Thankfully the story around this movie is shaping up to specifically be about JJ’s terrible storytelling and the way this movie betrayed The Last Jedi, so I feel like the long term conversation around it is going to be more like “Hey remember when Lucasfilm fucked up a completely good trilogy in the last movie?” instead of the ROTJ discussion where people just accept the retcons as canon now. Because frankly the Luke/Leia sibling reveal was as foreshadowed as and made more sense than Reypatine
Yeah, that’s what I think too. It’s still going to be accepted by a lot of people, unfortunately.
The sibling reveal ass-pull is the worst thing about the OT, it instantly shrank the universe and will always feel disjointed (I don’t remember seeing any part of the OT for the first time, it’s been on a loop since i was born- I still don’t naturally think of Luke and Leia as twins even though I’ve always known they supposedly are), but it doesn’t break the story, it doesn’t destroy anyone’s character arc. It leaves Leia hanging as far as resolution with Anakin, but that wasn’t something she needed until the retcon. They do at least acknowledge that it’s missing and try to address it (’tell your sister you were right’).
Whereas this Reypatine Skyusurper shit defeats the entire ST narrative. And no, it is not about found family.
1. Rey’s whole problem she needed to grow out of was her delusion about her long lost family who totally loved her and living in a shitty desert by herself with their imagined ghosts instead of getting off her ass and having a life of her own, she needed to stop looking for parents in every authority figure she met, she needed to accept her past and move on and forge her own identity. That was her entire character arc and the whole thematic basis of TLJ was confronting her with it. With this ‘um actually’, the story now says she was right to sit around in a graveyard waiting for her parental daydream to come true and to have a ready-made identity handed to her on a silver platter with no character development or hard work necessary on her part whatsoever. She’s back in the fucking desert on a dead planet with a delusion family of ghosts, but now the ghosts are literal.
2. Rey is a grown ass adult who ‘adopted’ herself into a dead family. They didn’t adopt her. This is infantilising and creepy. She doesn’t need a mummy and daddy, she needed to grow up and be her own person and start her own family. Now she never will, she’s completely subsumed any stirrings of her own identity she started to have. Ben was the only person who pushed her towards adulthood and actualisation, without him she settles back into her bad coping mechanisms surrounded by enablers who don’t know or understand her well enough to help. This is a horror film on at least three levels- Rey as the cuckoo changeling who steals the place of the true child, the Skywalkers as a cursed family of sociopaths who are haunting this bystander now that they’ve wiped themselves out, and Rey as mental patient who retreats completely from the real world into her fantasy.
3. Good Victim/Bad Victim replacement child bullshit. All of the Skywalkers and Han are such gaping fucking assholes they reject Ben but love Rey for the SAME reasons. Because she’s just inherently better than him and there’s nothing he can do to be worthy. There’s no moment in his life he could have done something differently to be accepted, he’s just a garbage child no one wants. He was doomed from conception. He dared to be traumatised by being preyed on, abandoned, and betrayed, so he doesn’t deserve to live.
4. Terrio said in an interview that the ‘original sin’ of SW was separating the twins. So adoption is bad, actually. Never mind that Luke and Leia were separated for their protection and both went to loving homes where they were raised well by good parents. They didn’t get to grow up together on Tatooine so that’s terrible?? And he says they were never reunited there so we all wanted that. a) No we didn’t, Chris, everyone hated Tatooine and no one wanted to live there, Luke says ‘if there’s a bright centre to the universe you’re on the planet that it’s furthest from’, Anakin was a slave there, his mother was murdered there, it’s a DEAD PLANET where BAD THINGS HAPPEN and every character wanted to escape from it b) Have you seen RotJ? Because Luke and Leia were together on Tatooine in the movie, my dude. Leia got to be a slave there for a while too. How fun for her to get in on the family tradition.
5. You made it 100% about bloodlines, Chris. This disingenuous bullshit that it’s about rejecting that is the most hollow fucking nonsense I’ve ever heard.
Rey’s power came from her bloodline, her ‘darkness’ is biologically inherited and isn’t her fault and disappears with no effort from her, you turned the Skywalker name into a fucking superhero mantle and had all the legacy characters anoint her as their heir because she was just born worthy. You made her ‘heir of all the Jedi’ and they’re her ‘chosen ancestors’. Hey, dumbass, the Jedi don’t have heirs. Anyone can have the Force, anyone can be a hero without the Force- you have destroyed that by making Force sensitivity the sign of the elect. F/nn shouldn’t be Force sensitive and making all the defected stormtroopers Force sensitive robs the characters of agency. You have rewritten a story about the deathless hope offered by the eternal possibility of choosing differently into a story about predestination.
This was never about ‘the Palpatines’ vs the Skywalkers. The Emperor was just one evil guy whose backstory and bloodline were irrelevant, he stands in for all selfishness and callous ambition, for the temptation to choose power and control over love. It’s a personal story about individuals and individual struggles- how to be an ethical adult. Lineage didn’t fucking matter, it was so important that Vader was Luke’s father because of the personal relationship it gave them, because of how it challenged Luke and his worldview. The connection it gave them which would radically redefine the stakes and ultimately give the OT its meaning. Rey has no connection to Palpatine and being related to him does nothing but implode any meaning her character ever had.
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