WARNING: There is a link to /r/saltierthancrait. If you despise that sub, I don’t recommend reading it.
TLJ give no motive why Rey’s parents left her on Jakku.
That’s the point. When Rey admits her parents were nobody, it meant they had no good, actual reason to abandon her, it meant they did this all for nothing, that they didn’t care about nor love Rey, they didn’t give a shit about her. It meant that, to her parents, she is worthless. Even if you cut out Kylo Ren’s following lines, it still has the same meaning. I heavily recommend you re-read the section of her TLJ arc in my actual post itself, to understand what I’m saying.
It’s even framed that way in TLJ. Why else is she not affected by the truth by the time we meet her at Crait? Because she’s clearly moved on from her parents and accepted that they did throw her away like garbage, that they did think she was worthless, and now she’s relying on the Resistance for validation.
That is clearly what Rey believes at the time. If you read about kids who have been abandoned, they can have many conflicting feelings, emotions, memories. Rey has been clinging to the idea that they will come back for her. Again, very typical for someone who has been abandoned. Kylo twists her memories (he was in her mind searching for the map so he likely picked up a lot more that he later found useful). He amplifies that feeling that although she hopes her parents will come back, she doesn’t know of a good reason why they left her in the first place. He is trying to pursuade her to join him and he is the one saying her parents were junk traders, nobodies, that Rey had no place in the story, that they sold her off for drinking money and are dead in a poppers grave in the Jakku desert. Rey said they were nobodies, but Kylo filled in the rest. Probably all things she had though at some point, but none of it true.
I just watched the scene and caught something so many have missed. Here Kylo is saying let the old die while at the same time he is doing exactly what we have seen every Sith do, try to turn their opponent and make them their apprentice/partner. I find it historical that here is his saying he wants to break with the past while repeating the past. The irony is beautiful.
I’ll give you a few comparison examples or something like these, to hammer my Rey pointer in.
Example 1.
You’ve probably seen Finding Nemo. Coral is killed by the barracuda and this heavily affects Marlin, he becomes overprotective of his son Nemo to make sure he doesn’t end up in danger, to avoid facing the same trauma went through when losing Coral.
Imagine if the third movie came out and blatantly revealed to us that (surprise!) Coral never actually died in the first place. This would undermine the entire first movie, including Marlin’s character arc - especially since it was the thing that made his arc necessary in the first place.
If you can say with a straight face that, “Oh, but bringing back Coral DOESN’T undermine Finding Nemo, because we NEVER saw the barracuda eat Coral!”, then I don’t know what to say.
Yeah, it doesn’t change the initial trauma or reaction to it. People have been writing that sort of story as long as stories have been told.
Example 2.
Imagine if Return of the Jedi revealed that Darth Vader was lying to Luke about his father’s identity in Empire. That would undermine the point of “I am your father…”, since it was there for this reason: “How is Luke going to deal with the revelation of Darth Vader being his father?”
If you can say with a straight face that, “Oh, but Darth Vader lying DOESN’T undermine Empire, because we had no reason to believe he was telling the truth!”, then I don’t know what to say.
That is exactly what I am saying. Perhaps you have forgotten the three years of endless debate on whether or not he was telling the truth.
See my point?
Also, as the other user stated, Rey is the one who admits her parents were nobody, not Kylo. He gets her into admitting the truth she has hidden away, then Rey herself admits they were nobody. He’s just elaborating or adding onto what it meant.
And there was absolutely no indication that “Rey’s parents were nobody” or anything else I said about that was otherwise in The Last Jedi itself.
If you read about kids who have been abandoned, they can have many conflicting feelings, emotions, memories.
Star Wars is a fictional universe. It doesn’t have to follow reality. (You might see it as ironic since it came from me, who detailed on how Rey has a core belief of self-worthlessness, but then, again, Star Wars picks up on some things from reality and doesn’t at times.)
In TLJ we have Kylo badgering Rey, telling her she remembers and she admits they were nobody (that is as far as Rey went, but Kylo went on to describe a scenario that we have no verification of). When we pick of the conversation in TROS, Kylo says that Rey’s parents were nobody because they wanted to be. They sold her to protect her. The only part of the TLJ conversation that was negated were the lies Kylo told (or perhaps they were what Rey had suspected or what Unkar Plutt had told her) that went beyond nobody. Nobody was confirmed in TROS.
But you really don’t get deeper story telling if you get stuck on what seems true in one chapter cannot be countered later. That sort of reversal is a major part of story telling. Characters actions revolve around what they believe to be true. When they learn it is not true, they adjust accordingly. We already have that with Ben telling Luke that Vader betrayed and murdered his father. Luke’s actions up until that reveal in TESB are based on that, but his actions after that are based on the new information. And we already know that he believes Vader, but he confirms it with Yoda. And yet we have that same thing play out with Rey’s parentage and it is shocking and horrible and it reconns everything that came before. Nonsense. It is just a tool of story telling. One that has happened in real life so often that we know how the human brain reacts to such things.
Face it, TROS doesn’t contradict a word of TLJ that comes from a trusted source. Not a word. It only contradicts what Kylo was saying to convince Rey to join him (which didn’t even work).