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Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) dir. JJ Abrams

Why Rey feels so off during the first part of the movie

I want to touch upon something that has been bugging me ever since I saw the movie. Beware, I’m not inventing the wheel here, and I’m also terribly sleep-deprived. I’m just expressing some thoughts that I wanted to share.

So, did you notice that basically all the Reylo scenes up until the one where Rey stabs Kylo and then heals him feel… off? Especially the way Rey acts? 

Were you as detached and alienated from her like I was, going so far as to ask yourself who this character even was?

Well, I gave this some thought.

I think that with the partial retconning of TLJ and the subsequent regression in the story, they shafted Rey in all kinds of ways, but especially when it comes to our ability to understand her actions and emphasise with her, most notably in the scenes when she is angry and/or fighting Kylo (ergo: in conflict).

Rey is a very passionate character, quick to anger. One article about her that I read (I’ll provide the link when I find it) described her as “deliciously feral”, which I think sums it up perfectly. Rey is somewhat unhinged, she reacts quickly and often in a heated fashion.

The thing is: whenever we see Rey being hostile and/or fighting in TFA and TLJ, we are provided a reason why. We get a narrative justification for her anger/violence/attacks, and it always comes from a place of compassion, a sense of justice or a place of pain/hurt relating to her past.

She attacks Kylo in TFA because he killed Han. She snarks at him in TLJ for that very same reason, and later on, after having changed her mind about him, she attacks Luke because he tried to kill him. (And then she just ships herself to him in the mail - an icon. We stan.)

But the bottom line here is:

We always get to see why Rey is angry, and what drives her to violence. We get a justification within the narrative. Her actions make sense.

But in TROS, this does no longer apply. Especially when it comes to Kylo. Because story-wise, we are beyond the fighting. Beyond the dueling. We are at the ‘reaching out, trying to find a balance and solving our conflict with words’ stage.

But since they basically ignore this whole narrative from TLJ, their dynamic is reverted to their TFA animosity. At least up until the scene where Rey heals Ben (after almost killing him, mind you!!), when it’s just randomly picked up again as if the first hour of the movie didn’t happen.

This is why Rey feels so off when she is interacting with Kylo in those scenes up until the stabbing. There is no reason provided by the narrative as to why she is so hostile to him. We expect her to act differently because we all saw TLJ. Sure, there is gonna be conflict, but not this lightsaber fight nonsense.

Their conflict at that point is not physical, it is emotional, and it should’ve been tackled as such in dialogue.

But since it wasn’t, and they just had Rey lash out at Kylo as if this was the ending of TFA, her hostility and aggressiveness come off as… well, just that. Hostility and aggressiveness. 

There is no reason, no explanation, no plausible rationalisation, and subsequently no possibility for us to relate to or understand Rey.

I don’t know why they did this.

Maybe they wanted to convey the idea that this was her ~palpatine darkness~ manifesting and making her lash out. (As if her real darkness, the one we see in TFA and TLJ, i. e. her pain and anger that stem from her abandonment issues, her loneliness, her struggle with her own identity, were not enough.)

Or they just wanted to retcon TLJ and they needed more lightsaber fights. I don’t know. Either reason works and both are terrible.

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Ok so this is going to be a comparison of the throne room scene from TLJ and the Padme confronting Anakin scene near the end of ROTS. The tl;dr version is that Padme and Rey go to confront Vader and Kylo to two different results. Vader & Kylo both offer to rule a new order - allowing the past to die - with their queens. It ends with both Padme and Rey turning them down. Vader then tries to kill Padme whereas Kylo says he’s going to destroy Rey but he honestly has the chance, and doesn’t. (I wrote more about that here -> x)

Long version with gifs and commentary under cut

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Change into these.