He hasn’t even met her before she’s realized the truth of her parentage.
‘Dear child, you already know the truth. Whomever you’re waiting for on Jakku…they’re never coming back. The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead.’
So glad that this minor mystery that she, by her actions, made peace with in TFA is now her central character flaw.
Of course you cut out an important part of that dialogue
Maz: “They’re never coming back. But there’s someone who still could.”
Rey: “Luke”Actually forgot that part, but it doesn’t really change the point.
It’s relevant insofar as it sets up that Rey has transferred her search for a parental figure from her actual parents to Luke (as Kylo points out).
As Kylo notes in TLJ
“You can’t stop needing them. It’s your greatest weakness. Looking for them everywhere - in Han Solo, now in Skywalker.”Her flaw is not the mystery, nor simply coming to terms with the fact that they’re never coming back. It’s relying on them or someone else in that role to guide her. The fact that they’re nobody isn’t devastating to her because it means she’ll never see them again, it’s because it means she doesn’t have an easily understood preordained story to follow (like being a Skywalker would), she has to figure one out for herself.
I don’t think Rey waited her whole life for her parents to return simply so they could reveal ‘her place in all this’, but because she wanted a family.
Wanting a family with whom to belong isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength. Of course it’s typical Kylo to make that mistake, but it shows the limitation of using his reasoning on Rey’s character flaws. Rey might have gone to Luke’s island ostensibly for the Resistance and for his guidance, but her real reason was to find a genuine belonging that she has lacked her entire life. If Luke had been that kind, fatherly figure that she imagined, she wouldn’t have gone to Kylo as a last resort, to find some sort of decency that even Luke couldn’t muster for her.
Searching for belonging and a “place in all this” are two separate things. As I said in my post (perhaps not worded properly), “Her flaw is not [about] coming to terms with the fact that they’re never coming back.” The reasons she’s fixated on them in TFA and TLJ are different. In TFA she wants a family, and she finds one in the Resistance. In TLJ, after the Force has awakened in her, she’s wants to understand herself as a person with a purpose in the galaxy. She explicitly states as much when Luke asks her why she’s there. The idea of “searching for belonging” still exists in TLJ, but it’s on a more subconscious level for her (she thinks she’s overcome it but perhaps she hasn’t fully, which is understandable).
When Kylo instead dives further into nihilistic abandon, telling Rey that what she’s searching for is a preordained place in the story, it’s his warped interpretation of her journey. He’s trying to give her what she wants, to the best of his understanding. But she doesn’t care about all that, not really.
So if Kylo was lying and her parents really were super secret Jedi or Skywalkers or Kenobis or Palpatine’s granddaughter, it wouldn’t make any difference to her. The fact that they never came back is all the evidence she needed in TFA that they didn’t care, and that she’d need to move on. This scene needed to directly threaten Rey’s journey, but it is a big swing and a miss, in terms of challenging her.
When Vader was revealed to be Luke’s father, it struck at the heart of Luke’s journey to be a Jedi. He wanted to be a Jedi like his father, and he never dreamed that his father could be anything but good. It was a revelation engineered for the audience to be sure, but more importantly it was put in place to directly challenge Luke.
When Kylo reveals that Rey’s parents are nobodies, it is no revelation except maybe to the conspiracy-minded audience members. Rey already knows it, and more importantly has known since TFA that they’re never coming back. If Kylo had made some argument to Rey that Luke, Finn, Leia all cared about Rey because of her powers and that he alone cared about her as a person, that might have struck closer to her core journey. But instead Kylo clearly only cares about her for her power, whereas Finn cares about her regardless. It’s a simple choice for her to reject that sort of temptation, and she does so even before the end of the movie.
It was a scene by, for, and to the audience, not Rey.
As most fan theories would prove, there’s any number of reasons why Rey’s family might not have come back.
The scene’s possibly a revelation only for the audience, sure (debatable in terms of the stuff about them being dead, hard to say for sure where that’s coming from), but that doesn’t mean it holds no weight for Rey. It’s her admitting some hard truths that she’s seemingly repressed or lied to herself about for awhile. When the last time you saw your parents was when you’re ten, it’s probably pretty easy to think there’s potential for them to be someone far beyond what you knew them as.