Yeah, that doesn’t work still. Her parents being nobody was about her not feeling like a part of this big and important conflict. Her grandfather being the biggest and most important part of this almost-century of conflict does contradict that. It contradicts her emotional arc of having to create self-worth, rather than her importance being externally from who her parents and grandparents were.
Her feelings of worthlessness don’t come across at all in Rise of Skywalker. It’s a feeling that she must be evil because Palpatine is evil. And overcoming that is literally what Luke already went through with Vader. It’s reductive to Rey as a character on a storytelling level, repositioning her again as a proxy for Luke rather than an autonomous character, and it’s also reductive to her arc that she already went through in Last Jedi to learn that she is her own person regardless of who her family was.
It’s just bad writing. Like it all you want, maybe it helps you with the accusations that she was a “Mary Sue” or whatever. It doesn’t make up for the fact that it was bad writing that hurt the character and story. Maybe that can and will be fixed, but it hasn’t been yet.
While I’ve enjoyed this thread immensely I have to agree with this. That said, as a huge fan of TROS, I like the ‘Rey as proxy Luke’ thing because it kind of goes where I wish the story had in ROTJ. Rey’s revulsion at her heritage, as well as the shocking manifestation of her inherited power during the Chewie incident, is much more convincing/interesting to me than Luke’s out-of-the-blue “there’s still good in him, I can’t kill my own father” routine. But this is purely because I view TROS in isolation as a defacto ROTJ reboot. In terms of being a coherent continuation of the previous film I think it’s a pretty blatant reversal. But the ‘Rey as nobody’ thing, compelling as it was in theory, didn’t cohere with TFA either. The whole ST is a hot mess really. It’s a shame…