@Hal 9000 The scavenger clothing is part of who Rey is, why would we want to take that away?
Isn’t this the entire lifestyle Rey wanted to run away from and associated with her being worthless? 😕
The “scavenger clothing” thing was something I found on the cantina subreddit in defense of Rey wearing that style of clothing in TRoS.
I’ll copy and paste a great relevant post from the cantina sub I saved awhile ago from u/ludwigritcher752:
In The Force Awakens (2015), we learn that, 30 years after the events of Return Of The Jedi (1983), Han and Leia are now separated due to what happened to between Luke and Ben (without knowing what Luke actually did). Han became the famous smuggler again and Leia went back to her political and military occupations, becoming a general. When their relationship was broken, both returned to what they were before they met for the first time.
Assuming that the heart of the Sequel Trilogy is the relationship/romance between Rey and Kylo, Han and Leia relationship in the Sequel Trilogy is almost a “foreshadowing” of what was going to happen between the heroine and the villain, specially between The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise Of Skywalker (2019), or at least is a very good rhyme.
At the end of The Last Jedi (2017), after the development of a deeper and more intimate dynamic between Rey and Kylo, Rey closes the door on him. They broke up. The idea that, when a couple brakes up, they both return to what they were before their first met plays again with Kylo and Rey.
In The Rise Of Skywalker (2019), Kylo reconstructs his mask (symbolizing that he is now the same Kylo that we met at the beginning of The Force Awakens) and Rey has now a very similar outfit and haircut to her TFA look when we first met her in Jakku.
Even the idea of Ben coming home in The Rise Of Skywalker mirrors with Han’s own situation in The Force Awakens, when Maz says to him “Go home” and responds “Leia doesn’t want to see me”. Han and Kylo feelings are pretty much the same: they don’t believe that they will be accepted again. In the case of Kylo in The Rise Of Skywalker, this works with both Leia and Rey.
We all criticize how J.J. brought back Kylo’s mask and Rey’s three buns and how this contradicts what Rian established in The Last Jedi, but there’s nothing we can do about it and the best thing we can do is to trying to make sense out of it and making the Sequel Trilogy more consistent. Intentionally or not, I think this idea works pretty well.
And then a great comment by u/Pyramaniac:
Destroying the mask doesn’t contradict TLJ. Destroying the mask was out of frustration of being a knock off and failure to live up to Vader, not necessarily to let the past die. When Kylo said let the past die, he meant the Jedi, the Sith, the Empire of Old, etc. and make the future his way, a new order as per his vision.
He resurrected the mask because he felt confident that he could live up to Vader in turning Rey dark and killing Palpatine. He openly told Palpatine twice that he’d kill him after being subservient to Snoke, and actually succeeded in turning Rey to the dark side before Leia turned him back.
We openly see Kylo calmly and contently embracing Vader’s mask, as opposed to in TFA where he was anxious and insecure.
There are multiple ways to interpret it. In 7, he clung to the past. In 8, he was hell-bent on killing it, which Totally lost him the fight with Luke. In 9, he found balance with the past and was a new man. Did you see how he wiped the floor with Rey?
The mask was like working out a muscle. It was weak in 7, Got ripped in 8, and grew bigger in 9.
In 7, he tried to hide behind the mask as much as possible. In 9, he took it on and off as he pleased.
Rian Johnson himself even said breaking the mask didn’t represent letting the past die.
Nothing got contradicted at all, the mask just went in a direction that flew over everyone’s head.
These movies are clever as HELL. That’s why people don’t understand them and complain.
I actually included this post and comment in a cantina post I made where I collected all of the visual parallels, themes, etc. in TROS that helped me appreciate it (DM me if you want a link to the post), so I’ll include my comment I put below it:
I’ve always liked how Kylo’s journey with Vader’s legacy is symbolized through his mask. He worships Vader’s mask and makes his own, but then he forgets about Vader’s and destroys his own when Snoke tells her he hasn’t lived up to the legacy. However, after encountering Vader’s master a year later who tells him he can not only live up to Vader but surpass him, he feels confident in himself and brings out Vader’s mask to meditate on it again which inspires him to reforge his own, even stronger now with the Sith metal Sarassian iron used as the glue.
Edit: Forgot to include the post and not just the comment lol