DominicCobb said:
You’re complaining that TLJ didn’t rehash Empire enough now? Not every film requires the protagonist to “pay dearly” when they make a mistake. What’s important in a story of failure isn’t consequence, but learning. Luke was put on his ass because that was the lesson that he needed to learn at that moment - the importance of patience. Rey learned an important lesson too (that unspoken third lesson, especially obvious if one considers the deleted caretaker scene), which is that the person that she kept looking around for to put her faith into was actually herself all along. Her failure with Kylo served a narrative purpose to illustrate this (amongst other things). Rey losing a limb wouldn’t have (necessarily) done that.
No, I didn’t want TLJ to rehash TESB, but I did need there to be consequences. One of those consequences might have been her accepting Kylo’s outreached hand. That’s where the story was going when Kylo rescued her from Snoke, and they worked together to defeat Snoke’s guards, but RJ backed down, and so Kylo reverted back to his role as the villain, and Rey to being the hero. It’s great that she has to learn to put her faith into herself, but the problem here is that she’s already been shown to be fiercly independent, and so this lesson only reaffirms, what she was doing all along, namely trust in her own abilities. It’s not much of a character arc, if an independent strong character learns to have faith in himself or herself. The discovery of her parentage could have been interesting, but ultimately doesn’t affect her choices, or the trajectory of her character. She was going to be in time to rescue the rebellion in any event, and so the entire parentage subplot feels like treading water to me.