TROS roast. Reylo. Star Wars shitposts. Food for (my) thought. Crackpot headcanons. (A Star Wars side blog). 18+ for some profanity & steamy situations
*Staggers in, hungover, 1.5 years late with starbucks* And that’s another thing: instead of Rey’s Big Dark Secret in tros being the asinine Rey P*lpatine thing, it should’ve been that she vibes with the Dark Side as much as the Light. Because the Dark Side isn’t necessarily evil, greed is. Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious is the manifestation of greed, and greed’s counsel is what caused most, if not all, of the problems in all the Star Wars films. But Rey lives in a society where the Dark Side is assumed to be automatically evil, so she is terrified of her friends discovering that about her. With this change, Leia’s words of, “Never be afraid of who you are” would be genuinely moving and meaningful, as well as heartbreaking, because she 1. is Force-sensitive and can therefore feel the dark and light in Rey 2. through her life, has come to terms with the Force being a balance of Dark and Light 3. has learned this too late to say it to Ben, but it’s not too late for her to say it to Rey
I was thinking about Exogol: it kinda looks like there was water on that planet, once. What if Darth Sidious squeezed every last living resource from the planet and continues to siphon energy from it, suppressing life and making the planet utterly barren? What if, to defeat him, the Dyad forces his energy to return to the planet? Ends the suppression of life on the planet surface. What is the remedy to greed? That I don’t know but if a millionaire/billionaire/trillionaire is hoarding money, I want that money redistributed to the working class.
I’m trying to decide how the Dyad is going to defeat Darth Sidious: just using his own force lightning on him isn’t thematically correct, and anyhow didn’t that happen in ROTJ when Vader threw the emperor off the balcony and it didn’t work??? So I need a better solution
The villain of the story is greed. That’s what Darth Sidious represents: the greed of the Empire, the greed of striving to defy death. I’m choosing to focus Rey’s conflict in the story upon the throne of the Sith: to sit upon the throne is to bend the entire galaxy to your will, and that is greed. It’s both justified in her mind (how else will I get the Rebellion to win?) and appealing to her baser instincts (I was the scavenger at the end of the food chain but look at me now! I won’t have to be hungry ever again!). But to sit upon the throne is to exclude everyone else, to bend every friend and ally to your will.
It gets to the point that greed is antithetical to life, and therefore the Force, right? Greed is a cancer, taking and taking and growing beyond the ecosystem’s ability to support it.
I’m trying to decide how the Dyad is going to defeat Darth Sidious: just using his own force lightning on him isn’t thematically correct, and anyhow didn’t that happen in ROTJ when Vader threw the emperor off the balcony and it didn’t work??? So I need a better solution
My take on the Dyad Reunion on Exogol, because I deserve nice things.
“Your path lies here before you, Empress,” Darth Sidious says, and Rey can’t take her eyes off the throne. “Do what must be done to save your friends.”
The throne is pulling at her as strongly as a tow-rope, darkness crowding in on her from the edges of her vision. The lights above her are being extinguished mercilessly, one by one. Soon, there will be nothing left, and at that time, it will be too late.
She takes a step forward.
A blaster bolt ricochets off the mechanism keeping Darth Sidious aloft, the creature hissing as the crane draws him away, out of danger. Rey spins in her spot, eyes darting, but another bolt doesn’t come. The shooter wasn’t aiming for her, she realizes, something light and bright stirring in her chest. That’s when she feels that something - someone - is coming towards her at full tilt…
Ben - Ben! All pretences cast aside, his armor thrown away, Ben! rounds the corner, and her heart jumps, as if to meet him in advance of the rest of her body. She can feel the moment he sees her - an echo, reverberating between them like a blaster bolt crashing against the durasteel walls of a room growing smaller. She can’t help it: she kicks up her heels and meets him halfway, each of them reaching out, a mirror of the other. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, their fingers touch, then - their hands grip, tightly! It’s the completion of a circuit, a sensation neither of them could’ve imagined, even with the ghost of it (in the firelight, both of them shivering with cold) at the forefront of their minds. Ben’s eyes are so open! His masks are all gone.
You’re here, they both think, hearts racing and - Rey can’t stand it anymore, she drops his hand and embraces him like Finn would embrace her: without reservation or embarrassment, holding him as tightly as she can. He doesn’t hesitate, pressing her to him with his immense strength, arms shaking. Their hearts are racing: with fear, with hope…!
What are we going to do? they wonder, still holding on as tightly as they can. They can feel it raining down all around them, the fear drowning the whole place, the flood that is rising to drown the universe…!
“He says that if we try to kill him, he’ll win,” Rey rushes to explain, listening to Ben’s heartbeat, speaking aloud to try and corral their thoughts.
“He’s a liar,” Ben bites out, cheek pressed to the top of her head. But we can’t risk it, they both think simultaneously. He’s too powerful…
Rey can see it unspooling, more and more vivid as each moment passes around them: death upon death, Ben’s last breath, her unending loneliness in the endless, barren sands, gasping, gasping…!
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Sidious was the poison in the water the whole time. Ben thinks about the stattered remains of the Galactic Republic, the shards of the New Republic, the fragments of ships and their pilots raining down from the sky: this was my design, indeed. Destruction and suffering was his aim and he accomplished all of it, enslaving everything to his will - the known galaxy, Vader, even the Force itself…!
“He can’t be killed,” Rey says miserably, twining her fingers into Ben’s sweater. “I know you can feel it.” She has to breathe for a moment. “The death of the body isn’t enough.” The Spirit survives and uses the killer as the host!
The immovable weight hangs above them: Ben’s death, the Spirit’s triumph, Rey lost to the aching, gnawing hunger of loneliness and anger until the cycle repeats itself again…
And then Ben’s arms squeeze her even more tightly, just for a moment. “We’re not dead yet,” Ben says fervently, determinedly. “In motion, the future always is.”
Out of nowhere, the smell of the barren planet around them changes just enough and Rey is abruptly, vividly reminded of her years in the desert: unending days, the chasm of hunger - then, a white-knuckled grip, finding the next foothold, taking until there’s nothing left to claim. One footstep following the next as heatwaves shimmer all around her. “Until our bodies are cold,” she says slowly, hope flickering into being, “it isn’t over.”
“Submit all things to your will,” Ben quotes slowly in agreement, “your blade, the universe, but above all, your destiny.”
Together!
“I promise this is truly heartwarming,” Ap’lek Ren says, with strained pleasantness, from somewhere to their left, “but we gotta wrap this up, kids. Kuruk might be running out of blaster bolts.”
Ben squeezes her once more, then lets go. “I’m not a kid,” he snipes back at the knight. “I should leave you here to rot just for that.”
But the knight laughs, brushing it off. “So, what’s the plan?” he asks, taking a moment to check the edge of the ridiculous axe he’s carrying.
Ben inhales deeply, then exhales sharply. “Don’t die,” he replies with finality. After a beat of silence without any further plan, the knight turns his helmet to look at him incredulously, then turns a bit to look at Rey instead.
“Can you believe this tactical genius?” he asks her sarcastically and, despite everything, a laugh bubbles up from somewhere within Rey.
Ben watches her laugh, a helpless softness in his eyes, then draws himself to his full height. “Stay behind us,” he orders Ap’lek sharply. He cuts off the knight’s indignant protest with a shake of his head. “You all got us this far, but now it’s our turn. Cover us so we can do what we need to do.”
Ap’lek scrutinizes Ben for a minute, but reluctantly nods in the end; he turns and fades into the shadows, to lay in wait.
Ben and Rey turn to face Sidious; Rey takes his hand. “Don’t let go,” she commands.
I wish I could express how bananas this scene is (4/?)
This scene is still not over.
Finn draws Rey’s attention to the prisoner ship and the fact that Rey’s stint into parkour is going to cost the group dearly if she doesn’t get her ass in gear. (I have utterly given up on trying to grasp the geography of this scene.)
Rey experiences a spike of fear that her messing around is going to get Chewie killed and she reaches out with the Force to pull the ship back.
Rey’s all worried and scared the ship is going to get away, oh no time is of the essence! She’s concentrating really hard, she’s pulling the ship back…!
Then she just happens to look down.
Queue the Villain Music!!
*gasp!* He’s………..alive!!! (I laughed OUT LOUD in the theater.)
Kylo is in literally no hurry here. I cannot emphasize enough how slow he’s walking away from that wreck when we have seen him stomp quickly and loudly through ship halls. He doesn’t start playing tug-of-war for another few feet at least.
With as slow as he was walking, Rey had plenty of time to get the prison ship back to the ground. She was just too distracted by her ex to get the job done 🙄
(The original post was getting too long so I’m starting a new one.) I found these tags on one of the reblogs about a possible minor fix to the TIE backflip scene:
#the fact that even op’s soultion look like paltry bandaid says something#honestly there LITERALLY NOTHING one can do to make this scene moetionally compelling#how could you compel people to root for anything here when there is no conflict between Rey not wanting to Kill Ben and then violently#trashes his ship which rolls like a ball on a cliff like that?!#like JJ handwaved it away when Ben saunters away from it like it was a minor inconviniences#and we laugh at it now#but when i actually saw it first time it honest to god look like Rey genuinely wanted Ben dead and doesn’t care#so her little tear and pity party in death star looked like big joke (tags via @ainomica)
First of all, you’re right and you should say it!
The main purpose for this blog is my efforts to run a post-mortem on this movie. The above tags made me think as I hunt for the root of the problem in this movie.
1. JJ wanted a retcon but didn’t put in the work to reestablish the characters as different from the previous movies. This is fanfiction 101: you have to establish the new assumptions. He was relying on the audience’s lizard brains to make the assumption that Ren is the Bad Guy and Rey is the Good Guy, and further make assumptions about their motivations, based solely on their costumes and voice tenor. Then, without firmly establishing the characters’ new roles in the story, JJ threw them together into situations thinking, “He’s the Bad Guy and she’s the Good Guy so of course there’s inherent conflict!” Newsflash bro: it didn’t work.
((2. If JJ wanted to make a retcon so bad, why did leave in a plot thread that is obviously a reference to TLJ, and even more specifically, Reylo from tlj?! (”I offered you my hand once” is what I’m referring to here). It boggles the frickin’ mind.))
3. The lack of emotion in this movie is death from a million cuts. The lack of believable emotion I point out in the original post is just one microsecond in a movie full of these missed opportunities. Yeah, one shot isn’t going to fix the movie (my suggestion really is a paltry bandaid solution).
4. JJ didn’t want a compelling emotional narrative. He wanted a David-and-Goliath shoot-em-up in which the Bad Guys are mercilessly punished.
5. The internal inconsistencies are what make the movie incomprehensible. Aside from the core theme of the movie being rotten, it’s probably the worst thing about the movie. I’m going to do a post about this as I think about it more, because this is a huge part of why the movie was so bad.
5. Frankly, Rey does want Ren dead in the TIE backflip scene. There’s no other way around it. You don’t cut the wing off a TIE and not expect to kill the pilot inside. As a result of that, her sorrow during the Ocean Battle absolutely feels like crocodile tears. This is a really good example of how the internal inconsistencies of the movie cause it to shoot itself in the foot. And I’ll reiterate: this juxtaposition could have worked, if there had been groundwork done of ‘oh, Rey looks conflicted/sorrowful’ during the TIE backflip scene.
6. …..I literally just had a thought others have definitely said first: Rey Palpatine truly is her grandfather’s heir. She:
- infiltrates the resistance and plays to their expectations of what a Jedi Hero should be in order to gain their trust
-cons Leia into trusting her
-tries to get her ‘friends’ killed and/or captured by the FO (by wandering away and delaying Poe from launching Ochi’s ship)
-tries multiple times to kill Ben and when that doesn’t work, cons him into trusting her - by telling him what he wants to hear (“I did want to take your hand - Ben’s hand”) - to the point he gives up his life for her ((not gonna lie, this section is the worst part of the realization for me))
-kills her grandfather so he can’t betray the truth of her machinations to the galaxy (i.e. can’t reveal that his goals are her goals)
-gets as much semi-valuable junk from the Resistance as she can (i.e. the Falcon and the ‘sabers: the Resistance was being held together with spit and glue there at the end)
-traps Luke and Leia’s spirits on a planet they both hated (?to get revenge for the fact they were hidden from Palpatine when Anakin became Vader?)
-then leaves to presumably spread her poisoned doctrine (the veneration of Luke Skywalker Jedi Hero) to the universe and people will listen to her because they assume she’s a Jedi
That last one is an EXCELLENT idea! Explains a lot! If Palpatine ever wanted to win, he would do it like that - BECOME the Jedi hero AND a Skywalker for the galaxy, let the galaxy venerate false assumptions and they should have peace…
Realistically, I think, the problem is the narrative treats Rey as a child to Ben’s adult. She throws tantrums that DO aim to hurt, but since she’s a child, she doesn’t have perspective on repercussions and Ben gives her room to vent and otherwise acts patiently, as an adult. The narrative sees no problem with that, since Rey indeed is a child through the narrative lenses. The one time her aggression DOES have a consequence- she mortally wounds Ben - she reacts exactly as a child would: she gets scared she’s gonna be scolded by adults for being bad, she feels sorry for herself, she wants a takebacksie (and GETS one) and she RUNS AWAY, to sit out her misdemeanor. A kindly adult Luke appears to pep-talk her, pat her on the back and give her his old toys. That’s also where the cognitive dissonance stems from in the writers chiming Ben’s sacrifice is okay because it’s just like Vader’s for his SON: this movie sees Rey as the CHILD generation (like Broom boy) even as compared to Ben and Finn and Poe, in the end -her pinnacle is “becoming” someone’s child declaratively, not an adult. Her last shot is “Luke BEFORE he went on a coming of age journey” (precisely because she is meek and alone, and dwarfed by scenery, not even holding her adult saber up affirmatively).
When I say that punishment is the rotting tissue in the heart of TROS, I mean it. I’ve seen some replies to that post talking about Ben specifically, but how the filmmakers killed Ben is just one brick in the wall. Fixing that one plot point doesn’t fix the overarching problem in the movie.
I’ve seen some posts criticizing JJ for not having a theme in TROS, and while I totally agree with those posts, I contend that there is a theme to the movie: punishment. The filmmakers wanted a david-and-goliath space shoot-em-up in which Good Triumphs Over Evil Despite The Odds but didn’t put in any of the work for that story to happen. Instead, what they made was a mean-spirited, cruel story about mean-spirited, cruel, uncaring “”””heroes”””” doing everything in their power to mercilessly beat down the enemy or just be plain shitty to their “”friends””. The filmmakers went out of their way to be as vindictive as possible, even humanizing the troopers just for the “””””good guys”””””” to kill them without even the option of surrender. There is no such thing as forgiveness in TROS. There is no such thing as ‘learning from your mistakes’. There is no escaping the powerful who strong-arm and/or brainwash the poor into fighting for them. There are only The Chosen Pure, and those that The Chosen Pure enact vengeance on.
I would also like to add that it seems throughout this trilogy series that in the end Rey is punished for romantically loving Ben as a significant other.
She’s punished for it and in the end its like none of her struggles or emotional conflict on just loving him ever really mattered.
This is exactly what I mean: nearly everything that happens is vindictive or punitive in some way, and it’s almost custom-tailored to the intended victim. Rey especially suffers from the filmmakers needing her to be 1. the flagship of The Chosen Pure and 2. A Strong Female Hero™.
The real rot at the center of TROS, the poison at the very heart of the film, is the idea that punishment and retribution must triumph over forgiveness and reconciliation - that unless you have been deemed worthy you must be destroyed without mercy.
@soft-prince-of-alderaan replied, “I don’t even think you can prove your worthiness. That’s how deep its cynicism-masquerading-as-hope runs. You are doomed from birth. This was true for Ben and is now also true for the troopers who never got ‘chosen’ by the Force to escape the FO.”
It occurred to me yesterday while I was perusing the TROS salt tag that in TROS, the filmmakers inadvertently made Kylo and Rey very much alike. This similarity is more subtle (less hamfisted!) through TFA and TLJ but it’s undeniably there.
They’re both angry. They’re both impulsive. They’re both Down To Fight. They both feel the dark side strongly. (I could go on but I haven’t seen TROS in two months, the details are fuzzy.)
And, like, they’re a Dyad In The Force or whatever - so it makes sense to me that they’re very similar in all these important ways. But then I realized the implications of this idea: I asked myself, “With Rey’s behavior in TROS, why do the protagonists welcome Rey when they rejected Ben?” In a more meta view: why did the writers of TROS punish Ben and ‘reward’ Rey when a lot of their behaviors are very similar?
Think about it: Rey in TROS does a lot of the things Kylo does in TFA or TLJ (see above) but Rey wholeheartedly embraces the Skywalker/Organa/Solo legacy - admiring Luke and Leia, wanting to be them, striving to ‘earn’ their legacy. Ben distanced himself from his family, killed the emissary Leia sends to bring him back. He opposed Luke. “Let the past die,” he insisted to Rey. He is punished by being killed off unceremoniously and being completely forgotten by every character in the movie. Rey’s narrative ‘reward’ is that she gets to take on a name that holds prestige and power in the minds of the writers and receives the metaphorical blessing of her guardians (Leia and Luke as benevolent Force ghosts).
And what did Ben do wrong? “He killed a lot of people!” Well, Poe kills a lot of people and he’s shown to be a triumphant hero in the end, so that’s not it. “He’s angry!” So is Rey.
I realized that Ben’s chief sin in the eyes of the writers is that he rejected the legacy of his family.
So, in the end, TROS is a movie that preaches: if you dare to reject anything your parents teach you, if you dare to distance yourself from any tradition based on harmful thinking, you will be rejected and forgotten and that’s the happy ending.
#i’m just really salty ok#i have mostly disowned my parents so this message was particularly painful for me#i understand that this understanding relies on the writers not being hypocrites#dont get me wrong they are indeed hypocrites#so this is kinda a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ situation#they’re hypocrites AND their themes suck
I know that in TROS, Rey’s mimicking behaviors/actions are supposed to convey that she’s Turning Evil, Ok? but it really falls flat. The filmmakers relied so heavily on the audience’s assumptions that they didn’t do any real work to tell a real story.
When Threepio says - totally sincerely - to Poe, “Taking one last look, sir - at my friends” I legit want to cry.
In grief: none of these a-holes Threepio is looking at have treated him with a shred of respect, decency, or friendliness through the whole movie. He has no friends there to look at. And his husband isn’t there to object to this BS and teach these people a lesson - R2 probably could’ve prevented this whole fiasco.
In frustration: this is one of the most contrived plot pieces I’ve ever seen, and for what - to have a ‘touching moment’ as a ‘send off’ to Threepio? Go to hell. This isn’t touching, it’s enraging.
Re-reading my scene analyses of TROS, I’m viscerally reminded how terrible the movie was. This is a film absolutely butchered in the edit, yes; plot twists and whole scenes manufactured in edit with ADR, yes; but I suspect it was rotten from JJ’s first cut.
