To me, the solution would have been simple.
When Rey goes to Ahch-to, she’s avoiding her fears, but she should have also been having a crisis of faith in the power of the Force (which Luke helps restore by lifting the X-wing).
At the end, to complete her journey, she decides not to avoid her fear, but also not to try to use brute force to overcome it. As Luke should have done in the cave in TESB, she doesn’t use her saber, and puts her trust solely in the force. When Palpatine starts shooting her with lightning, she turns off her saber and lets the lightning strike her - but it doesn’t, her faith is rewarded and it phases through her, Luke on Crait style (but without the need for astral projection). The lightning going through Rey destroys the temple and kills Palpatine.
People would have hated it, but it would’ve been pretty cool and a fitting conclusion.
Eh, feels too much like a deus ex machina for me. I’d prefer for Force powers to have some sense of realism, rather than just being a get-out-of-jail-free card for true believers. Plus, if you can’t get hit by lightning when you trust yourself in the light side, why did Luke get hit by lightning in ROTJ?
Yeah I don’t really care about that, to me it feels like a proper step up from the last film (and would’ve have made her death by exhaustion make a lot more sense). Plus she’s got the thousand generations living inside her or whatever.
Regardless, there are a few ways to accomplish the same idea. Her life-force creates a shield, or the ghosts of the Jedi block the blasts (ROTJ early draft style).
I disagree, I think that the “always make it one step up from what happened before” attitude was what made the movie so unfulfilling in the first place. It doesn’t make narrative or dramatic sense for Rey to just magically not die. The Force ghost idea might be better though, Jonh in the fanedit thread already did something like that.
Did you miss the part where I said she still dies? In my mind it’s the final installment there’s a license to show something we’ve never seen before. And I think I pretty well explained the narrative and dramatic sense for it.
Not that any of this matters of course.