NeverarGreat said:
DominicCobb said:
Anakin Starkiller said:
Why can’t she just have innate Force powers? Her usage of the Force never felt like a mystery to be solved to me. It’s just protagonist business.
Something something Mary Sue.
To be fair, she picked it up much more quickly than anyone else in the galaxy, including the literal Chosen One.
I mean, in the Original Trilogy, training in the Force is made out to be like putting yourself in the right state of mind. Every single moment on training Luke goes through in the Original Trilogy is a mental exercise, and not the workout regimen the prequels make it out to be or a lot of fans expect it to be based on other fantasy stories, especially ones with hard magic systems.
In that sense, Rey picking it up faster makes a ton of sense. It takes Luke almost a while movie before he even believes the Force is a thing that exists, takes him until the end of ANH before he’s willing to give it the time of day and even toward the beginning of ESB, he’s still not as reliant and trusting in the Force as a Jedi should be. Versus Rey, whose whole thing in TFA was that she starts out already generally believing in all of that, and it just takes her being involved in the legends she already believed in for her to reach the threshhold it took Luke a whole movie to pass.
After that, I’d frankly argue her growth is slower than Luke’s. In ESB, his conflict in training as a Jedi was to learn about what a good Jedi should be, but Rey’s in TLJ is about unlearning the bad and wrong ideas about how the Force works. Which is fitting honestly, after the prequels gave a bunch of people bad and wrong ideas about how the Force works.
As for picking it up quicker than the literal Chosen One… I mean the prequels don’t really show Anakin being powerful at all, all there really is is the Phantom Menace going on and on about how his force meter power level is so high. He doesn’t really do anything impressive, and he’s not shown to be any more in tune with the Force or the universe than any other Jedi, in fact he seems less so. Which is weird since apparently he’s supposed to be born of the Force?
I could go on and on and on about this but this isn’t the trashing the prequels thread.
tl;dr: Rey is great (in TFA and TLJ) and not a Mary Sue (in TFA and TLJ) and Rey Nobody is awesome and Rey Palpatine sucks