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Post #1432792

Author
yotsuya
Parent topic
In defense of Rey Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker, and why I do not think it undermines her arc in The Last Jedi.
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1432792/action/topic#1432792
Date created
28-May-2021, 2:06 PM

TestingOutTheTest said:

yotsuya said:

TestingOutTheTest said:

But my point is there was no indication it’s how Rey felt when she admitted “They were nobody.” There’s nothing that contradicts this as truth when we do get to that point in TLJ. If there was a hint that it was what Rey believed in TLJ, then I would agree with you.

But they were nobody. Even TROS confirms that. It is what happened and why they left that what Rey imagines is more imporant that reality for the plot of TFA and TLJ. But in TROS we learn the truth and it furthers the story rather than reframing.

I was referring to Rey’s parents being bad people who threw her away like garbage - they thought she was worthless. That’s what Rey meant when she said that, they didn’t have a reason to abandon her, they didn’t care about her. Re-read my previous posts and the original. It’s the (storytelling) truth or else that arc’d be pointless, all for nothing - which, again, is what happens in TRoS.

Looks like we’re gonna be going in circles…

I think you are going in circles. If you look at how she felt in TFA, she wanted her parents to come back. She had hope that there was some other reason. But deep down she couldn’t see a reason why they did what they did. Kylo made her face that and deal with it. In TROS we find out that her original hope was true, but it was also true that they were never coming back. She held the dagger that killed them and the force gave her a vision to show her the reality of the past. It was that hope from TFA, reiginted in TROS, that helped her overcome the fear of turning into Palpatine in TROS. Anytime someone is abandoned and doesn’t have the facts they will create fictions in their head about what happened. Often more than one. Rey had the fiction that they were coming back for her and that the had left her behind for no good reason. It is the same as in TLJ when we are related what happened at the Jedi Academy. Luke tells a story then Kylo tells a story, then Luke digs deeper and reveals the whole truth. Rey and her parents follows the same pattern. They are coming back, they were nobodies who abandoned her, they were on the run and left her to protect her.

Lucas like poetry, things repeating. I think the ST we got is full of that. Both in itself, with the other trilogies, and as a saga as a whole. Too much is made of the minute course corrections in the ST and ignore how many of those happened before. Too many whine about a story made up as they went along when that is how Lucas made the OT. Lucas may not like how the ST came out, but I am certain it came out better than if he had done it. We didn’t need to further complicate and explain the mystical force by bringing the Whills into it.

I think Rey being a Palpatine fits the saga perfectly. It gives her a place, a place that was hidden for good reason. It links to the greatest of the saga villains. It gives the story an epic climax that no other villain/hero combination could have had. Evil grandfather vs. troubled granddaughter. And it is fitting in the end that Palpatine made the instrument of his own destruction… twice. And it is even more fitting that in the end the granddaughter of Palpatine takes the name Skywalker to break signify the break with that family.

I do think this is separate from Rey’s feelings of self worth. Those do link directly to being abandoned on Jakku, but the details of her parents don’t matter to that. It was the abandonment without any reason given that did the damage and caused her self-worth issues. All you need to do is research what issues Foster Children deal with to know that. And so many stories have been told about people abandoned as children who have struggles in their lives from that. Rey thinks she has finally found a place, as Leia’s student and Finn, Poe, Rose, and Chewbacca’s friend and then she learns she is the granddaughter of the most evil being the galaxy has seen and she feels herself falling toward that destiny. Just when she was starting to get things together. She has to reexamine things and Luke clues her in and sets her back on her path and then she is joined by Ben and is backed by all the Jedi of the past. So if anything TROS just puts a hiccup in her story, as most series end up doing, and it only makes the ending stronger.