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fantastic-nonsense · 2 years

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@supersaiyanjedi14 "both sides are bad" When did that ever happen? The closest thing we get to somethign like that is DJ (a sellout who isn't supposed to be taken as objective) remarking that the ship they stole belonged to someone selling weapons to both sides (which says more about the arms dealer than the two sides) and Luke denegrating the Jedi (something he changes his mind about by the end). Everywhere else? The First Order are blatantly bad and the Resistance are blatantly good

Okay, let me lay this out a bit more in-depth. I could go into the Luke-Jedi stuff (which would mostly be me ranting about how Rian took away all the wrong things from the prequel trilogy, ignored the elephant in the room that is Palpatine, and leaned into the whole victim-blaming "the Jedi deserved to be genocided" nonsense for no reason other than he needed to create needless drama between Luke and Rey that justified him refusing to teach her), but I'm going to focus on DJ since that was the original point of my post.

This is what DJ says in that scene:

Finn: At least you're stealing from the bad guys…and helping the good. DJ: Good guys, bad guys…made-up words. Let's see who formally owns this gorgeous hunk. [holoscreen powers up, starts to show a slideshow of weapons] This guy was an arms dealer. [screen shows a TIE Fighter] Made his bank selling weapons to the bad guys. [screen flips to show an X-wing] Oh, and the good ones. Finn, let me learn you something big. It's all a machine, partner. Live free, don't join.

DJ is explicitly stating a kind of extreme amoral centrist perspective here: "there's no such thing and good guys or bad guys. Don't join either side." And to back up his claim, he shows Finn evidence of capitalists profiting off of both sides of the war.

Okay, cool. Capitalism and war profiteering are bad. Great high school level deduction. But this is Star Wars; usually, everything has a larger purpose (even if it's not executed particularly well). So why does DJ get to say "there's no such thing as good guys or bad guys" and have that claim remain unexamined and uncritiqued for the rest of the movie considering that the conflict between the Resistance and First Order is, all things considered, pretty black and white? Finn and Rose are both characters who have been directly harmed by the First Order's actions (Finn through being kidnapped, brainwashed, and raised as a child soldier, Rose through the exploitation of her planet and the sacrifice of her sister). And yet they have nothing to say to DJ about this?

After all...like you said, throughout the rest of TLJ the Resistance is portrayed as pretty unquestionably "the good guys." Unlike in say...Rogue One, where the darker and dirty side of fighting a guerilla war is both showcased and remarked upon on multiple times (both via Cassian and Saw Gerrera), the Resistance isn't shown to be using any questionable tactics or purposefully dealing under the table. And unlike the prequel trilogy, there's no messy, complex background political conflict underpinning the fight against the First Order. So why do we get an out-of-nowhere "both sides" subplot that ultimately says nothing and goes nowhere?

Yeah, sure, DJ's a traitor and a sellout. We're not supposed to like him or think he's right. But what he says is never actually discussed or refuted other than a prefunctory "you're wrong" from Finn later on in the film, when he sells them out to the First Order:

Finn: You murdering bastard! DJ: Oh, t-take it easy, Big F. They blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow. This is just business. Finn: You're wrong. DJ: Maybe.

Again, none of what he says is ever actually examined. Sure, he's a bad guy, but why spend so much time with his character, dialogue, and actions to do nothing with it? Especially considering he's functionally an unnecessary character Finn and Rose never should have run into to begin with (since he's not the hacker they were sent to Canto Bight to find and they never actually talked to the one they were supposed to bring with them)?

We could just say "eh DJ is wrong, don't listen to him," but why is he here in the first place? What is the narrative function of letting DJ run around saying the things he does and acting the way he does, especially when he gets off scot-free for doing it? It never comes up again. He basically says his speech, betrays Finn and Rose, runs off with his money, and is then promptly ignored. There's no follow-through. It just adds more elements that are never addressed.

Unlike Han Solo, who is explicitly called out by Leia in A New Hope for being "mercenary" and ultimately comes back to help the Rebellion and destroy the Death Star, DJ just betrays Finn and Rose, takes his money, and leaves. Unlike Jyn "I’ve never had the luxury of political opinions" Erso, who slowly shakes off her own political amorality to join the Rebellion and sacrifice herself on Scarif, DJ's opinion never changes. Unlike the various small-time antagonists we get throughout the PT, OT, and anthology movies, there's no coherent personal narrative going on that explains why he's there. And if DJ's supposed to act as the devil to Rose's angel on Finn's shoulder about his own place in the Resistance, what purpose do his words actually serve except to set up a moment of doubt (mind you, in an ex-child soldier's mind about fighting the group that literally enslaved him) which is never explored or brought up again because the conflict in practice is so blatantly black and white?

That entire plot thread also doesn't make much sense just on a basic practical level. The First Order isn't buying and selling weapons; they're building their own stuff and taking what they aren't. Meanwhile, the Resistance is canonically a splinter paramilitary group that isn't funded by the New Republic and is both a) made up of ex-New Republic ships, re-purposed Rebellion-era weaponry, and personal fighters and b) so poor that they can't even re-fuel their own ships, and yet we're supposed to believe they're buying stuff from Canto Bight's profiteering weapons manufacturers?

This conflict has also been going on in the MAJOR background for less than 5 years; the New Republic was canonically peaceful, prone to appeasement, and had a policy of non-aggression toward the First Order (at the time, a well-funded but fringe terrorist organization operating out of the Unknown Regions). The Resistance was actively avoiding engaging in open conflict with the First Order until Starkiller due to their lack of resources and firepower. When TLJ starts, "the war" has been going on for two days. Reasonably, there's no private military-industrial complex for anyone to profit from in this particular conflict. This entire subplot comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere, and makes little practical sense for the canon that had been laid out at the time.

So what we get left with is a character whose entire narrative purpose in the movie is to give a "both sides are bad, good guys and bad guys don't exist" speech without any of the ideas he actually discusses being examined in any way, shape, or form. Meanwhile viewers are promptly shunted straight back into Resistance vs. First Order dogfights like everything's just business as usual and we didn't just spend a whole hour with DJ and his amoral centrist nihilism. Within the narrative the sequel trilogy tells, DJ is right: the Resistance blows up Starkiller in TFA, then the First Order blows up the Resistance throughout TLJ before getting semi-blown up themselves on Crait, and then the Resistance blows them up again in TROS. What else are we supposed to take from DJ's presence in a story that is determined to either ignore his words without addressing them...or prove him right?

And all this in a movie about fighting space fascists that released the year after Donald Trump got elected. It's narratively incoherent, politically irresponsible, and blatantly out-of-place in a Star Wars movie.

#as a poli sci student who nearly wrote a thesis on star wars' politics I have a deep and burning hatred for how they were portrayed in TLJ #star wars #sw fanwank #sw meta #the last jedi #long post

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dgcatanisiri · 2 years

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Fuck it, I’m gonna say it.

Finn deserved to be the central character of the sequels, not Rey. And no, them as co-leads doesn’t work because fandom is a racist dumpster fire who would have taken the opportunity to build her up as the star anyway - which we can see, because FINN was the central figure to The Force Awakens. He moved the plot along, if you take Finn away from that movie, the whole damn thing needs rewriting, while Rey is more there to facilitate and move his story along. But TLJ and RoS end up shoving him to the side, even with RoS TRYING to bring up his importance by even alluding to the idea of Finn’s Force sensitivity - something that TLJ wants to toss aside entirely.

And it would have been a whole HELL of a lot more meaningful for the trilogy to have Kylo trying to make a big deal out of a rivalry with Rey, trying to make her the only one he’d allow to defeat him, only to have Finn shut him up and kick his ass in their final fight, the one that doesn’t presently exist.

We deserved Finn’s story. Rey’s story, though? Hers is one that the Star Wars universe has done a million times. Hell, it’s Luke’s story, just swapping out a male character for a female character. Like, sure, “the Force is female” might make for a great slogan, but Rey is still a prop for the sake of fucking Kylo’s development all the same, because she can’t get to do a damn thing for herself that doesn’t involve him. It’s not a very empowering feminist tale, that her growth and development depends on this man, who she also sets out to “fix,” for no good reason and actually plenty of good reason that she should NOT try to fix him.

(And don’t start me a-fucking-gain on the fact that Finn got dropped from leading man to disposable C-plot in the name of promoting the fucking neo-natsee who chose fascism in his place...)

Finn’s story was the one that needed to be told. Rey’s... wasn’t. Hers is tried and true within the Star Wars universe. And honestly? If the Sequel Trilogy hadn’t had her? I genuinely think that it would have been an improvement, because then it would have HAD to keep the focus on Finn.

Rey’s just a very flat character who is pulled along by whatever the plot needs her to do and be in the story being told (by VERY different storytellers, no less), which just doesn’t actually let her actualize into a full character - hell, by the end, it’s the character who SHOULD be the bad guy who gets to fulfill the role of hero.

Finn is the REAL counterpoint to everything that Kylo Ren is - Finn is a rank and file stormtrooper to Kylo’s top level enforcer. Finn was taken by the First Order as a child and made to be one of them, Kylo chose to join them. The order to slaughter a village that Finn refuses to follow was issued by Kylo. Where Kylo shows anger, Finn shows compassion. THEY are the mirrors to one another, and THEY should have been rivals. Again, it would even ADD to Kylo as an antagonist by having him explicitly dismiss his ACTUAL rival in the name of pursuing a rival that he would rather have a connection to.

But instead, we have Rey basically take over Finn’s arc as the movies go on, making her into the central figure, the counterpart to Kylo, when she NEVER NEEDED TO BE. In fact, the Rey from TFA? She had every reason to think that Kylo was dead after their fight on Starkiller, a fight that she certainly was ready to kill him during. And yet, so much of her character in the next two movies centers on the idea that she is going to either be a better student and Jedi than Kylo or even that she can redeem him. Because... fuck if I know.

This should have been Finn’s story. And it is racism that decided that there should be this other character who exists and takes over his arc, leaving him as a character with nothing.

* = Note that I am not slamming any actor in this, just the executive decisions made that pushed Finn into the background when he was even sold to John Boyega as the Luke Skywalker figure of this trilogy.

#dg rants #i needed to rant but i will not be gen tagging this #and i will not respond #agree or don't i don't care #i'm so sick of this arguing #and i would say this is my final word #but the more people build up the movie that made this stick to the trilogy #the more i grow resentful about the trilogy we DIDN'T get

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allgirlsareprincesses · 4 years

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A Saga in Ruins: How the sets reflect the empty nostalgia of the Sequel Trilogy

To the great surprise of many fans, the Skywalker Saga ended in the ruins of the Lars moisture farm on Tatooine. Perhaps this was intended to be circular, to be a coming home of sorts, but it was an odd choice for many reasons. Why would the youthful heroine find herself in an old, empty home to which she had no real connection, instead of on a verdant green world that she had so clearly craved earlier in her journey? Wouldn’t a place full of life be more fitting for a young woman starting a hopeful new chapter?

Of course, the dirty little secret is that there is nothing hopeful about the end of the Skywalker Saga. In fact, if we look across the Sequel Trilogy, we can see the theme of destruction, aging, death, and decay in many of the settings. Notably, the only sets that look truly new are the interiors of the First Order ships, and the rich luxury world of Canto Bight, but these sleek structures actually contain a moral rot.

It was appropriate for the Prequel Trilogy to be filled with shiny new sets as the Republic and Jedi were at the height of their power. The beauty was intentional, both so that we would appreciate the civilization that would be lost with the ascension of the Dark Side, and so that we would see it as the deceptive shell hiding the moral destruction within. In the Original Trilogy, the sets have an older, worn appearance, but are rarely what could be termed “ruins.” Given that the Sequel Trilogy takes place 30 years later when the galaxy has presumably been rebuilding since the Galactic Civil War, why then are SO many of the events set in ruins, or in places that become ruins?

Ruins in The Force Awakens

The first movie of this final trilogy started on Jakku, a ruin of a world home to the destroyed imperial fleet that made a last stand at the end of the Galactic Civil War. In the first scene of the film, new ruins are created when First Order troops destroy a village. Not long after, Poe and Finn crash-land into the desert, the ruin of their TIE fighter swallowed up by the sand. Later, we meet Rey, a lonely scavenger who is picking at the guts of a downed Imperial Star Destroyer. The shots in this sequence emphasize the scale of these ruins, along with the utter emptiness of the desert. Next, we see Rey in a little trading outpost cobbled together from disparate parts. She gazes dolefully at an elderly woman working the same task that she is, clearly seeing in the aged woman her own barren and lonely future. Finally, she travels to her own home, which turns out to be a collapsed AT-AT Imperial Walker. In an endearing but somewhat macabre moment, Rey dons the helmet of a Rebel X-Wing pilot. In a parallel scene, Kylo Ren is seen talking to the charred helmet of Darth Vader, beseeching his grandfather to speak to him. It’s nostalgia, yes, but for a past that is ruined, destroyed, and dead.

She next escapes Jakku in the Millenium Falcon, which might not be considered a ruin since it still (barely) flies, but it has clearly seen better days. Rey heaves the decrepit freighter through yet more bones of downed starships, finally escaping Jakku only for the Falcon to malfunction again. Han and Chewie, elderly yet vigorous as ever, join Rey and Finn and they all travel to Takodana, where Maz Kanata lives in a castle. From there, they witness the destruction of the Hosnian system, and then the First Order arrives and completely destroys Maz’s castle, creating yet another pile of rubble. The group next travels to D’Qar, a Resistance base nested in an old Rebel Alliance base from the Galactic Civil War three decades prior. Again, everything is old, aging, and recycled; nothing is new.

Starkiller Base is shiny and new, but it is also a tool of destruction, and before long it too collapses into space debris like Alderaan and Hosnian Prime. Meanwhile, we learn that the Skywalker-Solo family itself is in ruins, with Han and Leia split up, their son Ben fallen to the Dark Side, Luke missing in exile, and Han soon killed by his own son. Rey then travels to Ahch-To, where stand the ruins of the first Jedi Temple, to find the aging and bitter Luke Skywalker.

Ruins in The Last Jedi

On Ahch-To, Rey comes to find that the Jedi religion itself is in ruins, with their ancient texts abandoned and their one avatar, Luke, having cut himself off from the Force itself. In the course of her stay, she shoots a hole through the wall of her hut, slices through a large rock on the island, and emerges from the ruin of a hut that Luke explodes when he finds her with Ben Solo. Though Ahch-To is teeming with life, death is equally present, with Luke chatting with Force Ghost Yoda and watching the Jedi tree burn.

Further, Luke is a ruin of his former self, his moral certainty destroyed by regret. In the series of flashbacks to his last encounter with Ben, we see the hut collapsing, Luke rising from the rubble later, and his training temple in flames. Luke’s legacy, his relationship with his nephew, and now the physical manifestation of both is in ruins, as well. Even his X-Wing, once a symbol of his daring, sits submerged in water, presumably unusable and possibly scavenged already for parts.

On the Supremacy, the shattering of the Skywalker legacy is made visible in the breaking of Anakin’s lightsaber in the destroyed throne room. The ship itself lies in ruins after the battles that have raged across the ship and Admiral Holdo’s brave sacrifice, and even Ben and Rey’s fledgling relationship has been shattered by the end of the sequence.

Meanwhile, after the destruction of their fleet, the Resistance escapes to Crait, to yet another old Rebel Alliance base in the hope of escaping the First Order. Their speeders are so decrepit that Poe manages to punch a hole through one with just his foot, and the remaining forces are decimated before he makes the decision to pull back. With their massive laser cannon, the First Order punches a hole through the blast door to the base, effectively destroying it and rendering it unusable as a defensive position. By the end of the Crait sequence, the Resistance, their fleet, their base, and the central relationship of the movie between Rey and Ben are all in ruins.

Though destruction and ruins abound in The Last Jedi, the framing is notably different from the other two films because the purpose of all this imagery is to show hope for the future springing from the rubble. Rey states this theme explicitly when she’s meditating for Luke on Ahch-To, saying she sees “death and decay that feeds new life.” The breaking of Kylo Ren’s mask and the legacy lightsaber are intended not as endings but as steps in the cycle of rebirth and renewal. Luke manages to shed his broken shell and become the young hero he once was, later achieving transcendence as he passes whole into the Force. Despite the massive wound dealt on Crait, the salt cleanses and covers the carnage, suggesting rebirth with womb-like imagery. Ruins in The Last Jedi tend to serve less as nostalgic settings and more as visual symbols of brokenness that must and will be healed.

Ruins in The Rise of Skywalker

As the final film of the sequel trilogy opens, we see Kylo Ren fighting a group of cultists, whom the TROS Visual Dictionary tells us are Vader loyalists. Leaked images from the art book and cut scenes suggest that this scene actually takes place in the shadow of Vader’s castle, also now a ruin in the absence of its dark master. Using the Sith wayfinder, Kylo flies to the Dark Side planet of Exogol, entering what appears to be an ancient temple of the ruined Sith culture. There he finds the resurrected but still deathlike Palpatine, who is clearly such a ruin of his former self that he must be kept alive by machinery and dark arts.

In returning to the forested, hidden Resistance base, Finn and Poe nearly destroy the Falcon yet again, with the old ship catching fire as she lands among a small collection of similarly ancient ships that appear to be in questionable flight condition. While running her Jedi training course, Rey uses the same pilot’s helmet and training remotes that Luke used over 30 years earlier to practice her skills, and cuts down a number of trees in the process, leaving a path of destruction in her wake. Not only does the continued use of old, OT-era objects confound logic, but the wanton destruction of the natural world seems at odds with the Jedi philosophy’s reverence of the life which creates the Force.

Rey’s vision leads her to the barren desert world of Pasaana, where she meets the now-elderly Lando Calrissian, then finds the wreck of the ship that pursued her family when they were fleeing the resurrected Emperor. In the ruin of Ochi’s ship, Rey finds D-0, a broken and abandoned droid who yet again mirrors all the broken and abandoned characters (literally, ALL of them) in the Sequel Trilogy. When Kylo Ren appears, Rey first destroys his TIE Whisper, then when he crawls from the wreckage, the two have a Force tug-of-war over a transport ship which ends in Rey destroying it, as well. Of course, it later turns out that Chewbacca was not aboard that transport, thus continuing the pattern in this film of laying waste to the new planets, ships, and characters that were created for the sequels, while those from the original trilogy are miraculously preserved.

The gang next travels to Kijimi, where they apparently need to destroy C3-P0′s memories in order to unlock his ability to translate an ancient Sith language. As with Chewie, this is merely a temporary “death,” and Threepio’s memories are restored later. Kijimi, unfortunately, is not so lucky, and it is rather unceremoniously blown up, like Alderaan and Hosnian Prime. It seems that even with their allies, the Resistance heroes leave nothing but destruction in their wake.

Rey and friends next land on another moon of Endor, and the poor Falcon takes another beating. While her friends work yet again to repair the old ship, Rey escapes alone to the most imposing ruins of the entire film, collapsed shell of the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi. Calling back to not only Luke’s ordeal there, but also Rey’s own origins scavenging in the carcasses of Imperial Starships, the partially-submerged battle station serves as the backdrop for still more violence and destruction. When Ben Solo arrives, Rey engages him in another duel, which ends with Leia dead and Ben mortally wounded. Though Rey heals Ben, she next flees to Ahch-To, abandoning him and taking his TIE Whisper with her.

On Ahch-To, Rey burns the TIE, standing before the flaming ruins and attempting to throw her lightsaber into the fire. Luke stops her, then leads her to an abandoned hut to find Leia’s lightsaber, a remnant of her aborted Jedi training. Lastly, Luke raises his X-Wing from the water, offering it to Rey inexplicably space-worthy and no worse for the wear having been underwater for the better part of a decade and being at least 35 years old.

Finally, all the characters converge on Exogol, where they continue to engage in as much destruction as possible, including the apparent annihilation of an entire Sith civilization who lived on the planet as part of Palpatine’s Final Order. Ben Solo also arrives on the planet to help Rey (in another OT-era fighter that is miraculously space-worthy and moreover made it across the galaxy WITHOUT A HYPERDRIVE), but Palpatine sucks the power from him and then throws him painfully down a chasm, leaving his body broken. The climactic sequence ends with thousands dead, ships destroyed, and even Rey dead (or something) on the ground. Ben drags his broken body up and across the wreckage of the arena, and dies after resurrecting her, thus ending the Skywalker line.

After a celebratory hug with her friends, Rey flies the Falcon to Tatooine, to the literal ruins of the Lars Homestead. This is the place we last saw belching smoke as Owen and Beru’s charred remains splayed grotesquely across the scene of Luke’s destroyed childhood. Recalling again Rey’s beginning scraping a meager and lonely existence from battle wreckage, she slides down a sand dune on a loose piece of debris, and precociously explores the place. Finally, she buries Luke and Leia’s lightsabers (further cementing this place as a graveyard since Shmi is also buried here along with the Lars), and declares herself to be a Skywalker, the heir to these ruins.

Nostalgia as Love of a Dead or Imaginary Past

So, what does it all mean? If the Sequel Trilogy relies on ruins as a setting more than the other two trilogies, why does that matter? Isn’t it just paying homage to all the stories that led to the saga’s conclusion? Doesn’t it simply tie everything together?

Most critics and fans agree that the Sequel Trilogy relies heavily on nostalgia. In particular, JJ Abrams is often criticized for using nostalgia to such a degree that many of his films are direct copies of the stories they’re referencing: Super 8 is a mash-up of films like E.T. and Stand By Me, Star Trek: Into Darkness is a copy of The Wrath of Khan, The Force Awakens is nearly identical to Episode IV: A New Hope, and so on. Nostalgia is defined as:

“A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”

Most of Abrams’ movies succeed in creating this feeling because they rely on a shared cultural childhood memory. We fondly remember iconic moments from the films we loved as children, so seeing those moments again creates a feeling of remembered happiness. These movies encourage the viewer to recall how they felt the first time they saw certain images by repeating those images.

The first problem with this approach is that nostalgia is for the audience, not for the characters. The believability of the characters’ actions suffers when they are forced to act out scenes from a story that is not their own, from lives and perspectives that are not theirs. The audience might love seeing a lightsaber battle because that’s quintessential Star Wars, but if the two (or more) characters have no logical reason to fight other than as a spectacle for the audience, then the scene will lack any emotional depth. Likewise, a character revering someone whom they either barely knew or openly loathed makes no sense. In the case of settings or props, characters must respond to them in a way that is believable based on their actual history (or lack thereof) with the place or object. If the main characters of a story function only as a sort of modern Greek chorus, mirroring the nostalgic reactions of the omniscient audience, then they fail to be characters at all and become the most reductive versions of a self-insert.

This video explains the problem well, from 7:09 to 10:58 (the whole video is good but fair warning that not all of his takes align with what I believe about Star Wars, especially as regards Kylo Ren/Ben Solo):

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Another problem with this reliance on nostalgia is that in order to speak to a shared childhood experience, everyone in the audience must have had similar childhoods, or at least belong to the same generation so that they all fondly remember the same things. This is necessarily exclusive, as different generations have vastly different collective experiences and memories. The members of the audience who were children at the time of the Original Trilogy’s release or shortly after grew up in a very different world than those who were children during the release of the Prequel Trilogy, or from the generation living through childhood now. Some things that older generations remember fondly carry uncomfortable or even traumatic associations for younger generations, so something intended to be nostalgic will not impact all audiences in the same way.

The legacy saber is a great example of this: an older Original Trilogy fan might be delighted to see Luke’s inaugural lightsaber from the very first Star Wars film being passed on to the new generation, but a younger fan who grew up with the Prequels might see it as a tainted symbol of Anakin’s fall to the dark side and a weapon stained with the blood of innocent younglings. A family sword meant to press the nostalgia button in The Force Awakens instead invokes a feeling of dread and horror in fans with different associations. While Rian Johnson mentions deliberately referencing the Prequels in his creation of The Last Jedi, JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio make no secret of the fact that they don’t acknowledge those films, and it shows.

Lastly, Star Wars has always been a story of youth, of coming of age, growing up, and becoming one’s own person. Luke’s story in the Original Trilogy was about him learning who he was independently of his father and mentors. He is merely a boy, young and defiant, and through his own mistakes he learns how the elder generation was wrong, resolves to do better, and thereby redeems them. Anakin’s story was similar, except that he was unable in his youth to learn the right lessons from the failures of his mentors, his defiance taking a more destructive form. In contrast to both of them, Rey learns.... that all her mentors and parental figures were right all along. In the end, she defies no one, discovers no new and better way, and ultimately brings nothing new and different to the galaxy. She brings no peace or renewal, adopting a legacy of death and destruction to cap a life that has featured only the old, dead, and destroyed.

This is where Disney and Abrams tip their hand and the true philosophy underpinning the Sequel Trilogy is revealed: in an effort to appeal to the nostalgia of older Star Wars fans, they fail to tell a story of youth and instead offer an orgy of death-worship and aesthetic decay. Rather than having the Star Wars conclude with Star Peace, the final trilogy seems to say “Weren’t those wars great? Don’t you miss them? Don’t you want to be reminded of all those wars?”

In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym defines the term a little differently than the dictionary:

"Nostalgia (from nostos - return home, and algia - longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but is also a romance with one's fantasy."

Boym points out that memory is often faulty, and that fond recollection is often a reaction to current despair. If things are bad now, it is natural for us to imagine a more comforting past, as with popular references to “the good old days.” In fact, another translation of the root algos is “pain,” thereby associating the return home with pain. Is it pain that prompts our longing to return home? Pain that creates the fond memory of home in the first place? Perhaps home itself is a source of pain, and so our minds construct an imaginary home that is better than the reality. In any case, it is typical that our rose-colored glasses distort the truth of what we long for, so the danger of nostalgia is a disassociation from truth.

One of those truths that we might deny in our fantasies is the ephemeral nature of human life and experience. All things age, decay, and ultimately cease to be. They may be evergreen in memory, but in a contiguous timeline like the Skywalker Saga, every location, object, or person must inevitably show the passage of time. Thus it is that the youthful heroes of the Original Trilogy become wizened and less vital when they reappear in the Sequels, that old ships break, and symbols of better times shatter and burn. As Boym states, however, the nostalgic lives in denial:

“The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”

Nostalgia cannot hide the steady march of time, which is why most stories look to the future and the creation of the new. Not so the Sequel Trilogy. At no point in the story does there appear to be a goal outside of “defeating the latest bad guys, who are identical to the old bad guys.” There’s no vision of the future toward which the characters are striving, neither on a galactic level (achieving peace) nor a personal level (starting a new family on a vibrant living planet). As such, with nothing to look forward to, the story can only look backward, trapped in nostalgia for a past that appears worse the closer you look at it.

This is why the Sequels are filled with characters, objects, and places from the Original Trilogy that are revered in spite of their violent and even traumatic pasts, not to mention visible signs of age. Ultimately a story that has nothing new to say or offer, only weak attempts to recreate a half-remembered childhood feeling of an aging generation, can ONLY logically end in a graveyard. Viewed in this light, it makes sense that the young protagonist builds her life around fond memories that for her are only imaginary, surrounded by the visible evidence of death and decay to which nostalgia blinds her.

If this is all the fan in the audience is looking for, a faded echo of their favorite memory, then perhaps that is enough. But for those who do not share the reassuring memory, or those who look forward to the future and how things might change for the better, the ending of the Skywalker Saga offers only knowledge that all things fade and die. Without the lens of nostalgia, the Sequel Trilogy is merely an empty tale of death.

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emeraldspiral · 4 years

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In your opinion, does Rey be a Palpatine reduce to as a vessel for man's legacy? How does this contrast to Luke and Leia, the children of Vader, a powerful man?

Luke was introduced at the start of his journey as the son of a powerful Jedi and wanting to feel closer to the father he never met and avenge his and Obi-Wan’s deaths at the hands of the traitor Darth Vader by joining the order they were a part of. Revealing that Darth Vader was Luke’s father didn’t change anything previously established about where Luke’s power came from, but it did turn his whole worldview upside-down when he realized the hero father he looked up to was actually a monster and the monster he hated was actually the father he’d longed to know and emulate all his life.

Leia being Luke’s sister only happened because Lucas originally planned for a new character to be revealed as Luke’s sister who would star in her own trilogy, but got burnt out by the time they started making ROTJ and decided to just end the trilogy without any sequel hooks and leave his ideas for prequels and sequels on the back burner. But he’d already included the line “there is another Skywalker” in ESB and didn’t want to introduce a new character at the last minute, so he made Leia the promised sister. It was still revealed a bit too late to really matter. She never got to hone and develop her powers or really deal with the fallout of the revelation, and it did retroactively make moments from the previous films incestuous. But she was already a princess, a senator, and a Rebel leader, and none of those were retconned into being owed to her relation to Luke or Anakin and her newfound Force Sensitivity didn’t suddenly erase everything that was special or powerful about her before. Furthermore, the sequel trilogy actually turned this awkward, last-minute twist to its advantage by having Ben be the one and only Skywalker child of his generation. If Leia had been unrelated to Luke, then Ben wouldn’t have been targeted by Snoke/Palpatine and we wouldn’t have had a story. If Luke had been the one with the child turned to the Dark Side, then the audience would only care about how that affected Luke, and Han and Leia’s importance in the narrative would be greatly diminished. People wouldn’t care half as much how Ben’s turn affected Han and Leia if they were just his aunt and uncle or his dad’s best friends.

Reypatine is a completely different story. Rey was introduced as somebody who wished she had a secret heritage that would bestow her with power and a purpose, but more than that, justify how her parents had abandoned her and her choice to remain in miserable conditions instead of moving on. She rejected Han’s offer of a job even though she saw him as the father she never had and Finn’s pleas to run away together and kept looking to them as well as Luke and Ben to step up and be the heroes the galaxy needed instead of doing it herself. The entire point of the Rey Nobody reveal was forcing Rey to confront her unhealthy coping mechanisms, stop relying on other people to give her permission to be Somebody, and recognize that she doesn’t need Luke or Ben or anyone else to be the Hero, she can be that herself.

Rey Palpatine was explicitly said by Terrio to be an explanation for where her power came from, which was completely unnecessary because Jedi being nobodies was already the rule and the Skywalkers were the exception. There is no “Kenobi” or “Windu” or “Jinn” family, there’s just the individuals, so Rey having the Force at all didn’t need to be explained as coming from a linage. Rey knowing how to USE the Force didn’t need explaining either. TPM established that expert piloting skills may indicate Force sensitivity because the pilot may be unintentionally using precognition to boost their reaction times, but even non Force sensitive ace pilots are a dime a dozen. Rey already knew how to fight with a melee weapon and real life swordsmen will tell you that victory is more about luck and guts than formal training, and Kylo was badly wounded, tired, and deliberately didn’t take advantage of multiple openings Rey gave him because he wasn’t aiming to maim or kill her. As for Rey knowing how to use Jedi Mind Tricks and lift rocks without much effort, the only reason Luke needed training from Yoda to do that was because he’d never even heard of the Force before he met Obi-Wan. The entire point of Yoda’s “Do or do not, there is no try” line is establishing that mastery of the Force is mental, not physical. Luke struggled to lift the X-Wing because he didn’t believe he could. Rey, by contrast, grew up with stories about Luke and the Jedi which were probably way more fantastical than anything that ever happened, so she had no mental hangups causing her to fail from doubt. She also canonically siphoned Ben’s knowledge and training through the Force bond.

The only other reason cited for making Rey a Palpatine was to give her conflict in the story, which was lazy retread of Luke’s arc with no comprehension of what made it work for him. She’s never met Palpatine before and has no personal rivalry with him, but ends up usurping Ben and the rest of the Skywalkers’ roll in the narrative as the primary victims of Palpatine’s manipulations. She says she won’t hate him despite how he killed her saintly, martyr parents, but she doesn’t actually have to put her money where her mouth is by putting down her saber and enduring torture or the threat of death to stand by her principles. In fact, she was about to give in when Ben arrived and completely removed that moral dilemma and then ends up getting to melt his face off with zero consequences. She doesn’t have to make any hard decisions to win. She doesn’t have to choose love or compassion or reject hatred and vengeance. She just has to be a “vessel” and “conduit”.

It steamrolls over everything Rey’s arc had been about before for something tepid and half-baked. Suddenly, it’s good that Rey wasted her life on Jakku waiting for her dead parents because it turns out they were saints after all who “sold her to protect her” by leaving her screaming for them out in the open in broad daylight right where the guy looking for her can see and providing him with the brilliant cover story of “she’s not on Jakku anymore”. Suddenly, it’s not about how you don’t need to be related to someone to be special, it’s about how your genes, rather than your trauma, determine your struggle with darkness, but you can overcome it, but only if you’re not Ben Solo. Suddenly, the linage that caused Ben to be targeted his whole life by Palpatine is a desirable moniker akin to a super hero mantle, despite having just as much baggage attached to it as the Palpatine name.

It’s sexist, it’s loaded with plot-holes that make it nonsensical at the most basic, technical level, and it’s completely incoherent and incohesive as part of a theme or message regardless of whether you’re looking at it as part of a stand-alone film, a trilogy, or part of the greater nine-part Skywalker Saga.

#reylo #rey #star wars #star wars tros #tros #the rise of skywalker #rise of skywalker #star wars the rise of skywalker #anon #anonymous #ask #Anonymous

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jupitermelichios · 3 years

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What I’d change about Rise of Skywalker

To be clear, these are changes I’d make to the existing script, not what I would have written instead. We can all agree Sheev coming back was, at best, a bit dumb, I’m also fully aware that a lot of people disliked TLJ for a variety of reasons and wanted ros to retconn more stuff, but this is not an attempt to change any of that. I’m taking the basic structure of the movie and shifting stuff around to create something I think is tonally and thematically more in line with the overall trillogy.

Also i’m aware the extended universe is sort of canon-until-proven-otherwise at the moment but as far as i’m concered there was a DC style crisis and it’s now open season on worldbuilding elements

- Starting right at the very beginning, our opening crawl is now just about immortality being one of the secret sith powers Sheev kept hinting about in the prequels

- Our very first sequence in the movie is now a (short) montage of Sheev sending psychic messages to members of the First Order, telling them to join his secret sith club. It’s not just Kylo, this is a thing he’s just generally doing, Hux, Pryde, Kylo, random Storm Trooper number 7, they’re all getting this same message.

- Kylo buggers off to go murder Sheev, because Snoke never actually let him graduate (or whatever modern sith do) so he’s not actually a sith lord, but he’s like ah, new/old sith lord is in town, I go kill him and I get to take his title by right of conquest rule of one styley, and also take out a threat to my power base. Also in the one scene we see of him interacting with the first order it’s pretty clear he actually really fucking hates being in charge, so a mission to kill Sheev is looking super win-win

- The reason Exigor is sacred to the Sith now, the reason Palpatine’s able to communicate accross planets, and the reason he’s still alive (ish) are all the same - the planet “has a heart... oF KAIIIBURRRRRR!” (yes the line should be delivered exactly like that) that amplified force powers

- Instead of just being Ian McDermott in white facepaint, Sheev’s design draws heavily on Darth Nihilus or Darth Sion, his body is dead or maybe nonexistant depending on how gross they’re prepared to go. The point is, the answer to the question ‘how the fuck did he survive?’ should be essentially ‘he didn’t’; he’s a consiousness and a fuckton of willpower and not much else

- We establish a temple/cult in this universe that worships twin gods and are generally all about balance and shit coming in twos and they think force diads are sacred. I’m thinking someone at the temple has resistance information, and when Rey and Poe visit, Poe goes to talk to the contact while Rey meditates and sees Luke’s ghost who tells her how he and Leia came here together and about their belief system and how there are different ways of connecting to the force than just being a jedi, setting up the plot point of the diad, our theme of ‘the people we love are never really gone’, and also laying the groundwork for what’s going to be a second theme of building something new rather than repeating the mistakes of the past, by establishing the sith/jedi dichotomy isn’t the only possible path to take.

- Rose and Finn are bored and stuck on base while their friends are on this mission, so when they get a distress call from a minor First Order base they go off to investigate. They find Hux, who’s been ousted in a coup in favour of the First Order just straight up following Sheev after Kylo wondered off, who promises them information. At this base, Finn also sees some young storm trooper cadets.

- Back at the rebel base they all meet up and Hux (who they’ve taken prisoner) tells them about Sheev being back, which they didn’t know about because he’s only been speaking to bad guys.

- Leia is already dying, Rey is super upset about it and during an accidental mind share, Kylo finds out and tells her Sidious knows how to heal people by transferring life energy from one person to another. The healing thing is specifically a Sith power this go around. We get a moment pretty soon after during a mission where someone gets injured, probably Finn, and she figures out how to heal them based on the hints Kylo gave her

- Also this time Leia still isn’t a jedi but not because of a prophesy, it’s because she disagrees with their philosophy, which is going to be relevant later. We get a line to the effect that ‘Luke didn’t grow up surrounded by the legacy of the Jedi’s failings, I did’

- The weird knife thing isnt anymore, it’s just a hollicron now, and the whole bit with both Lando and Rey’s parents and the bonty hunter are removed to give us breathing room elsewhere, it’s just a more tradtional fetch quest now.

- In order to get the holicron translated, Poe’s like “you’re not going to like this, but I maybe know a guy from doing undercover missions”, and takes them to Black Sun to speak to Darth Maul, that’s right, Darth Maul is here now, and he helps them because his prosthetics are breaking down and Rose fixes them and saves his life. Also he’s pretty pissed at Sheev for getting him killed so he’s totally chill with them killing the guy.

- The Hollicron tells them that the last known map to Exigor was stored in the archives of the temple of Corisant.

- They go to the ruins of the temple, a place that is both nostaligic and also has actual character significance to kylo and ties into our theme of how the jedi and the sith are both a bit shit, and even though it makes more sense for it to have been cleaned up, it’s full of little baby skeletons from Anakin’s massacre, just for the drama of it

- Rey and Kylo fight, he taunts her again with the promise of healing Leia, but this time Rey uses their bond and her knowledge of how to talk to force ghosts to basically force Kylo’s third eye wide open so he’s hearing a hundred force ghosts all at one, stabs him while he’s distracted, heals him, and then she fucks off, leaving him to talk to the force ghost of Anakin, who tells him he’s a moron who’s falling for the same bullshit Sheev used on him

- Rey joins up with the others, but at the Rebel base Hux has managed to escape and shoots Leia (it’s dramatic and she dies saving someone but it’s not actually particularly plot relevant so imagine your own death scene of choice here), and obviously Rey feels it

- At this point the gang split up, Poe and Rose go back the the Rebels because they know they’ll be needed, Finn goes off to rescue the storm trooper kids he saw earlier (yeah I’m adding a subplot what’re you going to do about it), and Rey goes off to fight Palpatine

- In the temple, Leia appears to Kylo as a force ghost while he’s doing dramatic ‘i can’t go on’ kneeling pose and gives him a little pep talk and name drops the title

- Finn goes to the first order base, finds the kids, and the little ones are on board with escaping but then they run into some teenagers who actually have guns and it cuts away on a ‘will they turn him in?” cliffhanger

- Rey arrives in Sheev’s big cave thing, tries to fight him but he’s all ‘the jedi could not defeat me before, what makes you think they can now when you’re barely more than a padawan’ and force lightnings her a bit. They’re not related in this universe, he just wants to steal her lifeforce to heal himself more because she’s powerful

- Turns out that the First Order have been tracking Hux, so they know where the Rebel base is so there’s a big space battle going on, and the First Order don’t even have any fancy secret weapon but there’s a lot of them and there’s not enough Rebel ships left after TLJ. Poe’s up in the air flying even though he’s the boss now, and Rose is on the comms trying to contact allies

"This is the Rebellion, please. In the name of Leia Organa, we're calling you. Please, if there's anyone out there. For Leia Organa, for Luke Skywalker, for Amilyn Holdo, please…" and then when there's no response, in tears, she whispers, "For Rose Tico, please!"

There's a beat of silence, and then the radio crackles to life.

"Rose Tico calls for aid, and Black Sun will answer."

A moment later another, "Leia Organa calls for aid and Cloud City will answer."

and then a moment later, “The Rebellion calls for Aid and the Free Troopers will answer” and we cut to Finn in a stolen First Order ship full of the trooper cadets of all ages.

A makeshift amada joins the fight, same as in the original version, and rose and circular briad crown girl who’s also been trying to call for back up hug in celebration and have a very brief ‘oh wait maybe i’m into you’ moment

- Back on Exigor, Kylo arrives to find Rey on the floor, dying. He takes her hand and we see them as spirits, surrounded by the flickering memories of their lives, they’re seeing one another properly for the first time, and they ackoledge one another as twins via the force (personally i’d make them explicitly siblings, by force if not blood, here to carry on the proud star wars tradition of ambiguously incestuous twins, but that might not fly with disney execs in the the 21st century), and then he gives her his life force to heal her and his last words are a title drop again, mirroring what Leia said to him, because this movie is cheesy as hell

- "The power of the Jedi could have lived in you, as the power of the sith lives in me. But instead you threw it away, for what? For that pathetic little boy? He was no more a true sith than you are a true Jedi!"

"I don't need to be a Jedi. The force is with me, and I am with the force. You have the sith. I have all that was and is and will be!"

Behind her force ghosts begin to appear, but not just jedi. There is as many of the Skywalker clan as we can get (including some reused green screen footage of Carrie Fisher), and Rose's sister, and Han, and people visually implied to be Poe and Finn’s parents, and Holdo, and behind them hundreds of others. Basically if we can afford them, they’re cameoing here, alongside a load of extras. And last of all, standing beside her is Ben.They exchange a look, and then Rey strikes. Palatine tries to force lightning her but it doesn't work, and she presses her hands to his cloak, pulls the life force out if him. Thes a terrible screaming and we see glimpses of the other sith, before they dissipate and the robe falls to the ground.

And obviously the space battle also gets definitively won at the same time, this is movieland, I’m thinking Finn and Poe have to coordinate an attack that relies on Finn using the force is that vague ‘jedi’s are all amazing pilots’ way episodes 1 and 4 both used

Oh and then at the end they’re all celebrating back on the Rebel base, and Finn starts to hit on Rose and she’s like “I’m not the one you want to say that too, also you’re not my type” and smooches circular braid-crown girl who’s been in the background of all these movies with nothing to so

Finn joins Poe and Rey and they all hug in the same ambigiously-poly way they did in the original, and then Poe’s like “I’m sorry about Kylo” kind of awkward because he still hates the guy but he knows Rey doesn’t, and Rey’s like ‘I’m not, the people we love never really leave us’

and then the final scene, Rey is carrying Kylo’s lightsabre and lays Luke’s and Leia’s on the altar of the temple of the twins, and goes to ask the priests to tell her about their religion, with the implication that she’s starting to build her own new version of the jedi

(and if I was disney this would totally be the set up for a new animated series about Rey travelling around the galaxy meeting new weird alien cultures and learning about what cool force powers they have, and the knights of Ren can be the bad guys, and sometimes she’ll come and help Finn and Poe and Rose with trying to rebuild the galaxy. And then they have to take out Black Sun in season 2 and it’s all super dramatic because they were allies sort of and had cameos, and now rey and maul are forced to have super cool spider-legs lightsabre battles instead)

#long post #rise of skywalker #ros #script doctor #star wars #its not perfect by any means #i did like the 3po and chewie screen time from the original that i cut here #but it gives rose and finn a reason to be in the story #genuinely shifts the status quo in a way the original didn't #and cuts a fair amount of unecessary faffing about #i wanted it to be more of an ensemble cast #there's a lot of good characters in this movie #but ros just didn't make room for them all #i also tried to make things a little bit less contrived #i'll admit part of these changes may actually just be because i'm more nostalgic for the prequels than the original trilogy #but i also felt like the parallels they were draweing between anakin and kylo #made havig references to the preqels make a lot of sense

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apomaro-mellow · 3 years

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What Do You Say?

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The first time Finn met Poe, he thought they'd never get along. Poe looked like the rough sort of kids that had bullied Finn back home. And his hands looked greasy. Finn had stayed just a little behind Master Luke. Not hiding. But also hoping that if he wasn't completely seen, he wouldn't be made to play with the other kid, just like all adults made all children do whenever they wanted to talk to their adult friends. As if all kids got along all the time.

But Master Luke wanted to talk to his sister about important stuff. And that meant no children around. Finn tried not to frown too much when Poe took his hand.

When it was time to leave, Finn protested, asking to stay longer.

He got a look from Luke, as if the man had seen this coming. But it didn't change anything. They still had to leave and his sister wasn't running a babysitting service, despite was Poe's presence said.

Poe didn't see Finn again for another two years and because of that, he only had a vague memory of a kid he'd played with once. But he wasn't a kid anymore. He was nine and that meant he was practically a teenager.

This time Poe had been with his parents and Finn had been brought along with someone he didn't recognize. But he wore robes that he'd seen before. The kind of uniforms that Poe didn't exactly understand but thought were cool. And Finn was cool too. He had these weird powers and could move stuff with his mind.

"It's not 'moving stuff with my mind'. It's the Force", Finn tried to explain again, the way the older jedis did. Although even he didn't fully comprehend it. "It's more like there's a bunch of invisible hands. And if I focus really hard, I can use one of those hands."

"It's still really cool. I can't do any of that stuff", Poe said while bending some scraps of metal in his hand.

"Yeah, but I can't do that", Finn pointed at what he was working on.

Poe looked down to the creature he'd been making. Even he couldn't tell what it was, but he knew it had four legs and a tail. He liked fiddling with stuff and making other stuff with it. It was usually metal, since they had plenty of that to go around. Since Finn had said so, Poe felt a little proud of his work.

"Let's play hide and seek!"

They played for hours, taking turns finding each other. Poe was the better one at finding. But he had to admit that Finn found really good hiding spots. When it came time for Finn to leave, Poe felt a little sad, but his parents assured him he'd see Finn again.

And they had been right. It wasn't everyday, which Poe would have preferred, but he did see Finn a lot for the next couple of years, always accompanied by one of those jedi folk.

Then just as quickly it was all over. Finn came to him one day, more somber than he normally was.

"They say I'm at an important part of my training. And that I've really gotta focus. They're practically moving me to another galaxy."

"So what? We can't see each other anymore?", Poe asked, looking very much like he was going to knock some heads with the tool in his hand.

"Just not for now", Finn said quickly. "But we can still talk. They're not taking comms away from me."

For the next few years, Finn's only connection through Poe was his voice. The transmissions were audio only but Finn didn't mind. He found it very easy to imagine Poe's smile when he was excited and his pout whenever they had to wrap things up.

Once, just once, Finn tried to reach out and feel for Poe. It had been a few years and he'd already been trained to do so; to feel the life force of those around them. And could now recognize the unique signature of Rey, another apprentice being taught along with him. But that was only when she was right next to him. Poe was at least a whole solar system away.

Still, he tried. He thought of what Poe meant to him, how it felt to talk to him, how his voice sounded. Finn wasn't able to cross planets and feel Poe's life energy. But when he opened his eyes, he was floating.

It's a common thing in long distance relationships, whether romantic or platonic. Especially when one is growing up. You get a little busier each year and have less time to talk. And whenever you do have news, you wonder if the person on the other end is busy. Or if it's been so long since you've talked that their no longer invested in your life. Eventually the calls decreased. Poe felt bad every time he thought about calling Finn but not having the energy too.

Some days he'd wonder what Finn was getting up to. How was his training going? Was he a full fledged jedi now? Did he ever get into danger? Now that he was older, Poe understood the heavy responsibility on Finn's shoulders. He never wanted to distract him from his work or take up his time when he needed to rest. Then it got to a point where it had been so long that Poe figured Finn wasn't even thinking of him anymore.

So when General Leia had deployed him and his team to a mission where she had explicitly said some of their jedi friends would be part of the ground force, he tried not to hope. The chances of Finn being among them were slim. And even if he was there, it wasn't liked there'd be some heartfelt reunion. They hadn't talked in years. They were both totally different people now.

When the battle ended, Poe landed to meet with the jedi who had apprehended their surrendered enemies. He staunchly kept his eyes forward on the jedi in front of him. He wasn't looking for Finn. He wasn't looking for Finn. He wasn't looking for Finn.

After settling up and getting their new prisoners to a transport, Poe had been just about to return to his own ship. Then something compelled him to stop and look to the side.

And there was Finn.

"...Hey", Poe said, feeling a little breathless, which was weird, that was weird, right?

"Hey", Finn replied.

Poe couldn't believe the man standing before him. Of course Finn would grow up, that's how bodies worked. He looked so different. So mature. Did he look any different in Finn's eyes? Was that a good thing? Did he look more like a man? Poe normally kept his face clean shaven but maybe he should've started a beard? He'd just finished an air fight, he must've been a sweaty mess and probably had the worse helmet hair. His heart was beating rapidly, more than happy to see Finn again but also wishing that he could've gotten some warning.

"You look good. Like a real jedi." Poe noticed the absence of a braid. Had it really been that long?

"You too. Like a real pilot", Finn said with a cheeky grin.

"Yeah..."

"...Yeah..."

For a while, they seemed frozen and Rey looked on with worry. "Are they stuck?", she asked Luke.

Luke simply hushed her and led her away. As entertaining as it was, he figured he'd be nice and leave them to it. Even after they left, both young men hesitated, trying to think of what to say, almost saying it, and then re-thinking their words. Then Finn finally gathered the nerve.

"I've missed you."

And Poe was floating.

#apo writes #fanfiction #finnpoe #jedi finn #whoo boy don't worry about the logistics or details of this au #just join me for the ride

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gffa · 4 years

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(TROS SPOILERS) One thing that I really enjoyed a lot about TROS is Rey’s relationship with the Force and herself. That it was complicated and difficult, but she never wavered on wanting to be kind, compassionate, and a Jedi. Rey’s struggle has been about finding her path in the galaxy, her struggle in this movie wasn’t about what she wanted, she’s always kind of known that, but how to find it. And it was mirrored in how she can do all this physical Force stuff–she can meditate while floating there (THE MOST JEDI THING EVER, I LOVE IT EVERY TIME A JEDI DOES THAT), she can run a training course, she can do amazing fights, she can nearly rip a transport ship out of the sky, she can Force heal, etc.–but she can’t reach the voices of the dead Jedi. She’s struggling with her anger so much that she tips over into using Force lightning, that it shows that’s part of why she’s so strong, because she’s taking all these emotional short cuts she doesn’t even realize she’s doing. She’s taking that anger and fear, instead of confronting it, and shoving it into trying to do more and more amazing physical stuff. Yet she can’t reach the voices of the dead Jedi. She can’t confront her fears to let them go. That she excels at the physical and struggles with the spiritual is everything I wanted from Rey’s story in this movie! Especially wrapped up in how she wants to find the light, how she wants to be a Jedi, but she’s so scared of herself. That it’s wrapped up in the heart of one of the most important things about what the Jedi have always been–”Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi.” From the Jedi Order teaching younglings that the dark side is part of them and to be overcome in the crache to the younglings on Ilum to their everyday lives to Ezra in the Jedi Temple on Lothal to Luke in the cave on Dagobah to Rey’s entire journey, that’s always been the important step to the next part of their path. I love it because the spiritual is so important to what being a Jedi is, that she has to be able to not just admit to her fears, but be willing to face them, then she can finally hear the voices of the Jedi who have been trying to reach out to her just as she was trying to hear them. I love it because Rey does struggle with this stuff. I love it because it shows becoming a Jedi is not that easy. And I love it because it feeds into Rey’s complicated relationships with Force-users, that she’s scared no one knows who she really is, that even she herself doesn’t really know who she is, she’s desperate for connection, for someone to understand her, and there are so few people who have this same power within them, this same massive and unfathomable thing calling to her, this entire sense in her brain that no one else understands, except for Leia a little bit and Ben probably most of all, that it feeds into this complicated relationship with him and it feels my love of complicated psychic relationships where the lines of it are difficult to draw. I really liked the balance the film struck with how you can see her relationship with Ben as romantic, that’s undeniably there, but you can also legitimately see it as Rey giving him affection, knowing that he was going to die, her way of saying goodbye, or you can see it as her desire for psychic closeness being confused for romance, you can interpret it however you want. Maybe she loved him back, maybe it was more complicated than that, maybe it feeds into my love of those messy, impossible to detangle psychic relationships that I love so much with Anakin and his psychic feelings towards things, too. I love that it’s in a movie where Rey has to deal with this riot of feelings in her and she’s trying but she doesn’t really have a community of support, other than that she trusts Finn and tells him about it, but he can’t be with her on this in the same way another trained Force-user could. His support means the galaxy, but through Rey we see that a Jedi needs to have themselves or their emotions under control, because you can be an amazing person, you can be a kind and deeply caring person, and still in your anger and desperation to save someone you can RIP A SHIP APART BECAUSE YOU GOT SO ANGRY THAT YOU SHOT LIGHTNING FROM YOUR HANDS. This in the same week as seeing Baby Yoda Force-choke a person because either he thought he was playing or because he got REAL MAD that someone was trying to hurt his dad, it shows that you can be this incredibly kind, compassionate person, but if you don’t have your shit on lockdown, you can really hurt people and yourself. And given the similar Force-healing scenes, it’s not in doubt for me that the themes of “good person not having the training to resist the dark side so easily” is also a deliberate parallel. It’s Ezra with the fyrnocks all over again. The consistency of showing that, without the Jedi Order there to help train people, you see why the Jedi did everything they did and that they were the ones who did have their shit under control--well, with that one important exception who George Lucas was always clear about how he didn’t want to accept Jedi philosophy. I love that we see it playing out through Rey, that she has all these normal feelings of anger and frustration and desperation, that that’s her story. The Rise of Skywalker is unquestionably REY’S STORY more than it is anything else, that all the other characters are largely there to support her journey, and that that journey is one of finally being ready to confront the dark parts of herself. And that is when she connects with the Jedi of the past. That is when she becomes a Jedi in a way no one can deny. I love that her taking the step forward spiritually, confronting her fear and letting it go, that is when she hears the voices of the Jedi Order, like, yes, that is what she was missing to bridge that gap with them, that is the entire theme that she needed to complete, showing that it was their theme, too, that they are explicitly narratively connected to her facing her fears and moving beyond them, and UGH I LOVE THE JEDI AND I LOVE REY AND SHE IS THEIR LEGACY AND THEIR FUTURE AND SHE MEANS SO MUCH TO ME.

#rey #jedi order #jedi #the rise of skywalker #the rise of skywalker spoilers #meta

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tarisilmarwen · 4 years

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I'm not defending Reylo, but I think there's something you should know. When Rey and Kylo kissed, he wasn't Kylo. He was Ben Solo, brought back to the light side from his mother's sacrifice, and the last Skywalker. Kylo Ren died on the Death Star when Leia reached out to Ben. If it were Kylo and Rey who would've kissed, I would've been pissed, but I'm okay since it was Ben and not Kylo. Plus, comic issues reveal that Ben didn't destroy Luke's Jedi temple. In fact, he didn't ask for it to happen.

1. That is a hair-splitting difference. We never KNEW “Ben Solo“. There is very little canon material showing us who he was like before he went all murder-crazy Dark Side. So it really doesn’t matter that Rey kissed “Ben Solo” because we never knew Ben Solo before he turned, we have no reason to care that he did return, he’s basically a brand new character who has, what, ten minutes of screentime before he gets unceremoniously axed? The writers are banking on the fact that he’s related to the OT characters and they love him and want him back therefore we have to like him and care about him and I’m sorry, him sharing the same blood as Luke and Leia and Han is not freaking enough.

You want me to give a crap about Han and Leia’s son-who-was-already-evil-at-the-start-of-the-story you freaking show me what he was like before and give me a reason to sympathize with him.

And that only explains why the OT trio care about him. Rey never freaking knew Ben Solo and the OT trio never told her a goddamn thing about him so why the hell does SHE care so much?! What reason does she have for wanting to save him besides she’s The Hero and The Plot Demands It?

ALSO, blaming an evil alter-ego (who was NOT an evil alter-ego until this point it was HE, HIMSELF, WHO DELIBERATELY WAS MAKING THESE BAD CHOICES) is super cheap and shitty writing. You do not handwave a villain’s misdeeds by saying, “Well it wasn’t really them!“

It doesn’t matter! In the eyes of the galaxy he’s still guilty.

2. SHITTY RETCONS THAT EXIST OUTSIDE THE MAIN TEXT DO NOT COUNT FOR ANYTHING.

Is the average movie-goer going to read these comics and thus find this information out? No? Then WHAT IS THE X’HALDAMN POINT?! You should not need ancillary and supplementary material to have a full picture of what the hell happened. If they wanted to redeem this character and show that he was a victim of manipulation and circumstance and he didn’t actually burn down Luke’s school then they should have INCLUDED THAT INFORMATION IN THE ACTUAL FREAKING FILMS!

Because as it looks right now, the movies expressly contradict that narrative. And it wouldn’t be the first time that the films explicitly literally ignored information included in supplemental materials (Finn not being just a janitor, Rey going swimming in old Star Destroyer water tanks, Rey playing with flight simulators, Rey downloading skills and Force abilities from Kylo via their Force Bond, Kylo and Snoke and the Knights of Ren SUPPOSEDLY not being Sith) but that just makes the whole mess look actively WORSE and like there is NO coherent plan or story because the pieces do not fit together into a cohesive narrative picture and do not add up into a believable redemption arc.

Ben Solo is a nobody. He narratively does not exist in any significant or meaningful fashion. He is a non entity. Kylo Ren is the asshat we have been watching this whole time and just because he decided to stop being an asshole for five minutes in order to fight a bigger evil doesn’t mean I or anyone else has to give him any slack and it certainly doesn’t justify or excuse the writers’ decision to pander to literally the worst ST shipper base they could have possibly pandered to.

Everything and everyone else good was sacrificed for the sake of this character and it didn’t freaking work and shippers still aren’t happy.

So I don’t. Give a crap.

#askbox #anti reylo #i'm sorry i went off a bit #i am a very angry and bitter disappointed writer #'it wasn't kylo it was ben' SAME DIFFERENCE KAREN #star wars

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convoy914 · 3 years

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So, this May the Fourth, I was reminded of my...disdain for The Rise of Skywalker. As such, since I’m feeling nostalgic, here’s some disjointed notes I’m copy-pasting with very little alteration on some things I thought up in the wake: a backstory for a character, and some vauge notes on how I’D do the movie. It’s TECHNICALLY better I feel, but that doesn’t make it good. You decide, I guess.

The Full Life and Times of Supreme Leader Snoke: From Birth to Death

(Through his whole life he copied and was defined by others, and as such was swept aside by the new. So, the idea is that he’s Palpatine’s first attempt at creating a perfect apprentice, and how he found Kamino to do so. But he came out a bit “deformed” and he was discarded once Anakin came around, drifted for a while & became a crime lord like Maul and after Endor took on greater power by reshaping the remnants of the Empire into the First Order. All this in an attempt perhaps to subconsciously impress (or one up) his “father”. And we all know how THAT turned out, yeah?)

AND: My Own Take on Rise of Skywalker, with above backstory (I don’t normally DO this but if they’re gonna make a movie based on what internet trolls wanted, SOMEONE has to put actual thought into it)

Basically, the First Order has a tenuous grip on the Galaxy, the Resistance is building itself back up in secret. Buuuut if the fleet of Planet Killer Star Destroyers is completed, that’s basically game over for EVERYONE, really. Cause the Supreme Leader is liable to just blow everything up at this point. While organized resistance (seems to be) a thing of the past, there’s been dozens of scattered uprisings in the past six months alone. And to be clear, Palpatine’s role is VASTLY diminished. Technically he’s not even in the movie, just a holocron copy. A shadow with a big ego but no real power. Which Kylo destroys by the end. Speaking of the end, Rey’s still nobody (you don’t NEED a noble bloodline to be a hero but if we MUST overexplain this, then since Rey and Kylo are (at first) the sole Force users who use it in ways reminiscent of the Jedi and Sith, well there’s lots concentrated energy on em), and Kylo DOESN’T get a quick “guess I’m good now” arc.

The backstory I devised for Snoke makes it into the movie, and informs/furthers Kylo’s arc. I’m thinking Kylo doesn’t DIE, but rather something that makes him, willingly or not, a prisoner. He’s defeated ideologically, and doesn’t even get a “cool” death. Rey’s not Luke Skywalker and that’s the point. The point is that obsessively trying to recreate the past is pointless and harmful. You need to move forward, do things differently. Like, well, having 2 main heroes. Finn deserved better, so has here. And of course the past matters, but you can’t let it define you if it just holds you back. Continuing the themes of legacy and forging your own future & all that. I’m not bitter.

Oh, and Finn also becomes a Jedi, well a New Jedi to be precise. It’s NOT a “master and apprentice” thing, they’re explicitly equal. They help each other. Also Finn/Poe is canon, Rose is still a main focus character and ends up w/Jannah, Rey’s aroace, so’s Zorii, and there is not a single person on this planet or any other who can stop me. I HOLD ALL POWER. I AM POWER. Also I’m conflicted on how to handle Leia. While her dying in-between movies COULD help serve with the themes and all, the whole hope and endings and such I guess, I don’t know that I’d be comfortable with that OR the alternative the actual movie used. It complicated.

Basically, the ultimate idea is that Kylo is running the First Order into the ground, but thanks to the fleet of Death Star Destroyers might end up taking the whole galaxy down with him. Seems a likely outcome. I’m not great with dialogue, but the ultimate point would be something like: “Luke, Snoke, Han, Leia, Vader, Palpatine. They all fought and lived and died, and left all this behind“. Or something pretentious like that.

As for the main plot, as I said it’s basically: “The First Order is falling. Even Kylo Ren knows that at this point. He’s lost. But he’s more than willing (and, with this fleet, ABLE), to take the whole Galaxy down with him”. And if this hypothetical film needs to be Endgame length, then so be it. And yeah, I’m conceiving this as if I murdered the higher echelons of Yensid and seized power for myself and all. So I can just...do whatever)

HERE’S SOME MORE OF MY WEIRD IDEAS, KIDS! I think it’s better than TRoS but it’s not like that’s HARD or anything

EDIT FROM AUGUST 2021: Thinking on this again, and I’m imagining the final battle its not a one on one. Unlike Kylo, they’re NOT alone. It’s mostly Rey and Finn of course, and I’m imagining Kylo’s defeated by a simultaneous attack from both of them. Bring it all full circle.

Then during the celebration at the end we have a balcony scene with Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, BB-8, and the ghost of Luke where they ruminate on repeating patterns and being trapped in stories and all that. Killing Palpatine didn’t end all evil forever, and locking up Kylo (perhaps possible by taking away his force sensitivity? IF I can make that work) won’t either. But there IS still progress, even if it won’t be perfect. They should still try. Also Rey visiting Kylo in his cell for some final refutations

#Find Later

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azwriting · 4 years

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Secrets (Forget Me Not, Kylo Ren x Reader) - Chapter Thirteen

AHH! Only two more chapters left! Me finishing a project? A miracle. Anyways! As usual I hope you enjoy and feedback is always appreciated!

Summary: To hide from the First Order and Kylo Ren, (Y/N) must resort to desperate measures.

Warning(s): None really(?)

Word Count: 5903

The hallway was silent, no signs of life, as (Y/N) poked her head out of her quarters. It was the middle of the night, everyone was asleep on the Resistance base, except for the occasional patrolling guard. Exiting her room, she tightened her grip on the brown duffel bag that she carried by her side. She was not defecting or deserting, in truth she wanted to stay, but it was no longer an option. She needed to put as much distance as she could between the First Order and her, and being a member of the Resistance she was bound to run into them at some point. It was no longer safe to stay, it was time to go.

The ramp on the Falcon slowly lowered itself, revealing the night sky and the crowd that awaited their return. A mission to rescue a Resistance member who had been captured by the First Order for a long period of time, seemed to gather quite a lot of attention. (Y/N) hovered in the back, allowing for the four to descend first. She was still shaking, eyes watering, and heart in agony. Cheers were heard as Finn and Chewie exited out of the ship and then even more for Poe and Rey. “Did you find Commander Stryker? Does she need medical support? Someone get the medical team over here stat!”

The applause and questions seemed to halt when she came into view, everyone’s eyes staring in disbelief. “Wasn’t she being held captive by the First Order?” One hushed voice drifted across the deadly silent crowd of members. “She was gone for almost a month, how is she not dead?” “Dead? There’s not even a scratch on her!” “She’s even in a dress!”

(Y/N)’s arms clenched tighter around her frame as she tried to ignore the whispers coming from the Resistance members. They were right, why was a highly ranking Resistance member not bruised, bloodied, and beaten to a pulp by the hand of the First Order? If they only knew what their Supreme Leader had done to her heart. With her head down, (Y/N) followed closely behind her rescuers into the Command Center, where more eyes followed.

“Dameron, I explicitly denied you the right to leave this base! All four of you disobeyed direct command I hop-” A familiar voice shouted from the Center, but her rant stopped as Poe, Rey, Finn, and Chewie stepped to the sides revealing (Y/N). Her (Y/E/C) eyes lifted to the source of the shouting, finding a sight that made her heart wrench even more.

“(Y/N)?” General Organa breathed out in surprise, turning to look at Poe. “You found them?” Poe nodded, head held high despite despite the eventual repercussions of his defiance.

“I told you I would.” Leia exhaled, taking in (Y/N)’s disheveled sight, her eyes not so discreetly searching the crowd behind the crying girl. No doubt searching for a tall black haired man.

“L-Lele” (Y/N)’s voice cracked, fresh tears pouring down.

“You remember…” Leia whispered, confounded once again. She only nodded and rushed into the woman’s arms, completely breaking down again. Leia held her close, feeling the pain that surrounded her aura, stroking her messy hair.

“Clear the room!” Poe shouted. Everyone was quick to leave, retiring for the night or returning to their duties. Leaving the General and the Commander she loved so dearly. (Y/N) stayed in Leia’s arms sobbing, her knees wobbling from the sorrow.

“I-I lost him again!” She cried out, Leia’s eyes watering as she quietly reminded the girl it was not her fault.

That had been a month ago, she had been away from him for a month. (Y/N) tried to bury herself in work, in bringing the First Order crumbling down, in forgetting. But she never could, it was always on the back of her mind, and now it was time to leave. Resorting to running away in the middle of the night, without so much as a goodbye. She had no other choice.

A knock came at her door, pulling (Y/N) out of her wallowing thoughts. She had barely left her room the past few days, still attempting to deal with her pain. “Go away Poe!” she shouted, quite annoyed with her neighbor’s constant pestering. She was not necessarily mad at him, he had thought she was in trouble, and him and her could not continue living in their little pretend world forever, but she was tired of the constant apologies. She only wanted to forget it ever happened.

“Its - Its not Poe.” A distinct voice called from the other side of the door. (Y/N) sat up, eyebrows knitting together in confusion. She made her way to the door, pressing the button on the side panel, allowing for it to open.

Rey stood before her, an uneasy look etched onto her face, hands hidden behind her back. “I’m sorry Rey, I didn’t know it was you.” She apologized hastily.

Rey shook her head, “It’s alright.” The young Jedi’s eyes fell as she shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet, clearly nervous.

“What’s wrong?”

Rey let out a sigh, lifting her eyes, “I need your help.”

(Y/N)’s one brow quirked up, “My help? With what?” She was unsure what use she would be in such a state. Rey let out an uneasy laugh, revealing the two items she held behind her back. (Y/N) sucked in a large gulp of air at the sight, eyes looking up to the young woman in questioning.

“When I was with Luke, he mentioned a padawan who was strong in the Force, strong enough to take his nephew, strong with her lightsaber.” Rey’s hand extended out more, balancing (Y/N)’s lightsaber. She had purposefully left it on the Falcon the night they returned with the intention of never wielding it again.

“I can’t fight him Rey…” (Y/N) muttered, her sadness surfacing once again.

Rey nodded hand still outstretched, “I know I wouldn’t expect you to. And I know you closed yourself off to the Force, but could you train me? You and Ben trained together Luke said, you must fight alike.” (Y/N) winced at his name, the name of the boy she had fallen in love with, his real name. She had blocked out his name solely referring to him as Kylo Ren, it felt like another person when she did. Perhaps because when he had taken on that mantra, he had become someone else.

“You’ve beaten him before, why do you need my help?” Rey let out a loud sigh, filled to the brim with anxiety. (Y/N) was sure if she was still connected to the Force, she would have felt how distressed her aura was. Even without, she could see the stress weighing on the young woman’s shoulders.

“I just - I need to get better, stronger. Everyone is looking to me to step into Luke’s shoes and… it's just a lot.” (Y/N)’s eyes fell in shame. She should be helping the girl, not hiding away like some laser brain. It was not like her, even with no memory of who she was, she still had joined the Resistance to help others.

“I’ll train you, but we must go far into the Jungle. The Resistance cannot see me handling a saber, too many questions would arise and the truth would eventually come out. I could be branded a traitor to the cause.” The base had all been told a lie, to protect (Y/N). She had escaped the First Order rather quickly and crash landed on a deserted planet where she waited to be found. No mentions of Kylo Ren, of her remembered past, or her Force sensitivity. It was the only way to explain why she was not injured or malnourished. If anyone else found out about her previous relationship with Kylo, the Resistance would begin to question where her loyalties lay.

Rey nodded solemnly,“When do we start?”

(Y/N) plucked her lightsaber from the girl, trying to bury the resurfacing memories, “At dawn.”

As the sun began to rise casting an orange hue over the far off Resistance base, (Y/N) and Rey sat on the moist ground of the jungle. “I’m sorry, but I thought you were going to teach me to be stronger during a fight?” Rey questioned unsure as to why they were sitting down cross legged. (Y/N) quirked up an eyebrow at her, had Luke not disclosed the importance of mastering the Force? Silently she was cursing his Force Ghost. He had left her with one hell of a mess.

“I am but you have to know how to connect to the Force to become better.”

Rey nodded along, “So I control it better.”

“No.” (Y/N) shook her head, if she ever saw Luke’s Ghost she would surely have a word with him. “We don’t control the Force nor does it control us. We simply harness it and it guides us. It’s a symbiotic relationship.” Rey remained silent, urging (Y/N) to go on. “Do you recall the first moment you realized you were Force sensitive? I was no older than two and I remember lying in the meadow with my parents and lifting my rattle.” (Y/N) swallowed thickly recalling the summer afternoon with her parents before everything. She knew she was not alone, but she felt it nonetheless.

Rey seemed to look down at the palm of her hands, contemplating. “I thought it was on Starkiller Base, but I always knew something was there especially after one night. It was over ten years ago, I had been on Jakku for a few years by then, and I just remember waking with this awful feeling of pain and suffering. It was gone as soon as it started and in its place I felt this calling, this swell of Light in me.” (Y/N) pursued her lips at her words, dissecting them. Over ten years ago… her eyes widened, Rey had begun to feel her call to the Force when (Y/N) closed herself off to it. Darkness rises and Light to meet it...

(Y/N) slipped past a patrolling guard, stepping out onto the hangar ground. The sky was pitch black, the stars twinkling ever so slightly as she made her way to her X-Wing. She hated leaving, it made her feel like she was deserting her friends, family, and cause. But this was about something bigger than herself now, something she had to protect. Stepping onto the ladder leaning against the X-Wing, (Y/N) hauled herself up and tossing her duffel bag into the waiting ship.

“Leaving without saying goodbye, huh? You definitely got that from Han, no doubt about it.” She turned around on the ladder, finding Leia exiting out onto the hanger in a long nightgown and robe, her hair down and free. (Y/N) was surprised, how did she know she was leaving?

“I didn’t want anyone to know.” She called back, climbing down the ladder, hoping the woman was not here to stop her. She could not be stopped, her mind was already made up. Leia greeted her at the bottom, a knowing look on her face.

“You don’t say? Leaving in the dead of night, I wouldn’t have guessed.” Leia’s words were oozing with sarcasm and (Y/N) could only let out a short laugh.

“I’m not defecting, you know?” The General nodded, eyes holding such intensity it made (Y/N) want to back down from her decision.

“I know,” Leia paused her hands gripping (Y/N)’s upper arms, “(Y/N) this could be the thing to save him.”

The young woman gulped, “You-You know?” (Y/N) racked her mind, searching for any indication of when she slipped up, revealing that she would be running from the war. To her knowledge there had not been a single moment, she had taken precautions. Leia quirked an eyebrow up at her, obviously displeased by her tone of shock.

“Of course I do, I’ve only known you since you were four. I know when you are hiding something.” (Y/N) let out a sigh, knowing there was no she could even deny it now.

“He can’t know Leia. You can’t tell him. I wasn’t enough to turn him or even keep him from turning.” (Y/N) let out a harsh laugh, tears swimming in her eyes. “This won’t save him either, the only thing that can save Ben, is himself. And I’m not so sure he wants to be saved.”

Leia inhaled sharply, “I won’t tell him, I won’t tell anyone.” (Y/N) breathed out in relief, tears slipping down her cheeks as she thanked the General. “Where will you go?”

(Y/N) shrugged lightly, “Somewhere he won’t look, somewhere where he won’t ever realize I left the Resistance.” Leia nodded in agreement, it was best if she stayed hidden.

“Send word when you are safe, wherever. Don’t tell me where though, can’t risk the First Order intercepting it.” (Y/N) concurred with a curt nod, that was the last thing she wanted, the First Order finding her. There was already a mandated order floating around the First Order that if any Stormtrooper identified her that she would need to be brought to the Supreme Leader unharmed. Poe’s informants had heard the news and relayed the information and she had experienced it first hand.

Rey and (Y/N) danced around each other in the early morning sun, lightsabers raised and pointing at one another. “Breathe Rey, just breathe.” (Y/N) reminded her. “Feel the Force surrounding you and every living thing. Let it guide you.” Rey took a deep breath, closing her eyes momentarily. Her concentration and (Y/N)’s lesson was cut short by a loud ringing noise sounding in the distance. The two women stared at each other, eyes wide, before they took off back towards base. (Y/N) carefully concealed her saber in her small satchel as they came out of the clearing and onto the landing strip.

A group had assembled outside surrounding the higher ranking officials. Finn and Poe were pushing their way through the crowd, eyes scanning in search of someone. Finn’s eyes suddenly fell on them and pointed, the two men scrambling over. “Finn! What’s going on?” Rey questioned as the four merged together in the center of the landing strip.

“We got a mission.” Finn answered bumping his shoulder into Rey.

“The four of us.” Poe clarified.

“What?” (Y/N) gulped, unsure whether she was ready to go back into the field. To face all the possibilities.

“It’s nothing crazy, just gathering supplies on a neighboring system.” Poe added, reading the concern on her face.

“Then what was the siren for?” Rey pondered.

“Some of the other pilots have to escort new recruits to the base, The First Order seems to be getting close.” Finn informed and everyone nodded, moving towards the Falcon. (Y/N) felt the fear rise in her, scared to come anywhere near the First Order. Poe informant’s had gotten ahold of him the other day, stating that there was a hefty reward being offered to First Order members if they found a Resistance member with large burn tissue scarring the right side of her neck. Kylo wanted her back and it seemed he would result to anything just for it to happen.

Landing on the nearby planet of Thalrira, the village situated on top of a dry mountain range, the friendly natives greeted the four with open arms. They were people who sympathized with the Resistance cause. Poe and Finn got started right away with loading up the Falcon with the medical and food supplies the village was donating while (Y/N) and Rey loaded up the fabrics and boxes of devices and new equipment. Setting down the last box, (Y/N) stepped off the ship to thank the villagers along with the rest of her group. Outside the ramp, she was met with a sight that made her stomach drop.

Stormtroopers had circled around the four of them, their own weapons raised back at them. Their helmets raised at the sight of her, looking at her exposed scar.

“Get her!” Ordered one, two of the six stepping forward to grab her. But (Y/N) was quicker than them, her hand dipping into the satchel to retrieve her lightsaber. Purple light illuminated on the Stormtroopers white uniforms before (Y/N) drove her saber straight through one’s chest, quickly doing the same to the other. She jumped over the three, saber raised at the other four Stormtroopers. She blocked their blasts and quickly took them all down, Poe and Finn staring at her in shock.

“Is this what you guys do in the jungle every morning?” Finn asked.

“I didn’t know you could do all that!” Poe exclaimed after.

Normally (Y/N) would find their banter humorous but thundering footsteps behind squandered the opportunity. She turned to see another group of Stormtroopers stalking forward, and turned back to the group of Resistance members.“Ready?”

Rey bent down and received her saber from one of the fallen Troopers, “Always.” The two women smirked at each other as Finn and Poe retrieved their blasters. They all nodded to each other as Rey and (Y/N) took off first, the boys providing them cover. (Y/N) and Rey were quick on their feet, bodies dropping to the ground with a thud with purple and blue light whirling along the way. Poe and Finn having a shootout with a few Stormtroopers. Driving her lightsaber through the last Stormtrooper, (Y/N) let out a sigh of relief. She was unsure how the First Order had found them but it scared her.

“We better get out of here before more show up.” Poe informed, wiping away the sweat gathering on his brow. Everyone nodded eagerly, turning for the Falcon, but more thundering steps were approaching.

Another group of Stormtroopers were emerging from a First Order transporter just beyond, a group of six black dressed men following closely behind them… The Knights of Ren. (Y/N) gulped, eyeing her surroundings, did that mean their Master was here too? She could not face him.

“(Y/N) you have to go, we got it from here!”

She looked back to her friends, fear evident in her eyes, “N-No, I can stay. I can fight.” Her voice shook as she tried to feign strength, twirling her saber for good measure.

“You’re no use if you get captured.” Poe pointed out, ushering her behind them all. “Go, we’ll meet you at the rendezvous point!”

With that the three took off, weapons pointing at the incoming group. (Y/N) exhaled shakingly and ran on board of Falcon, heading straight for the cockpit. With familiar ease, she lifted the Falcon off the ground and flew off, to the cave just beyond the mountain range. The designated rendezvous point where she hoped her friends would arrive safely too. Inside she turned off the lights and sunk into the pilot’s seats, sobbing into the palms of her hands. She was endangering everyone just because of her stupid naive self, it was not right.

They had barely escaped that day and after that (Y/N) was not permitted to step off of the base, she was a dangerous to everybody. “Tell Rey I’m sorry I wasn’t able to finish training her.”

Leia smiled gently, “Don’t worry, I’ll help her finish her training.” (Y/N) nodded, tears beginning to quickly escape her eyes.

“Tell them I love them and I’m so sorry.” She thought of Chewie who she had known since childhood, of Poe since she was nineteen, and of Rey and Finn who felt like the younger siblings she never had.

“(Y/N/N) honey, its okay. They’ll understand.” She shook her head, collapsing into Leia’s embrace.

“No they won’t, they’ll think I deserted. They’ll never know the real reason, not as long as this war continues. Maybe even after that.”

Leia stroked her hair, shushing her blabbering nonsense. “If they know you at all, they will know there was a reason.” Her words seemed to calm her down, but the tears still continued.

All these emotions seemed to whirl around in her, bringing things she never said to light. “I never said thank you Leia.” (Y/N) mumbled into the woman’s shoulder.

“For what dear?” The General’s voice sounded puzzled.

“For this life. For taking me in, giving me a home, a place to feel safe in, for giving me h-h-him.” She hiccuped at the end, squeezing Leia tighter. “Despite it all, it’s been one amazing life.” She pulled away, taken aback by the tears in Leia’s eyes. She was not sure she had ever seen the woman cry. Leia opened her mouth to say something, but to squeeze so many feelings into such little words it was difficult, so in return (Y/N) just squeezed her hands. “I know Lele.” The woman let out a wet laugh and released her hands.

“Be safe.” (Y/N) nodded and backed away, clambering back up the ladder.

“(Y/N)!” The General called once more and she quickly looked down to the small woman who had been like a mother to her. “May the Force be with you.”

(Y/N) let out a chuckle tears still pooling in her eyes, “May the Force be with you!” She was unsure if she would ever see the woman again and something inside her broke at the thought. She quickly turned away, starting up the X-Wing, the engine roaring to life, and slowly began to lift up into the sky. With one last wave, (Y/N) disappeared into the night.

“General Organa! We have an unsanctioned departure!” A patrol member shouted running up to the woman.

Leia only smirked watching the X-Wing jump into hyperspace, fading into the stars, “Don’t worry, they had authorization.”

(Y/N) landed in the clearing of the vivacious forest, the light blue roofs barely peeking out over the trees in the distance. She hoped it had been smart to come here, she hoped she could disappear here. During her flight, all she could think of was this place and how it only seemed fitting. If she was smart, the First Order would never know she left, and if so no one would ever think to look here. Especially him. It was her objective to fade into the Galaxy and never be seen or heard from again, besides the occasional message she would need to send Leia. This planet would hopefully grant her her wish.

She climbed out of the cockpit, tossed her duffel bag down, and jumped down into the grass. She looked up finding the treeline above to be perfectly concealing her X-Wing. Always one to be overly cautious, (Y/N) cut down a few surrounding shrubs and placed them overtop her ship, hoping it would do the job. Hauling her duffel bag up she started the trek down to the villa that would become her new home. It had been years since she had been here and quite frankly the last time she was, was a painful memory. The warm sunlight trickled in through the tree coverage, reminding (Y/N) just how confining her white high neck sweater and brown pants were. She was misty certainly not dressed for the year long warm that graced this planet. Stepping out onto the cobblestone pathway, her eyes lifted to the magnificent villa, Varykino.

It was dead silent, no signs of life, she suspected the summer villa had been long deserted. There were no other surviving family members to reside here anyways, it would be just her for awhile. Her black standard issue Resistance boots clicking against the stone as she made her way towards the front of the villa, that had a perfect view of the endless blue that stressed across the beautiful planet. She first smelled the sweet fragrance of cherry blossoms, then the sound of lapping water, before she finally emerged to find the place that made her heart ache. It was silly of her to assume that it would not affect her by picking this place. The place they had married, oh so long ago. Her throat seemed to close, maybe picking Naboo was not the best idea, let alone the family’s long abandoned inherited estate. But she had no other choice, no one would look for her here, she could live out the rest of her days here peacefully. (Y/N) turned away to face the large wooden doors, finding it strange that they were open. Stepping inside, she expected to find dust to be covering every square inch of the house, but instead she found it oddly cleaned. She dropped her duffel bag in shock and moved silently through the house in examination. Something was not right.

A soft creak sounded from behind her and (Y/N) wasted no time igniting the purple lightsaber that was strapped to her waist and pointing it wildly at the source. An old woman with olive skin, braided up gray hair, and transfixing green eyes stood before her carrying a basket full of freshly made loaves of bread. The greens of her dress seem to reflect into her intense gaze, eyeing (Y/N)’s purple lightsaber. The two women were silent as they stared at each other, eyes attempting to read the other.

“For someone on the run, you use quite the distinguishable weapon.” Her voice was low, sweet, and raspy, bringing (Y/N) to the realization she was pointing her lightsaber at a frail elderly woman.

“I’m not on the run.” She tried to defend but the woman only pointingly looked at the saber. She exhaled lowly, turning off her saber and sheathing it back on her belt. “I’m sorry, you frightened me.”

The woman nodded in forgiveness and moved past her to the large table in the back of the villa, (Y/N) following instinctively. The elderly woman placed the basket of bread down on the glass table, turning quickly to face her, eyes narrowing in realization.

“Naberrie blood.” (Y/N) furrowed her eyebrows, in confusion.

“What?” The woman’s green eyes scanned her body, an unreadable look in them as she did.

“I sense Naberrie blood.” (Y/N) was puzzled at her statement, was this woman insane? How could she sense blood? Let alone the bloodline of Senator Amidala’s family? A part of her knew why, but she could not admit that. Not to a strange woman.

“You must be mistaken, I’m not related to Senator Amidala, I just knew the family that was. That’s why I’m seeking shelter here.” The woman only lifted an eyebrow at her words, a smirk falling onto her paling lips. (Y/N) wanted to squirm under the pressure, hoping the woman would not see through her lies.

“I see with more than just my eyes dear. Naberrie blood.” She reiterated herself and (Y/N) shrunk down into herself, knowing the woman knew her secret. The woman looked at her with such sincerity, she had no choice but to trust her.

Mutely, (Y/N) confirmed her words. The woman pursued her lips in satisfaction, her wrinkled hands grasping onto her tightly.

“You will be safe here, the Villa is yours. Princess Organa has had me looking over it for the past few decades, but the Villa belongs to the family of the Naberrie.” (Y/N) shook her head, graciously thanking the woman for her kindness. She was relieved, knowing she could find refuge here, where he would never find out the truth. “What is your name dear?”

She contemplated lying, using a false name, but Leia had trusted this woman, meaning she could too. “(Y/N) Stryker.” A wrinkled finger lifted from her tight grasp, waving it tauntingly in front of (Y/N).

“Your real name child.” The woman was already far too perceptive for her liking, she had a feeling they would get along well.

“(Y/L-” A tisk flew from the elderly woman’s mouth, halting her word. The green eyes seemed to stare into her soul and (Y/N) knew she was asking her once again, “Your real name child.” She gulped, eyes casting outwards to the endless water of Naboo, remembering the white and purple flowers and the hushed words of promise. Her eyes drooped, her heart already too broken to crack more, but it felt like a boot squashed down on the broken fragments of it. She turned back to the waiting woman, eyes watering as always.

“Solo, (Y/N) Solo.” The old woman hummed in content at her confession, her wrinkled finger wiping away a stray tear.

“Ah, the bride from so long ago.” (Y/N) nodded numbly, her arms wrapped around herself protectively. “My name is Euora Accu, come I will show you around.”

The sun shone brightly in the sky, reflecting against the glistening blue water as (Y/N) watched it from underneath the shade of the large tree. The tree she had been married under. Euora had retreated to her small hut hidden in the treeline for the rest of the afternoon, promising to return later for dinner, leaving (Y/N) to her thoughts. The past week had flown by so unrealistically fast, she had had no time to process anything. From trying to keep her secret from the Resistance and First Order to running away to Naboo. It was all so much, what this new chapter of her life would hold was nothing short of unfamiliar and frightening. She wished she could reconnect to the Force, ask for guidance on where to go from here, but she would risk Kylo and her connecting. It could not happen, he could not find her, he could not find out she left and why. There were so many secrets whirling around in her head, she felt lightheaded. The past eleven years of her life had been one big secret, one she had not remembered, so what was the next few decades? But many questions arose with it. Would she tell them who she really was? Who he was really was? Or would their lives be lies too? So many uncertainties plagued her mind it was frightening.

(Y/N)’s thoughts derailed at the blurry sight of something standing down on the lower level by the docks. She squinted her eyes and an audible gasp soon fell from her lips. She took in a sprint, stumbling rapidly down the flight of stone stairs, stopping behind the blurry object. It was a woman, watching the lapping waves, who was not fully tangible, a blue light edging her frame. (Y/N) stepped forward, stopping at the woman’s side to see her fully. She wore a rich blue dress that made her appear to blend into the water. Her brown hair was long, curly, and decorated with many little flowers and colorful ribbon. A hand hung by her side, fingers holding a necklace tightly. She was beautiful, a true vision, and oddly familiar looking. The woman’s warm brown eyes turned to her, a soft smile on her peachy lips.

“(Y/N).” Her voice was soft, as she greeted her, but (Y/N) was startled the Force Ghost knew her name. Her eyes narrowed observing the woman closely, the beauty mark on her one cheek and warm brown eyes seeming to connect the internal dots. She suddenly saw Leia in the woman, than Luke, and Ben…

“Senator Amidala?” She was in complete dismay staring at the young beautiful matriarch of the Skywalker family. How was this possible?

“Padmé.” Padmé corrected her ushering her in closer.

“H-How is this possible? Were you Force sensitive? Why are you here?” (Y/N) rifled off still struggling to process the image before her. She had never seen a Force Ghost before, only ever reading about them in the Jedi texts.

“Oh no,” Padmé laughed lightly, “I was never Force sensitive. My husband, son, and your great uncle are using their powers from the Netherworld to project me here before you.” (Y/N) nodded in astonishment, the words ringing in her ears.

“Is everyone okay? Luke? Qui-Gon? Wait your husband? Anakin is in the Netherworld?”

Dark side Force users did not reside in the Netherworld and if Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, how was he there? Padmé smiled at her, enjoying her look of bewilderment. “Everyone is alright dear, Luke and Qui-Gon are quite proud of you. They knew you seeked guidance and we all deemed I was the best suited to talk to you. And yes, my husband is in the Netherworld, a fact my son and daughter should have told Ben and you. Could have spared this family additional pain.”

(Y/N) clenched her jaw, that meant Anakin had been turned back to the light before death. A fact that most definitely could have prevented Kylo from turning, prevented her from losing him and her memory, and her now being all alone. She could not focus on that, not now, no she needed to know what guidance Padmé would provide her. Padme seemed to read her suffering and terror, a gentle hand coming up to rest on her cheek. (Y/N) could not feel her but the notion was comforting nonetheless.

“I wanted to tell you that everything is going to be okay.” She nodded rapidly trying to fight the tears rising, but to no avail they began to trickle down her cheeks.

“I’m frightened.” She cried, arms trembling as they wrapped around herself. “I don’t want him to find out, but at the same time I wish he was here by my side through it all.” Padmé nodded, her own tears reflecting in her eyes.

“I understand. I was scared too and just wanted Ani through it all. But (Y/N) you cannot let this fear and sadness control you, you have to rise above it.” (Y/N) agreed, wiping away her tears.

She had left the Resistance to protect her secret, came to Naboo to be safe, and she would be strong and fight through it. Padmé’s words seemed to pull her mind out of the darkness and remind her of her strength. She had been a powerful Jedi, a resourceful Resistance fighter, and now she would be strong, without him.

“Thank you.” (Y/N) smiled softly and the woman grinned back.

“Euora will help you, her father used to look over the house when I was a girl. Everything will be okay.” She reminded her with a telling grin. (Y/N) could see where Leia had gotten her unwavering strength and was thankful the women had passed it along to her. She stepped back from Padmé, now with the determination and confidence that everything would be okay.

Just before she faded away, Padmé issued one last piece of advice, “When choosing the room, might I suggest the one overlooking the gardens? It was where I wanted theirs to be.”

(Y/N) let out a wet laugh in acknowledgement, “I agree, that sounds quite lovely.” Padmé grinned, her eyes looking up to the towering peaks of Varykino. A content hum floated out from her lips and soon her beautiful figure faded away, leaving (Y/N) alone. Except she was not alone, she smiled to herself heading back up the steps.

In fact she had everything she needed.

Taglist:

@benpeggycartersolo

@2heures

@thephantomwriter

@thefandomzoneisdangerous

@carol-chann

@gambitsqueen

@pancakefancake

@zaneholtzwrites

@moonmamma03

@siren-queen03

#kylo ren #kylo ren x reader #kylo ren fanfiction #ben solo #ben solo x reader #ben solo fanfiction #star wars #star wars series #star wars imagine #Adam driver x reader

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tobiasdrake · 4 years

Text

Fixing Star Wars: The Dyad in the Force

You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about the wasted potential in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. The biggest problem the three films had was a lack of any cohesive plan. They’re three movies that exist more or less in a vacuum, who happen to share a few characters in a very broad strokes sort of way.

TFA is an island unto itself. TLJ feels more like an episode of a TV show than a major chapter of a trilogy. TROS is a climactic finish to a trilogy that doesn’t exist because TFA and TLJ were made instead, so it has to scramble to set up its own plot points to try and pay off five minutes later.

These are, uh, some very nice first drafts, Abrams and Johnson. Why don’t you go back and workshop them some more until a cohesive narrative emerges.

So I often think about, “Looking back over the three films that were made, what would you like to have seen done with the ideas presented in them?” There were some cool ideas introduced to the series. But what the films did with those ideas? Not so great.

Let’s talk about the Dyad in the Force. The Rise of Skywalker abruptly introduces this idea that Rey and Kylo Ren are connected by something something destiny something the Force something something. This serves as an explanation for why they’re still able to conjure one another across space, something that was explicitly presented in The Last Jedi as “Snoke did a thing to manipulate Rey”.

It had an explanation, but that was in TLJ and TLJ has no bearing on TROS. These movies are islands. So now it has a new explanation and that is that it’s a mystical Force power because the Force moves in mysterious ways.

This mainly served the purpose of facilitating Reylo (ugh), and so the reception to the Dyad as a concept often winds up married to the reception of Reylo. If you like Reylo for some fucking reason, you probably liked the idea of Force Soulmates. If you didn’t like Reylo, you probably hate the Dyad too.

But I actually kind of like the idea of the Dyad. I don’t like what was done with it, but I think when you divorce it from Reylo, it’s kind of a neat concept. But it absolutely should have been introduced much earlier. And it absolutely shouldn’t have featured Kylo Ren.

What Could Have Been

In my ideal reboot of the sequel trilogy, the Dyad in the Force would be Rey and Finn. It would be present from the very beginning; the idea would be that, for literally as long as they’ve been alive, Finn and Rey have been a presence in each other’s lives. They’re childhood best friends across space because of this weird thing connecting them. They’ve never met but they grew up isolated from one another, together.

This can be a romantic idea or something more akin to siblings. I will leave it to people better qualified than I to speak on that subject.

Rey in this treatment is still a Palpatine, but her identity is her secret that she keeps from others. She’s consciously in hiding but she doesn’t understand who her parents hid her from, and so she assumes that she’s hiding from some terrible fate that the New Republic would inflict on her if they knew. Her parents insisted that there is no better place in the galaxy to disappear than Jakku.

Finn is still a Stormtrooper. The First Order and Resistance isn’t a thing in this treatment; rather, we have the Empire and the New Republic in a galaxy divided. Finn still chokes when he’s ordered to shoot civilians and he still freaks out in a shipping container, but he’s freaking out to Rey. He conjures Rey through the Dyad because he desperately needs to talk about what just happened and can’t talk to his peers.

Rey, who supported Finn becoming a Stormtrooper because neither of them knew better, also supports Finn when he says he wants to run. And she has an idea. “You can come to Jakku! There is no better place in the galaxy to disappear.”

And so Rey and Finn meet for the first time, and through the trilogy discover the Force, learn the meaning of the Dyad, and use it as their personal advantage to undermine the Empire and Kylo Ren. I particularly like the image of a conjoined fight scene with Rey fighting in one place and Finn fighting in another, using the Dyad to repeatedly pass a single lightsaber back and forth between them across space, as needed.

#star wars #the force awakens #the rise of skywalker #rey #finn

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dgcatanisiri · 3 years

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I just will never get past the fact that The Last Jedi wants the audience to buy in to the idea that Kylo Ren is redeemable. Like, The Rise of Skywalker is also guilty of this issue, in some ways to a greater degree, but it’s very clearly built off of the portrayal within The Last Jedi.

Like... First of all, the difference of Kylo Ren and Anakin Skywalker comes down to what motivated them in the first place - Anakin’s course to his fall came from him being put through an emotional wringer that ultimately just made him crack and surrender to Palpatine. Moreover, that was explicitly played as a “point of no return” for him, that while Luke saw him as redeemed, and he got the Force ghost treatment, the legacy of Anakin Skywalker was still overshadowed by Darth Vader. And, even before his fall, Anakin was a child taken from slavery and put into a system of strict adherence to a certain code that demanded he refer to his superiors as “master,” so slavery in function, if not in form, when viewed from the eyes of someone who all he had known to that point was slavery. To Anakin, turning his fate over to others was how it was done, because he had no frame of reference otherwise, so, when he knows the Jedi won’t take him back after Mace Windu’s death, he turns his fate over to Palpatine - Anakin never knew a life where he was in control of his destiny.

Kylo, on the other hand, pretty much got to be as privileged as one could possibly be. Son of heroes, intimately connected to these people and this family, his spot in Luke’s attempts at rebuilding the Jedi assured, having all the options available to him... And he STILL makes the active choice to join up with a fascist order, built out of the remnants of the organization that his entire extended family fought to destroy, and destroy the academy, seemingly on the basis of “my uncle thought about killing me for what I might do, so I’m gonna prove that he should have gone through with it!”

What about that says even “tragic villain”? Like, Anakin’s fall is a tragedy because it could have been prevented had anyone - Anakin or those around him - veered from that course. Kylo is just a privileged rich kid who, once he has to face consequences, decides instead to burn down the galaxy so that he gets to be the one on top.

But TLJ decides that HE needs to be the leading man of the trilogy. That HE is the important figure of the Skywalker line that we should be watching and paying attention to. Meanwhile, TLJ throws Finn, who was the leading man of TFA and explicitly a parallel to Kylo Ren, completely under the bus, what with the whole Canto Bight sequence being completely disposable in terms of the plot, when it is already the C-plot of the movie.

And just... That REALLY grates when you realize that TFA? It HINGED on Finn and his actions. If Finn had not decided in the opening minutes of the movie to leave the First Order, breaking from the lifetime of indoctrination that he had gone through, then there would BE. NO. TRILOGY. Poe would have remained a First Order captive, tortured and eventually killed by Kylo, the First Order would have gone to the junkyard on Jakku and taken BB-8, with no concern about Rey being complete collateral damage in the process, Starkiller would have remained intact, and the map would have fallen in to Kylo Ren’s hands.

Also, again, hammering the point of Finn being paralleled to Kylo - the order to fire that Finn refuses to follow is issued BY Kylo.

Finn and Kylo should have been the central conflict of the trilogy. That’s not a slam on Rey, just that... All the real connection between her and Kylo? It comes from TLJ emphasizing that the two of them have a connection, and not due to the framing of the story of TFA. Finn HAD everything in TFA that TLJ gives Rey to make her seem a counterpoint to Kylo - Finn came from nothing, being a rank and file stormtrooper, versus Kylo as both the enforcer of the First Order AND the son of Leia and Han. The order Kylo gave to kill the innocent village was the one that Finn disobeyed. Finn chose to defect when Kylo chose the First Order. These parallels were all over TFA, and unceremoniously dumped in TLJ, so that it could build up the “connection” between Rey and Kylo.

And this “connection” between Rey and Kylo basically amounted to “he tortured her, they fought over the lightsaber, and now TRUE LOVE.” Like, why does Rey even CARE about trying to bring Kylo back to the light? The guy tortured her, killed Han - her mentor and his father - and then seriously injured the first person in her life who came back for her. Hell, for that matter, why does she even think he’s ALIVE? The last time she saw him, she’d left him for dead on Starkiller, the planet-sized superweapon that EXPLODED.

TLJ takes all of Finn’s relevance to the overall narrative of the sequel trilogy and just gives it to Rey, offering him nothing of real value to replace it. I honestly feel like TRoS TRIES (emphasis - “tries,” and I don’t want to hear a single Yoda quote) to give him SOMETHING of value, both with Finn trying to bring up being Force sensitive and Jannah and the defected stormtroopers the gang meets on Kef Bir, but that’s too little too late, with just not enough TIME, because TRoS basically has to build a finale that had no set up in the prior movie.

TLJ is just not interested in the story begun by TFA, swerving abruptly to tell some other story. TRoS is heavily flawed, but it’s honestly constrained by the fact that it had to take two stories that, by the decision of TLJ to go in its own direction, had very little connective tissue.

Which, y’know... Seems like a problem when we’re talking about movie two of a trilogy and movie eight of a saga.

#dg rants #the last jedi critical #anti the last jedi

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benperorsolo · 5 years

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Ok but who in the Resistance (except Rey ofc) would stop hating Ben first ?

Rose. That’s been my hc since forever. Because Rose–

a) doesn’t have awkward personal history with Ben that she needs to get over first (a la Poe and Finn) and

b) is a romantic who

c) also doesn’t take anyone’s shit.

Ben is the sort of person where he seems to get along best with (and this is explicit canon! thanks to the Topps cards :)) ) his mother and Rey– people who are compassionate but strong willed with very set moral compasses. People with whom he not only feels safe expressing emotional vulnerability, but also trusts (even if he may not be at a place where he can admit or verbalize this) to hold him accountable to bad coping mechanisms. People who can love without coddling. That’s what Rey does with Ben at the end of TLJ especially, and in the end the fact that Rey loved Ben enough not to enable his bad habits is what will save his soul. So. I think Rose is also the same kind of person– and Ben, being a Space Empath, will be able to sense this implicitly without either Rose or he vocalizing any of this. I think he naturally circles towards people who give off this energy without explicitly knowing he does this.

And Rose is a romantic– I think she would immediately be drawn to the story of how the Jedi Killer fell in love with the Last Jedi and redeemed himself because love taught him the way; and like Rey, I think she would be fascinated by Ben in general because of his place in galactic history. But as evidenced by Rose doing what was right re: Finn trying to defect despite her being star-struck by him, she wouldn’t suck up to him or try to be weird or precious about him after a certain period of excitement. I think she would think Ben is an amazing summary of her ‘save what we love’ ethos, and that this alone would make her happy to welcome him into the fold long before other people are comfortable with him.

I think they would hit it off well with their mutual strong personalities that are tempered by compassion, much like Ben is with Rey. (Except Rose is a little bit more ‘civilized’ than Rey, having grown up in civilization and not on Desert Hellhole, something that I think also makes Ben socialize with her more readily in the beginning.)

#asks #nonnie #hcs #ben x rose friendship #not tagging as ship bc don't wanna crosstag #as much as i love their friendship reylo is The One 4 me so

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loopy777 · 4 years

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A larger question that needs two asks to cover. One of the biggest criticisms against the star wars sequel trilogy, is that all the OT main characters died complete failures after having all their work undone. Luke was the shining hope for new jedi, but had his academy killed, gave up, and essentially just became a bitter Yoda, then after returning to the man he used to be, he dies. Han saw his son become evil, abandoned his wife and became a smuggler again, and died failing to redeem him.

Leia worked so, so hard to make the new republic happen, only for it to die ridiculously easy. Essentially, there's an argument to be made that all their work was undone and they all died miserable failures. What's your thoughts on the subject?

Well, my take on this comes my philosophy on sequels in general. Unless it’s something with enough entries to really play with things, sequels need to maintain or escalate the story stakes. James Bond and Marvel movies, for example, can sometimes go big and sometimes go smaller scale, because they’re essentially episodes in a television series or chapters in a massive book.

Star Wars, on the other hand, is all epic all the time. Its movies are always events- and when they aren’t, the titles of the movies themselves tell us that they’re small skippable little things. Episodes 1-6 are about the greatest threat ever to the galaxy and Jedi; a sequel trilogy can’t follow that with a story about mopping up and just doing the stuff implied by the ending of Episode 6. But Episode 6 was meant to be the finale to the saga, so there’s no remaining threats or plots on the same level as Palpatine, the Empire, and the Sith.

I thought the sequels, at least TFA and TLJ, had an interesting way around that by being about the concept of sequels themselves. In order to create the proper stakes, the heroes were indeed turned into failures- and the heroes are directly reacting to that! Leia reacts by digging in trying to keep fighting. Han reacts by going back to just surviving. Luke reacts by giving up and trying to die. They hate the sequels turning them into failures as much as the audience.

And then TFA brings them back into things by having them become aware of the new heroes and the cycle of stories. What so many people took as Han’s moments of “Wow, I think Rey might be my daughter,” I took as “Huh, another wide-eyed prodigy from a desert planet who’s dragging me into an epic adventure.” I took Luke’s reaction to Rey offering him the lightsaber as him realizing that the story is starting over again and trying to draw him back in. Even Kylo Ren is actively trying to fit into the Darth Vader role and is frustrated that he’s just a cheap copy.

(I could have done without the repetition being so explicit with the return of X-Wings, TIE Fighters, a jungle base for the Rebels, another desert planet, Bigger Death Star, etc. The themes could have been there with new visuals that merely homage the old stuff. But I think the choice to recycle so much was a direct ploy to ease people back into Star Wars after the reactions to the prequels, so hoping for a lot of new stuff in TFA was probably always futile.)

And then TLJ directly follows this up by making the concept of a repeating story one of the major themes, explicitly! I considered it solid validation of my interpretation of TFA! (Now I honestly have no idea what was intended with TFA, because I think Rise Of Skywalker is completely disconnected from it. If ROS indeed represents the original intentions of J.J. Abrams, then TFA must have been heavily pulled off track, to its benefit, by Lawrence Kasdan.)

Han’s death, to me, was a mix of triumph and failure. On the one hand, he finds the strength to give himself over to The Story, to let go of survival and offer everything up for the chance to save his son. I think he knows that it’s not going to work, but he understands that it’s a step that has to be taken, and so he makes the attempt and lets his life be claimed.

This is the problem facing the young cast in TLJ. They trust too much in The Story, in heroes and last stands and destiny and redemption and sacrifice and a righteous cause. Luke, on the other hand, sees how all of that accomplishes nothing in the long run; he sees The Story at work and knows that a Happy Ending depends on where the storyteller stops, that continuance inevitably brings back the darkness. He realizes that the storyline of the prequels was forced on him in a repeat, despite his victory in Episode 6, and wants no part in an endless cycle of dumb movies about space wizards killing people.

It’s Leia who seems, in TLJ, to see the possibility for a path of balance. She’s still part of The Story, still values the things that the younger generation does, but she also sees that those things won’t bring victory by themselves. They need to be smart about how they participate in The Story. Strategic with when they invoke The Story and when they should shy away from it. The failures of the younger cast eventually teach them this, as well. Rey uses the Millennium Falcon to bait the First Order at the end of the movie, pulling TIE Fighters into a reenactment of Return Of The Jedi to save her friends, but she no longer thinks she can force the redemption of Vader onto Kylo. Poe and Finn learn lessons about how the true value of Heroic Stands isn’t taking out bad guys, but changing the direction of The Story.

And Luke finds the path of balance as well, finding that The Story can be turned against the darkness. Where Finn and Poe learn when not to invoke the Heroic Stand, he rediscovers the moment when both a Hero and a Last Stand is the greatest weapon to employ against the enemy, and so steps back into his role in a way that will let the younger generation learn and continue to grow. That he does so in the single greatest feat of the Force in the entire saga makes it especially triumphant.

Kylo Ren, meanwhile, has likewise become frustrated with the nature of sequels, but instead of finding a balance between new and old, he casts away everything old (”Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It's the only way to become who you were meant to be.“) and seeks only something new- and in doing so is defeated by the protagonists who have weaponized The Story against him. Because a franchise like Star Wars can’t go fully New as there’s too much valuable IP to mine.

This is why I had such high hopes for ROS. Luke had already turned the tide of The Story, and the next cast had been set up to find an Ending that would prevent The Story from happening again. Literally all the next movie had to do was deliver on what was already set up with some plot mechanics.

And that’s why Rise Of Skywalker is so bad, to me. After two sequels dealing, on a meta level, with the concept of sequels themselves, ROS just copies tropes from the classic trilogy without adding anything, without finding new meaning in anything. Rey learns that her father is Darth Vader (metaphorically), and struggles with the same themes Luke did, eventually coming to the same conclusions. She confronts Palpatine just like Luke did, with the aid of a darksider she helped pull back to the light, and makes the conflict into just another clash of Jedi vs Sith, doing nothing to guarantee that another sequel down the line won’t bring that enemy back for a nostalgia cash-in.

Even Leia becomes a failure, throwing a Redemption trope at her son with no meaning behind it, turning him away from the darkness but without any insight into how he became Anakin Skywalker Redux, how she and Han and Luke had previously failed. She did nothing to prevent it from happening again in another generation; she just solved this one problem and then died, tidying up her subplot but having no lasting impact.

All of this confirms that Han, Luke, and Leia are merely failures, as you describe, as ROS shows that they’ve left nothing behind that will continue. Where TLJ introduced the idea that they had to fail in order to gain greater understanding of The Story, so that they could teach its mastery to the next set of protagonists and end things with merely one Sequel Trilogy,

And thus ROS confirms that failure is inevitable; Rey, Finn, and Poe will fail again the next time Disney needs to exploit nostalgia, because they never mastered The Story. The full cast tried to confront the nature of Sequels, saw the conundrum that they can have no impact while Disney sees more money to be made from Star Wars...

And they all give up, surrendering to cliche. Han, Luke, and Leia repeat their acts from previous movies, or the acts of their predecessors from the prequels, and cash their checks and walk away. I don’t mean the actors; I truly mean that ROS turns Han, Luke, and Leia into Space Opera jobbers.

So yes, they all died as miserable failures.

But, dangit, until ROS, I thought there was going to be a greater, beautiful point to it.

And there’s no fixing it now. This isn’t a story that can be retconned or ignored. ROS’s abandonment of the themes of the previous two sequels stands as a glaring Statement Of Intent from Disney: there is no meaning in these movies, just the exploitation of a thing we once loved.

And that’s going to take a lot come back from.

#thekingofwinterblog

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