They pretty much pulled out all the stops to HINT that her parents were Han and Leia.
Filmmakers going out of their way to not say who her parents were
Inexplicably equal in power to Kylo Ren, even able to read his mind
Instinctive knowledge of the Millenium Falcon
Expert pilot (even though she apparently never left that planet before?)
“You thought Han Solo could be like the father you never had?”
Long maternal hug from Leia (c’mon, that wasn’t just an “aunt” hug)
So only two options make sense: 1) It’s going to be exactly what it looks like so millions of voices can call out in unison “HA! I KNEW she was Han & Leia’s daughter!” 2) The filmmakers are trying to make it a big surprise when she turns out to be Luke’s daughter (and Kylo Ren’s cousin).
I disagree. The only way that psychic vision-quest makes any sense is if that lightsaber was planted in Maz’s chest after all the events Rey experiences in the vision, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with Rey’s parentage. Neither Luke nor Anakin showed any particular gift for psychometry (if anything, they must have been pretty bad at it, since it never showed up in any scene they were part of, unless it came up in some Clone Wars episode I missed), so it’s not what I’d call a Skywalker trait.
The assumption seems to be that Rey must have been one of Luke’s padawans, and since they’re ideally started quite young, it makes sense that she would have had a fair amount of training already by the time that traumatic separation we saw in the TFA flashback took place. Getting the specific memories of her youth wiped to help protect her seems an awfully heavy-handed choice on Luke’s part, but what the hell; we know so little at this point about the Knights of Ren and what Kylo was up to with them that I don’t mind assuming that Luke had to act fast in a very desperate time. So I can imagine him doing such a thing to one of his more talented (or otherwise valuable) padawans. But this event in no way indicates that she’s anything more than a hidden padawan. The flying skill is the stronger indicator of her Skywalker heritage. But the lightsaber-triggered vision must have been deliberately planted to make any sense, and though it could have been aimed at Rey because she’s Luke’s daughter, there’s no particular reason for it to necessarily be so.
Color me unimaginative, but I can’t think of any reason why, if Luke’s old lightsaber was returned to him at some point, he would drop it off with Maz under any circumstance other than that which I’ve been theorizing: as a deliberately-programmed key to find him when certain of his hidden padawans reaches a critical point of need or ability to find him. Maybe Artoo could have been programmed to wake up when Rey comes near him. It’s just as possible that he could have been programmed to reactivate when in the presence of that lightsaber. For the purposes of TFA, it doesn’t matter.
Uh huh. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming I’m entirely ignorant (or not in possession) of most of the EU material. I won’t argue canonicity with you, since precisely none of this stuff ever actually happened, neither in our own galaxy nor any other far, far away. People like Lucas and Kasdan and Abrams and Zahn and Foster and Wolverton and Allston and Stackpole and Tartakovsky and Filoni and Karpyshyn make shit up to entertain us, and people like Leland Chee have to bust ass to try to make it all fit together without having too many Bails on Alderaan.
One of the things that keeps this series interesting is that, for all the alien species and points-of-view, the grand dramas at the heart of it all are ancient and very human stories, and so when the characters depart too far from the humanity of their instincts, we lose sympathy for them. When Anakin’s love for Padme was forbidden because of the Jedi rule against personal intimate relationships, we really felt for those two, and thought that that rule, sensible though it might be in a security sense, was inhumane and unreasonable. The Jedi were simultaneously most effective militarily and least interesting dramatically when they were unemotional automatons… and so we don’t spend a lot of time with Jedi in the stories when the emotional wheels aren’t about to fall off.
All this is to say that the audience for the movies is made up of a huge majority of casual SW fans who’ve never picked up an EU book or played any KOTOR in their lives. Most of you LA-area True Believers were in line with me on Hollywood Boulevard in the middle of the night this week, but that movie is still playing, and will continue to do so for weeks and weeks to billions of people who don’t really know (or care) what a holocron is. But that’s the audience the movies are designed to reach, and so the key dramatic moments within the movies have to resonate with people who’ve had no exposure to any of the EU, Legendary or Canon. For those people, the dramatic choices have to make human sense in order to resonate our sympathy, and in that, The Force Awakens does not have a completely successful script. Doesn’t mean it fails as a movie by any stretch, but there’s always room for improvement.
I don’t think it’s helpful to take it all that seriously. The Force (or at least the Jedi Council’s interpretation of it, which sure does look to prove itself to be fatally flawed to my eyes) serves a narrative purpose, but shows virtually no internal consistency. Anakin Skywalker was prophesized to “bring balance to the Force.” In what useful manner did he do that? Just tiptoeing along the knife edge between Light and Dark for two movies? Were his years in power (as Jedi and as Sith) at all preferable to the years before and after his life?
The SW saga has a strong strain of fatalism at its core, practically rotten with Chosen Ones and Inescapable Destinies. That’s not its strong suit. Yoda and Obi-Wan prattle on and on about that shit, and always seem to be proven wrong by some Skywalker or another. If there’s any destiny at work, it’s only ever evident in hindsight, just like here in our galaxy. Maybe that’s the lesson.
It also stands to reason that on a desolate planet with few living things, not only would the Force-strength of a likely child be squelched by the lack of life, but in a significantly smaller sentient population, there just will be a concurrently smaller chance of encountering any likely candidates. Kinda like how MLB scouts probably don’t spend a lot of time scouting in Point Barrow, Alaska.
I dunno. It’s always easy to blame the studio suits, but I’d be surprised to find out there was significant studio pressure to include another spheroid planet-killing superweapon with a couple of key weak spots. Much of what Kasdan and Abrams got right was the result of being allowed (and encouraged) by Disney to make a genuinely good movie. Disney execs can read internet forums as well as anyone, and you can bet they have when they have a $4 billion investment to protect. If an equally-entertaining script had been written without Starkiller Base (or other Death Star equivalent) in it, my money says that it would have been approved by the studio just as readily.
Well, even though most of the noise seems to be saying she’s Luke’s kid, having her be Kylo Ren’s sister would be another goofy callback to the old movies, with Luke and Leia’s whole separated-at-birth thing with one being sent to a desert planet under the watchful eye of Malex Von Guinness.
I’m going to be slightly more irritated if that ends up being the case.
I wish it was, but it does mesh with little things like how Han treated the Falcon and talked to it, or in Empire Strikes Back how Threepio remarked about the ship’s dialect. It also makes sense to see the astromech droids as being able to serve as the ship’s brain, augmenting the reflexes of the pilot.
My biggest quibble with the Falcon has less to do with the ship than the idea that anything can be timed while it’s going FTL.
“Oh, their shield blocks everything going slower than light, so we’ll just go through it FTL then drop out of hyperspace.”
Han was right, Leia wouldn’t have liked the idea because it’s physically impossible unless they were projecting their shield a light second or two out from the planet. And even if the shield worked that way, why not project it just below ground level or something so that it’d protect the really important stuff still.
Also sub light speed plasma would be blocked so the Starkiller would have to lower its shields while chargin up itz lazor anyway.
What exactly was the point of this post except being a big whinefest directed towards me for misinterpreting my statement while plastering my name all over your memorabilia? Seriously, did you really get that mad at me ignoring your post that you got all your shit together, set it up for camera shots, took pictures, and uploaded it all on the Internet to go off on wild tangents I didn’t want to bother discussing in the first place?
When did I “dictate” what anyone should believe? I posted alternative explanations to what could have happened just like everyone else with what pre-exists already in Star Wars canon.
And again, you’re raging about George Lucas when we already established before with evidence that he isn’t involved in Star Wars canon anymore whatsoever. He can offer suggestions but no one LSG has to listen to him. [quote=“funruly, post:158, topic:70920”]
It’s referential, but not just towards itself.
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Except it is. All the time. All three trilogies are bildungsromans – they’re basically about young individuals going out to the big, grand galaxy and becoming grown-ups. They’re all about Jedi vs. Sith. They’re all about (presumably) the Skywalkers.
It’s pretty cringeworthy the lengths you went to in order to put my name on your stuff. I mean presumably you even reinstalled KOTOR just to do this.
Yeah, see? This is the reason why I didn’t want to respond to you. You struck me as a guy so entitled about people disagreeing with you on the Internet that you would post creepy, petty bullshit like this.
Cause it has absolutely nothing to do what I was talking about and I didn’t want to deal with some douchebag on the Internet dragging me into a topic I have no interest in discussing.
HAHAHAHA! Oh man. This is coming from the guy who wrote devoted at least an hour of his day to put an Internet stranger’s name on his shit to write a response to something I was never saying in the first place.
Please leave me alone. I’ll put the lotion in the basket.
Someone responded to EU material being used by basically saying “EU is shit”
Then he offered a paraphrase about how canon works, misunderstood it, and I cleared it up with evidence that Legends stuff does indeed enter canon.
Apparently this is “policing” fans. How exactly am I restricting anyone’s free speech here?
And then I make the mistake of actually responding to the guy who claims I’m censoring people simply by sharing my own perspective wherein he, very predictably, goes into creepy nerd rage mode by putting my name all over my shit just because I didn’t want to talk to him.
If the Internet was a bar, maybe people might realize just how creepy it is that posters feel entitled to responses. And when they get a response they aren’t happy with, they act really bitter and break the veritable fourth wall by writing a stranger’s name all over their shit?
I suppose we could say “oh the navicomputer can do the timing, and drop the Falcon out of hyperspace at the exact right moment.”
But of course that would make Han pulling that switch completely pointless. Unless he decided to use the switch as a relay for the navicomputer’s timing program. But even then, why not let the Falcon just do its timing during the whole mission? It’s not like clockcycles are a limited resource.
Nothing about Anakin immediately comes to mind but Luke does receive visions of a possible future when he entered the cave in Dagobah so there’s definitely film precedent for this.
But the Rey = Luke’s Daughter theory isn’t just about the lightsaber. It’s about the lightsaber and everything else. One or two pieces of possible foreshadowing are iffy, but with all of them put together, you suddenly have a strong case.
Same reasoning behind J=R+L. A couple winks and nods towards Rhaegar and Lyanna? Eh… Okay. But a dozen of them?
Won’t disagree with that.
Isn’t it kind of the opposite? Before Luke went off to confront Vader, Yoda mentions that there’s another Skywalker who could bring balance to the Force (talking about Leia). Then in RotJ, they also say that it’s very possible for Luke to fail. Someone strong in the Force is always going to be pulled into large events but they stil have agency in those actions. Luke falling to the dark side was a real possibility which is why Obi-Wan and Yoda were so worried.
I think it’s telling that most of the fan servicey and heavy-handed HEY DO YOU GET THIS REFERENCE stuff was shoved in the beginning of the movie. After Rey took off with the Falcon, the movie really hit its own stride.
But if this movie is aimed squarely towards casual fans like you suggested, then Starkiller Base would absolutely be a suit decision. People know the Death Star. They’d see a Death Star 3.0 and think, “Yeah, okay, I get that.”
Uhh, except I did? I wasn’t referring to the perceived quality of EU. I was talking about how EU fits into canon.
I wrote a response with Legends item that made it into canon in reply to a poster who said EU stuff is not canon anymore.
In response to someone who was directly referring to me.
Anyway, I’m interested in talking Star Wars, not getting pulled into endless shade throwing or encouraging a poster who was creepy enough to stamp my name all over his personal items.
Oh Jeez. Now the person who may or may not smell like wampa (it’s just a legend and has not yet been established as canon on dookiepedia) is telling me that I’m creepy for sharing pix of my personal effects with a group of my friends.
i could see han & leia honoring ben kenobi by naming a child after him, particularly since han gave him such a hard time and then learned that he was right all along. leia obviously looked to kenobi as an important figure, and honoring his history would be appropriate. i guess in the Extended Universe luke did have kids, twins, and he did name one ben. so maybe they lifted that for the movie and put it on han and leia instead. it would be cool if they were adoptive parents, but it seems so unlikely. my question is, if ren is luke’s daughter… who is her mother??
My secret hope is that they’re planning the biggest fanboy surprise ever by having Mara Jade walk out of a cave on the island to stand next to her husband.
