

By the end of the film, both the Resistance and the First Order are devastated. Kylo Ren is Supreme Leader of a handful of vessels with no real power base, while the Resistance fits semi-comfortably in Han Solo’s old beat up weed van. Meanwhile the New Republic is still in shambles. No one WON. All they got from victory was survival. By this point, they’re BOTH defeated, so... Where even was the story going to GO from here?

Also... That focus on the child slaves on Canto Bight at the end? Yeah, fine enough moment on its own, but... We already HAD child slaves established in this trilogy. Because Finn was taken as a child and conscripted, along with all the other stormtroopers of the First Order. So why didn’t THAT get any attention? Indeed, his infiltration of the First Order is no more than show, existing for like five minutes, rather than... y’know, trying to set up a stormtrooper rebellion, something that, by virtue of his character, should have been a running theme through the trilogy. Yet, see again, “Finn is a vestigial limb the movie can’t cut off” - we know from the DVD, he had A LOT of scenes cut and rewritten, at his character’s expense, after, again, being the leading man of the previous movie.

If this film had been a standalone film, like Rogue One or Solo, one of the Star Wars Stories films, rather than a main series film, I’d say it was a good Star Wars movie. But... As part two of a trilogy, part eight of a saga, it fails to connect to the rest of the story, and that, more than anything, is why Rise of Skywalker was what it was. If you didn’t care for Rise of Skywalker, look at what TLJ left for it in terms of connective narrative tissue, and where the story could go from there.

It might be a good film, but it was NOT a good Star Wars film. And I’m judging it as one.

#dg rants #the last jedi critical #sorry but i needed a rant on the subject #dg gets pissed #anti tlj

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ramblings-of-a-mad-cat · 4 years

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If you truly are the master of unpopular opinions, then I challenge you to name ten of them. Across any fandom you like.

Oh snap. Well, I certainly wouldn’t say I’m the master. A lot of my ships are pretty popular ones, for example. I think it’s mostly that a number the fandoms I follow feel like their stories have gotten bad recently, but I mostly disagree. I’ll try to tag each discussed fandom and character!

1: Star Wars: The Last Jedi is amazing. It’s the best movie in the new trilogy. I love Luke’s character arc, even the flashback moment that everyone hates. I really liked Rey being nobody (R.I.P.) and Rose was a great addition to the story. People unironically say she’s worse than Jar Jar Binks and I just don’t get it. How are they in any way comparable? Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Star Wars - I’m a Reylo shipper who also loves Finn and Stormpilot. Yes, we do exist. I’ve also made my peace with Rise of Skywalker. It’s a terrible movie...when you watch it as a sequel to existing Star Wars. But watch it as a standalone film? It’s pretty damn good.

2: Pokemon: Looker is one of the worst characters in the entire franchise. I feel such visceral, most likely irrational hatred for him. First of all, I don’t like it when the police are utilized in pokemon whatsoever, because they don’t really fit in this world, but Looker...when he’s not being creepy as hell, he’s just absurdly annoying, and forces himself into your life. I just want him to go away. Black and White are two of my favorite titles, but I still remember yelling “Get out of my house!” when he turned up in the post-game. As much as Sword and Shield have problems, I was overjoyed when I finished the game and realized that he hadn’t appeared.

3: Avatar: There is a certain moment in Legend of Korra, Season 2. I’m not going to spoil it, but it was a moment that broke everyone’s hearts and changed the game forever. Yeah...if you know, you know. People hated this twist. They felt like it ruined the series. Suffice it to say, I disagree entirely. Sure, that moment completely broke me as well, but I don’t think it was bad writing. I think it was incredibly bold and powerful. I appreciate that moment and how the characters had to move forward with that having happened. I felt like it was drama done very well.

4: Harry Potter: J.K. Rowling is...not the worst person to ever exist? Not even close? I’m not nearly the staunch defender of her that I used to be, as it has recently come to light that she’s kind of transphobic. Which breaks my heart, and I hope she learns better. However, literally...all the other complaints against her don’t make any sense? I feel like I’m going to get messages about this one, but I’m happy to respectfully counter-argue the reasons people have for hating her. As much as she can be problematic...she still gave us this universe. And as much as I love the Potter fandom...we can also be a bit entitled. EDIT: She has gotten far worse since this was posted and any desire to give her a second chance has since shriveled away.

5: Timeless. Garcia Flynn has always been my favorite character, and the fan-made Seasons 3 and 4 have made something of a Lucy x Flynn shipper out of me. However, I also don’t hate Wyatt. I actually love and enjoy his character....yes, we do exist. I’m gonna say it over and over again: Wyatt deserved better. Sure, he didn’t treat Lucy very well in Season 2. Considering how his worlds were colliding in ways no one could have predicted, I think we can acknowledge that he was wrong, and move on from it. If nothing else, he shouldn’t still be on the hook for it by Season 4. But...no. I guess he is. (Sigh)

6: Undertale: Asgore is not a terrible person. This is one of the weirdest takes I’ve seen, but people hate Asgore. More than just acknowledging that he’s flawed, they despise him. To the point where they write in head-canons that he groomed Undyne into being a child soldier, or that Toriel was forced into an arranged marriage and didn’t love him....the canon clearly defies both of these ideas. And I get it, he’s killed children before. His cowardice meant he couldn’t fully commit to saving his people. Fair enough. But he’s not evil. No one in Undertale is, that’s kinda the point. Also, you might think I’m an Asgoriel shipper, but no. Definitely not. I’m an Asgore fan, and I prefer Soriel. Yes, we do exist.

7: She-Ra: I’ve talked about this before, but even though I agree that Catra and Glimmer are interesting foils of each other....I don’t understand the idea that Catra opening the Portal and Glimmer activating the Heart of Etheria are somehow supposed to be comparable, or draw parallels between the two of them. Glimmer genuinely thought she was doing the right thing, that she would defeat the Horde and save everyone. She was misguided, but her motivations were selfless. Catra...was furious at Adora and just wanted to stick it to her. When Entrapta tries to warn Catra of the danger, she sends Entrapta to her presumable death. Catra’s motivation wasn’t noble. It was spite. Then, at the end of it all...she blamed Adora. Glimmer took responsibility for her mistake. To be clear, I’m not Anti-Catra at all. I’m just a very dedicated Glimmer stan.

8: Game of Thrones. I thought Season 8 was okay. The very ending, with the Grand Council? Absolute garbage. Do not talk to me about King “Bran” or the pointless exile of Jon. But everything before that? Even the destruction of King’s Landing? I was fine with it. Mostly because I kinda saw the warnings signs long before Dany got to Westeros. Was Season 8 amazing? No, Season 7 was better, but I still liked 8. Side note, because I just have to keep this recurring line alive - I’m a Sansa stan who will defend everything she ever does, including her betrayal of Jon, but I’m also a Jonerys shipper. Yeah...we do exist.

9: Doctor Who: I love the twist introduced in “The Timeless Children.” It blew my mind and it changes everything. I don’t think it ruins the canon at all, I think it reinvents it into something mysterious and intriguing. The rest of the episode? Eh...I love the Master, but other than that...Most people tend to think that this episode was at least better than “Hell Bent” barring the twist. I...feel the opposite. At least in Hell Bent, the timelords acknowledged that the Doctor was behaving out of character. At least that was the point. In this episode, using the death particle on Gallifrey with no moral debate about it...Doctor, you had a seven season character arc about why doing that was wrong. (Side note, Day of the Doctor is my favorite episode, so I am not happy the Gallifrey is gone again.) Even so, it has to be said - The Jodie era has been amazing. I will never understand why people don’t like it.

10: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse: Oh boy, it’s an unpopular opinion to even like this game, and I love it. Most people agree that the story is weak and cliche compared to the original. I disagree. It’s more like a different style. Yes, this game is very “anime” whereas the original felt more like a bible story. But this game has that rag-tag team of misfits who form a found family, and I just live for that trope. Speaking of the characters, my favorite is Asahi. I know people hate her, but I found her to be incredibly endearing, and she had an amazing character arc. Right up there with Hallelujah and Gaston. Nozomi, on the other hand....(deep inhale) let me know if you want to hear my rant about her...

#Harry Potter #Star Wars #J.K. Rowling #Timeless #Garcia Flynn #Wyatt Logan #Doctor Who #She-Ra #SPOP Catra #SPOP Glimmer #Asgore #Undertale #Game of Thrones #The Last Jedi #Legend of Korra #Shin Megami Tensei IV #Pokemon

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eirenare · 4 years

Text

My TROS experience and thoughts (the good, the bad, a bit of speculation, an “old” WIP drawing, and... hopes)

Putting this under a “read more” because, well... this post is a huge walking spoiler

This morning I woke up really, really early to re-watch TLJ with my brother and do stuff before the hour of watching TROS arrived—I remember almost crying watching TLJ, already almost crying listening to that damn TROS song on Fortnite as my brother played it for a while

I was nervous all day long, honestly. I accidentally stumbled the other day into a hashtag on Twitter called “BenSoloDeservedBetter”, and I was already on edge. A lot. Not to mention that I accidentally saw half a comment somewhere on Twitter saying something that had made me doubt

So, yeah, I basically spent all day trying to give myself hope and reassurance while deeply having ONE FEAR. That was: Ben not surviving

You see, I love with every inch of my being Reylo, but—Ben is my favorite character of all Star Wars. Like, I can’t help it, I have a super soft spot for him

I had, like, super high hopes for TROS, and yeah, I liked the movie... or well, most of it (and I got some things right to my delight and surprise, one of them being the throne with Dark Rey sitting in it, but more on that stuff later)

There were funny moments I enjoyed (Babu Frik, Finn joking about Poe’s past as spice runner, C3PO being C3PO...), the scary/terrorific moments were amazing (gods I love Palpatine’s new appearence, all the Sith and eerie stuff, the whispers, the machinery...), the action/fight scenes were cool overall (Rey and Ben fighting together against their enemies after seeing each other and doing the lightsaber trick was amazing, for example, also the jumps, and I loved seeing all the spaceships together), the imagery was sometimes amazing too (Palpatine sending that enormous lighting to the sky, for example) and the emotional stuff weirdly enough didn’t make me cry but had my heart pounding (Leia’s passing, Han and Ben’s parallel scene, Rey and Ben’s healing scene and their last scene...), not to mention I was gripping tightly my bag and jacket to my lap throughout most of the movie, BUT

B U T

The fact that Ben didn’t make it out alive left me very, VERY bitter

I have to say, again, that weirdly enough I just... didn’t cry, even when Rey died, not even when Ben died, and he’s my favorite. Most of the times it happens, that my brain’s kind of... messy, when it comes to emotions (it seems that, most of the time, my brain just goes from “step: something happens” to “step: body/voice reaction” skipping “step: feel” in the middle—... although that usually doesn’t happen if the emotions are negative, which sucks specially if you already feel like you yourself are a mess—), so... yeah

It kind of... Well, the tears didn’t start falling until I was watching the credits with my brother (bless his soul for listening to my rambling, and for granting me multiple hugs, for calling my dear “Ben” instead of “Kylo” now, and overall being so patient with me—I didn’t miss the fact that he was looking at my reactions at some points, like when the Reylo kiss, and then Ben dying, because he knows how much I love them), when it registered that it was really the end, and that yes, Ben was... dead. I kept crying as we watched the credits, and then outside of the theater a bit again, and then at home, and I’m now crying as I write this

Look, I loved the Reylo moments we got even though I wanted some more. And although (as I explained above) I was “numb” almost all the time and even while watching the kiss, I enjoyed it and I could “feel” that I was happy and excited about it because my chest was pounding like crazy and my lips were doing that kind of quivering when you can’t quite contain yourself and you’re emotional

(... Yes, living with this brain of mine is a mess, and I don’t even know if this has always been like this or started at some point, because my memory’s also a good mess—I hate this so much)

But then—then I saw Ben fall backwards and start to disappear, and I went from glee and triumph to “oh no” (also: hello there pit my old friend)

I mean... They just went and killed a character that was trying to do good after a life of strife with himself and what he did and did not do, a character that was just starting to go to the light (to see the light)—a character that’s been all his life marked by the abuse he’s been suffering ever since he was in the kriffing womb, therefore not even allowing him to really live. They basically killed... a symbol of hope

It feels sad and discouraging for me, even though what he did was noble

It just stings. And the fact that Rey didn’t see Ben at the end alongside Leia and Luke, when she adopts the surname “Skywalker”? ... Why. They could’ve added him, but no. Why. And I have to say, while I like a lot “Rey Nobody”, I also like the contrast between her and Palpatine, the subversion of dark and light, that even though darkness runs in her veins, she would still choose the light.

(Also, the totally not serious question my brother and I joke about, though: who the fuck decided to have a crazy night with Mr. Raisin Ass and to give him an “heir”?)

To soothe myself, I like to think that since Ben “vanished” into the Force and became one with it, and that since Rey’s kind of “a host” of the Force (?), he’s now always with her and they can feel each other. I like to think that, sometimes, they’ll see each other, be able to be together if only for brief moments—maybe at night, sleeping, Rey would feel Ben wrapped around her (my feels asdbfkffnggjglg)

(You can bet your ass that I’m abso-kriffing-lutely going to write something about this because I NEED IT BADLY)

Another thing that soothes me is that Ben passed away with the biggest, most beautiful smile on his face, and even though I hate that he died, I’m glad he was able to feel that kind of happiness with Rey and that he was able to join the light side in the end—now, yeah, give me Force Ghost Ben at some point in the future at least, p l e a s e

EDIT (addition of paragraph) — Also: Ben’s face when he looks at Rey every damn time, Ben running to Rey’s rescue with only a kriffing blaster, again the fight they had and when Rey sent him the lightsaber, and then lifting himself up from the pit with all his kriffing injuries and the pain he must have been enduring to then give up his life to save the love of his life—iconic, badass, a true dork in love whom I adore, the kriffing boss. But you know what I missed A LOT, that I realized I didn’t remember it being in the movie after watching it?? The “I DO”. I don’t think I’ve heard its equivalent in Spanish, and that has me pretty much confused and bitter. Like, wtf? If they let that out: w h y ?

Kathleen Kennedy pretty much hinted that maybe we’ll see “more Skywalkers” in the future, so, yeah *looks sideways at Rey and her ghost husband* Praying that they’d be in that “Project Luminous” of 2020, or later, but just... be somewhere else more

Something that bothers me, though—is there really a balance in the Force, after TROS? Rey’s lineage may be of dark and she may have taken the path of the light, but does that mean the Force is balanced now, or maybe not...? *scratches head* I don’t know, I need a re-watch and to have some serious thinking of this

As I write this post, I’m trembling almost to a shaking point and my chest is hurting. In all honesty, as much as I love Reylo... If I had to choose between Reylo happening or Ben living, I’d choose Ben living

... Now, it’s gonna hurt so much more reading “The Rise of Kylo Ren”. Oh, dear

If we set aside Ben’s passing, though, regarding how I saw the movie, I’d say that as much as I enjoyed it overall, it kind of felt like... it lacked things. Explanations and a bit more of worldbuilding, for example? More Knights of Ren stuff (although luckily we’re having them in “The Rise of Kylo Ren” alongside their leader, Mr. Hottie McHotHot aka Ren? Maz explaining how she got the Legacy lightsaber? TROS kind of feels, like... a little incomplete to me. I don’t know if to others it feels that way, but it kinda feels like that for me and my brother

Still I’m aware that, well, it HAS to be difficult to end such a story, and that it can’t possibly be easier to fit a lot in a 2h33 movie, you know? It seems... very complicated, and the stakes were high. So yeah, I understand that (while what I don’t take well at all, I don’t think I’ll ever do, is Ben’s death—it was pointless, and the fact that Rey didn’t show too much feeling about it... it feels weird). And well, the junior and non-junior novelizations will come out in March, so I like to think that we’ll get more details in them (like with the TFA and TLJ novelizations)

... And I really, really need a good rewatch of TROS because I’m forgetting a lot of stuff probably. So yeah, next Thursday if all goes well, I should have a ticket to go and watch it again, except this time in English with Spanish subtitles

A funny thing that happened at the theater, by the way, was that a woman hissed in excitement a pair of rows before us “I KNEW IT” when Rey was revealed to be a Palpatine

Also: I really, really hope that Rey doesn’t stay in Tatooine with how much she loves greenery landscape. I hope she went anywhere else that’s green and lush and was able to lead a nice life, to actually live the life Ben granted her, whatever path she would choose to take—and that Ben’s ghost would kind of like, be around her, you know?

Now, there are some things that made me laugh inside, and that is... that I got some stuff right. An example of that is the fact that Rey mentioned seeing herself sitting on that throne, something that happens in my “Rey of Jakku” fic and of which I was doing a WIP the last days of november (look, that happening was the thing least probable in my mind so... lol):

Also the cannon distroying Kijimi, too, and it seems that about the nature of Rey and Ben’s bond too. Also, when C3PO started explaining about the Pasaana festivity it kind of reminded me of how he started explaining the marriage customs in my “arranged marriage in Pasaana” AU. And I don’t remember now because my head’s pretty much a mess and specially right now (and as I said I really need a re-watch), but I think I recognized other things too

TROS wasn’t what I expected, and on the scales it has both its good and its not-so-good things (being the worst of them, for me, Ben’s death—of which I’m trying to cope by thinking what I said of him being literally with Rey now, maybe sometimes being able to see each other and interact), so... it’s a weird mix of me liking the movie while also not enjoying it nearly as much as I wanted to (as I think I should’ve)

Even though I’m super bitter about Ben, however, thank you to all of the team for working hard on the movie—doing the last piece of the Skywalker saga movies sounds everything but easy

Now, looking forward to the future...

I see myself continuing to write and draw Reylo, honestly. Ben’s death has kind of spurred me further to do stuff, so yeah—gonna keep up with my alternate TROS Reylo fic (“Rey of Jakku”), and I’m pumped to attempt writing other stuff, like... trying to write regarding Force Ghost Ben interacting with Rey, or working on AUs (*looks sideways at the “arranged marriage in Pasaana” AU, “Ice-skating” AU and the “padawan Ben meets mechanic Rey in Batuu” AU)

Will also be looking forward with utmost interest at “The Rise of Kylo Ren”, and to see what the merchandising team and the books and comics have to show in 2020—which means I’ll be dying inside all over again when I see Ben and Rey’s last scene, but well *shrugs* The novels are specially interesting to me. I mean, getting to read how these two felt about each other throughout TROS, and specially at the end? Written by Rae Carson? YES PLEASE

Also, if “Project Luminous” happened to have Rey (and even better yet: Force Ghost Ben appearing), I’d be even more interested in it—a lot more

The experience with TROS was a mix of good and not-so-good things, coupled with the One Fear I had regarding Ben (my baby... oh, how that kriffing stings), but still, it wasn’t that bad of an experience in my case

So, yeah... I think I’ll write some more thoughts later, tomorrow or another day when my head’s clearer (probably will write more when I re-watch), but so far, these are my thoughts on TROS

Rest in peace, darling, beloved Ben... </3 T_T

#Reylo #My art #Baby boy Ben Solo #Ben Solo #Kylo Ren #My TROS experience #TROS #The Rise of Skywalker #Star Wars #SW #Star Wars TROS #SW TROS #Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker #SW The Rise of Skywalker

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thehollowprince · 4 years

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I will maintain til my dying breath that Rey was supposed to be Luke's daughter, and the sequel trilogy would have been about two cousins fighting over the Skywalker legacy (she wouldn't have been able to be his sister a la Jacen and Jaina. Ben and Han and Leia would have known her immediately, but her being his cousin would have made them not really knowing her but knowing her make sense) Hell the script sets it up with Luke, knowing who she is (so say her mother/ Luke's SO took her away - 1/?

her way from the Jedi Temple because she feared Ben, and then something happened, and she was killed on Jakku, and like her death hit something Luke in a force wave and that’s why he can’t sense Rey is his daughter or whatever - look I reject the Sequel trilogy and replace it with my head canon okay?- all the callbacks: including the way Rey resembles Padme, Leia and Shmi- would have made sense. Her being a Palpatine doesn’t. But when Rian made her a “nobody” and stared pushing Reylo and 2/? all the mainstream commentators started talking about their connection ( isn’t it interesting they ignore that Finn was set up as Rey’s love interest? I wonder why),it does feel like J.J was forced into a corner, and this was the mess he came up with, cause I don’t know how he could have fixed the mess that TLJ was

Sorry I didn’t answer this right away. I got these at the end of my night shift and I wanted to be rested and awake before I answered it. With that, let’s get to it.

The problem with Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm back in 2012 was first and foremost the fact that they completely disregarded and dismissed the thirty plus years of extra material they had in the form of books, comics, television shows and video games. We had so much material to draw from for this sequel trilogy - George Lucas was even still alive so they could have consulted him on any kind of plan he had for his supposed nine film arc.

Even if we were to just focus on the material we got post-RoTJ, we still have so much to draw from. As you mentioned, Jacen and Jaina Solo, or Luke’s relationship with with Mara Jade, Jacen’s fall to the dark side, the Yuuzhan Vong war or even venturing further into the future to look at the rise of the One Sith, and dealing with Cade Skywalker’s flirtation with the dark side.

The fact that Disney discarded all of this and then cherry-picked from it to Frankenstein together some of these characters for the sequel trilogy.

For example, and as you and many others have pointed out since The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is just a cheap version of Jacen Solo from the Expanded Universe/Legends continuity, with some added elements of Darth Revan from the Knights of the Old Republic and a hint of Cade Skywalker from the Legacy Era, particularly this last little bit involving Force Healing at the eleventh hour. And in a similar vein, Rey is based off of Jaina… to an extent.

I don’t think their intention was ever quite so simple as a copy-and-paste by taking those two characters and making them the center of this new trilogy. If anything, watching this new trilogy, it’s very clear that they never had any plan for all three films. Disney went into this knowing they were going to be producing a trilogy, but approached it more like the original, on a movie-to-movie basis, pretending that they weren’t going to move forward unless the first one (TFA) was a success, which as we all know is bullshit. They ended that movie on a cliffhanger with the company announcing the Episode VIII before Episode VII even aired. So, while I believe that maybe someone on the production team, maybe J.J. or Kennedy or someone else high up came up with these characters that were mosaics of their Legends characters, that was only for that first movie. Then Rian did what he wanted with them, until we got to this last film where they were their own “fleshed-out” characters, while still relying heavily upon the original source material.

Personally, I would have loved for Rey to have been Luke’s daughter, though I don’t think Disney ever would have gone the route of your theory. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from them since they took over all of these big franchises, its that they don’t care to put much thought or effort into it. Everything is the cheapest and laziest writing possible, taking the quickest and easiest path to the end without putting any actual thought into it, just imagining all the zeros on the check they’re trying to get.

Having her and Kylo/Ben be cousins would have nicely mirrored the original franchise where the father and son (Vader and Luke) were both trying to turn the other to their side. That would have been a nice parallel for these films, given how much they went out of their way to make these new characters being just copies of the originals. Kylo was obviously supposed to be Vadar, with Rey being Luke, Poe being Leia, Finn being Han, BB8 being R2, Hux as Tarkin, etc. It was fairly evident that not a lot of effort was put into this series aside from an effort to grab money.

Even the big reveal that Rey was a Palpatine was cheap and lazy, an attempt to walk back The Last Jedi, but still give those loud and annoyingly persistent Reylos what they wanted, even if only the briefest of moments. Although J.J. coming out later and saying the kiss was like that between siblings was weird and I’m begging him to shut up.

At the end of the day, all we can do is either accept this steaming pile of garbage as canon, or rely entirely on our own headcanons. Despite how lazy Disney and Lucasfilm was when it came to the creation of these new characters, I, like many others, latched onto them. I connected with them and I’ve decided to completely ignore what I don’t like about canon, something I do quite a lot anymore in this era of “subverting expectations”, and just use them how I want. In my headcanon, Luke didn’t give up and become a Space Hobo like Rian made him. Finn was the protagonist along with Rey, as well as being in a relationship with Poe. Rose had a prominent role in the story and Kylo died unredeemed. I’m planning on doing what I started to do with the MCU’s Civil War and I’m going to try and fix it to match what I feel like it should have been originally.

#i've got mail #star wars #i feel like this got rambly #and for that i apologize #the rise of skywalker #the last jedi #the force awakens #tros critical #tlj critical #tfa critical #the sequel trilogy #star wars critical #anti disney #just my thoughts

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jadejedi · 4 years

Text

So You Hate The Last Jedi (part two)

Part One- Theme Part Two- Luke Part Three- Rey Part Four- Finn

Part Two- Luke Skywalker

My main complaints that I originally had about The Last Jedi were about Luke Skywalker, and I know that this is true for many fans. Luke is my favorite Star Wars character, and has been since I was a kid. I felt like Johnson had done him seriously dirty.

My complaints:

-Why is he so jaded and bitter?? What is up with the throwing of the lightsaber and the drinking of the green milk??? That is not the Luke we know at ALL.

-Why is he both wanting the Jedi to end AND protecting the ancient Jedi texts???

-Why would he be able to see the good in his father but not in his own nephew??? Luke already faced the darkside in RotJ, how could he have done this to Ben???

So, to start, I want to ask a question: who is the main character of the main Star Wars Saga, if there is one at all? Maybe when there were just six movies, you could argue pretty easily that it was Anakin. The prequels told the story of his fall, and the original trilogy told the story of his redemption. But, now, with the sequels, I would argue that the saga is now definitively *Luke’s * story. Not Anakin’s.

I would argue that Luke is basically the audience insert character, through whose eyes we see the story unfold, not just in the original trilogy, but in the entire saga. He experiences Star Wars in the same order that we as an audience did with the chronological release of the nine films (8 that are relevant to our discussion), and is basically the voice for the fandom at large. First the original trilogy with its hopeful message about fighting fascism and looking longingly back on the days of the Jedi and the Republic, wanting to bring them back. And then, sometime between the OT and the ST, learning about Palpatine, and the Clone Wars, and the fall of the Jedi Order.

While many Star Wars fans, including myself, love the prequels, the world as a whole has a complicated relationship with the prequels. Or maybe it isn’t that complicated. People hate them. For a lot of reasons, but I think that the most interesting reason is that people hated the Jedi Order for being boring bureaucrats. Obi-Wan described them as defenders of peace and justice, and they are literally out here using a slave army, fighting for no other reason than some planets want to split away.

While we don’t know exactly how much Luke knows about the Clone War era, he knows enough to know about the Jedi’s role in Palpatine’s rise to power. Like us, the Luke we see in TLJ is disgusted at this aspect of the Jedi, thus why he wants the Jedi to end. But at the same time, like us, he still believes, in his core, in that idea of the Jedi as protectors of peace and justice, which is why he hesitates to destroy the ancient texts. I would also say he kind of represents a certain kind of Star Wars fan, the kind that is so attached to the lore and trivia in Star Wars, that he hates the idea of anything changing or messing around with it, like Rey.

So why is Luke so bitter and angry at the beginning of The Last Jedi? Because, coming into the sequel trilogy, so were many of the people who have watched and loved Star Wars throughout the years. He felt betrayed by the image that Obi-Wan painted of the Jedi, just as many fans did.

In part one, I mentioned that I would be discussing another major idea running throughout this movie: grappling with a shared dark history. This is where that comes in. For this section, I will be drawing upon the ideas of literally my favorite YouTube video in existence, Quinton Reviews’, “Putting the ‘War’ in Star Wars- A Prequel Analysis”.

Beyond the large-scale, metatextual reading of Luke’s character in The Last Jedi, there is also what is explicitly happening in the text, which parallels what is happening on that metatextual level, which is that Luke is grappling with the fact that his history, the history of the Jedi, the history of the Republic, and even his own family’s history, is darker and more complicated than he originally thought, even by the end of RoTJ.

According to George Lucas, the prequels are the story of how fascism comes to power in a democracy. “Because democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.” That is the point of the prequels. Palpatine didn’t become emperor by overthrowing the Jedi and the Republic. They handed it to him, through the GAR, through emergency powers and weakened term limits, and through a commitment not to ideals, but to a government.

The original trilogy is a fanciful look at war. In the OT, war is not complicated. There are good guys, and there are bad guys. We don’t need to think too closely about how those bad guys came to power in the first place, oh no. We just need to fight them to restore the Republic and the Jedi. No need to examine those too closely either. The prequel trilogy pulls back the curtain on war and its complexities, which, again, I think is a big part of why people hold such disdain for them.

In The Last Jedi, Luke is dealing with the fact that the New Republic and his new Jedi Order failed, and they failed because they *didn’t* learn from the past. (Going back to the theme of learning from failure!) He, the galaxy as a whole, and us as the audience, are all learning that in order to deal with something like facism, you have to actually look at where it comes from, and realize that it didn’t come from nowhere, and if not properly dealt with, will be back.

Now, the last point about Luke’s character in The Last Jedi. Like I said in part one, Luke’s failure with Ben is a major part of the movie’s theme, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it makes sense for the character. I want to argue that it does. If you watched Shaun or Jenny Nicholson’s videos that I linked in the previous part, then you have already heard what I am about to say.

Luke very much did try to kill Vader. Like, multiple times over the course of two movies. While I would disagree with the assertion that Luke *only* tried to redeem Vader because he couldn’t physically defeat him, it certainly was a factor when it came down to it by the end of RotJ. With Ben, he could sense the darkness in him, and after having been through a whole lot of bad stuff already, thought for a split second that he could prevent future horrors. As Jenny says in her video, he had the thought. He didn’t spend several minutes desperately trying to kill Ben. He walked in there, ignited his lightsaber, and immediately realised ‘wtf am i doing?!’.

Going back to the idea of dealing with facism, Luke failed because he thought that he could deal with fascism by killing one dude. But facism is more than that. It’s always going to be more than one person; it’s an ideology.

And as for Luke having already confronted the darkside- that’s not how temptation works. It’s not a one and done thing. And yeah, he failed. We will all have a moment in our lives where we fail, and again, failure is what this movie is about. The fact that Luke eventually learns from his failure, by teaching Rey about the history of the Jedi, so that she can learn from his mistakes and the mistakes of the Jedi as a whole, makes his character arc a hopeful one, in my book.

For me, it is Luke’s journey in TLJ that ties the whole saga together. In this, we finally get to deal with the implications of the prequels and wrestle with what that means both in and out of universe.

#star wars #star wars meta #luke skywalker #the last jedi #sw meta #tlj #sw #hannah talks #so you hate the last jedi

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horrorinthegraveyard · 4 years

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Rise of Skywalker Quick Rewrite

We open with a distressed Kylo Ren, still fighting, obviously, with his draw to the light, being more and more tempted by Rey, his resolve to the dark weakening. We see through the film him double thinking his actions in an obvious way. Does he really want to do this? Even in moments when he double down, it is still out of desperation to succeed at something, though he’s loosing his cruel edge.

At the same time, Rey is struggling with the anger she’s been harboring her whole life and still fighting against the draw of the dark side, creating a chasm between herself and her found family. A family that she does deeply care about and they deeply care about her, but she still feels that hollow distance of an experience not understood and a fear that they may leave too.

Kylo hears the voice of Palpatine in his head, revealing himself, promising to help, revealing he was the voice manipulating him his entire life, shaping him. He sets out to find his location, needing a map to safely get there, curious, furious, refusing to have another master. This resolve is his turning from the dark, but not to the light.

Rey is informed by Kylo, and verified by the spy, of the threat, another offer to take his hand. She again, refuses, but sets out with Finn, Poe and Chewy to find the map. Rey and Kylo form a tentative and tension filled force bond team that gets rocky and breaks down, the search, chewy’s capture, the ship, all still happen, but it is a search in tandem, searching for the same thing, wanting to find a middle ground, working toward it, becoming softer, becoming more compassionate, but scared of the unknown it brings, scared of change and what it means to move on from the past and create yourself into something new, a parallel with recovery.

They have conversations of the grey jedi, of people who accept the anger, the emotion, but do not forsake it, because it is human. They speak of the mistakes of the Jedi, how terrible that life could be. How though they wanted to fight for the light, the distance from their fellows created an impossible goal.

Finn/Poe is canon and they are actually nice to each other. Leave the bickering couple trope behind in the trash.

Rey is confronted by her dark side self, the image preying on her insecurity with her found family, preying on the fear of the unknown, promising power. Who needs people when you have power, when you can force and ensure that people may never leave you?

Rey and Kylo meet, looking for the one map, they fight. Instead of laying down to die, the resistance is attacked by the First Order and that’s how Leia dies. The spy for the resistance is also against them, because of course Hux is. She fights, not to live, but for her people to survive. She uses the force, she holds a lightsaber. (acting note, double for the fight, because they would have used one anyway, and it would have limited the (personally) upsetting use of previously recorded footage into awkward scenes) She has made the decision to become one with the force, as Obi Wan had done, so she could be there, with her family, and be a guide.

Still, this is a death. Kylo feels his mothers loss. Distracted. Rey, blinded by her confusion, desperation, and rage at nothing and everything, ignores the feeling of loss. As she stabs Kylo. The loss falls in. The realization of what she has done, the horror of it all, and a realization this isn’t who she wants to be, but it pushes her from balance. She heals him, scared, apologizing. He reassures her, he understands but god this hurts. He apologizes too. He doesn’t know what to do, how to feel, how to move on, he passes out, close to death from a fatal wound. Rey is distressed. The wound isn’t healing. Leia’s ghost appears, helps heal him, shows him he is still welcome, there is still forgiveness, showing rey empathy, also showing her forgiveness.

Rey leaves, again afraid of herself. Ben has the moment with his father. Rey has a moment with Luke. They reach out to each other. Ben acknowledges the pain and suffering he’s caused, Rey acknowledging the fear she feels, the loneliness, the fear of being abandoned again. The feel a connection that gets interrupted. Rey has reached the planet first.

Everything else plays out, but Palpatine just needs a vessel, it doesn’t matter which. Rey isn’t a palpatine, she’s just a nobody of jakku. The fight happens, as it did, mostly. Palpatine shows how much control he had over Ben, forcing flashbacks, revealing false memories in an attempt to show how powerful he is, to dissuade a fight. Maybe even to get him to turn on Rey. He fights it. Succeeds. Rey discards the sabers, she redirects the lightning, with emotion, but not with hatred, not with anger. only wanting to protect. the powers of the dark side do not have to be used for evil, but must be respected.

Rey dies, Ben comes to her, tries to heal her. We see the rage he’s always harbored and then for the first time we see him truly calm, focus. We see ghosts of jedi of the past, Luke, Leia, Obi wan, and more connecting to him and rey, radiating out, filling the sith space with Jedi light. His acceptace back to harmony and the Jedi acknowleding how the past has damaged the present, wanting to fix the wounds that they have caused.

Rey wakes, she and Ben share their first kiss. They’re exhaused and collapse together to the ground. They have some moments of quiet. Knowing what will happen when they leave.

Ben faces judgement. He is closely watched, but is let free. The evil of Palpatine is known. His ability to manipulate and abuse taken into consideration. Ben will spend the rest of his life having to fight for his place and working for his redemption, but it will be a life worth having, though it may be dangerous.He starts over, as best as anyone can.

Rey gets her family and her soul mate. She gets to be excited by everything new and green in the galaxy without a hole in her soul. She and Ben travel the galaxy, maybe building a force school, fighting to right the wrongs of the First Order, and other issues the galaxy faces.

Rey has embraced herself as her own legacy, Ben has moved on from his. They let the past die and heal with it’s ashes.

#the rise of skywalker #star wars #reylo #i just #can't let this movie live

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alpha-centari27 · 4 years

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The Thoughts and Reflections of Someone New to Reylo and the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

This is a really, really long post and contains spoilers.

Please be polite and respectful if you choose to comment and / or reblog.

Ok, so before I get too heavy discussing my thoughts and reflections there are a few things I want to make absolutely clear.

- People can ship whoever they want. And it is perfectly fine for people to disagree and have differing tastes and opinions. Obviously some ships are better supported by canon than others. And there are shipping relationships that are toxic, but people ship it anyway. I think a great non-Star Wars example is Harley Quinn and Joker.

- I have delved deep enough into the reylo tag and other related tags to get the sense that anti-reylo are claiming a moral high ground. “As a ship reylo is wrong and therefore anyone who ships reylo is a horrible person.” And my simple rebuttal to this is--no, that’s not how this works. If someone ships reylo this by itself is not sufficient evidence that someone is a horrible person.

- Based on everything I have read about TROS Ben Solo’s story arc and character development could have been so much more than what it was on screen in TROS.

- Having said that a lot of other characters were short changed by whoever was pulling the strings and making the decisions: Rose Tico, Poe Dameron, Finn and Rey and arguably Leia, Luke and Han were short changed by some of the decisions made in TROS and earlier in TLJ and TFA.

- Being part of a fandom should be fun, so can we all agree to chill out, relax and be civil?

Moving on...now that hopefully I have cleared up any preconceived assumptions.

I am relatively new to reylo and the sequel trilogies.

The first time I watched The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi was only a few weeks ago. Some of the cable channels have been doing Star Wars marathons to get people pumped and nostalgic to pay for a movie ticket to The Rise of Skywalker.

One of the cable channels was doing yet another Star Wars marathon last night, so I again sat down to watch The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, but this time I watched the films with more awareness of the various critiques, criticisms and elements that have been deemed problematic.

I also went to the trouble of jotting down some notes.

This post is kinda all over the place, but I am going to go over my notes and observations and a main topic I want to look at is:

How Rey’s relationships and interactions with Finn and Kylo Ren differ and what sort of implications does this have.

Since stepping my toe into the reylo tags and other related tags I have NOT been able to fully articulate where I stand on whether reylo is toxic, Kylo Ren / Ben Solo is abusive, whether Kylo Ren / Ben Solo is worthy of redemption and to what degree Kylo / Ben being abused and manipulated excuses his actions.

I have to confess that the more parallels and similarities I see between Kylo Ren and Anakin / Darth Vader the more uneasy I feel about shipping reylo.

Regardless of my opinion people are free to do what they want. If shipping reylo makes you happy, who am I too badger you into doing otherwise?

Me, writing out this long post is an attempt to flush out my thoughts at the present.

Watching the movies again I was struck by how different Rey’s interactions were with Finn and Kylo Ren. There is a sequence in The Force Awakens between Rey and Finn that reminds me of the throne room sequence between Kylo Ren and Rey when Kylo offers his hand and asks her to rule beside him. ((Please pardon me for paraphrasing and not having all the lines of dialogue memorized.))

Rey and Finn

At Maz’s place when Han, Rey and Finn are trying to arrange transport for BB8 to the resistance and / or get another ship to avoid detection by the First Order.

Maz looks into Finn’s eyes and remarks that he looks like someone who wants to run away. Maz tells Finn that there is a way out. That there are some beings that will arrange transit to the outer rim and exchange for work.

Finn approaches the beings and tells them not to leave without him.

Rey is frustrated by this. How can he just leave? What about BB8? What about the resistance? I believe this is when Finn comes clean that he is not actually with the resistance. That he is a stormtrooper and he is not going back to the First Order and wants to stay as far away from them as possible.

Finn asks Rey to come with him. To join him. Rey says no. And I believe Finn tells Rey to take care of herself.

There are no hurt feelings on Finn’s part. He doesn’t try to persuade or manipulate her to change her mind. He simply wishes that she takes care of herself.

Here are a few other bullet point items I want to highlight.

- Kylo Ren force pushing Rey into a tree and Finn coming to her aid and kneeling beside her reminds me of Anakin choking out Padme on Mustafar and Obi-Wan Kenobi going to Padme.

- Finn’s main motivation for going to Starkiller base was to rescue Rey.

- Rey clutches & hugs an unconscious Finn who fought and lost to Kylo Ren.

- After Starkiller base is blown up and Rey, Finn and Chewbacca are in transit. Rey plants a kiss on Finn’s forehead as he lies unconscious.

- When Finn wakes up in The Last Jedi the first thing he says is, “Where is Rey?“

- Finn’s motivation for trying to get away in an escape pod is basically keep Rey safe. Finn thinks the fleet is doomed. If Finn can to an escape pod and reach safety, Rey will be able to find him and she will be safe.

- I want to say that there is another time that Rey hugs Finn. Maybe this is when Han, Finn and Rey first find each other on Starkiller?

Finn is not a perfect person. He does lie to Rey about being part of the resistance. In terms of being an honorable, moral and ethical person I think it is quite clear Finn is a better person than Kylo Ren / Ben Solo.

But in real life and in fiction people can be attracted to and fall in love with horrible people. ((I suppose right here my own words are a damning statement against reylo.))

Some observations I made from watching The Last Jedi

- When Kylo Ren and Rey have their first force skype call. Kylo’s first reaction is confusion. And his second reaction is to reach out with the force to try to manipulate Rey to bring Luke Skywalker to him.

- When Rey pushes Kylo Ren to explain why he killed his father, Han Solo--I find it curious that Kylo deflects the question and starts talking about Rey’s parents and how they threw her away. Given the plot twist in TROS this now makes Kylo look like a manipulator and a liar. In the best case scenario Kylo was telling a version of the truth that is incomplete. I suppose in a way Kylo does indirectly answer Rey’s question by saying, “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.“ This could be read as manipulative and an attempt to push Rey to the dark side by killing Luke.

- I’m still not sure what to make of the 2nd force bond scene. The connection is terminated and Kylo Ren is wiping his face with a gloved hand and we see...water? Kylo Ren’s tears on his glove? There is a wave of water crashing against some rocks in front of Rey just before Kylo is seen wiping his face.

- When an unconscious Kylo Ren wakes up in the throne room. It is just Kylo Ren and Hux. It’s quick, but it looks like Hux reaches into his coat to draw a weapon and shoot Kylo Ren.

- What did Rey tell Chewbacca to tell Finn? I’m sure someone knows, but I just need to do some more digging online.

- Kylo Ren vs Luke Skywalker. Near the very end of the fight Kylo Ren says, “I’ll destroy her [Rey] and you and all of it.“

- Overall I’m just surprised how often Rey is brought to tears throughout these movies. It’s understandable because of what she is going through and what she has been through. Someone must have counted how many times Rey cries and how many times it was with X or Y character and what they were talking about.

Rey and Kylo Ren: The Throne Room

Ok, so let’s sum up the events leading up to Kylo Ren’s proposal.

Rey is brought before Snoke who tortures her for information about Skywalker.

When Snoke gets the information he wants AND it becomes clear that Rey is a true Jedi who will not serve him, Snoke then orders Kylo Ren to kill Rey.

Kylo Ren spares Rey and kills Snoke.

Kylo Ren and Rey fight off the guards together.

Kylo gives his speech about letting old things die. What stands out to me is Kylo does NOT specifically mention the First Order. Snoke, Luke Skywalker, the Sith, the Jedi, the resistance all need to die, but not the First Order.

Rey pleads with Ben not to do this. Not to go down this path. Which is reminiscent of what Padme said to Anakin on Mustafar.

Kylo / Ben says, “You’re still holding on! Let go!” ((Holding onto what exactly? The resistance? Hope? The Jedi path? The light side of the force?)) And once again Kylo / Ben talks about Rey’s parentage.

“You’re nothing, but not to me. Please.” For a while I have interpreted this as Kylo Ren / Ben Solo being honest and blunt to a fault, but seeing and listening to this again in it’s full context this does read as Kylo Ren being manipulative. Breaking Rey down, she comes from nothing, she is nothing, she has no place in this, but hey why don’t you join me and have a seat right next to me on the winning side.

Final Thoughts:

- At the very least Kylo Ren’s conduct and behavior are red flags. Regardless of the extent that Kylo Ren was manipulated and abused his behavior and his interactions with Rey in the TFA and TLJ are troubling to say the least. There does come a point when someone cannot use the excuse of being abused to justify their abusive behavior. “Ok, so you were abused and learned some bad habits and coping mechanisms, but here is the thing your actions are causing real harm to another person and that is not cool.” It’s hard and it’s difficult to change those habits and people will slip up on the road to recovery. I think we also need to recognize the complication that Rey and Kylo Ren are at war on opposite sides.

- I think there was descent chemistry and a connection between Rey and Finn, but I feel like that gets de-railed at the end of TLJ when Finn is tending to Rose and Rey is interacting with Leia.

- I think Rey and Finn is a lot less problematic than Rey and Kylo Ren / Ben Solo. Just compare the throne room scene to the interaction between Finn and Rey at Maz’s place.

- Do I still ship reylo? Here is how I will answer the question for now. As flawed as Kylo Ren / Ben Solo is I do like him and find him to be a character I can relate to alongside Rey. I have not seen TROS in theaters and don’t think I will waste my money going to see it.

I would have LOVED to see a happy ending for Ben Solo instead of a variant of Darth Vader’s redemption and death. This has already been done, why not do something different? Isn’t this ending more hopeful? You know instead of Han, Luke, Leia dying in vain to save Ben.

I would have LOVED if the people making TROS put more careful thought and consideration into Ben’s story arc and character development.

Fitting with the theme of: finding the balance, not everything is black and white, there are a lot of grey areas / ambiguity, etc.

I would have been fine with some sort of ending where Ben faces some sort of punishment for his crimes and he is neither condemned to death or is completely pardoned without consequences.

I am very curious to know what political scientists and psychologists would say about sentencing someone like Kylo Ren / Ben Solo for war crimes. In the comics that have been released so far it seems like Ben Solo is much younger when he is turned to the dark side and taken in by the First Order. I think in TROS it’s revealed that Ben’s current age is 30 and he was 23 when he joined Snoke and the First Order. At age 23 Ben Solo is considered an adult, he is not a child soldier. “But he was being manipulated before he was even born.“ I hear you...unfortunately I don’t know how or if that would factor into Ben Solo’s being charged with war crimes.

Right now, I am in favor of ignoring the mess that is TROS and replacing it with fanfiction where Rey and Ben Solo are able to live a health and happy life. And perhaps some day they will rebuild a new Jedi order that strives to accept and learn from the mistakes of the past.

- Is Kylo Ren / Ben Solo worthy of redemption? I think in order to answer this question we need to ask, what does it mean to be redeemed? What does someone have to do in order to be redeemed or atone for their wrong doing?

I think the short answer is it’s complicated and everyone has different opinions. Some people are probably of the opinion that Kylo Ren / Ben Solo is beyond redemption. There is nothing he can do. He can never do enough to make up for what he has done.

I think the more complicated answer is it’s a long process and not everyone will forgive you--heck maybe no one will forgive you.

And whether you are punished or not punished is an entirely different matter.

There are things Kylo Ren / Ben Solo has done that he can never take back. Kylo Ren cannot bring Han Solo back from the dead or any of the hundreds or thousands of people he has cut down. The fact Kylo Ren has murdered even one person is probably reason enough in the eyes of some people for why he can never be redeemed.

Kylo Ren / Ben Solo turned toward the light and toward Rey. In my opinion I think this action could be considered an act of repentance, but falls short of redeeming / atoning for all his past sins. I think full redemption / atonement is a much more lengthier process.

Ultimately, I think this is a question worth pondering for ourselves.

#reylo #the force awakens #the last jedi #the rise of skywalker #ben solo #kylo ren #rey #rose tico #poe dameron #finn

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sasskarian · 4 years

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The Mostly-Complete Rise of Skywalker semi-liveblog and reaction list that literally no one asked for

I really dig the parallels between Exegol and Korriban. The way both places felt massive and cramped at the same time, all ominous and tomb-like. Both of them are desolate, devoid of all life. They both feel barren, but not just barren. Korriban feels like history crumbling beneath your fingertips. Exegol feels like a place that’s actively trying to wound you with its desolation, like it’s sucking the life out of you to try and renew itself. (Which, given that Palpatine is there and what he does later, yeah, that tracks.)

When Palps tells Kylo to kill Rey, you can see the micro expression in his eyes. The way the muscles in his face tighten up for a second, the brows drawing down in an expression of disdain and repulsion. If we could have seen his mouth, I’d lay money down on there being a sneer flash across his face for a moment. And damn if Adam isn’t a good actor for being able to portray something that subtle.

There were definitely a few moments where Chewie bitches at Poe for the stunts he’s pulling, including a very definitive accusation of “Rey would never do this to me or the Falcon,” or something along those lines. (This is when Poe snarls, “Yeah, well, Rey’s not here right now, is she?”)

Kylo reaching out into the Force. We’re supposed to think he’s trying to reach Anakin/Vader, but I don’t think that’s what happened at all. I think that he reached for Rey specifically, possibly as a self-soothing gesture. The need to feel her alive, reassure himself. And because of Rey’s feelings and connections to his own family, he’s clearly struggling with his more monstrous acts, and with seeing Luke and Han as intrusive thoughts.

Rey failing the training course because of him makes perfect sense. Notice that this is also when she gets angry.

The Kintsugi vibe given off by Ren’s helmet repairs are fascinating.

Given the way Pryde keeps focusing on Hux during the meeting, I feel like he suspects Hux.

I find it interesting that Finn seems to be the peacekeeper in the OT3. Poe is definitely a hothead, even though he’s matured since TFA and TLJ. And Rey snaps back at him, indignant that he’s snapping at her. And Finn is the one doing the “Guys, guYS, we don’t have TIME for this” routine.

I like the quiet horror of Rey recognizing Exegol’s name. Whether it’s Force shenanigans, or from reading Luke’s books, or from the vision, whatever. The recognition followed by horror is Good Fucking Acting.

I wish that there’d been a little more of Luke or Leia reassuring Rey that a name is just a name. That the legacy is what you make it. And that as the children of Anakin Skywalker, they know that better than anyone. I feel like that would have been a good tie-in and highlight for the way the surnames are treated in the movies. Ben shunning both Organa and Solo, Rey having a last name at last but one that carries the same kind of stigma and Dark past.

I… kind of wonder if Ren surrounded himself in atrocities as a means of self-punishment. We know it’s canon that he keeps being pulled to the Light, and that every time he does, he tries something Dark. Maybe it’s his way of reminding himself how far he’s fallen and that he can’t ever go back home again (which we know is bullshit, but hey, abuse fucks your brain up, and Snoke was abusive af). Like, again, I know it’s mostly just in the comics so far, but we see him a lot saying, “I never wanted this,” “I don’t want to do this.”

The Pasaana dance in the festival seems pretty clearly modeled after tribal dances, and that makes me wonder if powerful dances like the Dha Werda and the Ancestor Dance shown in the film send ripples through the Force. And what that might be like.

I… kind of like the idea of Ben and Kylo struggling for control? I need to finish reading TLJ and read TRoS when it comes out, but there are things Kylo does—the almost-gentle banter with Rey, the way he reaches out in TLJ when she’s on Ahch-To, warning her about Palps—that doesn’t make sense from a purely Kylo perspective. I mean, I’m also an angst gremlin who enjoys the idea of Kylo losing more ground to Ben Solo, and having serious identity clashes.

The bond between Rey and Kylo has grown exponentially. Each movie, it gets bigger and more powerful. In TFA, it allowed her to look into his head. And he wasn’t able to really bring himself to hurt her. In TLJ, it bridges impossible distances of space, even so far as transporting physical objects across the distance. And in TRoS, we see that it’s gotten so strong, it literally blocks out the rest of the physical world. You could argue that the darkness in the bond is what’s overshadowing it, but I don’t count it that way. Rey’s surroundings on Pasaana are slowed down and muted, as if only Ren is her focus.

The trio is so drift compatible, it hurts.

The way the trio grabs for each other, though. It was beautiful. Disney may have decided that Poe/Finn wasn’t a thing, which we all know is a damn lie, but this movie ships the OT3 so hard. The way Poe catches Rey as she falls, the way they both turn at almost the same time to look for Finn. The casual touching.

Childish though it was, I did enjoy the “mine’s bigger” joke with Rey’s lightsaber vs Poe’s flashlight.

Rey shows an affinity for Animal Empathy. Ren has used Stasis more than once. I could even argue that there’s been some subtle Battle Meditation going on throughout the series. And I kind of? Like that we’re seeing some of the more obscure and subtle Force powers.

Also? The snakey slow-blink? I love.

Rey seems to have some psychometry abilities. And I love it.

The way Rey says “I’ll be right behind you” isn’t what it sounds like. It has a lot of layers to it. (Just like Han’s “I know” in ESB) It’s declaration of intent (“I’ll handle this”), it’s a request (“Trust me”), and it’s consolation and reassurance (“I’ll be fine.”). The way all that is conveyed with five simple words is. Ugh. My heart.

As Finn gets stronger in the Force, I’m enjoying seeing his instincts kick in. He senses Ren’s approach, which is a nice completion of the parallel to TFA when Ren sensed him as the traitor.

I don’t know who’s read the Rise of Kylo comic, but the way she slices his ship to bring him down is a direct parallel to the shot he made when he escaped the destroyed Temple. (I love all the tie-ins, honestly)

Rey was doing okay with trying to pull the transport down until Kylo stepped in to push her. The most likely scenario is less “force lightning is genetic” (because that’s crap) but more that anger clouded her mind and she already had a direct Force ability going.

When I asked my roommate why she thought Rey couldn’t sense Chewie’s life force, she gave me an interesting theory. Well, a few, but one I think makes a lot of sense. The first was that Chewie was already off-world and thus too far away (later debunked by her sensing him as the Destroyer is in orbit). Or that maybe the transports were shielded against Force Abilities, but given that they’re so rare in this era, I don’t think that’s the case. I agree with my roomie in saying that it’s more likely that Rey burnt out part of her senses and basically put herself in shock due to the feedback of casting a powerful and traditionally dark side ability for the first time.

The first couple of times I watched the movie, the entire Threepio arc bothered me. Why didn’t they just plug him into the navicomputer, the way they’d done before? Why the angst build-up? Then I remembered that they left the Falcon on Pasaana, and it’s possible that L3 is more equipped to talk to Threepio’s forbidden memory banks than a post-TCW era ship that’s almost certainly out of date.

…Zorii and Poe have A Past. I’d put money on them having banged like screen doors in a hurricane at least a few times.

“Who are you hanging out with that spEAKS SITH?!?”

I? love? Babu?

“Does she do that to us?” had me in tears.

Oh my God, the sheer #aesthetic and foreshadowing of her duel with Ren. The red fruit (cherries?) spilling across the floor, the stark color against the too-bright white. The way Vader’s helmet thunks on the ground like a sour note in a song, the way the pedestal shatters with their combined strikes. Vader falling from Ren’s worship (as the truth is revealed that it was Snoke/Palps messing with his mind and he never heard Vader), the dark glass shattering the same way the darkness in Ren dies with him.

Finn is… kind of a gossipy biddy and I love it. The way Jannah hands him the part and he just flat out abandons the work to talk, the body language as he hoists himself up to sit on the ledge. I love it. He’s precious.

I wonder if the Death Star echoes in the Force. So many brutal deaths in those halls. So many restless ghosts.

…okay, I’m not sure how to feel about the dagger lining up with the fallen DS’s architecture. Because like. There’s so many layers to that? That suggests that Palps had the dagger created after Endor/RoTJ. Which suggests that he may have had the Wayfinders created then too (though it seemed pretty comfy in the Vault, so maybe he already had them?) (Also, there was one on Mustafar. Was it planted there? Did Vader know about Exegol? I need more information than this!) And like. The Death Star is sitting in a violent sea. It’s going to degrade eventually. What if the horizon line had changed? What then? It seems flimsy, for all that it was dramatic and cool.

The sheer aesthetic in this movie, though. The symbolism is everywhere. Like Rey taking the skimmer. I love the aesthetic choices of her struggling against these giant, furious waves as a fantastic visual analogy of her struggle against the emotions churning away inside her. And how Despair and Fear and even Anger threaten to overwhelm her and drown her, but she keeps holding tight to that little skimmer the same way she’s clinging to Luke’s teachings and Leia’s love and faith in her. Their belief in her.

“You don’t know what she’s fighting.” “And you do?” I wonder if, as a Force Adept, Finn can sense the bond between Rey and Ren, and that she’s struggling against it. As well as the Palpatine name.

Theory (that may or may not have been explored in the Legends EU): Any place steeped in enough Dark emotion can become a place of visions like the Mirror Cave and Dagobah’s Cave. Rey comes face to face with her worst fear on the Death Star.

Speaking of, I wonder if some small part of Rey enjoyed the vision of her and Kylo as Emperor and Empress. I wonder if that’s where the abject horror comes from.

Speaking of more aesthetic, the on-screen contrast and history of the window where Vader and Luke dueled, and the shot of Palps’ throne over Rey’s shoulder. Sorry not sorry but I’m going to be forever in love with the cinematography in this movie.

Ren seems… almost exasperated that she’s still drawing her saber on him. That has fic potential.

That. Entire. Fucking. Duel. That entire battle. Just… oof. OOF. My heart. It blew everything in me wide open. Looking with the eyes of a writer and SW expert instead of the wide-eyed “my hEaRt!” first reaction, I saw So Much. Like Rey and Ren trading battle stances. IDK if anyone else noticed, and it’s happened before (the throne room battle in TLJ, notably, but also their duel in Ren’s quarters). But here, it’s so clear. They gave and took from each other as they fought, and that broke my heart. It threw me back to KotOR II’s echani battles, and the fight between Sun and Mun in Sense8. Here, unlike TLJ, they weren’t fighting in tandem with each other. This was back and forth. Rey starts out saber up, in what looks like shii-cho. Kylo, like always, starts out in Ataru, with heavy, powerful strikes trying to bludgeon down her defense. Rey switches to an offensive, then to fast, agile strikes holding her lightsaber Ahsoka style. Kylo then switches to shii-cho, and Rey enters Ataru, with the aggressive offensive. The way they switched between each other was fantastic.

Near the end, Rey starts giving up. You can see it. Her movements get sluggish, like she’s just going through the motions. Like she’s so tired of fighting the bond in her head, her reluctant pull to him, like she’s just. So Fucking Tired. She’s resigned.

Kylo Ren dying by his own lightsaber while Ben’s mother called to him. That symbolism. That symbolism, though.

The way he looks around, like he’s in shock. The way the battle just stops, and he’s sitting there, dying. You can see the change in him, as Ben wakes up and Kylo dies. There’s so much shell-shock and disorientation, like someone who’s been asleep for too long, waking up confused. And I’d like to believe that Rey healing him poured not just healing but maybe a little Light into him, and that, along with Leia reaching for him, is what gave Ben the strength to rise over Kylo and overpower him. (See also, my love of internal power struggles)

“I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand.” Excuse you, I did not sign up for this feels trip.

Rey running away. I have… conflicted feelings on? Did she run away because she was grieving? To escape her own history? Did she run because she gave into the dark and struck down Kylo in anger? Or because she was tempted by Ben?

I know everyone says that Han was just a memory but I prefer to believe that Han’s just too stubborn to be a proper Force Ghost. And Disney and Lucasarts can pry Force Sensitive Han Solo out of my cold dead hands.

Luke, materializing out of the air and catching the saber. My heart screamed. Especially when he chided her (and himself) that a lightsaber deserves more respect.

“Leia didn’t tell me.” I think… I think Leia was trying to, without saying the words, “Rey, you’re a Palpatine.” She said, “Never be afraid of who you are.” And oh, God, that’s something Leia would know. In the EU she struggles with being Anakin’s daughter, with the legacy of Vader hanging over her. She struggles with it so much. And finally comes to terms with it. So if anyone knows what that’s like, it’s going to be her.

"She sensed the death of her son at the end of her Jedi path." So... she had nearly thirty years to plan for it. Yoda says, “Always in motion, the future is.” I don’t believe for a single instant that Leia Organa shrugged her shoulders and said “Welp, guess my kid’s gonna die.”

Luke KNEW Ben would go to Exegol. He knew and no one will ever convince me otherwise. “Take both sabers.” She’d need one for Ben.

I wonder if Lando looks at the Falcon and sees all the little pieces of Han.

So. The arrival order at Exegol threw me for a while. Rey gets there, in Red 5. Using the toasted Wayfinder. Then the Resistance arrives, following her trail. We see Ben arrive in a TIE fighter. But… how? Rey’s trail was given to the Resistance on what I can only imagine is an encrypted wave data burst. We know it was technically given to Lando, so that the people joining the battle could find them. But Ben’s in a TIE fighter. Did he get the message from Lando? Were the coordinates already programmed into the TIE via the Final Order? Did he memorize the path from before (given that he’s a stellar pilot like Han)? Did Rey give it to him?

I hate Palps being a one-trick pony in the movies. We see him in TCW having other abilities, and mad saber skills. But in the movies, his schtick is the same every time: He seduces people to the Dark and makes them feel like they don’t have a choice, usually by dangling, “Look, you can SAVE THEM” in front of everyone. And then once he has them, he keeps them by constantly belittling them and reminding them that there’s nowhere else for them to go, because they burnt all their bridges. (Ex: Vader being reminded of what he did to Padme, and Kylo being reminded via Snoke of his own actions)

WEDGE. WEDGE ANTILLES. WEDGE.

Rey felt Ben’s approach, and you can see the change in her body language.

THAT IS THE MOST HAN SOLO THING I HAVE EVER SEEN AND IT’S NOT EVEN HAN SOLO. Watching the changes in Ben (vs Kylo) is so fucking great. He’s lighter, he’s faster. He skids (Han/Death Star), shoots behind him (Han/TFA), and the Solo Shrug. Ugh. Seeing Leia and Han blended in Ben with the Solo swagger, and Leia’s grace is fantastic.

Also: he looks so Soft. And so much younger.

I wonder if they’re communicating through the bond? He knows she can see him, because he nods at her to give him the saber. And unless I didn’t see correctly, she mouthed/whispered his name. And again, we see the connections between them in the fighting style. They’re still acting and reacting like extensions of each other.

The way they meet, the relief on their faces. Relief that melts into stubbornness and determination. Also, the way they take up their sabers in the same stance, the same expression. It’s delicious.

We were ROBBED of seeing the Jedi around Rey. ROBBED.

I’m STILL SALTY that they weren’t there for Ben (that we can see anyway).

Ben proceeded to completely shatter my heart. When he pulls Rey into his lap, he looks around like he’s waiting for someone to tell him what to do. He’s actively seeking guidance and help. And because we don’t have an in to Ben’s head, we don’t know if someone told him what to do or how to do it, or if anyone comforted him. But we do see his face go from disbelief to despair to acceptance.

The face touch. Stop breaking my damn heart.

When the Core ships arrive, I’m almost positive I saw The Razorcrest and the Ghost. I need to check the disc where I can pause it, but I’d put money on it that I saw them.

The way the trio grabs for each other at the end is more movie-shipping-OT3. Finn holding the two people he loves most in the world, right where he can see them. Poe taking Rey’s hand. They don’t know what happened in the Citadel, but I’m pretty sure Finn can feel how tired Rey is, how wounded she is. And they’re There For Her.

Rey burying the sabers on Tatooine has so many emotions attached to it. Tatooine, where Anakin Skywalker was born of the Force, where Luke spent his formative years. Luke and Leia resting together in the Force, as their student moves on and tries to find her way in the galaxy. And the parallels and tie ins from TFA to now, like Rey building a dual saber from parts of her quarterstaff, the sand sliding, and the OT callback to the protag being silhouetted by the twin suns, were satisfying.

Rey’s saber being yellow is something I find… interesting. If you look at the newer movies, whenever a blue or green saber crosses with a red one, the light sparks and blending of the plasma fields look yellow. And Kyber crystals (in the new canon) aren’t colored. They take on a color when the jedi awakes the force in them. So for her color to resonate yellow as someone balanced in light and dark makes a lot of sense.

I have… Opinions on the surname controversy that I’m still trying to sort through. And I definitely have Opinions on Ben sacrificing himself (mostly that the entire sequel trilogy spent two and a half movies harping on about balance only to kill off half the balance and leave a Force Wound in their protag)

***

Was Rise of Skywalker a good movie? Eh. That depends a lot on your criteria.

Was it a successful Star Wars movie? That also depends on your criteria.

But for me, it felt like Star Wars. It felt like an ending to the Skywalker saga. Did I get everything I wanted? No. Am I salty about parts of it? Absolutely. Are there plot holes I could drive a Death Star through? You betcha. Were we robbed of a better, more cohesive movie based on the leaks from JJ’s crew? YUP.

But I found things to enjoy. I got things I wanted (OT3! Force Sensitive Finn! Bendemption! Lando! Hope for the galaxy!), didn’t know I wanted (Master Leia! D-O the anxiety droid! Generals Finn and Poe!), and things I definitely didn’t want.

#star wars #Star Wars Spoilers #Rise of Skywalker #Rise of Skywalker Spoilers #TRoS Spoilers #Episode IX spoilers #Episode Nine Spoilers #Reylo #Rey/Ben #Rey #Ben Solo #I will Cut a Bitch over a Skywalker #Sher does Star Wars #long post #look I have a lot of feelings okay

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alcida-auka · 6 years

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Rey Killed Her Parents

Rey Killed Her Parents — Just One of My Crazy Star Wars Theories

Hey everybody, I don’t do this too often, but I love the new Star Wars movies so much that I’m coming up with all kinds of crazy speculations for the trilogy and 9th movie, much like I did with X-files back in the 90s. Now I’m not the first person to have theorized that Rey killed her parents — which I find oddly reassuring–but I’d like to add my own process as to how I came to this fun little tinfoil theory with some visual cues from the films.

So how did I come to the theory that Rey is responsible for her nobody parents never coming back?

The Force Awakens

Well, it goes back to something I first noticed back on my second viewing of The Force Awakens a few years ago. I would not really come to the conclusion that Rey destroyed her parents at that time, but I did notice something that seemed too significant to ignore.

Namely it’s this:

In Rey’s force vision, in which she sees scenes from the past and future, she stands outside of herself as a young girl, arm held tightly by Unkar Plutt [likely why she has an aversion to having her hand held by the way]. As her family’s craft leaves her behind, ascending to the sky, she cries out pleading with them to come back.

But this particular vision of the craft ends strangely. As the ship ascends, the sky turns an ominous red. And take note of that, because in Star Wars red lighting is often used to denote something evil or dark afoot.

Later towards the end of the film, we will see this darkening of the sky and subsequent red lighting again. We will see it when Kylo Ren kills his father immediately after the Star Killer base planet begins to implode. From Abram’s commentary on this scene, Kylo Ren is entirely conflicted just prior to this darkening of the sky, and up untill that point he is truly thinking of leaving with his father. When the sky darkens, the lighting on Kylo Ren’s face changes from blue to red, and it signifies an abrupt change to evil/darkness. He immediately kills his father, an act he regrets intensely upon its conclusion.

Now, at the time, I only noted that the darkening sky in Rey’s vision was a parallel to the darkening sky above Star Killer base. I knew it was intended to be significant, but I was unclear as to how. It could have meant nothing more in Rey’s vision than a foreshadowing of Kylo’s patricidal act, a blending of timelines. But why cast that dark red shadow on both scenes? A dark red shadow that is specifically intended to symbolize the dark side?

This is where the Last Jedi comes in, and where I started drawing my theory.

The Last Jedi

In the throne room of the recently deceased Snoke, Kylo Ren makes his famous plea to Rey to join him in creating a New Order. Desperate to get her on his side, to “let go of the past”, he encourages her to remember her parents, something that she has been actively repressing for years.

Rey admits they were nobody. Kylo Ren, who so far has never been deceitful to Rey (and Rian Johnson the director backs this up), clarifies further her own memories that he saw back during their force bond in the hut. They were drunks, junk traders, who sold her for drinking money. Rey does not deny this and her face shows an unhappy acceptance.

But where it gets interesting is this: Kylo also says her parents are dead, buried in a pauper’s grave in the desert.

Now many fans have thought this a discrepancy from what Rey’s vision in the Force Awakens showed us.

But I don’t think that it is, and I certainly did not think it was in the movie as I watched it.

It’s entirely possible that Rey’s vision of her parents leaving were a fabrication in her mind. After all, Rey is an unreliable narrator of her own life, and created the fiction of her parents coming back as a way to rationalize her abandonment and the notion her parents did not want her. If she believed her parents were “somebody”, a great Jedi hero, a warrior, she could fantasize that they HAD to leave her for heroic reasons, and thus it would mean she was loved, and they would come back.

However, I find the idea that her vision of the abandoning ship being a fabrication to be unlikely. The Force does not create deceitful visions.

Thus, Rey’s parents did leave her.

But how did they wind up dead in graves on Jakku? Why are we told this?

This is where the Force Awakens vision and red sky comes back into play.

Just as the darkening sky and red light immediately preceded the violent action of Kylo Ren killing his father–a sudden, impulsive act–this image of the same red light symbolizes a dark act immediately after the ship’s ascension into the sky.

That act is Rey, a child powerful in the Force, unintentionally killing her parents by bringing down their ship, in a naive attempt to bring them back to her.

This is why she remembers being abandoned, and why Kylo Ren has seen their graves in her mind. Rey’s parents never got to leave, and furthermore, she remembers them being dead. I can imagine that this would be such a traumatic act that she blocks it out, and over time creates her comforting myth that someday they’ll return for her, that she was never a bad girl who hurts people, a girl that gets abandoned for being bad.

Now, obviously, this is just a theory of mine, and some other folks on Reddit and Tumblr. But it’s cool to see others have arrived at the same minor theory on their own as well.

There’s no telling if it is remotely true until the 9th movie comes out December 2019, but if it is, it has some interesting implications for her character.

It becomes yet another parallel to Kylo Ren. These characters are both mirrors of one another in several ways–they feel abandoned by everyone around them, they are intensely lonely (even Rey, when surrounded by her new Resistance friends, comes off to me as standing a part from them), and possibly, they have both killed parents.

Ben Solo is a character that has been described as “coming from the light [eg, has good, heroic parents]” but is putting on the dark persona of Kylo Ren. Nonetheless, he is drawn to the light, both in himself, and in the person of Rey.

If Rey is a mirror of Ben Solo/Kylo Ren, we can surmise that she “comes from the dark” but wears a persona of light. She is drawn to the dark side, something that Luke Skywalker points out repeatedly. Of course, she is also drawn to the darkness of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo.

How is Rey “from the dark”? Possibly this references her parents being good-for-nothing drunks, happy to sell their child. Going with my theory, though, it could also be that the “dark” is her darkside powers that she used to kill her parents.

Again, as much as Kylo/Ben is dark and light, so is Rey, their approaches to it are simply reversed.

And it’s not talked about much, but Rey wears a mask as much as Kylo Ren wears his metal one. It’s simply that Rey’s mask takes on the form of her la-di-dah, Pollyanna unbridled optimism. It’s a shame that people feel Rey is a dull character, because in reality she is as complex as he is, and is also fighting conflicts within herself. Through the Force bond conversations with Kylo Ren, the Last Jedi film was showing us the growing cracks in her ever-happy facade.

If Rey has killed her parents, not only will it bring about further conflict within her character for the last film, it may help to shatter some of her Jedi-like self righteousness that she tends to have. Granted, killing your parents when you are 5 years old cannot be compared to a young man in his 20s killing his father, but she will realize how intense the darkness in her can be. So far she has chosen the Light side of things easily, but I envision her having a crisis of faith in the next movie.

Ultimately, whether this theory is just tinfoil over-analyzation or something that could actually be realized, I suspect that the next film will have both Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Rey achieving balance of Light and Dark within themselves and between each other.

Side observation–one does wonder if Kylo Ren saw in Rey’s memory that she killed her parents and not just the graves on Jakku. If he did, it would mean he chose not to tell her, either hoping she remembers on her own, or not wanting to hurt her in that moment any more than she already is.

I could see the latter being a possibility–much of his suffering has been in the perception that people think he is a monster, and he is just stepping into the role he thinks everyone has driven him into.

While Kylo Ren certainly wants Rey to stop pining after her parents in the hopes that she’ll rely only on him and no one else (he is desperate not to be alone in this scene), he doesn’t exactly want her to become so utterly despondent to believe she is a monster incapable of being loved. Hence the “You’re nothing but not to me”, but no “And you’re a murderer just like me!”

Also, Unkar Plutt must know some shit, he’s the last guy aside from Rey to have seen her parents. I get that Rey hates Plutt and does not want to talk with him any more than she has to, but I wonder if she will ever consider asking him about that deal her parents made.

Anyways, that’s my crazy tinfoil Star Wars theory. I have no idea if Rey actually killed her parents, but it’ll be interesting to see if this one pans out or not! Have you got any zany wild Star Wars speculations or theories? Post them below!

#starwars thelastjedi rey reykilledherparents starwarstheories

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lucidlucy · 6 years

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Different anon. I think my main worry is that I don't know if I trust JJ to further Reylo, it wasn't canon by no means in TFA, no matter how much (some of) the fandom wants to believe it, and from what I've piece together, Rian did an almost 180 on the script (yes i know JJ was a producer but still, Reylo is Rian's baby) I just fear that even tho they undoubtably have feelings for each other, they will still be enemies in 9 and won't develop past that...

I actually disagree. The foundation for the reylo dynamic was created during TFA. The events of TLJ couldn’t in any way, shape or form have happened without those foundations. The “draw” to the girl, the curious “I feel like I know you” parallels (the visions in which Kylo seems to be the only one to turn and notice Rey in the rain, Rey’s feeling like she’s heard his voice before (novelization), that whole interrogation scene in which Kylo may have as well been speaking about himself because he saw his own loneliness in hers, Kylo’s sudden strong pull to the light coincidentally when Rey enters the picture, and vice versa in TLJ) that point to, as Rian plainly put it, two parts of a whole… those things were created by JJ. Rian simply brought them to light as a logical next step in that dynamic. The fact that Rey continually bested Ren, marking her as his equal when up until then he seemed to be the champion undefeated, were JJ’s ideas. When Reylo was born, it was literally as a way to explain that dynamic.

The romantic aspect of it was born out of other well established fairytale tropes (the bridal carry to starkiller base with the heavy death and the maiden symbolism, the whole light/dark dynamic of equally powerful users fighting it out in the enchanted forest (literally the name given to the forest set in the call sheet by JJ, btw) etc), that, lo and behold, were expanded on by Rian. But Rian couldn’t have done ANY of that without those seeds first planted in TFA, and while I understand that a lot of people aside from Reylos didn’t see it coming, it was more because they had already entrenched themselves in headcanons they wanted to see fulfilled regarding the Skywalker legacy and lineage more than it was about what both the text and subtext of TFA made clear. These two would be important to each other (the hero/main character and the last Skywalker left being important to each other? shocking /s). JJ is basically where the whole concept of Reylo was born. Nevermind that he loved what Rian did so much with the story progression he’s on record saying he wished he had directed it himself. Why would anyone think he wouldn’t continue on from that, when it’s obvious that he’s 100% on board?

Now, whether he’ll make it explicitly romantic is another thing altogether, but lack of explicit romance (kisses on screen, etc) doesn’t invalidate what’s already there. One can’t say that the dynamic of Reylo isn’t integral to the story, in fact, the beating heart of it, simply because we don’t know whether they kiss or not. Fans have taken the concept of “endgame” to mean characters kiss/fuck/whatever or else it’s a bust, but I disagree. They’re already the it thing of this whole trilogy. They already pushed past enemies. It’s obvious they can’t hurt each other. By TFA it’s because the Force refuses to let them when the ground splits neatly between them (and again in TLJ in the throne room when the saber splits), then in TLJ it’s not because they don’t have the chance, but because they choose not to. Rey chose not to kill him when he was passed out, and whatever he may have anger!shouted at Luke, the second he saw her again his look was not one of anger, but one of “I fucked up and I know it” and regret when confronted with Rey’s disappointment.

The story can hardly backpedal on that when we’re THIS close to the end, else the whole 2 first movies become redundant, and that’s not how movie making or storytelling goes. You have point A to point C with a dark and hopeless point B in between for the heroes to overcome. That’s it, that’s storytelling 101. So, going back to hateful enemies to the bitter end is no longer really in the cards, even if IX opens up with Kylo trying and continuing to fail in his endeavors. You have to remember the whole concept of this trilogy is the idea of balance, and these two are presented as the personification of that. Enemies as a concept to the end only leads to death for one or the other, and they can’t/won’t hurt each other, so…

That can’t be really disputed at this point, and all signs point to JJ furthering that story rather than detracting it, given that he was the one to put it in place, imho. I think a lot of the worry people have that they’ll remain enemies is misplaced. they’re not enemies now. They’re stuck on two sides of a war with clashing ideals of what is right but they have long since moved past personal hate for each other. That’s not enemies. That’s “it’s complicated.”

I also hear this is the last movie of the whole Skywalker saga, and I personally don’t see a 40 year legacy ending on a sour note, killing off the last Skywalker unredeemed and branding the whole thing as an exercise in futility by the Force via this one family that ended in tragedy. So there’s also that.

#;;mailday #Nonnie #holy shit this got long #sorry Nonnie #I have a lot of opinions about this lol #reylo

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kannuckthewolf · 6 years

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My personal thoughts on The Last Jedi

Here’s a list:

• Poe’s actions in the beginning were a product from his known knowledge of the layout of that dreadnought thanks to Zay Meeko from Star Wars Battlefront 2 DLC The Last Jedi. Should he have done it? Probably not. Did the cost of all those lives make his actions look reckless? Definitely yes. Was it still worth it? Yes and no, because the dreadnought was taken out, making it a great victory for the Resistance/Rebellion and the cost of life was massive. Which makes me wonder, what happened to B-Wings and Y-Wings? They still had X-Wings and A-Wings. If my memory serves me well, Y-Wings were bomber ships. What happened to them? Were they decommissioned or something?

• So if Luke went to Ahch-To do die, why would he leave two pieces of map that could help someone locate him? Was it specifically for only Leia so that when he died, Leia would bury or burn his body? That needs to be answered somehow because if he didn’t want to be found, then why would he make a map to FIND him?

• Why didn’t Luke ask Rey how she acquired his father’s lightsaber? Furthermore, how did Maz Kanata acquire that lightsaber? Last time we saw it, it went falling down a supposedly endless way on Cloud City in Bespin.

• The whole thing with Leia flying through space was... interesting. I mean, it was hinted heavily in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as well as the canon books she has Force abilities. Just... did it have to look Mary Poppins-like when she floated back to the cruiser? And how did, when that door open, did no one get sucked out into space?

• Vice Admiral Holdo. She was in Claudia Gray’s Leia, Princess of Alderaan book. So I knew who she was, but why wouldn’t she tell Poe her plan? Like the whole plan? Also she didn’t act like she did in the book. She had a weird speech pattern, not like Yoda. She looked like Holdo, but didn’t speak like her character.

• Which leads to wonder where were the Star Wars Loremasters in this? Where was Pablo Hidalgo? He does the visual dictionaries for the new movies. Why didn’t Rian Johnson ask him any of this was aligned with known Star Wars lore?

• Luke’s character. I mean, okay. Luke can change as a character. That’s fine. But the fact that Mark Hamill told Rian Johnson said that this Luke Skywalker wasn’t THE Luke Skywalker, I feel like Rian Johnson should’ve went back to the drawing board. Luke thinking killing Ben Solo, his own nephew, the son of his twin sister and his best friend, was a good idea just was not... Luke Skywalker. Remember, Luke Skywalker redeemed his father, Darth Vader, who everyone in the galaxy thought was irredeemable. Why not sit down and talk to Ben? Why not have an intervention for Ben?

• Also, his reason for his isolation was kind of a let down. Like, your nephew goes to the Dark Side so your response is to give up, cut yourself off from the Force, and run away?! Like what?! I thought the reason was to be more believable than that. Like, his wife (Mara Jade in my mind because she will always be canon to me) was killed by Ben Solo/Kylo Ren and maybe his child (boy or girl doesn’t matter) became hellbent on killing Kylo Ren so they went AWOL then Luke felt so guilty and shit that he lost all hope because not only had he let his nephew, sister, and best friend down, but his wife had been killed by said nephew and his child is going down the path of the Dark Side. You know, a little more emotional impact.

• The whole Canto Bight subplot. Why? We didn’t need that. I get the purpose for it, but it felt to Earth-like, too much Las Vegas/Atlantic City-esque. Also, Maz Kanata was playing a video game during that holo-chat with Poe, Finn, and Rose. You can’t tell me otherwise. Union dispute my ass.

• Vice Admiral Holdo’s scarifice was great with the hyperspace jump into the Supremacy and the Star Destroyers behind it. Just, it would have been more emotional impactful if it was Admiral Ackbar.

• Then again, this was Carrie Fisher’s last movie (Rest in Peace Carrie, you’ll always be my space princess and general). Why not kill Leia and have Holdo take Leia’s position in the Reistance/Rebellion?There were two emotional ways they could’ve done it. Instead, she lives at the end. They’re going to have to kill her off-screen and maybe give her a funeral scene in the next movie. Or just kill in a book or comic and have her funeral in said book or comic which would feel cheap in my opinion.

• Why kill Luke? I get Leia was supposed to have a big role in the sequel trilogy, but just switch her role with Holdo and have Luke die in the next movie. His death scene in this movie did bring tears into my eyes because of the binary sunset theme, reminding us of A New Hope.

• For people who gave The Force Awakens shit for having similarities to A New Hope, there were parallel scenes in this movie with Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. You can’t ignore that.

• Rey’s parents being no one. I’m okay with that. Remember, Anakin was a slave on Tatooine. He came from nothing. Hell, when we first met Luke, he was basically nothing to. While we did learn his father was a Jedi Knight in the Clone Wars, we didn’t see him as an heir to some great bloodline. He was a farm boy who finds out he has the Force. Rey is the same. Some junker girl who finds out she has the Force. Though, I’ll admit, it would’ve been nice if we got a training montage with Luke and Rey. He promised her three lessons and really only gave her one. The second lesson was just talking.

• Ben Solo/Kylo Ren’s personality seemed to switch back and forth between “I’m conflicted” and “I’m a monster and I’m okay with that”. Maybe that constant switching of personality was to show how conflicted he was, but... it was kind of jarring.

• Finn and Rose’s relationship came out of nowhere in my opinion. Rose, I like. Their relationship, not so much. Even Finn seemed surprised and confused when she kissed him.

• I feel like if Finn died in the way that he was about in this movie, I would feel like his arc is complete. He defected from the First Order, simply wanted to run away, then he met people that made him want to stay and fight for something beyond himself. He would’ve died a hero’s death in a heroic way. He would be remembered for this great heroic moment for all time. Instead, Rose crashes into his ship, “saving” him by dooming what remains of the Resistance/Rebellion.

• Luke’s astral projection fight with Kylo was pretty cool. Like, a part of you knew that wasn’t really Luke because he looked younger than he really was. But it was cool to see basically taunt Kylo, baiting him so that everyone could escape.

• The Luke and Leia scene felt more like a send-off to Carrie Fisher. “No ones ever really gone” (or something to that affect). Carrie Fisher will always be with us.

• Snoke dying the way he did wasn’t satisfying to me. Yes, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren killing was great. It was like that scene in Return of The Jedi where Vader’s watching the Emperor cackling as he electrocutes the crap out of Luke and Vader’s like “fuck this, I’m going to save my son” and picks up the Emperor and tosses down a long shaft. That was satisfying. Yes, people cheered at my first screening of the movie (the second time no one seemed to care). But then, after Rey and Kylo fight those red guards, Kylo’s like “I’m going to rule the galaxy and Rey, you should totally join me” and she’s like “Dude, what are you doing? Don’t do this” then the fight over Anakin’s lightsaber which is split in two. Seriously, you have Kylo kill Snoke and making it seem like he’s going to turn back to the Light then it’s all just kidding lol. Then, you don’t have the balls to make Rey go evil because you need that Jedi/Sith battle in your next movie.

• That brings me to this point. People say this movie takes risk. I’d argue it really doesn’t. Yes, they changed Luke’s character drastically. But they swing back and forth. Poe and Holdo’s tensions could have been avoidable if she just told him her plan, instead they make seem like she’s shady as all hell and Poe decides to mutiny for logical reasons until we finally know the whole plan and Poe is now all for the plan. Rey and Ben/Kylo’s Force Bond talks were great, but they didn’t really change either of their characters (though Reylo fans will tell you they’re totally canon now even though she rejects him after their fight on the Supremacy). They could’ve killed Leia and they almost did until they brought her back to life. Luke was against fighting the First Order because he wasn’t just going to walk out in front of the entire First Order with a “laser sword” and fight them even though that’s exactly what he does at the end.

• The Porgs were cute but unnecessary. Poor Chewie. He was under utilized in this movie.

• Captain Phasma was under utilized AGAIN! Seriously, you got Gwendoline Christie to play a kick-ass stormtrooper who’s apparently cool as all hell and then she gets even less screen time as she did The Force Awakens?! You hyped her up so much that of course what little she did do in the last two movies let us down!

• The Yoda scene was nice. It was nice to Empire Strikes Back Yoda again.

• General Hux has been a laughingstock in this movie. He became less redhead Hitler and more idiot general who wants validation.

• Another thing about Snoke. Look, when you or your parents first Return of The Jedi without any knowledge about the Emperor, did you care? No. You didn’t know his background. All you knew was that he was a scary old guy that Darth Vader took orders from. He was intimidating like Snoke was. We only learned about his origins through books and the prequel trilogy. Yes, I thought we’d see him in all three movies, but *shrugs* oh well. We’ll probably learn about him in books and comics now.

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zoeology31 · 6 years

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On Star Wars: The Last Jedi

So I saw Star Wars last Sunday. Between critics bowing down to it and plenty of people on here mourning it’s train-wreck qualities, I was pretty apprehensive, but I wanted to at least see for myself.

The verdict: Most of the movie is a giant mess and I’m glad J.J. Abrams is coming back for IX, but it does pack a punch in some parts. Once my life gets a little less busy, I’ll probably join the growing number of fans and write a fix-it fic.

Major spoilers below. Seriously, I’m about to spoil pretty much everything.

I get that this movie was trying to comment on the hardships of war and how people have to keep their priorities straight and make sacrifices, but did they have to kill so many people? The bombers, all the X-wing pilots except for Poe, the Resistance leadership, everyone who wasn't on the main Resistance cruiser, half the transport vessels, and half the skimmer pilots? None of those were even a fair fight, because they couldn’t fire back. It was just slaughter, and it got painful to watch after a while. The deaths that had the most meaning were the individuals who directly chose to sacrifice their lives for the rebellion: Paige, Holdo, and Luke.

Speaking of fair fights, where were my iconic Star Wars battles? The only fighter-to-fighter combat was at the very beginning and ended with the bombers destroyed and Poe demoted. Rey spent more time fighting Luke than the actual main bad guys, and while her tag-team with Kylo Ren against the guards was cool, I couldn’t really enjoy it because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. And of course Luke’s battle with Kylo Ren, while awesome, doesn’t really count.

A lot of moments felt unnecessary, if not extremely uncomfortable, and took away from the story, including: Rose electrocuting Finn (she could’ve just waved the taser in front of his face and let him explain the tracking situation, with the same overall result), the porgs, the pointless alien nuns, Luke milking the alien seal slug thing, Luke’s comment about Jakku being “pretty much nowhere”, Luke slapping Rey with a leaf, shirtless Kylo Ren in high-waisted pants, 90% of the shots of Kylo Ren looking sad, Rose and Finn (again) getting electrocuted for a parking violation, that opera alien at Canto Bight that looked like someone’s fetish, BB-9E, 75% of DJ, Hux slapping Finn with no consequence, BB-8 driving the AT-ST, Leia slapping Poe, Holdo saying “Godspeed”, Holdo stroking Poe’s face, that thing with Rey and the time dilation in the cave, Yoda’s weirdly corporeal Force ghost, the golden dice from the Falcon, Poe saying “you’re not dead”, that one dude tasting the salt on Crait, Rose kissing Finn, and the awkward introduction between Poe and Rey (weren’t they introduced at the end of TFA?).

What happened to the Force in this movie? The whole Force bond idea felt incredibly shoehorned, and since we don’t find out that Snoke was behind it until much later, we’re expected to believe Rey and Kylo Ren share some “special connection” because plot. It did wind up being pretty cool when Luke used it at the end to trick Kylo Ren, but I’m not clear on why he died immediately afterwards. Was it too draining? Did Kylo Ren running his projection through have a physical effect on him? Did he just voluntarily stop existing? And if Force ghosts can summon lightning, what’s stopping them from intervening further in the world of the living? Why hasn’t Anakin just showed up and killed Kylo Ren? Then of course there’s Leia floating through space despite never demonstrating any abilities beyond emotion sensing before.

Kylo Ren. I am unimpressed with the movie’s repeated attempts to create sympathy for him to the detriment of other characters. Your uncle drawing a lightsaber on you is not in any way an excuse to try to kill him, burn down his temple, and murder all his students who refused to join you. Besides, doesn’t this contradict canon in Bloodline or something? He’s still just as whiny, manipulative, and flat-out evil as in TFA, but now he’s responsible for even more deaths (remember, he fired the shot that blew up the X-wing hangar).

How are we supposed to buy Rey suddenly believing “there’s still good in him” or whatever when Kylo Ren killed her father figure, gravely injured her best friend, tortured her, and is in the process of racking up an even higher body count? TFA Rey is too smart for that, and she would never compromise her new family for the tiniest chance of redeeming a grown man who’s clearly made his choice and whom she owes nothing to. Luke didn’t start trying to redeem Vader until after he learned Vader was his father, what excuse does Rey have? Not only does Rey Nobody make no sense in the context of this movie, it ignores all the parallels and setup of TFA and turns Rey from the rightful Skywalker heir to some random girl who is arbitrarily powerful and arbitrarily the main character.

Because Rian Johnson lives under the delusion that Kylo Ren is somehow the male lead, Finn was forced into an extraneous sideplot and romance that repeated his character arc from TFA. Between getting electrocuted twice, falling into racist stereotypes at the casino, needing Rose to explain everything to him, getting slapped by Space Hitler, and being cheated out of a full-length, emotionally emphasized fight scene against his lifelong oppressor, Finn generally suffers some of the worst treatment of any character in the movie. The casino plot was tedious and its moral felt forced, and the undercover scene aboard the Star Destroyer was disappointingly short and ended in failure. Being sidelined meant Finn wasn’t written as wildly out of character as Rey or Poe, and John Boyega’s acting ensured we still saw the Finn we all know and love, but it was still an incredible disservice to his character.

Even though he got quite bit more screentime, Poe was almost a different character in this movie than in TFA. In the movie, comics, and tie-in novels, he had very clear strengths and flaws: charismatic, selfless, loyal, and an excellent strategist, but too willing to sacrifice himself and not good at thinking long-term. This is all thrown out the window in TLJ, making Poe instead a stereotypical Latino hothead who’s reckless ideas cost dozens of lives and who constantly battles his (white female) superiors. When he mutinies, we’re expected to agree with Holdo and be happy when she lectures him about hope and honorable retreats, but Holdo’s smarmy attitude and refusal to tell Poe the plan makes him seem like the reasonable one. Not only was Poe’s arc a lesson he didn’t need to learn, it was insulting, frustrating to watch, and poorly executed.

The three new characters were unnecessary and stretched the story too thin. DJ was practically useless and his verbal tics were more annoying than quirky. His only role was to show the grey morality of the war, but it would’ve been smoother for Finn to just observe and make his own comments, rather than have DJ and Rose give clunky exposition. Rose was a sweetheart, but her character was completely static and acted more as Finn’s morality pet than an independent person. Her tasering Finn at the start and kissing him at the end was probably supposed to be character development, but both felt forced. Holdo was a terrible leader and difficult to root for until her death scene, which was incredible but would’ve been more impactful with a character we had time to get attached to.

There were some things I liked about the movie. The cinematography was gorgeous when sets were properly lit, especially on Ach-To and Crait, and it had some truly stunning scenes, like Holdo wrecking the First Order fleet, Luke seeing the twin suns on Tatooine, and Rey lifting the rocks for the Resistance. The main cast was as attractive as ever, helped by some top-notch costuming. Despite exchanging zero words, Rey and Finn’s strong relationship was clear as day, and their reunion was fantastic. When Rey swooped in on the Falcon to give the skimmers cover fire and Finn cheered, that was my “I’m watching Star Wars” moment.

Luke’s arc was comparatively decent; he was too surly and irreverent at the beginning, but his criticisms of the old Jedi order made sense and his stand against Kylo Ren was the closest this movie got to iconic. Luke and Leia’s reunion was one of the most emotionally touching moments, and it doesn’t surprise me that Carrie Fisher wrote it. I liked the ending; everyone was together and getting along, the Resistance was safe aboard the Falcon, and Rey literally shut the door in Kylo Ren’s face. Even with the weird sympathy track, it’s clear he won’t be redeemed and it’ll be interesting to see him as the main villain.

#star wars #the last jedi #analysis #rey #finn #poe dameron #rose tico #luke skywalker #leia organa #amilyn holdo #kylo ren #my stuff

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byroncarter · 6 years

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Hi Firstly, I'm not sure whether you are Turkish or not,if you are you can totally answer in Turkish because I'm also Turkish😂. I've been following your blog for a while and I've seen that you are into Star Wars/Kylo Ren/ Reylo and Hileon.Both are my current obsessions and I wanted to ask for your opinion on The Last Jedi,since it's highly criticized among fans, and all those Reylo moments (in case you're a Reylo). I've really enjoyed it and think it was a good movie with little weak moments.

Hello!!

First off, yes I am fluent in Turkish, but since you asked about Star Wars, it’d be easier for me to answer in English, since I’m more used to talk about it in English, and feel like I lack a bit of the “terminology” in Turkish. :)

I’ve heard that TLJ was being critized among fans. Personally, I really enjoyed the movie, I thought it was awesome. It had really interesting twists and scenes.To be honest, I was always more of a “casual” Star Wars fan: I loved the movies and the prequels, I knew all about the universe, but I wouldn’t have called myself a hardcore fan, like I am for Marvel.But since the new movies, TFA and TLJ have come out, the franchise has struck my interest pretty intensely, because I just looooove analyzing and interpreting and researching the parallels and symbols and homages and references in the new movies, compared to the old ones.I’ve seen some really interesting fan-theory videos that made awesome comparisons: Like the parallels between the Obi Wan/Anakin fight in Revenge of the Sith (where everything around them is fire and reminds of hell) and between Rey/Kylo Ren in TFA (where the environment is the literal opposite of hell: They are fighting in the snow).I always thought Kylo Ren was meant to be an homage to Anakin Skywalker, especially to Anakin in Revenge of the Sith. Maybe Kylo Ren will be a “reverse-version” of Anakin? Anakin’s love to Padme was a great factor that pulled Anakin to the dark. Maybe we’ll watch his grandson finding his way back to the light through love to someone.My dear friend @midnightstarsky suggested that BOTH Kylo Ren and Rey might be homages to Anakin, representing the conflict between his dark and his light side.

While thinking and speculating about all this, the Literary Arts student in me is in DELIGHT. All those stylistic devices they are using, all the messages and all the references to the older movies are fascinating to me.I love it when something old gets picked up and reversed and remade and continued, while still paying tribute to where it all began.

Moving on to Reylo…Ah yes, the ship that overwhelmed me, before I even knew it. I’ve been shipping the two since I saw TFA, because the subtle (or not so subtle) chemistry and tension between the two characters was hard to ignore. After watching some theory-videos on YouTube, I was all the more fascinated. Not just about the ship, but also about the two characters. Kylo Ren has always been such an intriguing character to me: His occasional outbursts of rage, that reminded me more of a youngster who just had too much energy in his body, rather than a cold, controlled villain. His appearance that reminds me more of a medieval Knight (especially his lightsaber, that reminds of a medieval sword).And then his scenes with Rey. The way he pickes her up bridal style (there are some pretty awesome theory videos on YouTube that analyze that), and the interrogation scene where Rey sees his face for the first time and how Ren was more “polite” towards her (“You’re my guest.”), something that reminded me of Knight-ish behaviour again.And then Rey… the abandoned girl, that grew up on Jakku as a nobody and found new purpose in the Resistance. The idea that she naively, desperately waited for her parents to come back, and that she seeks a family, a place of belonging for so long. The happiness that radiates off of her in her scenes with Finn and Han. Like a Rey of sunshine :’) And then the way she feels drawn to the dark, which we saw more in detail in TLJ.

I think TLJ picked up all the great stuff we saw in TFA pretty interestingly. The Force bond between Kylo and Rey was very symbolic (someone on ao3 made the tag “The Force ships it”, I laughed for 5 minutes straight). A flawed Luke Skywalker was captivating. It was unexpected and made the plot all the better, in my opinion. Especially in relation to Ben Solo. The scene in the end, where Luke appears to help the Resistance? Awesome.I am a huge fan of the game Luke played on Ben: The way he appeared in his younger state, that would remind Ben of the time he tried to kill him. He did it to provoke Ben and he succeeded: Ben forgot all about the Resistance and all he wanted was to destroy Luke, the man who was the reason he turned to the dark fully, in the first place.I think the fact that Kylo Ren HATES Luke Skywalker this much, shows us more than anything, that Ben Solo isn’t dead. Because it was Ben, it was the nephew, it was the CHILD, that Luke betrayed. Therefore I even would go as far as to say: The boy on the ship, ordering to put every gun that they had on “this man” wasn’t Kylo Ren. It was Ben Solo. It was a hurt and disappointed and abandoned and angry child.

This is getting far too long, okay, I’ll wrap this up by referring to the theme of “Letting the past die” in this movie.Interesting how all sides, both light and dark, seemed to say the same thing, just paraphrased during the entire movie, isn’t it? “Let the past die.”We saw this message in Luke Skywalker who turned away from being a Jedi Master, and was reluctant to come back. We saw it in Master Yoda, who said Luke shouldn’t mourn old books, he should focus on the future not the past.And we saw it in Kylo Ren, who told Rey to “Let the past die, kill it if necessary. The Jedi, the Sith, everything.You’re still holding on, let go!”Even though Kylo Ren’s offer looked like a temptation of the dark that Rey resisted (and aye, Kylo’s imagination included a tad darkness, what with the whole “we’ll rule the galaxy together” part and stuff. But I mean, old habits, die hard), I think the ESSENCE of what he was saying had a deeper meaning. We had a long conversation about that with @midnightstarsky, about how the Jedi and the light were also flawed and open to corruption. If the light was as perfect as they want to have you believe, it technically shouldn’t have been possible for men like Anakin Skywalker or Ben Solo to be tempted by the dark.The flaws of the light where what gave villains like Snoke the chance to use it against Jedis and draw them to the dark.Think about Leia and Han and Luke failing to protect Ben. They are an extremely dysfunctional family and I think that dysfunctionality comes from somewhere.The whole system seems dysfunctional. The Jedi, the Resistance, the First Order, the Sith.So maybe it will be better to let the past die?Maybe the relationship between Kylo Ren and Rey will lead the two of them to create a new order, a new perspective and a new balance between the dark and the light side of the Force.

I can’t wait for the third movie and see where this will all go and how they will wrap up all the things that happened so far.

This got WAY too long. Thank you so much for your question and for reading!! :)Have a wonderful day.

#star wars #tlj spoilers

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