I was looking forward to seeing your post about your ideas regarding TROS!
To be honest, I’m really surprised that you’re killing Rey. With how much you have been pushing this idea of portraying balance in a different way, I felt the obvious way to do that would be to have both Rey and Ben live, so they can work together to forge a new path. I personally feel like the way the story ends would be really ambiguous for most audiences to actually be satisfied with, especially if you paint Kylo as not really being redeemed.
But as far as I’m aware there isn’t a version where Rey dies, so it might be interesting to see how that version would turn out.
As I watched theatrical trilogy, I never ever wanted Kylo to be redeemed. I thought it was a terrible decision to go down that path after seeing what he did to Han. There’s no way I could ever forgive him, but I loved him as a villain. I don’t think he deserves a redemption arc, as I find his pursuit of Rey to be predatory and not a selfless act befitting of the Light. I don’t see how any of his actions paint him in a good view, so he will remain as a burdened and disgraced individual, suffering the consequences of his corruption. He has no one. Maybe it ends ambiguosly, but at least something different happens this time. The cycle of dark beating the light and then light beating the dark appears to end, and at last people can rest as both sides have fallen.
My idea of balance for this film is not having Rey and Kylo live to lead a new order of light and dark, but to have them essentially both die in a way, physically or spiritually, and signify that the age of both the Jedi and the Sith has ended. In a way, they each contributed to the destruction of both the Jedi and Sith orders. I wouldn’t say either order is good for the galaxy, and for there to truly be peace a new order would need to rise in the void. It is almost as Kreia originally wanted it… No Jedi and no Sith. People are free, for now.
A future story I’d tell would be Kylo becoming a sort of oracle, teaching others about the failures of both sides as a warning of flippantly creating dogmatic orders. The key to peace with the force is symbiosis with life, not adhering to a man-made code.