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Disney Star Wars Is It Actually That Bad?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8715440" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>While Rey is not in the top 5 problems with either TFA or the trilogy as a whole, her problems are much more serious than this and start earlier.</p><p></p><p>This really should be obvious to anyone that plays RPGs. Indeed, I'll go so far as to say I wouldn't enjoy playing an RPG with anyone that thinks Rey is an interesting character. </p><p></p><p>The original Star Wars had a viable and interesting party dynamic. While Luke was the lead, he was initially by no means the best member of the party at really anything but flying an X-Wing. C-3P0 was a surprisingly effective face man who passed a rather large number of social tests over the course of the 3 films, and was familiar with "six million forms of communication". R2-D2 was the technical expert - hacker and mechanic. Leia was a competent leader and able to hold her own in a fight. Han was obviously older and better than Luke at just about everything initially. Chewbacca was the muscle without being as one dimensional as that suggests. But in any event, this was a legitimate party dynamic and it continued through the whole of the movies.</p><p></p><p>By contrast, Jar Jar Binks was a terrible character because he contributed nothing valuable to the party dynamics. He was useless. If he'd at least been competent, I don't think he'd have been hated so much.</p><p></p><p>Rey was as bad of a character as Jar Jar, but in the other direction. She was so competent that she didn't need a party. She was built as a solo protagonist, but they tried to write her into a party dynamic movie "because that's how Star Wars works", and it was disastrous - more disastrous even than Jar Jar Binks because they couldn't write her out of the story. When we first meet Rey she's actually pretty cool. She is a well introduced character. She's a rogue. She's a scrounger. And we can accept easily that she's a good rogue and a good scrounger having had to survive on her own. Character established and all well and good. The trouble is, that she's made into a Luke analogue (beyond just the force sensitive orphan that comes from a desert planet and wears his clothes) in as much as the writers try to send her on a coming of age story, and the character they present is not suited to that. Rey then exhibits the talent of immediately mastering every skill she encounters. When we first meet Luke, he's whiny, he gets outsmarted by a droid, gets brained by Tusken Raiders, nearly gets killed in the Cantina and gets a lesson in astrogation from a put upon Han Solo that puts him back in his place. When we first meet Rey, she not only is a competent rogue, she immediately outflies professional pilots despite not having the background, tells Han Solo how to fix his own ship, and she's already fluent in Wookie... because why not. Then she teaches herself the Jedi mind trick and finishes the movie by defeating a master of the Dark Side. The problem isn't merely that she's heroically good at something - that would have been fine. The problem is she's heroically good at everything to the extent that she doesn't need anyone. The party is superfluous. Mentors are superfluous. She wants to belong, but she only needs to in an emotional sense. </p><p></p><p>Then to finish off her arc, they give her in the next movie that most stereotypical of female hero tropes: she doesn't need to mature or grow. She doesn't need discipline or training. She just needs to allow her inner power to flow and to get everything else out of the way that is holding her back. Luke has to learn things and "grow up". Rey only has to get rid of things holding her back and unleash herself. Rey grows up by getting less mature.</p><p></p><p>But here's the thing, while that's enough to turn a good movie or series into a mediocre one, that's not even remotely the worst story telling sins of TFA. TFA is a terrible movie that was held afloat by good cinematography and the expectation that the story that was dropping all these foretells had somewhere it was going. TLJ gets blamed for ruining the series because it went in stupid directions, but the real trouble is that the writer of TFA had no plan to begin with and was expecting someone else to fill in all the gaps. But given how internally incoherent TFA was, that was never going to happen.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8715440, member: 4937"] While Rey is not in the top 5 problems with either TFA or the trilogy as a whole, her problems are much more serious than this and start earlier. This really should be obvious to anyone that plays RPGs. Indeed, I'll go so far as to say I wouldn't enjoy playing an RPG with anyone that thinks Rey is an interesting character. The original Star Wars had a viable and interesting party dynamic. While Luke was the lead, he was initially by no means the best member of the party at really anything but flying an X-Wing. C-3P0 was a surprisingly effective face man who passed a rather large number of social tests over the course of the 3 films, and was familiar with "six million forms of communication". R2-D2 was the technical expert - hacker and mechanic. Leia was a competent leader and able to hold her own in a fight. Han was obviously older and better than Luke at just about everything initially. Chewbacca was the muscle without being as one dimensional as that suggests. But in any event, this was a legitimate party dynamic and it continued through the whole of the movies. By contrast, Jar Jar Binks was a terrible character because he contributed nothing valuable to the party dynamics. He was useless. If he'd at least been competent, I don't think he'd have been hated so much. Rey was as bad of a character as Jar Jar, but in the other direction. She was so competent that she didn't need a party. She was built as a solo protagonist, but they tried to write her into a party dynamic movie "because that's how Star Wars works", and it was disastrous - more disastrous even than Jar Jar Binks because they couldn't write her out of the story. When we first meet Rey she's actually pretty cool. She is a well introduced character. She's a rogue. She's a scrounger. And we can accept easily that she's a good rogue and a good scrounger having had to survive on her own. Character established and all well and good. The trouble is, that she's made into a Luke analogue (beyond just the force sensitive orphan that comes from a desert planet and wears his clothes) in as much as the writers try to send her on a coming of age story, and the character they present is not suited to that. Rey then exhibits the talent of immediately mastering every skill she encounters. When we first meet Luke, he's whiny, he gets outsmarted by a droid, gets brained by Tusken Raiders, nearly gets killed in the Cantina and gets a lesson in astrogation from a put upon Han Solo that puts him back in his place. When we first meet Rey, she not only is a competent rogue, she immediately outflies professional pilots despite not having the background, tells Han Solo how to fix his own ship, and she's already fluent in Wookie... because why not. Then she teaches herself the Jedi mind trick and finishes the movie by defeating a master of the Dark Side. The problem isn't merely that she's heroically good at something - that would have been fine. The problem is she's heroically good at everything to the extent that she doesn't need anyone. The party is superfluous. Mentors are superfluous. She wants to belong, but she only needs to in an emotional sense. Then to finish off her arc, they give her in the next movie that most stereotypical of female hero tropes: she doesn't need to mature or grow. She doesn't need discipline or training. She just needs to allow her inner power to flow and to get everything else out of the way that is holding her back. Luke has to learn things and "grow up". Rey only has to get rid of things holding her back and unleash herself. Rey grows up by getting less mature. But here's the thing, while that's enough to turn a good movie or series into a mediocre one, that's not even remotely the worst story telling sins of TFA. TFA is a terrible movie that was held afloat by good cinematography and the expectation that the story that was dropping all these foretells had somewhere it was going. TLJ gets blamed for ruining the series because it went in stupid directions, but the real trouble is that the writer of TFA had no plan to begin with and was expecting someone else to fill in all the gaps. But given how internally incoherent TFA was, that was never going to happen. [/QUOTE]
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