Yeah, perhaps I shouldn’t have responded to Strange’s idea to begin with since Hal already gave them a firm “no”. My only purpose in responding how I did was to convey how, from my perspective at least, this idea is impossible logistically given what this film has for Rey’s arc. So Hal’s “no” answer is understandable even beyond the fact that this edit has cemented itself already. At a fundamental level, Rey’s arc in this movie is about her discovering an unsettling fact about herself and struggling with the dark side and her sense of self-worth because of it. There’s no way to undo that unless you delete massive swathes of this movie. But then you’d be better off merging TLJ and TROS into one, which isn’t the goal of Ascendant.

With Rey Nobody, this dark secret is that she’s fated to kill Palps and take the Sith throne. That works, but misses out on the idea of not being defined by a crappy relative, which is what I like about the OT. Plus, Rey Palpatine makes Kylo and Rey rhyme in a way congruent with the concept of the dyad - Kylo looks up to his grandfather, and Rey wants nothing to do with hers. I toyed with the idea of Rey being created by Palpatine’s influence over the midichlorians, but that overcomplicates everything since Anakin would be dragged into that discussion and everybody in the saga would be related to each other in a really strange way.

Honestly, the only alternative Rey background story that I think could work decently is that there is a prophesied Sith chosen one created by the dark side itself as Anakin was by the light. But the final movie in a saga is a weird place to introduce such an idea.

EDIT: But that’s not anything I’m suggesting! Ascendant v5 is good where it’s at.