Okay, I'm gonna skip the politics this time and focus on this last exchange because holy
fuck:
Bobby discusses the Rey films with an Angel of his:
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Let's start with the troon's post. I'll give a point for the acknowledgement of Rey Palpatine being a hamfisted retcon, because oh boy was it ever. But the sheer fucking audacity to claim that Rey
ever had a single moment of growth throughout the entire Disney Wars trilogy is ludicrous. From start to finish, Rey was literally the exact same character: a boring blank slate with no real investment in what's going on around her, just being shoved from one scene to the next because the plot needs her to be there to deus ex machina the good guys out of whatever problem they've found themselves in. Hell, even in the big reveal from Grandpa Sheev, Daisy Ridley is incapable of doing any emotion beyond gaping fishmouth, so the audience gets no clue as to what's supposed to be going through Rey's head at that point. There was no cleverness here, it was just "shit, nobody liked the explanation in TLJ, quick, let's make her a Palpatine!"
It didn't help that TROS had so much other shit crammed into its runtime that there really wasn't any time to have Rey grapple with her feelings on this. I mean, for a direct comparison to what JJ was ripping off, look at the revelation of Vader being Luke's father in ESB (oh spoilers btw): Luke is absolutely horrified that he's descended from this embodiment of evil, and his despair almost causes him to lose his life as he plummets to the bottom of Cloud City. It's a real turning point for his character, where he now has to wrestle with what his lineage means, and this comes to full fruition in ROTJ when he not only refuses to turn to the Dark Side, but helps Vader redeem himself and return to the Light. In TROS...Rey just gapes at Sheev and then blasts him with a retarded lightsaber move a few minutes later. Bravo, JJ.
Now, I absolutely hate TLJ, but I will say that the initial idea of "Rey's parents are nobodies" could have worked in a better trilogy. The idea that you don't have to be descended from one of these legendary families and still be a great hero is a good message; your lineage doesn't necessarily dictate who you will be. However, the problem was that Kathleen Kennedy wanted Rey to be an overpowered Mary Sue that she could self-insert into, and considering the general sense of "strong Force users are descended from strong Force users" in Star Wars, that meant there had to be some kind of explanation as to where the fuck Rey got her powers from. Thus, Rian's attempt at subverting expectations fell flat because fans were still convinced she had to be descended from someone important, so JJ had to come back and throw that out the window. Really, Rey being a Palpatine is little more than proof that Disney had no fucking idea what they were going to do in their trilogy from the start, and by
God does it show.
This is why Bob's suggestion is stupid. I feel like a basic rule of storytelling is that everything you need to know should be found in the work itself, not expounded upon in ancillary materials. It's a problem that Disney has had with Star Wars ever since they took it over: so little is actually told in the movies that you're pretty much forced to read a bunch of books and comics and reference materials to actually figure out what the fuck you just watched and how the plot's supposed to make sense. Except that really doesn't work a lot of the time because there's nobody actually wrangling the canon at Lucasfilm anymore, so you're left with a bunch of contradictory bullshit. Having some kind of sequel story written later where Rey practically tells the reader what she was supposed to have been thinking during TROS is absolutely moronic, and it doesn't make it any less shit of a film.
On a side note, it's really telling that Disney hasn't released
any stories that are set after the end of the Disney Trilogy, to say nothing of how awful the merchandise sales for the sequels are. Instead, they keep putting out OT stuff, or going back hundreds of years with their stupid High Republic project. It's almost like they know how much of a dumpster fire they've made, and they're pretending it doesn't really exist.
