Since I wrote about Kylo’s character for this novelization in the main topic thread, I figured I should write out my goals for Rey since it was brought up.

The passage that I’m basing Rey’s character on in this novelization is the following passage from chapter 2:

“There it was. Her greatest fear. That these people she’d come to care so much for would be disappointed in her, maybe even hurt by her. And then they would disown her, just like her parents. She’d been alone for so long. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing any of them.”

Basically, she gets super frustrated when she messes up on even the slightest of things. This is because she thinks the only way other people will accept her is if she satisfies them in all ways. But obviously nobody is perfect. Fixing Luke’s lightsaber she fails at, contacting the past Jedi she fails at, and she has a hard time taking out a simple training remote. Rey sees all of these failures as diminishing to her value. But as TLJ points out, failure is actually a good thing since you can learn from it.

The dark side is “the quick and easy” path to mastering things. That’s why Rey is so drawn to it. But it comes at the cost of immense shame for Rey. So it’s a sort of lose-lose situation for Rey, where she wants to be perfect asap so people are proud of her, but also doesn’t want to use the dark to get there.

Obviously in the end she is taught that a person’s value is determined by their heart and spirit, not what other people think. And the calm and courage that Leia was trying to teach her simply had to do with that general message - you shouldn’t apologize to anyone for who you are. You have to find comfort and pride, not fear, in who you are.