LesPaul32 said:
Also, if I could add my own input regarding any additional line alterations: the line that still lands with a painful thud for me is the “They sold you, to protect you” moment.
To be clear, I have no major issue with the film portraying Rey’s parents as being vaguely noble in their intentions… despite how crowbarred into the story it can feel at times. I just find the notion of selling your kid into endless slavery as a means of protection to be a really problematic concept to take seriously, especially when it’s so quickly brushed over with just a single line and a rushed flashback.
To me, this line attempts to sloppily reaffirm TROS’s newly proposed concept that Rey’s parents were completely innocent and did everything they possibly could for her, while still trying to somewhat gel with the retroactively jarring Simon Pegg slave trade moment in the TFA forceback.
I feel that in trying to achieve both goals at once, the film ends up severely missing the mark on each. My proposed fix for this is to trim the line to a simple “They sold you” with Rey promptly cutting Kylo off with “Stop talking!”
This change would instead make Kylo’s part of dialogue exist as more of a crushing taunt to Rey. It highlights the pain of her abandonment, a decision made by her parents which inadvertently went on to define her entire adult life (and character arc), a topic to which she’s more than understandably sensitive to. The actual payoff of this sequence (her parent’s intended nobility in selling her) would then have better punch, in that their “noble” intentions would now be revealed in the later flashback, instead of being deflated and spoiled in Kylo’s already redundant expositional line.
This change could also very mildly gel better with TLJ’s “drinking money” reveal, in that her parent’s intentions now have just a few clicks more ambiguity without such a concrete explanation given, leaving room for why supposedly “good” parents may have handed Rey over to Unkar Plutt, of all people.
Perhaps they were indeed good people forced into a tough situation, but did they truly do everything they possibly could to save their daughter from a miserable life? For me, having this question remain even vaguely open gives Rey’s arc in TROS so much more dramatic complexity, instead of just having her parents be flat out good people with no shades of grey at all.
Would it be feasible to trim the line like this without it disrupting anything else, or being too jarring? Less jarring than the line already is, I mean!
I don’t disagree with your points, but personally, I don’t think it matters so much with the Rey Palpatine version. We’re already committing a massive ret-con by making her heritage important; to me, making her parents good people is just kinda icing on that cake, rather than a new problem unto itself.
To put it another way, I’m just cutting my losses on the “Rey parents” stuff, which is why I’m holding out for Rey Nobody. But I definitely agree that her parents shouldn’t be good people in that version. Feel free to voice your thoughts on the matter on the Rey Nobody thread.
(… sorry for the essay. Oops! I guess I dislike the implications of the original line even more than I initially thought… lol)
I’ve written a few essays myself! I don’t think any of us would be contributing towards a fan edit if we weren’t passionate about Star Wars. As long as it’s respectful, I don’t think there’s an issue.
Shaddy Zaphod really hit the nail on the head, I think: “it’s becoming more and more impressive to me just how knotted-up the problems with this movie’s writing are…man this is a real fixer upper of a film.”
