Yes, except for the fact that Anakin went through a decade of Jedi training, and still failed to become the Jedi, he was supposed to be. The prequels put the entire concept of believing in prophesies in doubt, and reinforce the idea, that allways in motion is the future.
Sure, but like Rey he was pretty gifted when we first met him.
I think there is a question that people aren’t asking, which is “What exactly is Jedi training”. I don’t think Jedi training is about moving rocks or lightsaber technique. I think Jedi training is more about indoctrination. The Jedi are a religion, and like most religions, you have to start them young so they understand the world they way you need them to, because Jedi in the Jedi Order are basically celebate monks. Thats why the council rejected Anakin, too old to indoctrinate, and they were right. The jedi don’t spend 10 years learning how to fight and move rocks. Their lessons are basically learning about the force and how to understand it better, but understand it the way the Jedi want them to.
You could also say that things like moving rocks or deflecting laser bolts are pretty much the Jedi traning 101, in EpII we see kids deflecting blaster bolts, they probably can lift brooms as well with not much traning. Anakin didn’t need training to use his force powers to Fly Pods. Luke didn’t get much training to learn how to grab his saber and to use the force to blow up the death star.
Lukes training in Degoba wasn’t about lifting rocks, he could do that without much of an issue, but to understand why he could lift rocks. What he needed to learn about the force and how it connects to the universe.
Is Rey faster and more powerful than Luke and Anakin? sure, but I don’t see this being without precident.
Rey gets her trainig the same way you teach a child to swim, throw them in the deep end. Kylo’s probing of her mind taught her how to fight back, which taught her how to influence that storm troopers mind. She’s as powerful as the narrative needs her to be. It would have been nice for her to stay longer on the island, sure but I think she gets everything she needs to know for the narrative.
Which is why I find the Rey’s traning argument to be kind of petty and shortsited.
To me being as powerful as the narrative (or the writer) needs her to be is precisely the problem. Luke could lift a rock, but lifting an x-wing, or a ton of boulders was impossible for him, or any other novice, because it requires the mindset of a Jedi, to see beyond preconceptions, to be able to reach a level of control that comes with dedication, and experience. This is what makes becoming a Jedi so arduous. To now have a character come in, and do it all on the drop of a hat greatly diminishes the trials of all the Jedi that preceeded her in my view. It’s like having a novice who never did any sports compete in the Olympics, and still come out on top despite a lack of proper training. If not liking that is petty, then so be it.
Yoda was disappointed that Luke didn’t lift the X-wing, which means he knows he could have. His problem wasn’t that he was a novice.
I always thought that having Yoda say ‘size matters not’ was an extremely daring thing for the writers to do, because could potentially break the idea of a Jedi as a videogame character with leveling up and unlocking abilities and whatnot. The Force is a kind of spirituality made manifest in a world. For it to work as such it must be, in a sense, boundless in its potential. I imagined that when Yoda said this the implication was that everyone has the potential for unlimited ability in the Force, since it’s more primal and important than matter. It’s merely the limitations of the mind which keep a person’s abilities in check, which is presumably why the Jedi liked to recruit at such a young age - small children have less mental barriers. When Luke failed to lift the X-wing, Yoda implies that his failure is precisely because of his lifetime of assumptions as to what is possible.
But presumably the lack of assumptions alone is not enough for lifting X-wings. One also has to be conditioned to believe that they can do these things in variance with their own understanding of physical reality. I imagine that this is why mentors are so important - if you have an example for what is possible, you can override those ingrained assumptions much easier.
Based on this, I can see how Rey would be an ideal candidate for ability in the Force. She is constantly looking back to her young childhood and has a strong faith formed over her entire life as she’s waited for her parents to return. Because she’s waiting for them, she has never traveled off planet, even though she is clearly capable of doing so. In fact, she is established as being overqualified for a scavenger’s existence, but because she stays she has known no real failure from inability. Her conception of good and evil is childlike due to her nostalgia and desperate need to return to that state of belonging, to the point where she accepts Maz’s view of the light/dark dichotomy without question and joins the Resistance without a second thought. Her mentor is Kylo Ren, whom she ultimately defeats in both movies. She is a person who has not yet found her limits, not yet known real failure and defeat. This makes her terrifyingly powerful in the Force, but also terrifyingly fragile, for with a single failure she could lose much of her ability.
At least that’s how I would interpret the character. I’m willing to bet JJ doesn’t share this interpretation.
I like your interpretation, except for the fact, that if her desperation of being accepted, of finding a home is her driving force, and she has zero training and experience, she should be extremely vulnerable to manipulation, and temptation. Hence, for her character arc in the ST to work she had to accept Ben Solo’s proposal in my view, and take his hand. In stead RJ seems to waver, and after an extremely interesting dynamic, the best in the film in my view, where black and white become gray for a while, the two characters fall back to their traditional hero and villain roles, and the movie becomes far less interesting, as the Empire vs rebels/Jedi vs Sith battle continues.