So, I finally figured out what I’m doing with the hangar scene! This one took a while. I wanted to maintain the moment of Kylo’s revelation and the shock it causes for Rey, because it drives the plot moving forward. Without it, the midpoint of the narrative is… nothing, there’s no change, and the second half of the story plods along without the stakes being raised or changed from the first half. It needs something there.

I didn’t want to go with “Rey killed her parents,” not because I think the idea is bad, but because I don’t think it matches up that well with how the fallout of the revelation plays out in the text (or onscreen) - the recontextualisation works on a technical level, but feels kind of off. But with a Rey Nobody edit, there’s not a huge amount to work with. That’s where editing a novel has unfair advantages over editing a film: I’m able to invent new dialogue wholesale, and tweak characters’ interactions and reactions, in service of a different idea and a slightly different approach.

So, here’s what I’ve got. It’s not actually anything that big, just a shifting of gears and actively amping up the “Rey fears her Darkness” stuff:

Kylo’s big revelation is that Palpatine wants Rey dead because he has foreseen that her Dark Side powers will eclipse his own. (This is Kylo being shrewd; it’s not exactly true - Palpatine wants her there alive so he can steal the Force Dyad energy, but neither Rey and Kylo nor the reader knows that at this point.) This is shocking to Rey because not only does it confirm her worst fears about herself and the Dark Side, but it goes even further - she won’t just fall to the Dark Side, she’ll be even more Dark than Emperor Palpatine. From Rey’s perspective, this claim would seem legit, because why else would Palpatine be sending the Knights of Ren to kill her - and Palpatine doesn’t gain anything from letting everyone know Rey will be stronger than him, in fact, it sounds like telling people that would be actively detrimental to his cause.