A Rant About Rey.

A rant about Rey.

I'm so sick of the entire Mary Sue debate. It's ridiculous! And this bullshit right here is the straw that broke the camel's back!

Here was my response to that dudebro-

Aside from pissing me off, this interaction also got me thinking...

What I told him about her life was absolutely true and it only takes 1/2 a working brain cell to realize that... Rey grew up in hell.

Niima outpost is a bona fide shit hole. It's the kind of place where the most famous ship in the galaxy can be hidden in plain sight... for years! The kind of place where people sell children. Where people ignore a teenage girl being attack in the middle of the city market... or worse, find it entertaining.

Rey is rather plain looking and shapeless when we meet her... and that was not by accident. Daisy is a beautiful young woman who can turn heads walking down any street in the world... but the difference of appearance between her and Rey are as marked as those between a peacock and a peahen.

The heartbreaking truth is, this is as much a defense tactic as it is a statement of Rey's poverty. She's 19... even if she was a late bloomer she's spent, at least, the last few years having to worry about being seen as a desirable woman... because if someone stronger, more clever, or sufficiently devious enough took an interest in her she could and likely would have been sexually assaulted, raped and/or murdered... the chances of her having never been AT LEAST sexually assaulted are very slim...

She fights every fight like her life depends on it. Even when it's a simple robbery... of something worth zero money to her... did you notice how fast she went from "stop that" to complete savage beast mode on the thugs Unkar sent? It was instantaneous the moment that thug grabbed her. That's panic fighting, pure survival instinct. She's been grabbed before... and it's apparently left her with the effects of lingering trauma.

Did you see how she didn't hesitate to attack, with intent to kill, Kylo the first three times that met? She's had to fight for her life before. Enough to have conquered the panic to the point she can fight effectively. That means she's done it A LOT.

Rey is no sweet cinnamon roll, nor some overpowered bimbo... she's a survivor living in one of the foulest pits of hell that the GFFA has to offer.

Sure, she's a decent person... but make no mistake, she is absolutely willing to cut a bitch. She is a stone cold killer. We don"t know her body count, but anyone with eyes can see that she didn't hesitate and she didn't bat an eyelash at killing that first stormtrooper in the forest before Kylo found her. She'd have done the same to him if not for the fact that he was a Jedi.

Which brings me to the point where they actually do meet...

When he took off that helmet and introduced his real PERSON to her you can't help but wonder why the fuck the big bad guy would do such a thing.

But, if you watch the scene that follows you can see him become more and more fascinated by her with every passing second.

I didn't watch him when I saw this movie at the theater, I watched her. She was emoting beautifuly... terror, panic, revulsion... I can see why someone could see this scene as akin to rape... they'd be wrong, but I CAN see how they've come up with that.

Guess who else wasn't looking at him during this scene? Rey wasn't either.

You know when else she wasn't looking at that incredibly expressive face of his?

When he first got a load of her.

The novel states and it's actually pretty easy to see if you look for it, that Kylo Ren was surprised by and impressed with her from the moment she opened fire on him in the forest.

Yup. He was a goner from the word go. He didn't take her because it would be just as easy to get the map from her as it would be to get it from the droid... frankly the data chip would have been infinitely more useful than a 30 second, unfocused memory... no he took her because he felt incredibly drawn to her. He took her because she intrigued him. He could feel there was something different and special about her. He was so distracted by her and elated to have gotten her under his control that he didn't give even a fraction of a shit about finding the droid or Luke anymore... he actively didn't want the droid anymore because that would have robbed him of his excuse to keep her around and investigate her mind... the perfect cover for his sudden, urgent, NEED to learn everything about her and figure out why he felt so "inexorably drawn" to her.

Watch his face after she says the bit about Vader... he's scared shitless... but he's not afraid for his life... he's scared because he didn't find out why he was drawn to her, and now it was a way more powerful draw... and it felt incredible... like nothing he's ever felt or seen or heard or read about...

Scared Shitless and Incredibly turned on.

That my friends, with a shiver down his spine to mark the occasion, was the moment he realized that she was his ONLY equal in the entire galaxy... and he wanted her. Like a trophy, yes, on the surface, where he could acknowledge and accept it - but also on a deeper level... on the level of a unique being who had found the only other of it's type in existence... on the level where Adam wanted Eve.

Rey missed 100% of that... just like a lot of the fandom... just like I did upon first viewing.

In fact she missed every bit of him falling in love with her... allllllllll the way up to this moment

Yep... even says so in the book... she had no inkling that he had actual, real, deep feelings for her.

Not even when this happened-

She was clueless.

And guess what else she didn't know? She didn't know he was physically attracted to her until this moment-

It never occurred to her that he might want ALL OF HER... because she only found out 10 minutes ago (a LONG ten minutes!) that he felt ANYTHING towards her besides a desire to shape and control her Force training and abilities.

It was a lot to take in all at once... especially considering that she was still so terrified of him that she tried to kill him 18 hrs ago!

She had hoped she could convince him to go home to his mother and his family... to return to the light... to fight the good fight... she never even suspected that he had fallen in love with HER... the lonely, scrappy, unwanted, abandoned, flawed, unlovable dessert rat... not her powers.

I think she misjudged him terribly from start to finish.

She has no idea when she closes that door in his face that his feelings were hurt but not changed... that they were real and not some fucked up manipulation tactic.

That naked vulnerability is why they chose Adam Driver... Kylo's feelings for Rey are alive and well... that's why the last time we see him he is bowing under the weight of massive amounts of grief.

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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