ForeverACharmedOne

YUP

People trying to do the ‘Rey took the name because she considers Ben her husband and therefore she’s joining the family’ take is so ridiculous to me. I get they’re trying to make themselves feel better but twisting yourself into knots to apologise for this piece of complete garbage and pretend like it means anything is not a productive use of your time.

1. Ben is cut out of his own family’s story and then literally erased. He is never mentioned again and no one mourns him, his entire life and death means nothing to the film’s narrative. Rey is depicted as fine and content without him, lacking nothing, having learned nothing from him or their relationship.

2. Rey replaces him in his family, she doesn’t join him and become part of it through her connection to him. She’s the ‘perfect heir’ they all ‘should’ have had. Everyone loves her because she is inherently better and more deserving and they all just ~knew~ that instantly. Ben wasn’t worth raising or training in the Force or trying to save or give a pep talk or listen to, every one of his caregivers gave up on him before he’d ever done anything wrong. This is the unavoidable subtext of the film and Terrio has only doubled down on it.

3. Rey regresses to childhood with a new set of deified dead parents, Luke and Leia, and now they’re looking on approvingly to show this is supposed to be a good thing. This is about a restitution ‘adoption’ of a worthy child, not about her moving into the fullest adulthood possible as a widow, living up to the person Ben taught her she could be. He isn’t fucking there even symbolically, everything he tried to teach her about herself and her power and how worthwhile she was has been undermined into a lie because no, your power is from your lineage and you were born special and you should worship the past and wait in blissful, dysfunctional denial until some new mummy and daddy arrive to tell you what to do. Her parents were good heroes and she was completely right not to ever grow up or accept her abandonment.

4. How dare anyone compare this to Titanic. Titanic is not broken and it’s not pointless, it is a functional story and Rose’s decision to take Jack’s name was actual culmination of her character arc, it made thematic sense, it served the significance of their relationship, and it was earned. Rose is embracing a true self which was always there that Jack helped her discover and define by pushing her to face the truth, forging a new free life in adulthood and self-knowledge with the gift he gave her. Their love was consummated and productive, she doesn’t go back into denial and childhood. He MEETS HER in the AFTERLIFE because it was about them and his positive impact on her. Ben has no Force ghost and no token in the final scene because as far as this movie is concerned he is completely irrelevant.

5. It’s not Ben’s name. He has a name and this is not it. There is no in-universe reason for either of them to want the Skywalker name, even if they both didn’t have the worst relationship with the only person they actually know whose name is Skywalker, they still don’t need to take a new name when Ben has one already. The name has NOTHING TO DO with Ben, the thing that affected Ben’s life was THE BLOODLINE.

When I first saw that Chris Terrio had given an interview “explaining” TROS, I wasn’t going to read it.

But then, I thought, hey! Let’s see what the corporate spin is on this disaster!

1.  “…it’s about taking the ideas that came from ‘VIII’ and trying to complicate them and develop them and to have some new surprises.”

Umm…the ideas from VIII were plenty complex. They didn’t need to be “complicated”, they needed to be explored. And if you were trying for new surprises, you failed utterly. Everything about this movie was completely predictable to anyone who’d seen the other eight movies. Okay, moving on.

2.  re: Rey Palpatine. Terrio argues that this reveal is in dialogue with “The Last Jedi” rather than just a ret-con of it.  What dialogue? The idea that the Force isn’t tied to bloodlines, that people can be strong no matter their ancestry, was a major theme of TLJ, and it was echoed even at the end, with Broom Boy. Saying that Rey actually did get her powers from her genetic heritage is directly opposed to that theme, not in dialogue with it. Unless, of course, that dialogue is nothing more than a taunt of “In your face, Johnson!” So that statement is some bullcrap. Next one.

3.  Terrio added that anyone who thinks he and Abrams ignored the direction of “The Last Jedi” or countered it rather than developed and deepened it…are “not understanding how writers think.” That’s an interesting statement, since what I’ve seen from this fandom is an enormous amount of creativity and intelligence, including fanfiction that is far superior to many works of published fiction. There are also innumerable meta that explore the story structure of the ST and of the three-trilogy body of work as a whole, written by people who know what they’re talking about. I agree that somebody doesn’t understand how writers think, but I don’t think it’s the fans.

4.  “We wanted to show all the characters growing in some way.“ One of my biggest problems with this movie was the static nature of the characters. They had basically no arcs whatsoever, except for Ben, whose arc has been building from Episode VII and who regresses immensely before making the final push to become Ben Solo again. So you failed at that, dude. Big time.

5.  “ Luke stopping Rey from tossing a saber away….That moment for us was about Luke having learned something and … he will not let Rey make the same mistake that he did.” Unpopular opinion incoming – I actually agree with this statement. That’s how I read the whole Luke interaction when I saw TROS. In TLJ, he was still too into his own head, still a bit of the whiny farm boy from Episodes IV and V; here, he actually seems to finally be wise. My issue with this particular Luke segment is simply that it was rushed too quickly (which was no different than the rest of the movie).

6.   “ As J.J. said, that it would almost be weird for Palpatine not to be in some way in this movie.” No, it wouldn’t, because he was canonically dead.Threats to peace can come from anywhere, and there were any number of big bads in the EU that could have been used here, if you don’t want to go with an original character.

7.  “We probably could have written a whole movie that was just a lead up to Kylo Ren going to get the wayfinders…Where he now is the king, and he had to sort of earn the throne. And now, how will he perform as Supreme Leader?” Innumberable amounts of people would have paid such good money, multiple times, to watch that story, if it were done well (and probably if it were done in a mediocre way, to tell the truth). You left something really interesting in the Idea Trash Can.

8.  “I think Rey has to keep asking herself who she is and keep declaring who she is in the course of this movie, and that changes. At the beginning of the movie, Rey is a different person than she is at the end,” Actually, she’s not (see point #4 above). You may have intended for her to wrestle with her Palpatinian heritage, but then you never gave her time to do so (never even wrote it into the script, apparently). She struck me as frustratingly indifferent about it, to be honest. So, that’s another big fail for you.

9.  “I don’t think we think of it as she’s going to live there,” Terrio said. “We thought of it as just paying her respects and sort of undoing the original sin at the end of the third movie, which is the separation of the twins.“ Then that’s another big fail, because everyone I’ve talked to about that ending believes she is going back to live there. That was the message we got from the way it was written, shot, and edited. It says the exact opposite of what you’re claiming it says. So either a) you’re spouting bullcrap because you realize it was a horrible ending; or b) J.J. Abrams is an utterly incompetent filmmaker.

10. re: Rey Skywalker  “In the end, we thought that the final victory of the Light and the final act of self-affirmation for Rey was to declare that despite her blood she is a Skywalker. At that moment, the Skywalkers truly win the family saga.” Um, you people had a whole-ass actual Skywalker with a complex backstory and a tremendous fan following – remember him? Yeah, the guy who sacrificed his life to save the woman he loved, the woman who was essentially his parents’ “replacement child” for him. He died and then was never mentioned again, and there is no indication that even his soulmate ever mourned his passing. That is not a win for the Skywalker family, not by any stretch of the imagination.

11. re: the Force Ghosts at the end.  “Spiritually, it’s not a crazy idea that all the Jedi would be standing with them, but it might’ve been a bit of a visual shock to see all these new characters on Tatooine who weren’t part of the story of Leia, Luke and Rey.” The Ben Solo erasure is breathtakingly astounding. I just can’t even with this. AN ENTIRE MAJOR CHARACTER FROM THE FRANCHISE’S MAJOR FAMILY DIES AND IS COMPLETELY IGNORED. It is absolutely shitty storytelling. But then again, I’m probably way off base here, since I “don’t understand how writers think.”

12. re: the specific Force Ghosts they chose.  “But, the twins never got to Tatooine together. So, the idea of seeing the twins together after the sabers are laid to rest felt like it was something that was very moving to me and J.J.” First of all, the twins were on Tatooine together in Episode VI, so jot that down. (Seriously, did these people even watch any of the other movies? Sure doesn’t seem like it, from the amount of canon that got exploded or ignored.) Second, I’m glad it was a moving idea for you and J.J.; how nice that you were able to share those feelings with each other. However, this movie isn’t about you. It’s about the story. And within the context of the story, it made no sense for Rey to go bury the sabers on Tatootine in the first place, no matter how great you all thought that Force Ghost thing felt. That, in short, is what was wrong with the entire movie – it wasn’t about the actual story, at all. It was about making pretty set pieces and cool-looking battles. It was a shallow veneer that hid a hollow core.

Ugh. Enough. Had to have my say but am going to go write some more positive fanfiction now. Because what we need in the world is hope, not melancholy, and we sure didn’t get it from TROS.

“First of all, the twins were on Tatooine together in Episode VI, so jot that down…”

Thanks for reading the Terrio interview so I didn’t have to.

The Last Jedi resolved the intrigue surrounding the heroine of this new sequel-trilogy, Rey, and her parentage with a gracefully simple, bold assertion: Rey is… just Rey. Not the daughter of some space aristocracy or legacy lineage, but a hero of her own making. […] That Rey’s parents were ordinary people meant anyone from anywhere could be born a hero; what determined a person’s place in the world was who they chose to be, rather than their last name. “Rey is our protagonist. And the truth is, in the story, the toughest possible thing for her to hear is, you know, you’re not gonna get the easy answer that you’re so-and-so’s daughter, this is your place,” [Rian] Johnson told me after The Last Jedi’s release. “You’re gonna have to stand on your own two feet and define yourself in this world.”

Instead of taking the baton from Last Jedi and running with it to new heights, The Rise of Skywalker retreats right back into the safety of nostalgia. […] It’s as if Abrams and Terrio scrambled for a loophole specifically to mollify the “fans” upset that this hero—worse, this girl—dared to wield such incredible abilities with only her own strength […] Bookending the saga Anakin began with the story of a girl from nowhere who sets right what he helped unbalance might have been resonant. But who cares for that when there’s another billion-dollar franchise to set up and potential spin-offs to tease?

— Melissa Leon, ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ Erases the Power of Rey’s Story and Surrenders to Sexist Trolls