and Rian had to have his umpteenth subversion.
Buy Rey rejecting Kylo wasn’t a subversion at all. Having her join him would have been a subversion, since we expect the hero to reject the offer to join the villain, like Luke and basically every hero in every story ever.
But Rian = The Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened to Star Wars, so gotta make stuff up to be pissed at him for when there isn’t anything there I guess, huh?
You’re right actually, I just got so conditioned to him doing it that I lumped that expectation in with the rest of the subversions. Thinking about it now, if Rey HAD joined him then that would have been one subversion (the only one) that would have actually worked for me, instead of coming off as another cheap “gotcha” trick.
Rian is certainly the worst thing to ever happen to Star Wars in my books as for me he essentially killed the new trilogy and the possibility of enjoying a larger saga than the original 6 part one. His movie literally killed joy and interest in new Star Wars movies for me.
nl0428 said:
When Rey shut the Falcon’s door, she wasn’t turning him off in an act that she can’t trust him anymore, but in an act to show him that he needs to find where he truly belongs within himself before she can allow him to come to her. She’s not turning Ben away forever, but only until he begins to become and realize the person he needs to become in order for him to be with her. Ben begins to slowly come to a realization when he looks down in loneliness, defeat, and feeling upset. Very much how he felt weakened when he killed his father. You can tell just from reading the looks on Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver’s faces.
Kylo is responsible for killing most/all of Luke’s students, murdering Han Solo in cold blood in front of Rey, being an enabling part of an organisation that wiped out BILLIONS of people and other alien races in the destruction of the Hosnian system and who knows how many other atrocities. Kylo is supposedly the reason Luke does a 180 flip on his OT character as we knew him, causing Luke to go hide on an island while he waits to die alone. Luke’s absence is a major factor in Snoke and the First Order rising to power unchallenged. You think after all that Rey will enter into a loving relationship with this utterly evil, deranged and mentally unstable excuse for a human with a galaxy worth of blood on his hands??
There might yet be a path back to the light side and redemption for Kylo as with Vader but Rey is actually correct in calling him a monster, which she seems to forget 2-3 force-skype sessions later and if she ends up “with him” in IX that would be completely fucked up and the only way it could have made sense was if she went to the dark side and gave into some dark, evil desires she had been suppressing till now. Luke even comments earlier how she went straight to the dark side during her lesson, that she didn’t even try to resist it and this would have been the perfect lead in to her joining Kylo. Yet for some reason this leads no where and I think this is where my original thought that her not joining Kylo was a subversion as Rian had set up a few things to try and lead one to think that’s where it might be heading.
ChainsawAsh said:
Eh, there are some things about TLJ that were clearly designed specifically to subvert audience expectations, but it’s certainly nowhere near as prevalent in the film as the internet would lead you to believe.
It’s certainly not every minute or anything like that but it is a consistent theme running throughout the entire movie and this is based on my own experience, not what the internet says 😉 It’s one of the main things I recognised early on for myself when I started to internalise afterwards why I felt like shit after watching what was supposed to be a Star Wars movie.