#I know who will oppose Rey in the next film

[basementexplorer07]

[darth-schism]

Might Have Been Asking For What Already Was...(but I’ll still count this as a victory)

Due to the ever shifting dumpster fire that is the cannon of Disney Star Wars, I neglected to check the official Wookiepedia as I usually do, before I started dreaming/posting about hot takes that would help improve the enjoyability of the sequels...without actually confirming whether or not they had already happened.  

So disclaimer here: I am unsure whether all of what I’m about to address was already in place upon/shortly after the release of TROS, or if enough fans like myself presented certain ideas to the point that some of the creative minds at Disney/Lucas opted to put it into their cannon.

And disclaimer pt 2: I am still a fan of mostly relying on in film evidence for my takes. That said (and especially because Disney chose to be such ridged poos about how officially official their cannon was while everything else could no longer possibly exists under their corporate superiority), it is still GREAT to have what was inferred in the movies, confirmed in a comic/book/etc. 

So (presented in no particular order) what did I find?

- Confirmation that Snoke knew of the concept of the Force dyad, which further confirms my suspicions that is choice to try and kill Rey was in direct opposition of Palpatine.  

- Confirmation that Snoke had memories of a past life, just as the phantom Emperor had memories of his own. There will be more on this later, but it starts to paint an interesting picture. 

- Snoke took even himself my surprise with his ascension to power (go figure, a non-human leading a faction of xenophobic human fascists). Now, it is made clear that he was being used by Palpatine, and this was according to the phantoms plan. That said...I think it was a two way street with that...  

- There is further confirmation, beyond just the obvious that we see in the films, that Snoke sought to operate the First Order without any heed to Palpatine’s former rule.

- He possessed these memories, but made no mention of his origins on Exegol. It would be easy to say he simply didn’t know (and that is possible), but given what else I came to read about, it is not as likely. 

- SNOKE AND LUKE FOUGHT (seriously I thought this particular thought was a pipe dream. But here it is. Vague and unexplored. But still there. At some point in time, Luke damaged Snoke. If I had to put money on it, I’d say Luke is the reason Snoke has that scar on his head).  

- Confirmation (loose) that Palpatine was lying about being Snoke. Yes, I am sure there were days he reached out from Exegol and imitated the Supreme Leader the same way he imitated Vader. But it is still official that Snoke, of his own accord, spoke to Ben Solo’s mind.

- Okay, I’ll have to partially disagree with some of the elements presented in the next section below. It’s only partially, because I LOVE the idea of Palpatine orchestrating Snoke’s training of Ben in order to bypass being killed in the generally consistent process of the Rule of Two. It is so in character for that scumbag. The only part I don’t think is accurate (in light of everything else discussed) is that Snoke was (completely) played for a fool. I think the Supreme Leader was definitely duped into being a sacrifice, but I also think Palpatine was unwittingly put on the ropes by someone who he just wanted to consider a mere puppet. 

- A second minor point is the general disagreement that Palpatine was more powerful than Snoke. Considering what is described, and what we see in the films, the two seem closer to that of equals. But again, I’ll give a better (and longer) reason as to why I think that in another post (PM me for details).

- Confirmation (loose) that Luke’s isolation was a deliberate effort to undermine Snoke. I misunderstood Snoke when he called Luke wise in TLJ, as I thought he simply considered him wise for wanting the Jedi to fade into a thing of the past. However, here we see that he has essentially acknowledged how Skywalker had tricked him into a seven year wild goose chase.   

- Follow up confirmation about Snoke deliberately opposing Palpatine. He knows of the dyad, which means he would have known Rey and Ben were such a phenomenon the moment he merged their minds. So if he knew even a single thing about Exegol (and it would be insane if he didn’t, also I think there was some mention of him working there until he finally rose to power), then he would know of the Emperor’s son, and how a powerful descendant of his bloodline was needed to fully restore the Emperor to life. Which means that there were two ways that Palpatine could be fully restored to life, and Snoke nearly removed both options in one cruel stroke. 

- So it’s cannon that the Knights of Ren ultimately serve Palpatine, or at least the First Order in general, as they turn against Ben the moment he returns to the light. So if Snoke knew the inner workings of them, it’s even more reason to believe that he was aware of everything happening on Exegol as well (Yes, it’s possible he didn’t know. But like I said, it’s exceedingly unlikely).

- Confirmation (loose) that Luke wasn’t fully at fault for his reaction when he saw what Ben would become. Snoke feared Luke, and had an arsenal of mental weaponry he hurled his way. Granted, even without this, Luke’s reaction to what he witnessed was incredibly believable and human. However, this is a nice addition.   

- Snoke didn’t just have memories of an ancient past, he had the body of one as well. His species could not be identified. Because it likely hadn’t existed in ages. Let’s also not forget the depiction of the Prime Jedi on Ahch-To, that looked oddly like Snoke. There is also mention in the Wookiepedia of how Snoke taught Ben both light and darksided elements of the force, as he believed in versatility. My theory, is that the phantom emperor, Palpatine’s son, and Snoke, are not just genetic clones, they ARE LIVING RELICS OF THE PAST (a post on why I think this so is up and coming. PM me for a link or details if you’re interested).

Summary:

- Luke v. Snoke confirmed

- Snoke being independent of the Emperor confirmed  

- Snoke and Palpatine being at odds/in a power struggle loosely confirmed 

- Snoke being aware of everything on Exegol loosely confirmed

- Luke’s isolation having a strategic element confirmed beyond just the map 

- Luke’s reaction to what he saw in Ben was also orchestrated by Snoke loosely confirmed

[dragonrebelrose]

TROS Reaction 12-20-19. AKA my 6 page long dissertation about why I really disliked TROS.

I didn’t think it would be this bad. I truly thought there would be some gleaming moments of redeemability, but no. It’s one...giant...shit-show. What a horrible blow to the end of not only the sequel trilogy and these characters but to everything that came before. It really takes skill to mess up this badly.

A little something nice though, was the guy I sat next to. Really nice (and cute too ^-^ ) and he offered me some of his candy (Buncha Crunch! My favorite!) before the film started and then throughout the film because he said, “Well this is consolation for having to sit next to me.” Aw I couldn’t have asked for a better seat partner, I didn’t even know him! And then when the film ended he knew I didn’t take it well and I cried and shook through many moments and he offered the rest of his candy and I said, “Thanks, I think I need it.” I asked him what he thought overall and he said, “C-3P0 was pretty funny.” I said, “Yeah I agree. I actually knew everything that happened before I saw it, and I thought it was a mess.” He chuckled and said, “Me too, but I didn’t want to say anything in case you liked it.” I said, “Oh, no, I didn’t really like it. But I gotta be honest, Ben Solo didn’t deserve to die. That’s just my opinion.” I think he was surprised by that but didn’t disagree. He just kinda nodded or something and then we said goodbye and he left with his buddies, who also seemed pretty unenthused by the whole movie. Hopefully I gave him something to think about with my comment, but he was really nice and I’m glad he sat next to me.

Pessimism aside for now, I’ll start by listing the things I liked. I gotta be honest, there’s not much here.

Reylo is canon! But, in my opinion, it was handled pretty badly. Ben’s death is only the start of the problems for it, but more on that later.

C-3P0 is funny I guess. Yes he is annoying sometimes like usual, but not more so than other times.

D-O is freaking adorable. Out of everything good I’ve listed I have no qualms with this one. His manner is cute, his speaking is very funny, and his actions are just precious.

Babu Frik is very cute too, just perfect! Lovely little puppet! Don’t know why he was shoehorned in at the end battle but whatever. We never saw him again.

Maz is a puppet now? Okay, cool. Wish that would’ve been the case since the beginning. You had the technology JJ.

The music is good, when it’s given its own time to shine and be noticed. I feel like I barely noticed it was there because sound effects just drowned it out. Really wasted, but still good nonetheless.

Leia’s death and how it affected Ben. Wow. This was the first moment I truly cried. This was handled very well by Adam Driver, and then Maz saying “Goodbye, Princess.” Ouch, that got me.

Ben talking to the memory of his father! This is something I did not know was in the movie and boy am I glad I wasn’t spoiled for it! THIS is where the really hard tears and sobbing came. I was literally shaking and shivering trying to keep it in so as not to disturb everyone else. This. Part. Was. Perfect. Ben looks at him like he wants to say “I love you,” and Han says out loud “I know.” *crazy screaming and crying* Out of all the things they got wrong for Ben in this film, THIS they got right!

Ben Solo is the Solo boy we always wanted. Running in with a t-shirt, gun slinging, blasting opponents without even looking. THIS is a true son of Solo! But of course they give him no lines except “Ow.” THAT was a bad idea.

And that’s it. Yes those are the only things I even remotely liked, but I have to be honest, each one of these has some kind of problem attached to it which sours the real enjoyment.

On to what I disliked. Strap in lads, this is going to be a long ride.

1. The pacing. OH. MY. GOSH. SLOW. THE. FUCK. DOWN. For fucks sake I couldn’t even process what the hell was happening before we were on to the next thing! This was the biggest problem with the movie, BY FAR. Yes I know the story is terrible, we’ll get to that, but the pacing just completely took me out of the movie. I couldn’t feel invested in anything because it was all in one ear and out the other like ten-fold!

And this is part of the issue I have with how Reylo was handled. It. Felt. So. Rushed. And. Unfinished. There weren’t enough scenes with them and the scenes we did get were so fast and then over with that it felt like no progress was being made at all! It felt, for lack of a better word, unearned. And I know, that’s not really the case since they’ve had plenty of build-up in the last 2 films, but there wasn’t enough time with them spent NOT fighting and hating each other and opposing each other. Yes, I know, Kylo kept trying to get Rey to take his hand, but it doesn’t feel genuine because even Kylo feels out of character, and Rey too, big time. Now this isn’t the actor’s faults, they did what they could with the shitty story they were given, so I put all this blame at JJ’s desk.

In any case the overall film pacing was too fast, too much, too soon, too many things onscreen, too many things happening at once, not enough character, not enough motivation, not enough letting scenes breathe and just play out naturally. Everything felt forced for the sake of the “plot.” Oh we gotta get this thing, and then that thing, to get this thing, so we can defeat these guys! LET. US. BREATHE.

2. The story. My gosh, they couldn’t have picked a worse storyline to follow. Everything truly felt like it was written by a fanboy who wanted to retcon everything in TLJ, even down to the dialogue. Everyone keeps saying to Rey “You’re a Palpatine.” But it sounds SO strange, like nobody says things like this. I get it, it’s a space fantasy, they talk weird mumbo jumbo but it just sounds like a fanboy ghost wrote this. Like we gotta have everyone know now she’s a Palpatine! You’re a Palpatine! You’re a Palpatine! Palpatine heir! All bow down to the Palpatine! Give me a break.

3. Yeah, let’s talk about Palps. The old raisin himself. You know, I never really liked ROTS, but Palps was always a great thing about it. He was sinister, diabolical, he had a plan and knew what to do with it. But this Palps. *le heavy sigh* What a waste this was. For one thing, the lightning effects that lights up his face is really annoying, even for someone who doesn’t get seizures, I can’t even imagine what it’s like for those who do, I’m so sorry. And like, he has this whole legion of Sith followers? The fuck? Where the hell were these guys before? I’m sure they existed BEFORE the last Sith Lord died, right?

I digress. I have a question though: why does he want Rey so much? Why didn’t he try to get his son to take over? Wouldn’t that have been easier? Also, WHO DID HE FUCK TO GET A SON?? HOW DID HIS SON GET AWAY FROM HIM?? WHY DID HIS SON APPARENTLY TURN TO THE LIGHT?? THERE’S TOO MANY QUESTIONS HERE AND NO GOOD EXPLANATIONS. AND NO DISNEY, I DON’T WANT A 10-PART COMIC ON THIS. GO FUCK YOURSELVES.

The only interesting thing about Palps in this film is that his face gets melted off like a Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off. He better not be coming back. Ever again.

4. And hey, while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about Rey’s parents. So apparently they’re both good people. *le sigh* But what kind of good people leave their daughter alone on a harsh and unforgiving planet with a blubber guy? And don’t tell me they didn’t know he was an abusive asshole, they LIVED on Jakku, they HAD to have known him, ESPECIALLY if they truly were junk traders, they would have DEALT with him. Oh, and apparently the “I’ll come back for you sweetheart, I promise” line is changed up a bit and given to her father after all. No. Screw that. That line was meant for Ben, I don’t care how petty this sounds, this is terrible. So yeah, fuck Rey’s parents, I don’t care how “good” you try to make their intentions, they’re badly shoehorned in and they screw up anyway. Next.

5. Ben’s story and his fate. So yeah, obviously I hate that Ben died, but more than that I hate how his story was handled here. It was so rushed, it didn’t feel as natural as it should have. It needed time to BREATHE. A lot of time! And I feel like they really shafted Kylo/Ben’s story off to the side to give more time to the hereby named GoldenTrio. (You know who I mean...we’ll get to them.) It really seemed like JJ didn’t even care about Ben’s fate anymore, and just kind of put it in as an afterthought. His death scene? Not even given a fucking minute to process because WE GOT TO PARTAY. All in all, his whole story is so terribly sad that I don’t even know if I can watch TFA or TLJ anymore, knowing how it ends.

6. The GoldenTrio. Oh for fucks sake, JJ, you should have killed Poe off when you had the chance, because now the story is all about THEM. Boom! They’re literally front and center in the movie. I don’t even think Reylo gets as much screen time as them. I mean really, Ben’s death scene and Rey’s grieving gets 1.5 minutes, tops. GoldenTrio reunion and threesome hugging? 5 fucking minutes of nothing but them hugging. I’m not even exaggerating. (Okay maybe I am, but it’s given more focus and time to “breathe” than Ben Solo’s fucking death. I’m getting a headache remembering it.)

Hey, remember in ESB and ROTJ where the trio got split up and had their own story lines and own purposes to fulfill without each other hanging around (apart from Han and Leia because their story lines are interconnected)? Yeah, I miss that too.

Also, Rey keeps wandering off being “pulled” to something, and every...single...time, Finn is like “Rey, wait! Poe we gotta get her! rEy CoMe BaCk!!” This happens at least 5 times, pretty consecutively too. It gets old real fast. Boy do I miss the days of TLJ where people got to be away from each other to discover new things without interference.

Which leads me to another point: They tried to shove FinnRey in here while shitting on FinnRose quite literally. What. A. Slap. To. The. Face. This is horrible treatment, and I hope Kelly will never do another interview for Lucasfilm again. She doesn’t deserve this.

7. The Ending™. Wow. What a way to show that your characters haven’t progressed at all by showing them in the same environment that they started in. Let’s do an overview: Rey starts out alone on a desert planet and meets a droid that isn’t hers. Rey ends up alone on a desert planet with a droid that still isn’t hers. PROGRESSION 101!! *slaps forehead* I mean, don’t even get me started on the fact that Ben isn’t there with her and that literally one half of her soul is gone (how is she not in agony right now??), but then to add more salt to the wound she’s just like “oh yeah I must be the rightful successor to the Skywalker name, even tho I’m a Palps...makes sense to me!” Fuck off. You don’t deserve that title after hating Luke for not doing what you wanted him to do and for hating Ben for most of this movie too.

Can we also acknowledge that this is THE ABSOLUTE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO END A 40 YEAR SAGA AND FAMILY LEGACY? So, Palps had a kid who had a kid. This kid is then deemed a-okay by the family that was affected most by Palps and they welcome her like the sunshine child she is, yet shun their own offspring for being damaged goods because he was being manipulated by said Palps. Okay, it’s official now, everyone’s an asshole...except Ben. He seemed to be the only one to understand his faults and right his wrongs and not be an idiot. Then the kid who was abused and manipulated is killed because “reasons” or “problematic” or whatever and the offspring of Palps lives while the family that Palps manipulated is ultimately gone forever because it’s last descendant wanted to save the offspring of Palps out of the goodness of his heart. Now the offspring of Palps doesn’t even give a flipping thank you and steals their name. wHaT a SaTiSfYiNg EnDiNg!!! Someone gag me.

8. Luke’s X-Wing being raised out of the water and it’s in perfect working condition. What. The. Fuck. I don’t know if you guys realize this, but this completely undermines Luke’s arc in TLJ. That X-Wing was sunk and dead to show that he had no desire to return to the outside world. He was staying on the island. For good. And he buried that thing in water to make sure he couldn’t use it ever again, but it was still visible to him to remind him of his conviction if ever he questioned it. But no. That thing is a-okay and ready to fly. No need for parts, there’s no rust or any sea salt corrosion, ready to go skipper! This was just added for easy call-backs to ESB but boy this had absolutely 0 weight to it. I literally yawned or looked at my watch around this part thinking “oh my gosh isn’t it over yet?” Pretty much sums up my entire experience.

9. Rose got shafted to appease the fanboys. This one needs no further explanation or analysis, it just sucks and has no real reason to exist.

10. Luke was barely in it and offered not that great advice. Poor Mark. His performance really peaked with TLJ and never went back up.

11. Rey is suddenly the Avatar now? You can now talk to all previous Jedi’s who existed? What buffoonery is this? Oh, but Ben doesn’t get a single. fucking. word. from Anakin, the man he looked up to. I’m so tired right now. What’s left?

12. The message changed from “it doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody, you’re a somebody to me” to “you’re a somebody with a bad bloodline, but that doesn’t define you (except when it totally does)”. That sort of message would be fine if it had been the message since TFA, but it wasn’t. The message since TFA was “I’m a nobody, but I can become a somebody regardless of my lineage or my childhood.” Why change the message in the 11th hour? To appease fanboys. Literally anything that makes no sense in this movie can be attributed to fanboys. There’s so much contradiction and hypocrisy in this film from both the narrative and the characters that it’s insulting.

13. Hux was utterly shafted too. What a waste of a well built up and conniving little bastard who in the end gets shot for shock value and laughs. It’s like what TLJ did but way worse because he’s actually killed. Hux as the spy? Just no.

14. Jannah was kind of wasted too, not enough screen time. I get her and Finn kind of bonding over being ex-stormtroopers, but it’s not really delved into. Also the whole “nature vs. machinery” thing kinda briefly shows up at the big battle and feels unearned too, because there was nothing before in this movie or others to suggest there was a war between the two.

15. Poe is treated more as the heir to Leia than Ben is. Poe gets to fly the falcon and gets to wreck it up (dishonoring who it belonged to before), gets to be by Leia’s deathbed, etc. Not earned at all.

16. The pointlessness of random cameos or thrown in references. Not a single person in my theater noticed John Williams as the bartender, nobody pointed out or said anything about any reference from previous movies, it was silent.

17. What the hell was even the point of the whole “Dark Rey” vision? Oh, she shows her scary pointy teeth ala Bilbo style. No thank you.

18. Why the hell does it feel like these characters aren’t the characters from TFA and TLJ? They feel so different and it’s noticeable.

19. Finn is Force sensitive. Literally tacked on like nobody wouldn’t notice. We noticed JJ. We notice everything.

20. Rey and Kylo/Ben fighting for way too much of the film and their interactions. Not enough caring or understanding, not enough longing looks, it feels like their romance was almost cut from the film entirely.

21. Oh yeah, Rey floating at the beginning? Looked stupid as hell. And the “Be with me” line? I thought maybe, just maybe, she meant Ben, but no. She’s trying to reach “her past selves” like the fucking Avatar and she’s even floating rocks around like Aang did. Ugh.

22. Anything else? Oh yeah, this movie sucks completely and wholly...FOR NOT GIVING ONE FUCKING LINE OF DIALOGUE TO BEN SOLO AFTER HE HAD BEEN REDEEMED. HOW HEARTLESS CAN YOU BE THAT YOU LET HIM DIE WITHOUT SAYING ONE FINAL THING?!?! DAMN J.J. YOU’RE STUPID.

And that’s it. Kudos if you read the whole thing. I ramble a lot.

[aion-rsa]

Star Wars: 12 Snoke Facts You Might Not Know

https://ift.tt/2Tc5xc4

Set up in the first half of the Sequel Trilogy as a powerful new Star Wars villain, Supreme Leader Snoke of the First Order turned out to be something else entirely. Despite fulfilling the role of Emperor Palpatine in The Force Awakens, he’s completely off the table by the end of The Last Jedi. And in The Rise of Skywalker, the galaxy is only big enough for one galaxy-conquering villain as Kylo Ren’s fall shows.

By the end of the trilogy, Snoke is revealed to have been a bio-engineered villain all along, Force-puppeted tool Emperor Palpatine used to regain his grip on the galaxy while hiding his weakened physical form on the Sith planet of Exegol. His triumphs no longer truly his own, Snoke’s ultimate legacy is the rise of Kylo Ren as well as legendary motion capture actor Andy Serkis’ performance. 

As we look back at Snoke’s short tenure as the big bad of Star Wars, here are some facts you might not know about Supreme Leader Snoke: 

1. Snoke Was a Strand-Cast Created by Palpatine

Emperor Palpatine created Snoke to be his proxy through which he could regain his power. Although Snoke was bio-engineered in a lab on Exegol, he was a strand-cast, not a clone. This bit of Star Wars jargon means Snoke isn’t an exact copy of anyone, but isn’t natural-born either. We’ve heard the term “strand-cast” before. In The Mandalorian, Kuill speculates that Grogu might be a strand-cast — a speculation which turned out to be wrong when Ahsoka revealed Grogu grew up in the Jedi Temple. 

Palpatine’s ultimate plan was to use Snoke as his voice to whisper in Kylo Ren’s ear. It was one of several ways he was working behind the scenes all along to build the First Order — itself just a shell for the new Empire being built on Exegol. With his own clone body decrepit but his spirit still strong in the Force, Palpatine could possess other people but was looking for a permanent new vessel. 

Stream your Star Wars favorites right here!

Snoke was likely born from these experiments but was too imperfect a vessel to house Palpatine’s spirit. There were other candidates, like the strand-cast who became Rey’s father. But since the process that created strand-casts could not reliably replicate Force-sensitivity, Palpatine’s “son” was not Force sensitive. It was another dead end. The Sith lord next turned his attention to Rey in The Rise of Skywalker.

This strand-cast/cloning storyline shares several plot points with the classic Dark Empire comic series, where Palpatine bided his time until he could come back in a younger, stronger clone body and re-create the Empire.

2. Snoke Wasn’t Aware of His Own History

Unlike Palpatine’s strand-cast “son,” Snoke didn’t know he was created in a lab by the Sith lord nor that he was being manipulated to rebuild the Emperor’s forces. In fact, despite being created some time after the Battle of Endor, he believed to have lived through the rise and fall of the Empire.

All of this is revealed in the novelization of The Force Awakens, in a twist that might actually have been a result of The Rise of Skywalker not having been written or planned out yet. But his status as a Sith sleeper agent fits with Palpatine’s plan, too. Snoke truly believing that he himself was really a dark Force user who had lived through the Galactic Civil War likely prevented Ben Solo/Kylo Ren from sensing the deception throughout his time as Snoke’s apprentice. Palpatine needed Snoke to believe the lies he told Kylo Ren so that he could more easily manipulate the fallen Skywalker.

3. Hugh Hefner and Snoke’s Injuries Informed How Serkis Played the Character 

Andy Serkis rose to fame as the motion capture performer behind Gollum’s creepy mannerisms in The Lord of the Rings, quickly becoming well-known for injecting unique life and personality into monstrous characters. For Supreme Leader Snoke, Serkis drew from “the gold-lamé Hugh Hefner look,” the shining robe evoking the Playboy magazine founder. Serkis says he and The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson also considered drawing inspiration from “so many different dictators,” but settled on the uncanny Hefner idea. 

Snoke’s visual appearance was still being finalized when Serkis joined J.J. Abrams to work on the character for The Force Awakens. Therefore, the actor developed his ideas about the character at the same time as the artists were developing theirs. In The Last Jedi, Snoke finally appeared in the flesh as opposed to as a hologram, allowing Serkis to draw even more from the villain’s grotesque physical appearance. 

Serkis says he imagined Snoke’s deep scars were the source of some of his anger. “He’s terribly powerful, of course. But he is also a very vulnerable and wounded character,” Serkis told EW (via io9). “He has suffered and he has suffered injury. The way that his malevolence comes out is in reaction to that. His hatred of the Resistance is fueled by what’s happened to him personally.”

4. His Look Was Based on Classic Horror Movies 

According to the book The Art of The Force Awakens, “J.J. [Abrams] and [creature effects supervisor] Neal [Scanlan] didn’t want him to be old and decrepit, like the Emperor,” said senior sculptor Ivan Manzella, who sculpted a maquette of an elderly, bald face for Snoke. Early ideas made the difference even clearer by making Snoke a female character. 

The final result did look a lot like Palpatine, though: a hunched old man with a face distorted by deep wrinkles and scars. Manzella, who also made the final sculpt, says that Abrams wanted his look to evoke Hammer Films horror movies (such as classic takes on Frankenstein and Dracula). In particular Peter Cushing, who played Victor Frankeinstein and Abraham Van Helsing in several Hammer movies, was a direct inspiration. 

Manzella also added what he felt was a sense of beauty to the character: “I imagined him to be a beautiful marble sculpture, so dark and menacing, but actually quite beautiful to look at … It’s almost like Snoke was quite handsome when he was younger.”

The Frankenstein comparison is especially apt since Palpatine and his Sith cultists built Snoke themselves.

5. Snoke Is Not a Sith Lord 

You may have noticed that Snoke does not have the “Darth” title like the Dark Lords of the Sith do. He was never given one because he isn’t technically a Sith Lord. But the fact that he’s a bio-engineered being created by Palpatine explains why his training of Kylo Ren followed the Sith mold so closely, since all along Palpatine was trying to manipulate Ren.

During the time of The Force Awakens, many fans theorized that the next film would reveal Snoke to be Darth Plagueis, the Sith master who taught Palpatine the ways of the dark side. Plagueis was interested in extending one’s lifespan through the use of the dark side, so an old man with mysterious origins could very well have been him. This theory didn’t pan out. 

6. Rian Johnson Felt Snoke’s Presence Distracted From Rey and Kylo Ren’s Stories

The fan theories didn’t line up with what The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson had in mind for moving the Sequel Trilogy cast into the future. In a conversation with EW (via Collider) Johnson explained his reasoning for knocking Snoke off the Sequel Trilogy’s chessboard.

“When I was working on the character of Kylo, I came to a place where I thought the most interesting thing would be to knock the shaky foundation out from under him at the beginning of this movie…By the end of this film, he’s gone from being a wannabe Vader to someone who is standing on his own feet as a complex villain taking the reins.”

But if Kylo took the reins, where would this leave Snoke?

“That made me realize the most interesting thing would be to eliminate that dynamic between the ‘emperor’ and pupil, so that all bets are off going into the next one. That also led to the possibility of this dramatic turn in the middle, which could also be a really powerful connection point between Kylo and Rey.”

Instead of focusing on Snoke’s history, Johnson found Kylo Ren’s ongoing story more relevant and felt killing Snoke was necessary to push his former apprentice’s arc forward.

7. Snoke Chose Ben Solo Because of His Skywalker Blood

Speaking of the Sith, Snoke may not be one, but he is interested in the lineage of one of the strongest Sith of all time. He chose to corrupt Ben Solo specifically because he was the grandson of Darth Vader. Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa were perhaps too ingrained in the light side and too dedicated to the cause of the New Republic for Snoke to manipulate them, but the mercurial and directionless Solo was the perfect target. Using Ben’s obsession with Darth Vader to turn him further to the dark side was a relatively easy task for Snoke.

In the comic series The Rise of Kylo Ren, we learned how Snoke began reaching out to Ben from an early age– and another comic, Age of Resistance: Supreme Leader Snoke, also fills in some of Snoke and Ben’s history. Before the events of The Force Awakens, Snoke spent a lot of time planting seeds of distrust between Ben and his uncle and teacher Luke Skywalker from afar, all while biding his time on a space station with an expansive garden, where Ben flees for guidance after the destruction of the Jedi academy. 

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Some time after this, Snoke took Kylo Ren to the Force cave on Dagobah from The Empire Strikes Back to experience a vision. There, Kylo kills an illusory Luke, but stops short of killing his parents. But Snoke encourages him to use his anger, fear, and other emotions associated with the dark side to complete his training.

The visual dictionary for The Rise of Skywalker shows how deep Palpatine’s plan went. It says Palpatine intended killing Snoke to be the mark of Kylo Ren’s full descent into the dark side and rise into Sith-hood. Snoke’s death was in a way a symbolic killing of a Sith master — it’s traditional for the apprentice to kill the Master — while Palpatine himself remained alive and well to take over as Kylo’s new master. A final, decisive victory over the Skywalker bloodline.

8. Snoke Trained At Least One Other Apprentice Before Kylo Ren

According to the The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary, Snoke canonically trained someone else before Ben. Little is known about this mystery apprentice. We don’t know the person’s name, when this took place, or how it connects to Palpatine’s overarching plans. The existence of this apprentice is implied by Snoke’s description of Kylo Ren as his most gifted apprentice, suggesting there must have been someone else to compare him to. 

In the Age of Resistance comic, Snoke also mentions that he plans to have more apprentices after Kylo Ren is gone. But Ren cuts that plan short in The Last Jedi.

9. Snoke Had At Least One Earlier Run-In With Luke

The facial scarring and collapsed cheek Serkis talked about might have been created by Luke Skywalker. In The Rise of Kylo Ren, Ben Solo alludes to “what Master Luke did to you.” But Snoke is more interested in Ben’s conflict with Luke. 

What happened between Snoke and Luke is still unknown. It’s possible that whatever confrontation led to Snoke’s scars was also the first time Ben met Snoke. 

10. Snoke Played a Key Role in the Empire’s Transformation into The First Order

Since Palpatine had to hide his weak clone body from everyone except his secret Sith acolytes, he placed Snoke in charge of the day-to-day growth of the First Order. Through his own lackeys, General Hux and Captain Phasma, Snoke spearheaded the new stormtrooper program that captured and indoctrinated children, building a military force powerful enough to go against the New Republic. And behind the veil of the Unknown Regions, an uncharted sector of the galaxy where the New Republic held no dominion, Snoke helped reorganize what was left of the Empire into the First Order, eventually becoming its Supreme Leader. 

Snoke’s Attendants, the purple-robed aliens seen briefly in The Last Jedi, are also part of this initiative. They are the ones who helped the Imperial remnant settle in the Unknown Regions, using their abilities to blaze hyperspace trails that made First Order conquest much more efficient.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

11. Snoke’s Flagship, The Supremacy, Is the Only Ship of Its Kind

Snoke’s flagship was ripped in half by “the Holdo maneuver” in The Last Jedi, a strong blow by the beleaguered Resistance. Along with being the site of Snoke’s throne room, the Supremacy also contained enough factories to produce entire fleets for the First Order.

In fact, it was the base of operations for the entire First Order, which did not have a capital planet but instead maintained their military superiority from space. Technically, the Supremacy was a Mega-class Star Destroyer and the only one of its kind ever made. 

12. Snoke’s Ring Contains a Relic From Darth Vader’s Castle

Snoke was a collector of Sith relics and secrets, traveling around the galaxy in search of knowledge, settling on his Force philosophy, and collecting things before he recruited Ben. It’s unclear how much of this Sith pilgrimage really happened versus the memories implanted by Palpatine, but it does appear that Snoke did actually discover the lost concept of a Force dyad, which he used to bring Rey and Kylo together.

He also discovered many dark side artifacts. One detail that’s easy to overlook in The Last Jedi is Snoke’s ring. The gaudy gold ring contains a hunk of black crystal. The Last Jedi Visual Dictionary defines this as obsidian from the catacombs beneath Darth Vader’s fortress on Mustafar. The ring also features “gold etched with glyph of the Dwartii.” In both canon and Legends, Dwartii is a planet which is home to several different schools of philosophers. 

The post Star Wars: 12 Snoke Facts You Might Not Know appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[queenofcarrots]

Manuscripts in Star Wars (And Star Wars Fan Fiction)

This is the text of a talk originally presented at the conference Fan Cultures and the Premodern World at Oxford University in July, 2019, organized by Dr. Juliana Dresvina of the Oxford History Faculty. This presentation represents a collaboration between myself and Dr Brandon Hawke of Rhode Island College, and is essentially a summation of our video project Sacred Texts: Codices Far, Far Away, (Introduction to the series at that link) and examples below will include links to brief conversations where Brandon and I talk about the examples in a bit more detail. This has also been posted on my academic blog but I’m cross-posting here to reach a different audience.

Hi, My name is Dot Porter, and I want to start by thanking Juliana for the wonderful organization of this conference, and also for including me in the program. This is very different from the kind of conference I normally present at – in my day job I’m a special collections curator at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in medieval manuscripts, their digitization, and their post-digital lives. Basically I get paid to digitize medieval manuscripts and then play with them. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which is just finished, and through which we digitized and made available for reuse more than 465 codices from institutions in Philadelphia)

Aside from my family there are two things in life I adore: medieval manuscripts, and Star Wars. I must admit that while I am a scholar of manuscripts, of a sort, I am also a fan. I love manuscripts – the way they look, feel, smell; I love to hold a manuscript and think about all the other people who have touched it, and consider the signs of use that imply their long histories. This interest has led to current work on conceiving of medieval manuscripts as transformative works themselves, first presented at Leeds 2018 and work I’m continuing looking specifically as Books of Hours. (My original draft of this presentation featured some of this work, but it threatened to take over, so I axed it all; a blog post of my Leeds paper is on my blog, if you’re curious).

While I am arguably a manuscript scholar, I am most definitely not a scholar of fandom studies – you will, I’m sure, find my theory wanting – nor am I a scholar of Star Wars, but I am a fan. I do the things that fans do. I’m on Tumblr, although that platform is pretty dead now, and I have a fandom Twitter account, which is much more active. I write and consume fan fiction, and I regularly commission artwork to illustrate my stories and stories I would like to write. I have written exactly one notable meta, which was even picked up by the AV Club – they actually cited me, unlike many of the other websites, which only cited the person who stole my work and posted it on Reddit!

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, released in December 2017, we were introduced, for the first time, to manuscripts in the Star Wars universe. I had avoided trailers and spoilers, so the first time I saw this was in the theater, and I was, as the kids say, shooketh. Not only one manuscript, but a whole shelf-full of them! And they’re important. Rey, our heroine, has been sent to the island of Ahch-to to bring Luke Skywalker back to help the Resistance, led by Luke’s sister General Leia Organa, defeat the First Order. Rey has been there for a day or so, following Luke around, making no headway, when she is called to the Uneti tree, a large, hollow, Force-sensitive tree that houses these manuscripts. It’s in the company of these books that Rey and Luke finally communicate with each other, when Rey admits that she has only recently come to the Force and that she needs Luke to train her to be a Jedi, and when Luke grudgingly agrees to give her some lessons, but also tells her that the Jedi must die. Exciting stuff, and the books are there to hear it.

According to Star Wars The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary, Luke Skywalker scoured the galaxy for these texts and collected them himself, storing them in the tree that we see in the film. So these texts weren’t originally all in one collection, they are from many different planets, potentially written in ten different places, ten different times, ten different languages and alphabets, although there’s only one we ever see in the film. The starwars.com blog post “Inside the Lucasfilm Archives: The Jedi Texts” gives us an up-close look at the prop book that was shown in the film; as you can see it’s a real book, written and bound, and even damaged. There are manuscripts in our collection at Penn that look not very unlike this book. It is a real manuscript.

This is one manuscript in the universe. What else do we know about manuscripts in star wars in general? To be honest: not much. But we do know that it is rare to write by hand (as opposed to writing with digital technology like data pads). In Claudia Gray’s novel Bloodlines, which takes place six years before The Last Jedi, Leia Organa is preparing for a fancy party when she finds a handwritten note at her seat, and she’s shocked: “Virtually nobody wrote any longer; it had been years since Leia had seen actual words handwritten in ink on anything but historical documents.” So it appears that, by the time the current films take place, there are no longer manuscripts being actively written in the galaxy, or at least it’s very rare.

Interestingly there is one character in the Sequel Trilogy who it is suggested knows how to write by hand: Kylo Ren, formerly Ben Solo. There is a scene – the same scene is actually shown three times, from three different points of view – where a young padawan Ben is sleeping and his Uncle, Luke Skywalker, comes to him and looks into his head, sensing great darkness in his dreams. Ben calls his lightsaber to either attack his uncle or defend himself against him, depending on the version of the scene, and in one of these shots we can see that he has a calligraphy set in his bedroom. We can see the set here, in a screenshot of his desk just before he calls his lightsaber over – which knocks over the pen and inkwell and jar of parchment scrolls in the process – and in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

What else do we know about these specific books? There is concept art in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi; including six internal pages and six shots of the bindings.

I remember looking at the concept art and thinking how alike and different they were from the manuscripts I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Penn, and I discovered that my Twitter mutual Brandon Hawke, an Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College, was having many of the same thoughts that I was. So in October of 2018, Brandon came down to Penn and we sat for hours in front of a green screen and talked about manuscripts and Star Wars, comparing books in the Penn collections to what we see of the manuscripts in the concept art. We’ve been posting snippets of our discussions on the Schoenberg Institute YouTube channel, and there’s a link at the top there if you want to check them out. So for most of the rest of this paper I’ll be walking through some of the possible comparisons between real manuscripts and the Star Wars manuscripts. I want to stress that we did this for fun, and not for science, and that we’re limited by the collections at Penn and by our own knowledge.

Consider yourself warned: The remainder of this presentation is essentially an educated fan, raving.

As far as Brandon and I have been able to determine, this is a previously unknown script in the Star Wars universe. When I saw it my mind immediately went to Ge’ez, shown here in an early 20th century book of Hymns from Ethiopia. There’s something about the blockiness that is just slightly curved, and a few of the letter forms are slightly similar although I don’t think that’s necessarily meaningful. (video)

We also made a comparison with Coptic, which is thinner, more curved, and perhaps a closer match. (video)

For the third example we looked not at the text, but at its layout on the page. We found a similarity with this 16th century collection of Persian poetry, both its illuminated header (similar in aspect to the illuminated blue line of text in the center of the ancient Jedi text) and the framing of the text. (video)

Aside from text, it is clear that the concept art of pages supplied to us here represent astronomical texts. This is really not surprising, considering that in the Star Wars universe we have a galaxy that seems to have been very closely connected, between planets and cultures, for a very long time, and so it makes sense that even the most ancient texts would be concerned with objects in the system – stars and planets and moons – and how they related to and interact with one another. And this is a major concern in medieval astronomical texts, too: these texts illustrate people trying to make sense of the system they live in, in the best way they know.

One of the pages in the jedi texts is the symbol of the Galactic Republic, but placed on some kind of chart, with characters dispersed through the chart and text – perhaps labels – along the outside. We found a similarity with this chart in LJS 57, a 14th century astronomical anthology from Spain. I don’t know exactly what this chart represents but I can tell you that astronomical texts are full of similar charts; it was one of the ways that medieval people made sense of the data they had available to them. (video)

Something similar is happening here, in LJS 449, a 15th century German medical and astronomical miscellany. These charts are perhaps a bit simpler than the Spanish chart, but they have that attractive blue coloring. Both the coloring and the arrangement of data around the circle reminded Brandon and me of the diagrams on this page of the Jedi texts. (video)

The next three slides show diagrams from LJS 26, a mid-13th century copy of Johannes de Sacro Bosco’s, Algorismus and Tractatum de sphaera, an immensely popular text that was copied and translated and commented upon from the time it was written in the early 13th century (it is possible that our copy was written during Sacrobosco’s lifetime) through the 16th century. It is full of diagrams illustrating the movement of the planets, and the sun, and the moon in relation to the earth. I personally find these diagrams most reminiscent of the two pages on the bottom left, although I feel like their organization suggests a sense of scale that is lacking in the medieval diagrams. (video)

Medieval astronomers only had to think about the earth, and the moon, and the sun, and a few other planets. On the other hand, the Star Wars universe operates on a whole other level – a galaxy with countless star systems and planets that aren’t even charted. When I look at these diagrams I see a clever attempt to illustrate scale using the relatively primitive technology of ink and paper in place of the star charts and 3D maps that we see in the films.

On the other hand, there are some really simple 1:1 comparisons to be made, such as this diagram, which pretty clearly illustrates the phases of a moon. (video)

I want to take a quick look at the bindings of these manuscripts, particularly this piece of concept art, which is quite similar to the prop that we see in the film.

This has a fairly standard binding structure, quite similar to LJS 102, the Ethiopic manuscript we looked at earlier, except for the front cover, which is built of three separate pieces that are obviously connected together. In western bindings, if a wooden cover were a composite of multiple pieces, we would expect that to be obscured, as in this late 13th century Catalonian manuscripts (It’s hard to tell, which is the point, but this cover is made of three pieces of wood).

The only example of a cover like this I’ve seen is from the Walters Art Museum, this 14th century Ethiopian Gospel book. The cover was broken and then sewn back together, but this was the result of an accident, not done on purpose.

My colleague Alberto Campagnolo also suggested that it is similar to the Chinese practice of writing on bamboo strips and binding them together, as in this 18th century example.

This is one instance where the artists who created these concepts have done an excellent job with suggesting a manuscript culture – in fact, several manuscript cultures, cultures that use what is available to them. There are two manuscripts here that appear to be bound in decorated tusks, one that has what appear to be shells embedded in a leather binding, and another that might be bound in hairy skin or – I like to think – had the binding grown on it underground. In any case these all suggest books written in different places, perhaps at different times, and as a manuscript scholar I find that fascinating.

Following up on this I wanted to see how the concept of the manuscripts was received by writers of fan fiction. As a fan author myself I have written a few stories featuring the ancient Jedi texts, but given my interests that made sense; I was curious to see what other authors have done with them. I think there’s more extensive work to be done here, but in reading through the 40 or so stories I was able to find (by searching AO3 for ancient jedi texts, and the “jedi text” tag) I discovered not surprisingly that the stories focused on the text of the books, not on their physical appearance (which is at least partially due to fan fiction being a written medium, vs. film being a visual medium) and that there are three main themes that can appear by themselves or be combined:

Rey can read the texts on her own, or she needs help (Kylo Ren, C3PO, Obi Wan Kenobi’s force ghost)

The translation is used to further the story (whether or not it happens)

The texts do something (e.g., magic spells)

What will happen next? Will there be manuscripts in the Rise of Skywalker, the final film in this last trilogy? Of course I hope so, and it seems likely. The Uneti tree was struck by lightning and burned, but Rey took the manuscripts with her (here is a screenshot of a drawer in the Millennium Falcon, at the very end of the film, showing the books clearly safe and tucked away)

and in the Poe Dameron comic #27 we learn that Rey has been working with C3PO to translate the texts.

And there’s also the spectre of Kylo Ren with a calligraphy set; if he had access to these manuscripts when he was studying with Luke Skywalker, it’s possible that he has read and perhaps even annotated some of the books. Only time will tell, and I for one can’t wait for December.

[stillwinterair]

Pretty sure this thing is rife with typos and inconsistencies because I spent way too long writing this and Refuse to proofread, but, some notes from the writers’ room (my brain) on my Personal Mental Sequel Trilogy Rewrite:

On paper, I think the Kylo/Snoke situation as it occurs is really compelling. Killing Snoke midway through the trilogy was a stupid move in the context of the trilogy we got, but could have very easily been made to work well with a few changes... many of which in The Force Awakens.

(This is gonna mostly be focused on Kylo Ren, but in this version of the story he’s far from the focus, it’s just kinda what I would want to see from a villain)

The ultimate goal in my own personal version of the trilogy would have been to make the late-second-act twist (this trilogy’s “I am your father” moment) be Kylo Ren becoming Supreme Leader, and cementing himself as the big bad. But to do that effectively... we have to make Kylo Ren more sympathetic. We have to trick the audience into thinking he’ll come around. As it stands... the movies don’t actually do this. A certain subset of fans certainly think they did, but there’s really no buildup to “Bendemption” aside from a single scene where he’s hesitant to kill his mom, I guess. Other than that, he’s all evil, all the time.

He should still do all the same things: slaughter a village of innocents, torture multiple people, stand idly by as his fascist regime destroys the seat of galactic government. But give him moments of pause before they happen, and feed into the “pull to the Light” with whispered voices calling through the Force, begging him to stop. Every time, he almost listens... but he pushes them away. And every time he pushes them away, something in him changes. He stands taller, grips his blade tighter, and his power with the Force grows a little stronger.

Now, another crucial building block to the twist: move Kylo’s “doesn’t wanna shoot Leia” scene up a movie... and give it to Han.

The scene plays out as we see it in TFA: Han Solo pleads with his son to come home (I would have had them find Luke by this point for the sake of a trio reunion but that’s an entirely different thread to follow). Kylo Ren -- or, perhaps, Ben Solo? -- grips the silent hilt of his lightsaber, visibly unsure. Is he going to submit to his father? Does he plan to kill him?

We don’t find out. Not in this movie, anyway.

A blast rings out. A bolt hits Han in the chest, his eyes glaze over, his fingers drift from his son’s cheek, first slowly, then altogether. He tumbles aside, falling to his death. The camera pans: someone, perhaps Phasma or Hux, is looking down the smoking barrel of their rifle. They salute, then quickly take cover as the distraught and agonized trio of Rey, Finn, and Chewbacca begin firing on them.

Rage fills Kylo Ren’s eyes. He tenses. His lips twist into a twitching grimace. It seems entirely focused on Phasma/Hux. Bands of white-hot electricity trace the lengths of his fingers.

And then it all subsides.

He turns on his heel and pursues our trio, and the film proceeds as we’ve seen it, except again, Luke is also there. I’ll figure out that puzzle piece later.

EPISODE VIII:

Snoke should be heavily involved here, very clearly the puppet master pulling Kylo’s strings. Kylo is clearly haunted, though: those whispers we heard throughout the last movie are growing louder. Who are they? Jedi of the past? The souls of the dead? Anakin Skywalker himself, his spirit shattering itself into a million little pieces trying to push past the jagged barrier of Dark-side energy Kylo Ren surrounds himself with?

But Kylo needs to be less composed in this movie than he is in TLJ. No standing around calmly or stoically, he’s constantly on edge, looking over his shoulder, feeling judged by everyone and dreading it. Kylo Ren is tortured and haunted and it feels like at any moment, the facade will break. Clearly, the source of all his problems are because he isn’t being who he’s supposed to be, right? Clearly he could turn around at any moment and become someone better, right? Right?

Rey ends up before Snoke and Kylo Ren again, because she thinks Ben Solo can be saved, because the narrative is at least putting some work into making us think he can (“he’s haunted by the choices he’s been making, why wouldn’t he turn back to the Light?”). Snoke plays them against each other, yadda yadda yadda, but it perhaps becomes apparent that Snoke has an ulterior motive:

He doesn’t want Kylo Ren anymore. He wants Rey.

He toys with them, makes them duel to the death, but there’s a lot at play here: Snoke wants the strongest to survive, to shape them into a more worthwhile apprentice. Rey fights defensively, refusing to give up on Ben. Kylo is as aggressive as we’ve ever seen him, more conflicted than ever, raging against the voices in his head. Turn away from her, and strike him down, they say. Join the girl, rebuild the Jedi. Come back to Luke. Come back to your mother. The voices are familiar: Jedi from the past, friends who have died along the way. And then a final voice rings out, more ghostly than the rest: Come home, son, says Han Solo, an echo of his soul which has left a stain on the Force surrounding his son.

He knows what he has to do.

The electric currents we saw in our previous episode return, stronger now. The ground around him is charred, ash-black. Years of so-called “Gray Jedi” in Legends jump back to mind: are we actually going to see a Light-sider using Force lightning? you might wonder. All of his energy goes into a singular blast, aimed at Rey...

But it arcs past her, decimates Snoke’s guards. The Supreme Leader stands, shocked and enraged. He challenges Kylo: “You dare slaughter your own allies? You, boy, are nothing but a worm! But it matters not. I never needed you, anyway. The girl will take your place, and you’ll die as they did.”

Snoke attacks, but his mastery of the Force is nothing compared to what comes next: a torrent of lightning from the fingers of Kylo Ren.

The blast knocks Rey back, flings Anakin’s lightsaber from her hands. But when she stands, there’s a smile on her face. She did it. She won. The evil in Ben Solo has been vanquished, the Light has prevailed, and the First Order is finally defeated.

She asks him to come back with her, back to Luke, to Leia, to the Jedi. He can start again, help rebuild, save the galaxy.

He turns back to face her, and his eyes are bloodshot and yellow. He’s seething. He extends a hand, and an offer: join him, let the past die, create something new. Feel the power of the Dark side. There’s nothing like it. There never has been, and never will be.

This is the true Kylo Ren. The first steps of his manipulation were led by Snoke, but it was the taste of power that led him the rest of the way. It seduced him. Consumed him.

We cut back to the lightsaber of Anakin Skywalker, lying on the ground far away. We see Ren and Rey far in the background, standing opposed, but they’re out of focus. The lightsaber is all we can truly see. It begins to shiver, as if being called by someone. Presumably Rey. We cut back.

Rey refuses his offer, refuses the power, tempting as it may be.

“No? Then you’ll die as he did. As all your weak friends will.”

Another torrent of lightning bursts forth from Kylo Ren. But Rey makes no moves to defend or attack: she’s utterly in shock, confounded by this turn of events.

When the lightsaber ignites, it isn’t Rey who’s holding it. It’s Finn. Lightning crashes into it, holding it back, long enough for Rey to regain control, Force-push Kylo, and for the two of them to run.

Rey and Kylo’s Force bond from TLJ is maintained, as is the ending shot of Rey closing the door of the Falcon in Kylo’s face... but with it comes a darkness. The bond is severed. The door has been closed forever.

The twist of the Original Trilogy’s second act was that the villain was of our hero’s blood; in the end, it saved him.

The twist of our Sequel Trilogy’s second act is that the tortured soul we thought might have been a hero, never was one and never could be. You ~subvert expectations~ but in a way that builds the mythos and actually pays off a plot thread. Looking back at all of Kylo’s moments of tortured almost-goodness, the realization hits that he always had a chance and never took it, that the whispering voices which followed him, his pull to the Light, were an annoyance that pushed him the other way.

Anakin, Luke, and Ben were easily corrupted by the Dark. The difference is, Anakin was manipulated, Luke had the force of will to be a hero anyway, and Ben reveled in the Darkness. These are the Palpatine genes resurfacing.

And then in our Episode IX, we wouldn’t [re]introduce a new (well, old, but new to this trilogy) villain in the LAST ACT, but would instead build the story and mythos of one villain throughout the trilogy, off the puppet master when his role is done, and let him flourish as the evil bastard he always should have been. And then the Force-ghost of Anakin Skywalker can show up and basically confirm that he hasn’t been around because he’s been trying for decades to reach his grandson, that it consumed all of his power, etc.

Anyway. This is a lot but we could have had a really compelling villain here but they didn’t do fucking ANYTHING with him

[thelastjaedi]

TROS Rant

This post will contain spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker, so below the cut is spoilers.

The Palpatines Ultimately Win

Rey, a palpatine, ends up taking everything that belong to the skywalker family: the legacy saber, the millennium falcon, Han’s blaster, leia’s ex machina saber, the chosen one prophecy, the last skywalker’s life force, and their name/legacy. And her first act as a skywalker is to bury their sabers on the planet they all hated. The planet where Anakin was enslaved and where his mother’s life was stolen from him. The planet Luke could not wait to get off of and where his aunt and uncle were murdered. The planet where Leia was enslaved by a crime lord.

And the worst part is that Palptine gets what he always wanted: the lifeforce of a skywalker is used to keep a palpatine alive.

It Makes Everything the Skywalker Family Went Through so Pointless

If they were going to undo RotJ’s happy ending, they should have made the ending of the sequels even happier and more triumphant.

But instead, Anakin’s sacrifice amounted to nothing because Palpatine just lives on to completely wreck his family. Luke was a complete failure when it came to rebuilding the Jedi order. Palpatine manipulated/groomed Ben Solo since infancy, turning him against his family. Leia‘s wish was to create something better than the Republic and the Empire, but the New Republic was destroyed by the First Order. She wanted her son back, and Han sacrificed his life to try and bring their son back. Luke did too in TLJ. He gave his life to manufacture a situation where he could apologize and acknowledge what he did to his nephew, and in such a way to where Ben could not act out without ending up with another family member’s death on his hands. And then with the whole “salt purifying wounds” symbolism of the planet in general, it felt like the first steps to repairing this family. This story’s trajectory seemed to be about saving the last skywalker from the mistakes of the previous generation and in doing so, allowing the new generation to learn from those mistakes and build something new. Han, Luke, and Leia gave their lives to try and right that wrong and bring the last scion of this bloodline home. And when Ben FINALLY makes the right choice, he is excluded from the final fight against Palpatine via yeet pit, and then dies 2 seconds after finding the happiness and acceptance he was never allowed to have with Rey. 

They Did The Character of Ben Solo So Dirty

They took a huge retconnish step back after TLJ paved the way for something really cool in TROS. He was finally free to be his own person, out from under the thumb of an abusive master, leader of his faction, and resolved rather than conflicted. Resolved to do what, we will never know—would he have acted as an anti hero against palpatine’s sith army? Would he have been dethroned by Hux/Pryde and have to operate independently? WHO KNOWS. But instead of exploring anything NEW with him, TROS has him reforge that mask (for no given reason), still be conflicted about everything, and have to plot with Rey to overthrow yet another abusive master. He just repeated his arc in TLJ, but with prequel-level dialogue with Rey and a RotJ-Vader ending. Except he gets NO LINES in the last act beyond “ow”. After his scene with Leia-induced-memory!Han, he essentially becomes a mute. Also that scene where Luke gives Rey Leia’s lightsaber, saying that she always knew Ben would fall so she gave it up and wanted Luke to pass it on to someone worthy? What? Give up on your son I guess. Way to destroy Leia’s character and make her look like a terrible mother.

And because of how exhaustingly how contrived the whole reylo angle was presented in general, the kiss scene probably felt REALLY forced for the general audience. Like the actors played the scene well—Adam’s facial expressions of utter hopelessness and regret upon finding her dead was absolutely gut wrenching. But his death happens SO fast: he meditates, she wakes up, they kiss, the music swells and you think everything is going to be ok—then he drops dead 2 seconds later and neither the audience nor Rey are given enough time to process that. It moves on to the celebration montage ripped straight from RotJ’s remastered version—AND HE IS NEVER SEEN OR MENTIONED AGAIN! Not even as a force ghost on Tatooine with Luke and Leia when she proclaims herself a Skywalker. Are they going to edit his force ghost into the scene 20 years later when they remaster this film? Or are we just going to pretend this character never existed and he was not the hero--because he really was the hero of this film.

Balance is Never Restored

Did that “Journal of the Whills” passage in the TFA book even matter? In the end, balance was never reached. The light won the day and the darkness perished. Again. History literally repeated itself. So what’s the next fascist regime or sith zombie that’s going to sprout up in 30 years? There was no resolution or catharsis between the two aspects of the force. It was just “Sith avatar Sideous bad, Rey jedi avatar good, don’t think too hard, enjoy the holidays and see you in 30 years when we want to see what Rey Skywalker is up to!” And you know that’s coming — they did not even give us closure to the Skywalker saga because they can always make movies about her and any of her false-Skywalker decedents! It’s SO UPSETTING. 

I’m mostly disappointed because it would have been nice to see a resolved view of the force that is not so black and white. Like maybe the Sith were a perversion of what the dark side is: a cancer or parasite that has corrupted it. TLJ opened the door for so many nuanced and honestly really intelligent concepts that TROS just threw out the window for “cool force powers”.  There is absolutely no “peace” in the force, it’s used with straight up aggression constantly save for the force healing/life transferring, which is overused in this film and has therefore lost any substantial weight in the story because of it.

Rey Repeats the Mistakes of a Past Generation

She literally repeats Leia’s mistakes. She is a Palpatine, but in choosing to hide that from everyone (besides Finn, I guess) by taking another family’s last name, she is essentially lying. That did not work out so well with Leia, who hid the fact she was Vader’s daughter from everyone besides Luke and Han. It got out, her political career was tanked, she lost the trust of a lot of her friends, and it helped alienated her son from their family. 

And what is this nonsense about Luke and Leia having always known she was a Palpatine all along, but never said anything? Even though she was aware of Rey’s desperation to know where she came from and why her family left her behind? Did she just omit the truth from Rey just like she did Ben? WHAT? THIS IS SO HORRIBLE.

If they had to make her a Palpatine, why not have her own it and be like “it is not my bloodline that defines who I am, but the choices I make.” Which is a nicer message and juxtaposes with Kylo who accepted his dark legacy because he felt like he had no other choice—especially when everyone who was suppose to help him thought he is another Vader/a lost cause anyway. 

I personally really like the message that she was no one, and you did not have to be anyone special to be a hero. I also hate how her bloodline diminishes her struggle with her affinity for the dark side. Her backstory as an abandoned orphan provided enough reason for her to struggle with the pull to the dark side. But this reveal oversimplified that and just chalked it up to her genes. And to say that her power was a result of her heritage, and not because she was a chosen vessel of the cosmic force is a mistake. 

Rey and Kylo’s Force Bond is Terribly Misused

Their force bond (which was arguably the most compelling part of TLJ) was turned it into exposition fodder and weaponized. It was originally created for the purpose of allowing these two opposing forces to TALK to each other rather than fight. TLJ established that they could not use the force on each other OR harm each other through the bond for a reason: so they could communicate and learn from each other. It really felt like foreshadowing for some sort of catharsis or resolution between the light and dark aspects of the force. Especially with the whole spiel about balance, and how the light and the dark are both natural parts of life and the force (warmth, cold, peace, violence, death and decay that brings forth new life ect). That was such a lovely and spiritual interpretation. 

But instead of expanding on that idea, TROS not only made them able to fight each other through it, but he took it to video-game-super-power level extremes. And it was just plain absurd. Were some scenes cool? Yeah, I thought him pulling the legacy saber out from behind his back to fight the knights was great, and the teleportation was hinted at in TLJ, but I hated their lightsaber fights. It was too over the top with the flipping and such. I really liked TLJ’s message that the force is not a super power, but rather a mystical force that guides you if you are open to letting it work through you. This movie just spat in the face of that idea. 

And it’s so annoying that they described their bond as this mystical “dyad” that occurred because of who their famous grandparents were—THAT IS SO INFURIATING! It’s not the will of the force that these two people on opposing sides were linked so deeply, but because of their family legacy. Bloodlines are all that matter apparently—not that the force is working through these two similarly broken people in an effort to fix and balance itself. And ultimately refine the incomplete view of the force that the Jedi and Sith tore the galaxy apart over. 

I also hated how the bond is described “two as one”, but then one dies without the other (twice!) and Rey can wound him without so much as a flinch. If the bond is really one life force/spirit inhabiting two bodies, shouldn’t they have to die at the same time? Or at least be able to feel each other’s pain? Or be able to share this life force they supposedly already share and both survive? Like you can’t kill one without killing the other, sort of deal? It just feels like it was hyped up to be this immensely powerful thing, and that in order to defeat Palpatine, they would have to do so together. But all that exposition seems pointless after one half of the dyad survives without its counterpart. And it is never addressed after. Like what even is the point of any of this yin yang stuff if yin can just die off with no consequences? Was the entire point of that plot thread meaningless exposition? And if the explanation is that Palpatine stole their force bond to revive himself, that’s straight up stupid. TROS will have wasted this unique connection that had so much potential for good and for meaningful resolution and fabricated yet another way to empower the already OP villain. 

But if you pretend none of that dumb dyad shit happened, Ben Solo’s death is one of the ONLY things about this movie that makes sense thematically. I’m not happy that he died. I do not think it was necessary. But I am trying to make peace with the fact that it is a beautiful sacrifice. I always felt like their arc was reverse Padme x Anakin, and Anakin’s entire fall to the dark side was because he wanted to become powerful enough to save the person he loved from death. He never achieved that because his love for Padme and his motivations were inherently selfish. He wanted her save her so he could keep her beside him. Ben, however, rights that wrong and selflessly gives his life for the one he loves. He does so knowing that he will die, and does not even hesitate, because he wants her to live even if he can’t be with her. So in that way, and excluding the dyad stuff that makes his death confusing and nonsensical, I actually felt like it was fulfilling. Sort of. One of the only things that came close to feeling well thought out in that movie, I suppose. But it still did not land quite right because of how poorly it was orchestrated. I genuinely do not think people picked up on the subtle romance hints they dropped around those two. Like the tropes are there, but it’s almost entirely subtext and not something the general audience picked up on until the shirtless scene and even then it was more of a meme. But regardless of whatever romance was set up in the previous films, I felt like their entire arc in this film was dysfunctional as fuck and not cathartic at all. It was very juvenile and reduced to a series of “join me! No! —sword fight— Join me! No! —sword fight—” Did I enjoy some of their banter, yes. But it was not nearly as satisfying as their exchanges in TLJ. 

The Retconning of TLJ and Extended Material 

It felt like TROS was trying so hard to pacify everyone who hated the direction TLJ took the narrative. And so much of the movie’s run time is spent retconning what was revealed in that movie, with no explanation other than “from a certain point of view” loopholes. And there were so many tasteless digs at TLJ. The comment about the Holdo maneuver. Luke catching the lightsaber and raising that ancient, sea-corroded x wing from the water on Ach-to. Rey’s parents becoming nobodies to protect her from Grandpappy Palps. Leia unable to get a single ship to answer her distress calls at the end of TLJ, but Lando can fetch the whole damn galaxy in an End Game like fashion.

Poe is randomly a drug smuggler despite his backstory already being established as being a part of the New Republic’s Navy and having Rebel Heroes for parents. 

Chewbacca already got a medal in the comics, so that scene was so redundant. Did the writers even consult with the Lucasfilm’s story team?

Leia was trained as a Jedi and only gave it up because she knew her son was going to turn to the dark side. It was already established in Bloodlines that Leia chose to be a senator because the galaxy needed her in politics more than it needed her with a laser sword. That was where she could do the most good. And she sacrifices everything--even her family--for the sake of building something better and new. But that sacrifice is reduced to her giving it up because she essentially has given up on her son before he is even born? I just do not understand why that flashback was necessary. Or why she needed a lightsaber. It is like it was included to pacify people who were upset with Leia using the force to save herself in TLJ, but an explanation is not needed because we have already established in the films and in extended material that she is force sensitive.

I don’t even want to talk about the vats full of Snokes.

Finn being force sensitive is cool, and I could totally see the potential in that from TFA, but it goes absolutely nowhere and his character is back to being Poe’s sidekick and Rey’s lost puppy. Rose gets absolutely NO screen time, and is sidelined the entire film to pacify people who hated her character in TLJ. I do not need FinnRose to be canon, either. I loved their development in TLJ because Rose challenged and progressed Finn as a character. And even though I always thought FinnPoe was going to be endgame, I never thought they would sweep her under the rug. Speaking of Finn and Poe, they queer-baited everyone with Stormpilot, only to give both of them hetero love interests. Finn and Poe have so much natural chemistry and meaningful interaction, especially in the last resistance novel that came out, that it was a slap to the face to see Finn psuedo-paired with Jannah/Rey and Poe paired with Zori.

Hux was set up to have all this ambition and a tense rivalry with Kylo Ren. But he gets shot by a random new character for helping the Resistance he hates so much-- that is incredibly nonsensical. There was so much potential for a First Order civil war between Kylo Ren and Hux, and he was hyped up in the comics to be a very dangerous adversary. What a waste. 

Were there moments in the film that were fun and enjoyable, sure, but I find that all of the problems eclipse those moments. It’s really hard to find stuff I actually liked about it. C3PO was great, but I felt like him getting his memories restored removed the weight of his sacrifice. Much like everything else in this film. There were way too many fake out deaths for anything to be meaningful. The movie itself was, admittedly, gorgeous. The Death Star ruins was such a magical set. The soundtrack was beautiful as ever. But I just feel so depressed and sorry for the tragedy that was the Skywalker family after watching it, that I cannot even enjoy the parts that were enjoyable.

[jedimaesteryoda]

Rise of Skywalker Review

WARNING MASSIVE SPOILERS

Rise of Skywalker is by far one of the worst Star Wars films ever made, and easily the worst of the sequel trilogy. The entire plot was a mess, it was unfocused, rushed, uneven and had too much plot convenience in the way of things like a dagger that manages to have a replica of the remains of the second Death Star for some reason. It also seemed more devoted to fan service than telling a good, coherent story. 

To be fair, Johnson was given charge of the middle film of the trilogy which clashed with Abrams’s vision. He also had killed off Snoke, so he couldn’t serve as the main villain in the next film,and dealt with Rey’s parentage so Abrams wasn’t left with a lot. Of course, Johnson largely didn’t retcon anything from the previous film, while Abrams did with ROS, which was a mistake. It felt like he was trying to undo Johnson’s changes in this film. 

The way Rey’s identity is revealed is poorly handled. Kylo tells her in the middle of the film that she is Palpatine’s granddaughter. Imagine if in Empire Strikes Back, instead of Vader telling Luke that he was his father at the end, it was Yoda who told him that in the second act. It would have had nowhere near as big an impact. It shouldn’t have been Kylo, but Palpatine himself who told her about her heritage. Also, Rey turning out to be a nobody with no magic bloodline as Rian Johnson intended, which is one of his few ideas I agreed with, actually would have been a better story and character choice. It at least promotes the idea that anyone can be a Jedi, that the Force chooses who is worthy without any attention to bloodlines. Also, how did Palpatine not keep track of his own family? This is the most powerful man in the galaxy we’re talking about. 

The main villain of the Rise of Skywalker turns out to be the main villain of the previous two trilogies: Palpatine. Admittedly, Palpatine is one of my top two favorite characters in Star Wars, and it was always great to see Ian McDiarmid play him on-screen. He was the main highlight in the prequels; I could look at each scene he’s in, and write an essay or at least a few paragraphs about just that one scene. However, his character seemed out of place in this one.

For starters, there was the way Abrams handled him in this film. Instead of not mentioning him, and just saving his reveal for the third act after some building up, and maximizing surprise and shock for the audience, Abrams just reintroduces him in the opening. It doesn’t have the same effect. They just shoehorned him into this film without him even being mentioned in the first two. At least in the original trilogy, by the time we see him in person in Return of the Jedi, Palpatine had previously been mentioned in the first film, A New Hope, and later introduced via Holonet in Empire Strikes Back, which provided plenty of build up towards his appearance in the third film. He played a key role in the story as he was the dark side counterpart to Yoda, founder of the tyrannical Empire, the one who turned Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, and was seeking to do the same to Luke. He was the personification of temptation towards the dark side and the Empire, the devil himself, who along with Vader was the trial Luke needed to face in his final step towards becoming a Jedi. In the prequel trilogy, Palpatine was the main villain in plain sight all along who was masquerading as the friendly Supreme Chancellor while he was Darth Sidious in the background pulling strings, and slowly turning the Old Republic into the Empire. In the sequel trilogy, he is introduced at the eleventh hour just to give Kylo and Rey something to unite against. 

In my opinion, he should have stayed dead. It seemed more fitting in that despite being the most successful Sith lord in history, having gone where no Sith has gone before by conquering the Galactic Republic and wiping out the Jedi Order, Palpatine still succumbed to the tradition of the Rule of Two, and like his predecessors was killed by his apprentice. The man who destroyed countless lives and betrayed so many people in his rise to power as well as after from the Separatists and senators to his apprentices, himself met his end by betrayal. By making him alive, Abrams also made Vader’s sacrifice in Return of the Jedi less meaningful. Vader originally found himself in choosing between the light (Windu) and the dark (Palpatine), chose the latter largely to save someone he cared about, his wife, and nearly wiped out the Jedi Order. He found himself in the same situation again, choosing between the light represented by Luke and the dark, again represented by Palpatine, and he chooses the former this time for the same reason: to save someone he cared about, his son. In the end, he turns again and in his last act destroys the Sith line, killing the last of the Sith lords, and ending Palpatine’s reign of terror for good and all. He thus fulfills his role as the Chosen One … only, whoops, turns out Palpatine survived, and the Chosen One didn’t actually do shit. I know Legends brought him back too in Dark Empire, but even that decision was met with some controversy within the community. It made little narrative sense to bring him back, and it was years before the prequels with Lucas doing the Chosen One angle for Anakin. I know some argue that Anakin brought balance to the Force briefly by killing Palpatine, but if Palpatine was the reason for the imbalance, then Rise of Skywalker means he was never truly dead, and that Vader didn’t truly correct the imbalance. 

Palpatine also was most effective by being subtle and nuanced with an undercurrent of menace, which clearly wasn’t present in this film. He didn’t feel as threatening as he did in Episodes VI and III. Even Sir Ian’s performance seemed largely more subdued in contrast to the confident, megalomaniacal character we all knew and loved. He wasn’t even fun in this one.

He also managed to disable an entire fleet just using Force lightning? I’m sorry, but that really pushes it as I know Palpatine is powerful, but even he never struck me as that powerful nor should he be. As George R.R. Martin said “I think if you put too much magic in your fantasy it overwhelms the plot, and it starts to make the plot nonsensical. If you do have a sorceress or a wizard who can speak a word and wipe out an army, why would you even assemble an army?” The use of the Force is supposed to be used in small, limited ways in battles a la Luke using the Force to accurately fire proton torpedoes into the exhaust port of the Death Star. Otherwise, if a Force user can take out an entire army or in this case, fleet, in a single blast, why didn’t any Jedi do that during the Clone Wars?

I wouldn’t have opposed seeing Palpatine in Rise of Skywalker, but as a Force vision akin to Luke’s experience in the cave in Dagobah. I felt that while the prequel trilogy was about Anakin and Palpatine’s backstories with the former’s journey to the dark side and the latter’s rise to power, the sequel trilogy should have been about their posthumous legacies through the Skywalker family and Empire/First Order respectively. Lucas didn’t envision bringing Palpatine back simply because he knew when a character had effectively fulfilled their role in a story. 

There are plenty of plot points or scenes that also don’t go anywhere or make sense. 

The Sith-class Star Destroyers being all armed with planet-destroying superlasers also made no sense. Watch Rogue One, and you see how the Death Star’s superlaser focus lens dwarfed all the Imperial Star Destroyers and Rebel capital ships, and yet they somehow managed to shrink it down to 1/1000th of its original size and still be as effective? In the original trilogy, the logic behind the superlaser being found only on a Death Star was simply because a laser powerful enough to destroy an entire planet had such huge power requirements and required so large a configuration that only a space station the size of a small moon could accommodate it. Palpatine also commissioned the building of at most, two, since one was threatening enough to send a message to the galaxy, and having an entire fleet of them also had more risks, ie the the risk of one being used against him. All it’d take is one to be hijacked, and be used to blow up the planet Palpatine is on. Then there is the context of the superlaser being used. Alderaan being blown up was treated as a big deal simply because it was. It was this universe’s equivalent of the first atom bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. It was something so terrible and devastating, that it was originally thought to be unfathomable. Leia also was helpless as she witnessed her home planet being obliterated in an instant, which made it that much more devastating. In this film, Kijimi is just blown up without any emotion or impact at all.

Also, there is the side trip of having to get C-3PO translate Sith language. Why have C-3PO be able to translate a language if he is forbidden from translating it? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just not have that language in his programming at all? What legitimate reason is there for Sith even being a forbidden language? It’s not like black speech from LOTR, which was discouraged simply because it drew the Eye of Sauron.

C-3PO also made the conscious decision to have his memory wiped away, stating if he didn’t then everything they fought for would be lost. He made this personal sacrifice to save the Resistance and the galaxy just to have R2-D2 later restore his memory in another scene. That just takes away the impact of his decision, as throughout the journey sacrifices are made along the way, and a sacrifice needs to be permanent in order for it to be meaningful. Imagine if after Obi-wan was killed in A New Hope, he resurrected in the original trilogy. 

General Hux is also revealed to be the First Order spy, and allows the group to escape, only to be found out right after and immediately killed. It doesn’t go into more detail regarding his defection, and he is killed off just like that as if he were a random side character rather than a major supporting character for two films. 

In another scene, Rey destroys a transport that supposedly carried Chewie by accidentally hitting it with Force lightning. Rey, of course, takes it very hard, believing she accidentally killed Chewie, only for it to be revealed shortly, that Chewie is alive as he had been on another transport that we never saw. What was the point of all that? Rey didn’t learn any lessons, and it didn’t contribute at all to the plot. The whole thing felt completely unnecessary. 

We also never got to hear what Finn wanted to tell Rey, or Poe wanted to tell Finn.

As far as lightsaber dueling goes, there were two lightsaber duels in the middle, and there was no point to them as opposed to Ben buying Luke time in A New Hope, Anakin sealing his fate as Palpatine apprentice in the beginning of Revenge of the Sith or a final duel at the end between light and dark like in all the other films.

However, there were a few moments I liked. I liked Kylo’s scene with his father Han. I like how it was left ambiguous as Han clearly couldn’t be a Force ghost given he wasn’t Force-sensitive, and we don’t know if it was all in Kylo’s head. Rey giving Kylo a lightsaber in the final fight to help, and maybe, Kylo sacrificing himself to heal Rey. 

It was good to see Lando, although we barely got to see him. He managed to get all the fleet together by convincing them to fight in the end, so he does play a role, but I think the Resistance should have more help due to Luke’s sacrifice in the previous film. Luke appeared, because he knew the galaxy needed Luke Skywalker, and the kids talking about him facing Kylo showed how he was inspiring the galaxy to resist the First Order. That proved to be another thing Abrams retconned. 

Finally, there is Rey choosing the surname of “Skywalker,” honoring the people she wanted to be and mentored her. Was it necessary? I mean Luke didn’t exactly decide to use the surname “Kenobi” in Return of the Jedi, although to be fair, his father did save his life in the end. Rey deciding to use her surname “Palpatine” would be her owning her identity, and showing that while she acknowledges her dark lineage, like Luke did with his, she doesn’t let her predecessor’s legacy define her. 

Long story short, Abrams and Disney really bungled the handling of the franchise. Each film felt like it’s own thing being separate from the other two rather than being part of an overarching vision. There was more focus on fan service than storytelling, and ROS didn’t leave me feeling satisfied. 

Also, Korriban will always be the Sith homeworld. 

[pacificwanderer]

I’m already seeing people bringing up the notion and being bitter about the idea that’s Rey is gonna kill Palpatine because she’s the “heroine.” And I’m just..Guys...Ben and Rey are both gonna fucking kill that motherfucker. Why is the title even called “The Rise of Skywalker.” Who is the Skywalker of ST? (Also who killed Snoke?) It’s Ben! That title alone should tell you that this film is gonna heavily focus on him. Rey is the heroine and Ben is the legacy character. Both are important!

Yup, it’s really not rocket science lol. They’re two of the last remaining Force users in the galaxy. Whatever they do next, they’re going to be doing it together. TFA LITERALLY builds to their meeting, everything that happens, happens so they can meet. TLJ shows them a glimpse of how things could be if they were on the same side, but they’re not ready yet. RoS is going to be the completion of their story and I’m pretty certain it’s going to be GD epic.

Even John is excited about it (not that I’m surprised, he’s a huge SW fan)!

“I thought it was going to be ‘Star Wars: Heirs to the Force.’ For some reason, I just had that title in my head, that it would be something along those lines.

“This is just very specific: ‘Rise of Skywalker.’ And I don’t know what it actually means. Bearing in mind that I’m a part of it, but there were certain changes to the script while we’re filming and I’m not in a lot of the scenes that Rey has with Kylo Ren. So my curiosity just hit the roof.”

So, one, I’m super excited to see any F/nn and Kylo scenes and two, WHAT SCENES, JOHN. YOU’RE NOT IN A LOT OF THE REYLO SCENES? TELL ME MORE. SOUNDS LIKE THERE ARE MORE THAN A FEW.

Shocking. Almost as if people want to see what happens next between these two lol.

Anyways, none of that has anything to do with Sheev LOLOL. I wonder if he’ll come back in a corporeal form? Or as a Force ghost? I know in the TFA artbook, there is a quote about how they were working with the idea that not only the light side of the Force could manifest Force ghosts, but the dark side as well (during the concept stage, I wonder how much of that carried over–HAS SHEEV BEEN LINGERING ALL ALONG).

I still maintain, and I think I’ll be right, that Ben’s journey (as well as Rey’s) will be mostly emotional and internal. Like of course they’re going to do battles and fly around etc, but I think the majority of the importance will be on how they change as characters by the end of the movie–their emotional journey, as opposed to something that’s focusing on the physical. So drama, conflict, gimme.

I definitely think they’ll need to rely on each other to be able to overcome that “greatest evil.” Also, these people really need to get over their sexism, or what is it that they call it? “I hate her because she’s a mary sue?” and “not well written”? Oh, but those rules only apply to her? And because I can’t relate to her story, that means it’s bad???? OHKAY. SURE BUDDY. The world is so much better when you can appreciate heroes from all walks of life, in all shapes and sizes, and all genders, like what a narrowminded, boring way to see the world. 

Also. Also. ALSO. I just fucking love Sheev. He’s just a bad bitch and I am stoked that they worked him back into this story. Now, if only we could get some Anidala in here (ESP Padme) and my heart will burst from happiness.

Cheers! Also, this sentence made my day lol: “Ben and Rey are both gonna fucking kill that motherfucker.” Stick that shit on my tombstone, Nonnie!

UPDATE: I’m not getting into a character war here, people. Like who you like. This story is and was and ever shall be focused on the Skywalkers. And I’m certain Kylo will get lots of screen time, but “orrying about it “means you suffer twice.” Enjoy the EU content that’s coming for Kylo. He’s got a comic up soon, which I’m super excited for, as well as Delilah’s Skywalker Saga book that has a Kylo POV, and I expect to get years of SW stuff concerning Ben Solo after this. Stans are going to be well fed, mark my words, they know how much people love him.

[scruffyhappaboreherder]

On the Basis of

Aroace ficlet for my other fave SW ship, Finnrey, to go with the one I did for rebelcaptain.  Modern AU, college AU, teacher/student involving another ship mentioned but not shown.

Finn stopped to check himself in the hallway mirror before he went out the door.  Maybe he looked funny in the Hawaiian-style shirt featuring the college mascot, even (especially?) combined with rough linen trousers, but he was hoping it would make Rey laugh, so that was all right.  They were both recent thrifting finds she hadn't seen yet.

He stopped on the way to her place to pick up their usual huge order of Chinese.  Rey lived in a quiet neighborhood out of delivery range of most of the campus restaurants; he lived just off campus.  Friday nights were frenzied and raucous, even during the summer, and somehow watching movies with Rey as part of a class on the history of military films had turned into regular movie nights.

It was just for fun: Finn's major concentration was in military history, and Rey was planning to specialize in British history, with a minor in film and a sideline as a textile historian if she could get away with it.  So she liked to watch films with period costumes, where period was any time before the 1990s.  Maybe she'd get a paper out of it somehow.  In the meantime, they both got to unwind and keep moderately current on pop culture, or deepen their knowledge of the classics.

He biked over to Rey's with the takeout in the basket, bungeed into place in case of dooring or lose rocks or any other hazards.  He paused after a few blocks to get on the sidewalk long enough to stow the shirt in the basket too: it wasn't breathing as well as he'd hoped, and he didn't want to spend the whole night in a sweaty shirt.

Once he was on her doorstep, he pulled the shirt back on.  While he was seeing nothing but the inside of his shirt, he heard the door open.

"Let me help you with the—oh," said Rey.  Apparently she'd heard him arrive, or seen him, and not waited for him to ring the bell.

"One second.  Just trying to avoid a wardrobe malfunction," he told her.

"That shirt is a wardrobe malfunction all on its own.  I think my eyes are burning."  But she was smiling as she undid the bungee cords and grabbed two bags of food.  He wheeled the bike into the foyer, locked the door behind him, and grabbed the other bag.

They sat down at her little kitchen table.  Two plates were ready and waiting; they served themselves family-style.  Rey ate with chopsticks; he went with plasticware.  In between bites, they caught up on department gossip.  The TA for the class where they'd met had actually succeeded in getting a visiting professor to go out for a drink with him; Rey was less shocked that Poe had managed this than that he wanted to.

"It's maybe not the smartest move," Finn conceded.  "But it's not like Professor Skywalker is on his thesis committee or something.  So it may raise some eyebrows, but it'll pass."

"I don't know.  Jessika and Karé told me that Professor Holdo was kind of torqued off."  Rey grabbed another dumpling and stuffed it into her mouth.  "And she is on his thesis committee.  So who knows."

Finn grimaced.  "Well, shit."

"Sometimes I wonder if it was a good idea to make friends with the graduate students," Rey added.  "Maybe we'd be better off not knowing about all the gossiping and politics."

"As opposed to finding out about it when we were already graduate students?  No way," Finn countered.  "Did you ever hear the saying that the politics in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small?  I think we may be seeing that in action."

"Because politics in the rest of the world are so kindly right now," Rey said irritably.

"You got me there," Finn admitted.  "But let's not talk about that.  What are we watching?"

"Not talking about that might be a problem.  I got that Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie."

"The documentary, or the other one?"

"The other one.  I just want to kick back and watch something from when women wore dresses and skirts all the time.  But not completely crazy frou-frou impractical dresses."

"Got it."  He surveyed the table.  They'd emptied most of the containers.  "Want me to do cleanup while you start the movie?"

"Sure.  Thanks."  She went into the other room, and he got up and started pitching the empties into the trash.  Leftovers went into the fridge, and he washed the dishes even though Rey had said before that he didn't have to.  It made him twitchy to know that they were just sitting there unwashed while they were watching a movie.

When he was done, he followed Rey into the living room and sat next to her.  She hit play, and he watched with only minor moments of secondhand embarrassment as the movie unfolded.

"Thanks for not being like that," Rey said, after one of these.

"Hm?"

Rey hit pause.  "All hormones and backseats."

Finn waved vaguely in the direction of his bike.  "You can't have that problem when your main mode of conveyance doesn't have a back seat."

Rey smiled.  "I was thinking, though ... we could snuggle.  If you want."

"Um, okay.  Like how?"

"I want to be the big spoon."

He grinned at her.  "I can work with that."  He stood up, and she stretched out on the couch; he laid down in front of her, and she put an arm around him, gently tugging him closer.  They watched like that until the movie ended.

[swshadowcouncil]

The Case for Rey Skywalker: Another Interpretation

In the first Case for Rey Skywalker, we presented the idea Luke knew who Rey was at the end of The Force Awakens and kept it from her to protect her. Now we present an alternative possibility.

Rian Johnson referred to Luke and Rey as the “beating heart” of The Last Jedi.  Yet the film he made portrayed their relationship as contentious and emotionally distant.  Either Rian Johnson has a very unusual idea for what constitutes the beating heart of a film, or there is more going on between these two characters than meets the eye at first glance. In our first series of articles, we proposed that Luke knew from the moment he saw Rey that she was his daughter, whom he had long thought dead, and that he made the painful choice to reject her in order to spare her from the sort of tragic fate that Skywalkers are prone to.

Now, we present a second possible frame through which to view the film — that Luke does not know Rey is his daughter when she first arrives on Ahch-To, or at least does not believe it to be possible. In this interpretation, Luke’s motivation for rejecting Rey is not part of a concerted effort to drive her away, but is rather a response to how Rey reminds him of the loss of his own daughter (who, incidentally, would be right around Rey’s age and have a similar appearance and temperament). While this interpretation retains the overall shape of our initial Rey Skywalker interpretation of TLJ, it provides an intriguing new context for Luke’s behavior towards Rey, and towards the overall development of their relationship.

The Interpretation

Luke, from the end of The Force Awakens and throughout his interactions with Rey in The Last Jedi, is going through an existential crisis. His treatment of Rey is his response to the extremely conflicting thoughts and emotions that she causes in him.  Even though he is cut off from the Force, he is drawn to her and yet at the same time he is constantly putting up emotional barriers to keep her at arm’s length.

When Rey first comes to Luke at the end of The Force Awakens he has an emotional reaction to seeing her.  There are tears in his eyes and his eyes and lips quiver like he’s about to start crying. Indeed, The Last Jedi is very careful not to overwrite Luke’s reaction. Yet when Rey hands him the lightsaber he promptly flings it over his shoulder and rushes off. In this interpretation, we propose that this is the beginning of an internal struggle between Luke’s heart and his mind.  

His heart is 100% sure that this is his child standing in front of him, hence his emotional reaction to seeing her.  His mind however, is certain that his daughter is dead. Perhaps he thought that he had felt his daughter die or felt that there was no way she could have been alive all this time without him sensing where she was. Him tossing the lightsaber then would be akin to someone throwing their hands up in exasperation. He can’t reconcile what he thinks with what he feels, so he runs off. The anger he displays in doing so would also be explained by this interpretation of events–of all the people Leia could send to retrieve him from Ahch-To, she sent a girl who looks exactly like a teenage version of his deceased daughter, in what would appear to be a transparent attempt to pluck at his heartstrings and guilt him into coming back. The “cheap trick” he’d undoubtedly believe was being played on him would make Luke’s frustration and rejection perfectly justified, and the bewilderment he would feel at seeing the ghosts of his past in the flesh would drive him to run and hide instead of confronting the reality of what was happening.

Mark Hamill has also suggested that Luke’s bitter attitude towards Rey is at least in part an act. To defend himself from the emotional turmoil that Rey is causing in him, Luke adopts a bitter shell to mask his feelings and to keep Rey from getting too close to him emotionally. He tells her to get lost and spends a good part of the day blowing her off despite the fact that she keeps following him around like an angry duckling. However, Luke also likely actively dislikes Rey because she reminds him so much of the child he lost. If Luke had been the father to a Force sensitive child, he would have certainly dreamt of one day teaching her the ways of the Force, a dream that would have seemed to die some 14 years prior to the events of The Last Jedi. Now, he’s tasked with becoming a mentor to someone who he believes is a complete stranger but whose appearance, manner, and temperament all remind him of what might have been.

Yet Luke, still a hopeful man at heart, is also drawn to Rey in a way. He repeatedly gives her glances over his shoulder and when she stops following him to go to the tree on Ahch-To, he follows her there. Luke asking Rey, “Who are you?” in the tree might not seem odd at first, but Luke already knows her name at this point (we know because he refers to her by it later in the scene) and he knows she’s a member of the Resistance come to bring him back. He also asks her who she is prior to her telling him that she had seen the tree and the island in dreams. If Rey were truly a nobody with no connection to Luke, he would have no reason at that point to think there was anything more to her than she had already told him. Him asking her who she is implies that he has reason to think there is more to her than that. If Luke does on some level feel that Rey is his daughter, his questioning of her becomes incredibly poignant.  

He desperately wants to know why his sister would send a girl to him that reminds him so much of the child he lost. He asks “who are you?” because he can’t bring himself to have enough hope to ask “Are you my daughter?” In his mind he is certain the answer is no, but he has to know one way or the other. At least if Rey can tell him definitively that she is someone other than the child he lost, he can resolve his internal conflict and see her as an individual rather than a ghost come to haunt him. Rey can’t do that, however, because she doesn’t know who she is herself. She shows Luke that she is Force sensitive, but to Luke that just adds another similarity between Rey and his “dead” daughter. This new bit of information only heightens Luke’s inner emotional conflict.  Again, he reacts to that conflict by throwing his emotional walls back up, adopting the bitter act again, and running off.

During the scene with Artoo, Luke drops the act.  He seems much more like the Luke we all remember from the original trilogy. There’s no bitterness in his voice or his actions, just hopelessness and deep sorrow. This is one of our earliest inklings that the seeming erraticness of Luke’s emotions actually follow a clear pattern–he alternately puts up walls and breaks down into fits of grief in response to his interactions with Rey. When we see him next, he’s gruffly telling Rey he’s agreed to teach her, his vulnerability nowhere to be found.

During the first lesson, Luke once again starts to open up to Rey just a bit. His voice is kind and sincere, and he seems to watch her intently as she meditates, clearly interested in learning more about her and her abilities. However, when Rey is drawn to the cave and her raw strength is revealed Luke freaks out again.  She reminds him too much of Ben and (as The Last Jedi comic adaptation repeatedly states) too much of himself as well.  Yet again, Luke’s reaction to Rey triggering his conflicting thoughts and feelings is to throw up emotional walls and run off. Later, we see that he is unable to reject her entirely–when Rey goes to practice with her staff and the the lightsaber, Luke watches with a look of wonder on his face before once more turning and running off.

Rey, too, undergoes something of a journey in her relationship with Luke. When she first encounters him, at the end of The Force Awakens, she has tears in her eyes (as does he), which seems a bit strong of a reaction for someone who’s simply glad she found someone to teach her the ways of the Force. Though she is not outwardly as conflicted as Luke in The Last Jedi, Rey seems puzzled that he does not welcome her in the way she expected. She pushes continually for his approval and acceptance, such as when she pledges to Luke, “[Kylo Ren] failed you; I won’t.” bringing Luke to tears. The extremely emotionally heightened nature of their relationship, as well as Rey’s sudden seeming personality change upon being rejected by Luke (such as beginning to trust Kylo, who she had previously detested), further implies that both characters know or suspect more than they have the courage to admit to one another.

The real key to understanding everything that happens between Rey, Luke, and Kylo, however, is the deleted scene at the Caretakers’ village. In this scene, Luke pranks Rey into thinking the locals on Ahch-To are in danger, when in fact they’re simply having a bonfire festival. When Luke catches up to Rey, who sprints off to rescue them, she turns on him, castigating him for making a joke out of the person she had once “believed in.” Rey storms off, and Luke is left looking guilt-ridden as she walks away.

Without this scene, the following events seem to transpire: Rey pledges not to disappoint Luke, and, although she is a total stranger and Luke has no reason to take her promise seriously, this is finally the thing that motivates him to reconnect with the Force so he can train her to be a Jedi. Then, seemingly at random, we cut to Rey, who is extremely upset, demanding of Kylo why he murdered his father. With the Caretaker village scene, however, the following story falls into place:

Rey’s disappointment in Luke spurs him to try and reconnect with the Force, likely out of a feeling he has let her down and a desire to make amends. Meanwhile, we catch Rey on her way back to her hut from the Caretaker village (as opposed to wandering randomly in the darkness), still extremely–even suspiciously–upset after her altercation with Luke. When she encounters Kylo Ren, she tearfully demands why he murdered his father, shouting “You had a father who loved you, he gave a damn about you.”

Prior to this, Rey is quite hostile to Kylo. During their first encounter, she tells him he’s going to pay for what he did. During the second, she calls him a snake and a monster and tells him he has lost. The third encounter is the first time where she starts to actually try to talk to him. The fact that this issue is so pressing that she’s willing to ask her mortal enemy about it seems to imply that whatever just happened to her brought the topic directly to the forefront of her mind. In other words, Luke’s spiteful and dismissive prank drove Rey to question how someone could ever fail to appreciate having a father who loves and cares about them, something she now particularly feels she does not have.

This heavily implies that by this point, she has begun to suspect that Luke is her father. Kylo picks up on this and starts needling her, telling her that her parents threw her away like garbage (much like the lightsaber at the beginning of the film). This is before the scene in the hut where the two see into each other’s minds, so it shows that Kylo already knows that Rey’s parents are her greatest weakness–he’s perceived it from her words and actions alone. It also shows that he’s already begun to push the idea that her parents abandoned her before having any clear knowledge to suggest they did so, casting doubt on his later interpretation of what he sees in her mind.

After talking with Kylo, Rey decides to go to the tidal cave that’s been calling to her throughout the film. When she arrives in the hall of mirrors within the cave, the very first thing she does is ask to see her parents. This is important for two reasons. The first is that it shows that Rey doesn’t remember what her parents looked like. If she can’t even remember that, she is unlikely to remember anything else about them. The second is, up until this point Rey has shown no signs of deeply desiring to know who her parents are. She has only shown a desire for them to come back to her. Notice she doesn’t ask for the mirror to show her where her parents are. If at this point all she wanted was to get back to them, asking how to find them would be the most logical thing for her to do. Like Luke asking “who are you?” to Rey, Rey asking the mirror to show her her parents only makes sense if there was a specific answer she was hoping to either have confirmed or disproven. She’s hoping that the mirror will show her Luke, so she can finally confront him and find out why he’s seemingly rejected her. But just like when Luke questions Rey, Rey is given no firm answer and left only with inner turmoil.

Rey feels abandoned by Luke and because of the lack of answers from the cave she begins to believe that her real worst fear might be true–that whether her parents are Luke or somebody else, they abandoned her deliberately and do not want her back. She’s hurting and very emotionally vulnerable, but she also feels a deep connection to Kylo Ren, likely because he is her family as well and seems to understand what she’s going through. So in this moment of weakness, she confides in him and starts to sympathize with him.  

At this point, Luke rushes back to Rey calling her name. Though the timeline is unclear, it’s implied that this happens on the heels of Luke reconnecting to the Force for the first time. When he first opens the door to Rey’s hut he’s smiling, showing he was running to her with good news. The movie’s novelization suggests Luke is running to Rey because he’s decided to come with her and join the Resistance, but this sudden change of heart makes slightly more sense if he had also dared to allow himself to hope that Rey was his daughter (keep in mind that when the two parted, they were angry with each other, so it would be odd for Luke to burst into her house unannounced and smiling unless something significant had changed since they last spoke).

When Luke sees Rey with Kylo, he blasts the hut apart in shock and anger, only to realize that Kylo wasn’t actually there. Rey accuses Luke of trying to murder Kylo, obviously a very emotionally sensitive topic for Luke. Luke’s response is, again, to retreat back into his bitter shell and tell Rey to leave the island, though his pleading with her shortly thereafter not to leave at all suggests that this, too, is an act of emotional self defense, not where his heart truly lies.

Rey demands to know the truth from Luke, who tells her that he had sensed darkness building in Ben during his training. Luke’s motivation in going wasn’t to kill Ben, but to look in his mind and see how deep that darkness went. Luke then tells Rey that by this point, Snoke had “already turned [Ben’s] heart.” Instead of the future, we believe a terrible calamity has already happened that demonstrates Ben’s inner darkness. If what Luke saw was that Ben was somehow at least partially responsible for the death of his wife and the “death” of his daughter, and thus that Han, Leia, and everyone else Luke loved were at risk because of Ben, then suddenly him having the split second instinct to draw his lightsaber isn’t so out of character for him. More importantly, the choice to put the saber away and not strike down the man who he believes caused the deaths of his wife and daughter, becomes yet another testament to Luke’s unrelenting goodness and compassion, rather than a sign that he has failed.

After getting the truth from Luke about what happened the night of the Temple massacre Rey decides to go to Kylo Ren to try to turn him from the Dark Side. Luke begs her not to go, but when she holds out the saber to him he refuses it again, looking dejected.  He’d just been forced to relive what he considers to be one of his greatest failures. If he had been feeling like he could go back to being a hero earlier, that has all been reversed now and he’s back to feeling like a failure again.

Luke’s feelings of utter failure continue into the next scene where he goes to burn the tree, but despite his feeling he still can’t bring himself to go through with it.  After blasting the tree with lightning, Yoda begins to lecture Luke on needing to look past the Jedi texts. Luke’s demeanor changes when Yoda first mentions Rey. Yoda picks up on that and the tone of his lecture completely changes. He criticizes Luke for missing the “need in front of [his] nose.” This is true on two counts. Luke needs his daughter but refused to believe it when she was standing right in front of him. Rey needs her father, but that was something Luke refused to be to her. Luke says that he was weak and unwise. He’s realized that pushing Rey away was a massive mistake. This prompts his next line, “I can’t be what she needs me to be.”

In this interpretation, the line serves as an explanation for why Luke has refused to accept that his daughter is alive–not only is he afraid of being disappointed if he is proven wrong, but he also feels like he can’t be the father that she needs because of his previous failures. Just as he did on the day of his death, Yoda reminds Luke to “pass on what [he has] learned,” not only his success but also his failures. For only in learning Luke’s failures could Rey grow beyond them.

By tracing Rey’s journey, we can easily see how she reaches this point. She arrives on Ahch-To believing Luke might be her father. When he rejects her, she is shocked and confused, and tries to make sense of why he has received her so coldly, though she, like Luke, is too afraid to admit her suspicions outright. She finds a partial explanation when she learns he’s cut himself off from the Force (“of course you have”), and still pushes for him to accept her, even if he might not be able to sense who she is. Her patience runs out when he plays a cruel prank on her in the deleted scene, after which point she begins to have doubts of whether he is her father after all. This leads her to the mirror cave, which she hopes will confirm or deny that Luke is her father, but instead it gives her no answer. She offers Luke one last chance to prove his care for her, but when he refuses the call she gives up on him and flies off to confront Kylo.

When she arrives, Luke’s rejection is still fresh in her mind, and when Kylo, who she thinks may be another member of her family, also refuses to join her, her greatest fear takes hold. This fear is not that her family is “nobody” in a general sense, but rather that they are “nobody” in that they are not the Skywalkers, whose trust and acceptance she had struggled so hard to win. The Skywalkers, she imagines, must have had a good reason to leave her behind, and so when Luke (and now Kylo) disappoint her, she believes they must not be her family at all, leaving only one explanation: that her parents had no good reason to leave her; they abandoned her simply because they did not love her.

As we said before, Kylo doesn’t come straight out and say that Rey’s parents are junk dealers, he gets her to say they were “nobody” first. This could be because at this point he doesn’t know how much she knows, he only knows that she carries with her a deep-rooted fear of who they are, one that is now weighing heavy in her mind for all the reasons listed above. If Rey had instead said “Luke abandoned me on Jakku,” it’s entirely possible that he would have used that to try to persuade her to join him just as well. In any case, the evidence presented strongly suggests that Rey’s “confession” is a fear that Kylo is persuading her to “admit” as truth, and that while not deliberately lying, he does not possess certain knowledge aside from what he saw in Rey’s mind that she fears.

Rey’s arc of discovering her identity ends, in this film at least, on a bitter note. The end of Luke’s side, however, unfolds a bit differently. In his duel with Kylo on Crait, he notably tells Kylo “I will not be the last Jedi,” at which point the scene cuts to Rey. Her eyes shoot open and she glances behind her, clearly sensing something (which the novel says is Luke reaching out to her through the Force to tell her he will “always be there” with her). When she runs to embrace Finn immediately afterwards, the shot zooms in on her face, then cuts back to Luke who is smiling slightly and has a distant look in his eyes.

If this interpretation is correct, this is certainly the moment Luke finally fully believes beyond doubt that his daughter is alive. Moreover, he also knows she’s now safe and back with the people she cares about most.  For the first time in the whole film Luke looks truly happy and at peace, and this is when he puts up his saber, ready for Kylo to strike him down. He does not wait even until the Resistance is flying away–his thoughts are entirely on ensuring Rey is safe, an odd focus to have in his final moments if she is just a student he knew for a few weeks. Kylo picks up on what Luke is doing, and his happiness and contentment, and vows, “I’ll destroy you, and her, and all of it.” This line clearly indicates that Kylo knows Rey is on Luke’s mind at this moment, further confirming that Rey and her well-being are among his final living thoughts.

Both Leia and Rey are shown reacting to Luke dying, while the film gives no indication at all that Kylo has sensed anything. It would be strange for a girl who knew Luke for a few days to feel his death while Luke’s own nephew, who had lived with Luke for years, did not, if there were no other connection between Rey and Luke. Rey tells Leia “Luke is gone”, but of course no one is ever really gone. When Rey left Luke, their relationship was in a very contentious place, and they received no closure before Luke died. Most stories make a point of resolving the conflict between protagonists prior to or during the climax of the third act. Often the resolution occurs in a touching way or otherwise serves as an emotional climax for the story, so the fact that this moment does not occur in TLJ has some interesting implications for what will happen in IX.

Conclusion

Overall, the effects of this interpretation are similar to those in our first Rey Skywalker theory. We still assume the same backstory for Luke, Rey, and their separation; and the emotional effect of their reunion is very similar. What differs is primarily Luke’s purpose in the narrative arc. Rather than serving to protect Rey from the knowledge of her heritage (thereby placing the story’s focus on the significance of the Skywalker identity), he plays a more personal role, placing the focus more on the emotional journeys of both father and daughter. This may not seem like a significant distinction, but it fundamentally shifts what we can expect in Episode IX.

A story where Luke knows who Rey is, and must protect her from the danger of her bloodline, requires a resolution focusing on identity. However, a story where both characters’ arcs are focused so strongly on their specific relationship, as opposed to them belonging to the same family, requires a conclusion focusing on the repairing and healing of their broken bond, more than on broader implications. There are arguments to be made for both these potential conclusions.

A conclusion rooted in the meaning of the family identity makes sense, given that the conflict between Rey and Kylo is a proxy for the dueling legacies of Anakin and Vader. At the same time, we’ve spent an entire film simply setting up the relationship between Luke and Rey. It stands to reason that the conclusion of their arcs will focus on resolving the antagonism that built up between them for the duration of The Last Jedi, a resolution that would be diluted by a focus on broader themes.

Regardless of which way the story goes, we expect that JJ will give a satisfying explanation for why Rey and Luke didn’t realize (or admit) they were father and daughter in IX, and we can’t wait to see what it is.

[actualreyofsunshine]

Hey so does Daisy have some issue with John? She seems so admant against Finnrey? I get she may not feel Rey needs a romance but she's an actress, a hired hand who is paid to show up and do what she's told and it feels like if Finnrey doesn't happen it's because she didn't want it to and I have actually a really big issue with that?

K, so off the bat, I haven’t watched the latest panel, just the trailer, so I don’t really know where she’s talked about FinnRey or has come across as being adamantly against it. But I’ve literally never heard of Daisy having any issues with John personally. They seem to have a really close relationship with each other as co-stars. Daisy has mentioned multiple times that it really threw her for a loop that John wouldn’t be with her for the filming of TLJ, and how they’d both come to rely on each other since TFA, and I honestly can’t think of anything that could have changed between them for this film.

As for FinnRey--again, I haven’t watched the panel. I don’t know what they discussed in it in terms of ships or anything else. But unless there’s something really concrete, it feels like a really big leap to assume from the teaser trailer and the panel that she’s dead set against the ship, let alone that she’d be the one who’s responsible for it potentially not happening in the next film. If there was something that she said that sounded off to you, you’re really going to have to direct me to it, because I have no idea right now what that might even be.

“she's an actress, a hired hand who is paid to show up and do what she's told”

That’s not entirely true? I mean, it’s one thing when actors or actresses have a particularly bad take on their characters, but the idea that they shouldn’t have any input at all because they’re just a “hired hand” isn’t the right perspective to have either. Daisy is embodying the character of Rey, so of course she’d have some thoughts on who she is and what she wants as a person. John probably does as well, and so does Oscar Isaac. Creating a film is a collaborative effort, it’s not just down to the decisions of the scriptwriters and directors.

If anything, it’s much more likely that if there was any opposition to FinnRey, it came from the people who are higher up in LucasFilm. We know for a fact that Kathleen Kennedy was really opposed to the idea of casting John Boyega as Finn. We also know that producers and financiers, in general, tend to make really racist assumptions about what they think would “sell” to a general audience, because their goal to make money. 

Again, I don’t know what, if anything, Daisy has said about FinnRey here, but on the whole, it’s just much more likely to me that a bunch of suits don’t want to put a black man and a white woman together romantically because they think it wouldn’t be well received. And that’s assuming FinnRey is entirely off the table here, because between the teaser and the panel, I honestly don’t think there’s nearly enough details to go off of to make a concrete conclusion. 

[feebtastic]

On Rose: Finn, the Stormtroopers & Reylo

Let’s me start by saying how much I love Rose Tico and the qualities she represents. Kelly Marie Tran did such a phenomenal job in the film, making me fall in love with this character at first sight. Down to earth, fierce and compassionate, Rose is above all devoted to the cause to fight against the FO, not to become a hero but to do the right thing. Rose’s dedication to the Resistance and her fighting spirit are her greatest strengths.  

I was therefore especially happy to get more of her thoughts and feelings in Jason Fry’s novelization. There’s one particular passage that I really love and wish to explore here:

“Rose didn’t know what to think about the fact that a man trained to be a First Order stormtrooper could be innocent enough to assume a feral, unapologetic thief actually owned a fancy yacht. She supposed it made her feel simultaneously better and worse about the galaxy. On the one hand, maybe there were painfully naïve young men behind many more of those expressionless, skull-like helmets—lost boys who’d never been allowed to have so much as their own name. On the other hand, battalions made up of those lost boys had destroyed Rose’s homeworld and so many others. How much more ruin and misery would they inflict on the galaxy? How many more people would they rob of loved ones? Rose had never heard of another First Order stormtrooper shaking off his brainwashing and refusing to carry out the murderous orders he’d been given. Maybe Finn was the only one.”

Chapter 22, Jason Fry. “The Last Jedi: Expanded Edition.

The line “She supposed it made her feel simultaneously better and worse about the galaxy” initially puzzled me a bit. Rose sure has lots of reasons to feel worse about the galaxy but what makes her feel better? And it’s not only about Finn. Let’s break down this excerpt and consider what it means for Finnrose and even Reylo in Ep. IX.

I. On Rose and the Stormtroopers

Firstly, I love that her time spent with Finn has allowed Rose to consider something she might never have thought of before, that Stormtroopers could be ‘innocent’, ‘naive,’ and most of all, even ‘lost.’ Rose has witnessed the atrocities that the FO and their Stormtroopers had inflicted on her home planet. She must have heard of many other planets’ destruction since joining the Resistance. And before meeting Finn, these ST were probably just faceless monsters to her. These soldiers wear “expressionless, skull-like helmets”, embodying the death and devastation left in their wake. While recalling the exploitation she’d witness on Otomok, her home planet, Rose was “pale with anger”. But just as Rey has realized that beneath Kylo’s terrifying mask is a broken young man, a lost and terrified boy, Rose also realizes that there might be more ‘Finns’ in the FO. There might exist more “naive young men” who have not been allowed any kind of identity or knowledge beside what makes them “well-engineered cogs in [the FO’s] war machine, designed to further its murderous work.” (Chapter 24)

Secondly, the multiple use of ‘maybe’ suggests how tentative Rose’s thought is. She feels pity and sympathy for these troopers, these “lost boys (and girls) who’d never been allowed so much as their own name.” Would they not be considered victims of the FO as well? Kidnapped and brainwashed, would these Stormtroopers know any better than what has been drilled into them?

Perhaps the answer is no, Rose thinks, they wouldn’t know any better. Battalions of these troopers are inflicting “ruin and misery on the galaxy” after all. There’s also a sense of resignation in Rose’s last thought: how “she’s never heard of” another deserted trooper and so “maybe Finn was the only one.”

To me, Rose feels better about the galaxy because there might be Stormtroopers who are not inherently evil and murderous monsters, but lost boys whose minds have been twisted to do the FO’s bidding. She feels worse because these lost boys ARE following orders to kill, destroy & oppress.

More than that, I think Rose feels better because there’s a glimmer of hope in the form of Finn, who has somehow done the impossible and was able to escape the FO’s grueling conditioning. Finn represents the hope that goodness and humanity can survive against all odds, even against a system that was built to snuff out these qualities from its soldiers. But Rose also feels worse because there might ONLY EVER be Finn, a single Stormtrooper who could rebel against the system. Finn being an outlier, an exception is in that way both better and worse.

II. On Finnrose

The given excerpt is such an interesting addition because it demonstrates Rose’s character development in TLJ beyond her feelings for Finn, which we see more clearly in the film. Rose’s interactions with him have allowed her to rethink the human identities involved in the war, esp. those on the opposing side. Among all the characters who have interacted with Finn, Rose was the only one who wonders about the larger implication of Finn’s desertion. She questions, even only briefly, whether there are or could be more Finns out there. Maybe Finn was the only one who could break free from the FO on his own, but with the right catalysts, could more follow his steps?

The passage also shows how Rose is Finn’s most suitable counterpart in the Sequel trilogy. On the one hand, Rose is one of the more mature characters in the ST. Paired with her, Finn, who has been isolated from the outside world from birth, is able to learn and grow. In TLJ, Rose has shown Finn what she and the Resistance are fighting for: for freedom, against the injustice done to her home planet, for the oppressed and exploited across the galaxy. Finn thus gains reasons to stop running and join the fight. On the other hand, the learning doesn’t only go one way. Rose has also learned many things about the FO from Finn and not just from infiltrating the Supremacy, as was clear from the excerpt.  As a result, in IX, I expect Finn’s arc to be him finding a role in the revitalized Resistance. And Rose, with her own newly gained knowledge about the FO, could again work in tandem with Finn (under/alongside Poe) to help shape the Resistance’s strategies.

While Finn has mostly contributed his knowledge of key FO weapons and technologies to the Resistance in TFA and TLJ, I wonder if he would be able to supply even more powerful insights about the human elements within the FO going forward.

In the TLJ junior novelization, prior to his execution, Finn thought this:

If Finn was going to die now, at least he could rest well knowing he had tried to help his friends make a difference in the galaxy. He had only one regret. He wished he could have convinced other troopers to do the same.

Perhaps in IX, we’ll see Finn and Rose discuss the Stormtrooper program, Finn’s experience in it and how he wishes he had tried to convince other troopers to turn while on the Supremacy. It seems quite plausible then that Finn and Rose could together plan and realize a Stormtrooper rebellion from these musings. Finn’s intention has been shown above. And Rose’s thoughts in the excerpt that starts this post suggest that if Finn voices his intent in Ep. IX, Rose would be able to see where he’s coming from and understand the potential of that idea. While nothing much about a potential rebellion has been hinted at    within the first 2 films (beyond these tidbits in the novelizations), I believe that if he wants to, JJ can still pursue this storyline in next film.

III. On Rose and Reylo

Last but not least, I find that Finnrose and Reylo have more parallels than I’ve previously thought.

In TLJ, Rose is not only coming to terms with her own grief but also with the real person and motivation behind Finn’s hero image post Starkiller Base. Her initial hero worship of Finn was from a somewhat simplistic point of view, (just as Rey’s view of Kylo as a ‘murderous snake’ was.) Reality, Rose finds, is much more complicated. While his desire to take the beacon and flee (to save Rey) is not entirely selfish, Finn also hasn’t had a reason to join the Resistance cause. Though Finn had returned once to the FO to save his friend, all he wants to do at the start of TLJ is to continue his run since TFA, mostly out of fear. This fear is the result of his years in the FO, of having been disciplined and punished to elicit obedience, and of knowing the FO’s terrifying military capabilities. Knowing what he knows, the most realistic action is to run. Throughout the film (and the book), Rose gradually realizes that she needs to “give him a break”, that he might need time to really shake off the pernicious effects of his oppressive Master, to find the courage and desire to be in the fight, and to find his belonging.

“Maybe it hadn’t just been his infatuation with Rey that had driven him to flee, she thought—maybe he’d also been trying to escape unfamiliar surroundings in which he was alone and didn’t fit in.” (Chapter 24)

Isn’t this what Rey also realized about Ben after the throne room scene to an extent? That the choice to turn and what to do after that turn is a complicated and difficult one?

“Luke’s error had been to assume that Ben Solo’s future was predetermined—that his choice had been made. Her error had been to assume that Kylo Ren’s choice was simple—that turning on Snoke was the same as rejecting the pull of the darkness.” (Chap. 29) (or the same as joining the Resistance)

While both Finn and Kylo had done the right things, the selfless things at some point (Finn helping the Resistance on SB and even with the Canto Bight mission, Kylo killing Snoke), they were not ready to immediately join a new cause or to change their long-held paths. But as I’ve described above, both Rey and Rose see the glimmer of hope and the goodness within both men. Similar to how Finn still retains a good heart despite all his Stormtrooper training, it is incredible that Kylo still feels compassion for Rey (and Finn at the beginning of TFA), remorse after Han’s death, and love for his mother. Even after a lifetime of manipulation and abuse by Snoke. Although Finn and Kylo are surely at different stages of their journey, I believe the parallels are there. While Finn was able to escape the FO in TFA, the shadow of what he endured as a Stormtrooper remains with him long after. It was only with time, others’ help and inspiration that Finn realizes the cause he truly believes in and find the strength & courage to fight for it.

And so will Ben Solo.

Many have said that Rose will be one of the first people to understand Rey and Kylo’s connection and Rey’s belief in Kylo’s goodness, and I wholeheartedly agree. Rose’d definitely know what it means to focus on saving those one loves, rather than just destroying the things one hates. Not only that, given the above excerpts, it is also clear that after TLJ, Rose has gained a more complex understanding of her enemies. There’ll surely be ruthless and remorseless individuals in the FO, like Hux or Phasma. But there might exist lost boys (and girls), who are killing, hurting because of years of manipulation & conditioning. Finn’s escape represents the hope that perhaps all is not lost. Finally, I think Rose will also understand that not everyone can make the right and selfless choice all at once, or all the time, even if that choice comes more naturally to others. Even if there’s goodness in someone, it might take time for them to choose to follow the hard path or the right cause.

All in all, Finn and Rose’s individual development and dynamics in TLJ are some of my favorite things about the film. Their relationship, though not as angst-filled and brimming with sexual/romantic tension like Rey and Kylo, still presents some of the most interesting ideas and concepts in the Sequel Trilogy. If Reylo has the epic trappings and mystery of the Force, Finnrose deals with the war in Star Wars on a more on-the-ground level, where troops and technicians dwell. However, both represent themes about hope, faith in love and in the goodness of others.

Just some of my thoughts. What do you think? How are you imagining Finn and Rose’s arcs in IX? What’s your wishlist for these two?

[aeternallis]

Reylo’s happy ending: a rant / nonsensical thoughts on it

Y’know, as a Reylo fan I sometimes get so caught up in wishing and hoping for this ship to have a happy ending in EPIX that I forget about the fact that I don’t actually know what that so-called “happy ending” would entail.

In my head, I do want both Ben Solo and Rey to be alive and together by the finale of the film, but thinking about the nuances of what comes after the “I love you”s and the kisses and overcoming everything else to be together becomes a little bit more murky for me.

This in and of itself is both wonderful and kinda nerve-wracking; I want to savor the time this fandom has with the theories and speculations and the endless meta and fanworks, while also grappling with time to hurry itself up already so it’s December 2019. It’s a strange mindfuck all on its own, IMO.

For example, as much as I love my domestic fluff, I don’t see these two running off somewhere to live in a dreamy, Scottish-esque cottage somewhere and having a normal life. As characters, they’re both naturally passionate people who want to make a difference in the galaxy. Even if they have yet to meet halfway with their opposing viewpoints, I can’t help but feel that their end goals are relatively the same.

At the same time though, I don’t want Reylo to end up being in HanLeia’s situation in the future, where each of them chose their professional careers over facing the problems they had as a family; ten, twenty years from now if they decide to continue this frandchise with a new trilogy, it would break my heart if we were to see Reylo separated.

It sounds dramatic and extra af, but I do admit it freely.

When I think about the older fans who hated TFA and how they loathed what Disney did with the OT trio’s characters, although I don’t agree with them, I can’t help but also feel bad for them, yknow? Return of the Jedi gave a “happily ever after” to HanLeia, but their “happily ever after” didn’t last. When the OT fans next see HanLeia in TFA, they’re separated (almost akin to a divorce, really) and although the audience can clearly see they love each other, the accumulation of the painful choices they made in their lives could also be felt.

In essence, the older generation who loved the OT trio were forced to confront the imperfections and the tragic humanity of their heroes. Thinking about it this way, it’s not really a surprise some of them are cursing the sequel trilogy to hell and back. 😔

But getting back to HanLeia, in retrospect, one could argue that this couple’s clashing personalities just couldn’t last long term, realistically speaking. After all, for all its boast of garnering inspiration from myths and fairytales and the Hero’s Journey and whatnot, SW also tends to hit too close to home at times. For those who genuinely loved the love story of the OT, it must’ve been so disappointing to see that one of the most legendary couples in this franchise weren’t really...a couple anymore.

Even if I know it’s ridiculous for me to be afraid that that’s what Disney may do the next time we see Reylo in another trilogy, it’s a thought that lingers in the back of my mind.

At the same time though, I do comfort myself in the thought that, at least compared to HanLeia, Reylo would be a little bit more welcoming and acclimatized to the idea of sharing a home and building a family together (should Disney go with this route). Whereas HanLeia both wanted something different in their lives (Han with wanting to maintain his freedom as a smuggler and Leia continuing her work for the Rebellion/Resistance), Reylo have a common desire in that they both want to find belonging.

HanLeia valued their professional lives over everything else; Reylo’s professional lives, the way I see it, are really just a means to an end to get what they both want in life: belonging.

Thinking about it, neither Rey or Ben started out wanting to make a difference in the galaxy (don’t @ me, I know I’m going contradicting what I said earlier in this post): Rey wanted her parents to come back to her and Ben wanted to find a balance to the internal conflict of light and dark within him, to give him answers. What they still want in life is essentially the same, even if how they go about attaining it is vastly different.

Does this fundamental difference between these two couples make a difference? I’d like to think so; if anything, it gives Reylo all the more reason to find balance together, as I believe meeting each other halfway would benefit them both in trying to overcome whatever problems they will face in the future, when their political differences inevitably collide.

Compared to the other couple, in which although they genuinely loved each other, couldn’t negotiate a meeting in the middle between their personal/professional lives.

Ofc, this could also just be nonsense on my part, and the simple reality is that I just gotta calm tf down. 🤣

Either way, my life as a Reylo shipper must go on~

[reynaberrieorgana]

Positive Aspects of TLJ Novelization

 I’m not excusing the negative aspects of the book. I’ve already gone over them repeatedly. I just thought it was a good idea to focus on some positives.

FinnRey is all but canon. This is solidly a FinnRey novel. They both care deeply for each other and their bond is never threatened. Even when an interloper is jealous of their relationship and tries to undermine it, there is no weakening the importance of their relationship. That said, it wasn’t always handled in the best way. Hopefully, JJ will fix that.

Rey Skywalker lives. I already thought that the only parentage theory that TLJ ruled out was Rey Random because of how the reveal was handled and RJ’s interview about the question still remaining open. But there are a number of hints toward Rey being related to the Skywalkers in the novel, including a father-daughter dance that serves no purpose other than advancing the familial bond. We’re also reminded that Anakin’s lightsaber called out to Rey and not to Kylo, suggesting that is still important. I also find it interesting that Luke dreamed of an AU where he never left Tatooine and had a wife but no children despite his hopes for some. Since the book takes the time to let us know that he didn’t believe in the Jedi’s belief’s on no attachments, that suggests there were attachments in his real life, though likely not a marriage. A child from such an attachment that he never knew about isn’t at all unlikely. 

Rey Organa Solo was teased. I think Rey Skywalker is more likely, but I still find it interesting that the only reason Leia survived in space was due to Rey. The thought of her made Leia use her power to bring herself back to the ship. Also, the beacons they wore were meant to lead Rey “home” to Leia. This is specified at least twice. But this could just be a sign of their familial bond, not necessarily mother-daughter. Though Luke does introduce Rey as his niece to the caretakers for no particular reason at all. As a Force wielder, Rey can be there and gain their assistance without being a relation of his so he could have told the truth, yet didn’t.

Force Sensitive!Finn is still an active possibility. The novel specifically says that children who showed power in the Force were not removed from the Stormtrooper ranks to train with Snoke and Kylo. They were left where they were. Though Finn isn’t specifically noted as one of them, we know from other canon material that he was an exceptional cadet who outperformed everyone else. It’s also highlighted again that Finn is the only Stormtrooper who has ever been able to fight off his brainwashing, meaning he has something special about him that the others don’t.

Finn is extremely knowledgeable. Despite being seen as naive and not having much experience in the world outside of the First Order (Rey is also naive, but more on that later), when it comes to subjects he is familiar with, he is very quick and intelligent. He knows about advanced technology as well as weapons. When he goes undercover on the Supremecy, of the three, he’s the most skilled at the deception and already has an escape route planned once the mission is achieved. There’s also one instance on Canto Bight where he understands the sewer system and warns Rose about continuing in her direction, which would lead her into the middle of the ocean at an unknown depth. When she insists on being right, he suggests they do the space equivalent of rock, paper, scissors/eeny meeny miny moe and wins. Then he reveals that he knew how to begin the game in a way that would guarantee a win, thus tricking her.

Rey and Finn’s inexperience with the world outside of their former homes is something that’s highlighted realistically. For example, Rey is just as wowed by the colors, the grass, and the water on Ahch-To as Finn is at the finery and wealth found in Canto Bight. Rey even thinks that the ocean is a surface and can’t comprehend why it keeps moving until realizing what it is. Considering their upringings, I thought these were realistic reactions for them to have. 

Kylo’s evil is something that was in him before he was even born. Leia saw darkness within him then, which fits other canon material that’s usually ignored by fandom. While Luke feels guilty for not being able to fix him, it’s not his or his parents’ fault. He’s clearly past redemption as well. He gives the order to murder everyone in the Resistance with no mercy which he knows includes his mother. He even glories in killing Han. He’s firmly a villain with no desire or potential to go back.

The book also firmly establishes Rey’s dynamic with Kylo to be completely non-romantic. The characters wouldn’t even consider it. There’s literally no sign of attraction. If anything it’s antiRe/lo since Kylo wants to murder Rey, outright thinking, saying it, and gives the order for it. Rey also plans on killing him and fantasizes about it at the end of the throne room confrontation after he’s knocked out, but she senses that the Force has other plans for him.

Like the Empire before it, the First Order is full of people with opposing interests who are more than willing to act against each other and planning each other’s downfall. The film only shows Hux versus Kylo. The book shows it at several levels. It’s also believed the Kylo will be a detriment to the whole organization since he’s erratic and irrational. So basically, the First Order will probably kill or weaken themselves, even without the Resistance fighting them.

Jessika Pava and Snap Wexleyare alive and out on their own missions to help the Resistance. Hopefully, this means Jess will play a role in Episode IX.

So yes, there’s A LOT to complain about with TLJ, both the film and the novelization. But there are aspects that lay the foundation for good things in the next installment. 

[sleemo]

The All-Stars of ‘Star Wars’

Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver and their “Last Jedi” comrades discuss the difficulties of new relationships, the joys of villainy and those porgs. — The New York Times | Dec 8, 2017

LOS ANGELES — While they tell tales of Death Stars and daddy issues, the “Star Wars” movies are also stories about duality: how goodness and evil can coexist — on the same planet or inside the same person — and what happens when they collide on an intergalactic scale.

These themes are revisited once again in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the eighth episode in the science-fiction saga that George Lucas started in 1977. “The Last Jedi,” which opens on Dec. 15, is the first to be written and directed by Rian Johnson (“Brick,” “Looper”). It follows the resounding success of “The Force Awakens,” directed by J. J. Abrams in 2015, about two young heroes, a scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley) and a renegade stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega), caught up in the search for Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).

The new film continues where “The Force Awakens” left off, as Rey and Luke are about to meet on the planet Ahch-To, and it promises a further exploration of their relationship to the sullen evildoer Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and his nefarious master, Snoke (Andy Serkis). It also features the final performance in the series from Carrie Fisher, who played Leia and who died last December.

At a running time of some two and a half hours, “The Last Jedi” continues the adventures of Finn and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and their adversaries Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) and General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson). Somehow it finds room for the new characters Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), and a wide-eyed alien species called porgs.

Like the film they made, the creator and cast of “The Last Jedi” can encompass a spectrum of darkness and light, seriousness and silliness, all in the same conversation. Just days before the movie’s opening, they gathered for what felt at times like a solemn high-school graduation and, at other times, like its after-party.

Here, Mr. Johnson, Ms. Ridley, Mr. Boyega, Mr. Hamill, Mr. Driver, Mr. Serkis, Mr. Isaac, Ms. Christie, Mr. Gleeson, Ms. Tran and Ms. Dern discuss their work on “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and some of the questions it raises. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Audiences have a strong sense of what they think a “Star Wars” film should look and feel like. But Rian, you make films that are personal and idiosyncratic. How do you do that in a “Star Wars” movie?

RIAN JOHNSON I don’t think you try to. It would be bad news if you came into this saying, “How do I make this mine?” You’re just desperately trying to make a good “Star Wars” movie — to me that means that it’s a balance between opera and bubble gum. It should make you come out of the theater and feel like you’re 10 years old, and want to grab your spaceships and start flying around. On top of everything else.

For the veterans of “The Force Awakens” —

DAISY RIDLEY I’m not a fan of the word “veteran.” We did one movie! How about actors?

JOHNSON Sophomores.

As you make your way through Star Wars High —

OSCAR ISAAC I was so high the whole time. [Laughter]

— there are actors you were paired with and worked with closely on the last film. What was it like to have those relationships scrambled and rearranged on “The Last Jedi”?

ISAAC What Rian did so well was that he asked the really tough questions. Not only of the characters, but also about the themes that “Star Wars” brings up. What is to be a Jedi? What is it to be a hero? What is it to be, in my case, a hotshot pilot? And then try to find the opposite of that — the hardest thing, the thing that’s furthest away, and have that be what the character has to deal with. Even in pairing the characters, he’s taking away what you know, and making you as uncomfortable as possible.

Was it bittersweet to have Finn and Rey, our heroes from “The Force Awakens,” split up?

JOHN BOYEGA It was horrible when I read the script for the first time and I wasn’t with her. We auditioned together. We went through this whole experience together. To be split apart was scary for me. But then I understood that is something that we could draw from — something that Finn really feels, and Rey really feels. And then I was like, “Oh! Rian does know what he’s doing.” [Laughter]

RIDLEY I felt the same. When I read the script, I didn’t cry right away. I was like, “Wobble, wobble, wobble, [shaky voice] I’m probably going to cry and I need to see Rian.” Then I went into Rian’s office and I was crying my eyes out. I’m not great with new people. I think Mark can attest to that. [Silence, then laughter]

ADAM DRIVER No one says, “No, you’re great!” Everyone else is like, “Yeah.”

RIDLEY I find it really difficult to relax. And then that’s influencing someone else’s performance. You don’t want to be the thing that’s holding something back, when there’s me, going, [awkwardly] “So … how’d you get into all this?” Mark and I were lucky enough to have proper rehearsal time, and then we could talk through everything with Rian. It ended up feeling great, but it was nerve-racking.

We were just getting to see the relationship between Luke and Rey before the curtain came down on Episode VII. In Episode VIII, were you able to pick up where you left off?

MARK HAMILL We had no relationship in VII. It’s left up to the audience to decide if he knows who she is. They established earlier that I had a telepathic ability with my sister — would I know what’s going on now? Would I know I lost my best friend? That’s all left up to the audience, and that’s in the great tradition of the cliffhangers that inspired George in the first place. “Continued next week.” Two years, in this case. But don’t worry, it’s only five months until the next one. [Rolls eyes] Great marketing there, Disney. [Laughter] What are they going to do, fire me?

LAURA DERN Luke Skywalker, ladies and gentlemen. That’s why they titled it “The Last Jedi.”

RIDLEY When I meet people I’m not like [gasps]. [Mr. Hamill pretends to pout, as Ms. Dern playfully rubs his back in comfort.] I’m more impressed with a human than a reputation. To me, I was working with Mark, I wasn’t working with Luke. I was nervous because I was working with a new person and I wanted to do my best, and I wanted the scenes to go well. Luke is regarded in this way, and Rey does understand that. But Rey, on a very human level, is asking something of Luke: “I need some advice here.” We were able to pick up right where we left off, chronologically, and it worked very well.

Is it uniquely satisfying to play a villain in a “Star Wars” movie, where you get to be especially villainous?

DOMHNALL GLEESON It was a delightful surprise, having people come up to me after “The Force Awakens” and say, “You were so bad in that movie.” It meant a lot to me. [Laughter]

GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE It’s always exciting to be bad, isn’t it? It’s even more exciting to be bad as your job. And in a context where it doesn’t impact human lives. It’s particularly resonant at the moment, the idea of, what is a better use of human energy: to serve the group or to serve the individual?

Andy, you play Supreme Leader Snoke, one of your many motion-capture characters, so there’s a whole other layer to your performance.

ANDY SERKIS There’s a gold lamé layer. The Supreme Leader as Hugh Hefner, that’s something that I particularly grabbed onto. The luxuriousness of it all. The thing about Snoke is, leaders are fearful people, because when you’re in a position of maximum power, you can only lose power. And that fear drives nearly all decisions. That fear then makes you aggressive. It makes you want to destroy others. It makes you unable to see or care about others. But when you’re creating a villain character, it’s about humanizing — there’s something important in the task of creating Snoke to find his vulnerability, because that makes him even more dangerous and despicable.

Adam, I wouldn’t say that Kylo Ren is strictly an evil person, even though we’ve seen him do terrible things. Where does he come from for you?

DRIVER The best way I can describe it is, it’s like a conversation that we started with J. J. and it continues through this film. It was less interesting to think of him as pure evil, because I don’t really know what that is. He’s someone who thinks he’s right, more than he thinks what he’s doing is bad. When I meet people who are unable to hear the other side, who not only think they’re right but they’re justified, then there’s no end to what they would do to make sure that their side wins. To me, that’s more dangerous, because the boundaries are limitless. As opposed to just being evil, that seems like it can’t sustain itself. When you feel morally justified, that feels more long-lasting and more unpredictable.

He has a lot of emotional conflict but you seem pretty even-keeled. Am I reading you correctly?

DRIVER No. [Laughter] I’m a rational person. And then I killed my father. [Laughter]

This is the first “Star Wars” movie for Kelly Marie Tran and Laura Dern. What is it like to be initiated into this franchise?

KELLY MARIE TRAN It is both horrifying and amazing. Obviously, I was intimidated, but I never felt intimidated, personally, in Regina George fashion. Every single person sitting here was honest and open. I was allowed to go to set when I wasn’t working and watch them perform. I felt like I was in this epic acting school that I didn’t have to pay for. Someone just gave me the key.

DERN I have to discredit you, Daisy, with your comments about yourself [not being great with new people]. When my daughter came to set, she said, “Oh my God, Mom, do you think we get to see Rey?” I was like, “Oh, we don’t want to bother people.” And then your trailer door opened, and you went, [singing to the “Jurassic Park” theme] “Laura Der-rrrr-rrn, Laura Der-rrrr-rrn.” [Laughter] My daughter was like, “She’s the most welcoming person.”

HAMILL Another royalty for John Williams.

How do you make a movie that finds time to provide moments for every one of these actors?

JOHNSON That’s part of the reason that this movie is a little longer than all the others.

ISAAC He made sure everyone gets to cry.

JOHNSON “Star Wars” is on the public stage in a way that nothing else is. But even on a big scary thing like this, every single one of these people was excited to step outside their comfort zones, to go to places that were really interesting but not necessarily easy.

HAMILL Like the top of Skellig Michael [the Irish island whose steep, precarious mountains are used as the setting for Ahch-To].

JOHNSON I offered to carry you on my back, Yoda-style, but you didn’t trust my legs.

HAMILL Really, when I read VII, I said, “Oh, they’ll do it with green screens and J. J. will be up the road — I’ll be done by lunch.” Little did I know, I’ll suffer for your art, kid.

JOHNSON In the edit room, you get to a point where you realize, ah, we could make the movie shorter but we’d have to give somebody short shrift, and we’re not going to do that because every one of these guys has an amazing journey in the movie.

Is there a character, other than your own, that you wish you’d gotten to play in this film?

ISAAC What Adam does in this movie is insane. It’s incredible. [Mr. Driver begins looking around awkwardly, as if searching for a way to escape the room.] It’s so wild and unpredictable and very magnetic. It made me very jealous.

BOYEGA I have to second that. I was blown away by the conflict and the change in the character arc. And the fights.

ISAAC Oh, the fights. The beautiful fights.

BOYEGA It reminds me, as a guy, of the transition from a boy to a man, learning how to maintain a certain type of energy that you have and choosing the way you let it free. That’s what he struggles with.

Who here got to meet the porgs?

RIDLEY I got to meet the porgs, but also, I’ve gotten about 300 questions about the porgs. What’s the big deal about porgs? They wouldn’t even be able to fly. Their body-to-wing ratio is like a chicken. They can’t!

DERN The more I went on about how adorable they are — it was like looking into the eyes of E. T., I loved those eyes so much — Oscar only continued to talk about different recipes.

ISAAC Porgs with roasted turnips. Glazed porg.

What would you like to see happen to your characters in Episode IX? Do you want to have that much influence over them?

ISAAC Sorry, I was still talking about porg recipes.

JOHNSON It depends on who survives at this point.

GLEESON I only have a small part to play in all this, but if I had decided what I was going to do, from the last one to the next one, it wouldn’t have been nearly as surprising as what Rian came up with it.

ISAAC It’s amazing to think about giving up that feeling of control. You have to just be open and see what’s next.