The lack of political context irked me at first. Eventually, I realized the relationship between the Republic and the Resistance is at least roughly analogous to the relationship between the French Resistance and Free France in World War II. This is an imperfect analogy but the closest historical example I can think of at the moment.
The Republic and the First Order each occupied a large part of the galaxy. Wary of an arms race out of a fear it could provoke war, the Republic signed a disarmament treaty with the First Order, which reneged on the agreement. The Republic secretly provided indirect support to the Resistance while publically denying this.
See, this is all good stuff and makes them feel like less of an empire 2.0 but the problem is that none of this was actually in the film. Its a huge shame. However, this may have been done intentionally since TFA was meant to be a nostalgic film with it being so close to ANH. Problem is that the nostalgia doesn’t hold up through repeated viewing and you start asking questions to which the film (or the whole sequel trilogy) doesn’t answer.
Logically, one person must have been the first Force user in the galaxy if you go back far enough. That person must have taught himself without training. Right?
While true, I imagine that scenario being a long long process of them discovering the power to becoming fully trained. Far longer than normal Jedi to be trained (from kid to adult). I’d even say that he/she wouldn’t have even come close to mastering the power but passed what little they knew to someone else who continued exploring the possibilities. Now we come to Rey with huge spikes in knowledge and power without even being told that any of these possibilities exist. Like I said in a previous post in this topic, apparently the cannon explanation is due to the force balancing her out with Kylo (which is why there’s a lot of talk about balance etc in TLJ) but if that’s the case then now Disney have went and put a plot hole in the original trilogy since the force never balanced out Luke and Vader so that he could kick his ass in Cloud City. It’s as if they just wanted to skip any training so that they could just carry on with the story without any regard as to what has come before.