Lemme first just say how legit insightful and extremely useful everything you’ve written is, and it’s very helpful to me going forward.
Hey, I am glad to hear that! I try to not let my suggestions stray too far from what your objectives are for this project. At the very least it helps solidify you’re reasoning for some of the changes you want to make.
I avoided all leaks before I saw the film, and once I’d seen it, it never occurred to me to go back and read any of them. So that’s new information to me, and really interesting that by trying to unpick the tangle I wound up back at that same earlier point. That’s gotta be a good sign! Is it worth me seeking the leaks out and reading them, like the DOTF screenplay, do you reckon?
Oh, you definitely should! The leaks just summarize what the edit was shaping up to be before rewrites and reshoots, and his later update explains some of the changes that were made. So you won’t be able to pull lines verbatim like you can with the DOTF scripts, but it could give you an outline that you could potentially follow. In a way, your book edit could essentially follow what was, at one point, an earlier version of the film. As if Rae Carson had just written her novel based on the original script, and not the final cut. I personally prefer the leaks’ depiction of the Palpatine plot and the Dyad stuff. It felt more like the manipulative Palpatine we saw in the prequels, trying to groom our protagonist(s) and appearing weaker than he actually is to gain sympathy and catch his enemies off guard.
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I personally prefer the Dyad to be part of the big reveal at the nadir of Rey’s arc; Kylo knowing something about her that she doesn’t is important, I think, especially something that connects the two of them. It gives her a more personal reason to believe maybe she’ll join him, and it also means the two options Kylo presents for her are “you turn to the Dark Side and become more evil than Palpatine, or, you turn to the Dark Side but you do it with me, someone who you already have a personal connection with,” which makes his preferred choice a lot more palatable to her. I think it should also be a reveal to the reader, since we’ve already seen all the evidence of the two being uniquely connected (Force Skyping etc), and now we finally get an explanation which we didn’t expect but makes sense in retrospect.
Yeah, I’m thinking a lot on the same lines as you. Maybe the book depicts it better, but I worry about the audience really believing that Rey could become more evil than Palpatine. It’s not like when she shoots lightning she actually enjoys the power she feels. She’s terrified of it. The movie shows that the dark side is in her, but not that she really is seduced by its power at all.
And I understand wanting the Dyad stuff to be a part of the reveal to Rey. I still think it would be nice to hint at how Kylo found out what a Dyad even is, though.
I want to avoid the stuff about killing him = he can possess you, since I don’t really see the logical connection between the two things. It’s something I found distracting when I watched the movie for the first time - it feels like a pair of unconnected events.
I’m not sure if I understand. So how are you planning to do the climax when Rey confronts Palpatine?