Don’t apologize for brainstorming on your own thread!

The big issue the writers ran into by introducing this concept in the last film is that you have to exposit so much backstory in order to explain it, and then it screws with the pacing of the story they’re trying to tell present-day. So trying to go into more detail sort of just exacerbates the issue.

And of course, one of the major storytelling rules is to show, not tell. You can kind of get away with it when it isn’t a lot, but the more that must be explained, the messier it gets. I thought the idea of having a chapter that just quickly flashes through what happened wouldn’t be a bad idea, and then you could get into her dad’s head as to why he wouldn’t give up her location.

Could it be possible Palpatine didn’t know about Rey until recently, and Ochi killed her parents before they had a chance to even mention her to Ochi? Like, they left her on Jakku in their own ship, then Ochi found them, snuck on their ship and killed them while they were in a drunken stupor?

But again, you can get away with this complicated backstory in the novelization, but even the little bit we get in the film is too much nonsense for my tastes. At least you’re trying to make some sense of it.