I'm joking about the third thing, but seriously I do think anyone who says anything about Revan in a discussion of anything other than the KOTOR games should be put in jail. He's Star Wars Goku. Enjoy smashing your action figures together, thirty-year-old men complaining that he's not canon anymore. Let the rest of us enjoy a new story.
And that's really what it's about to me: New Stories.
Everybody wants Rey to be Luke's daughter, or Obi-Wan's granddaughter, or even Leia and Han's kid. And I don't think that makes the story better. Quite the opposite — insisting that all the characters be related to each other makes the story worse. It defeats the point of expanding the Universe with new characters and locations if everything comes back to one family's slap-fight about the Force in the end.
Never mind that for her to be Obi-Wan's implies that he boned the Duchess Satine as a Padawan, and she had and raised a child in secret and never told him about it.
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| *urk* Obi... I wish we had more time... for... expository dialogue... |
And to have a dramatic reveal that not only Kylo Ren but also Rey is a daughter of Han Solo is just stupid. It requires Kylo to be in the same room as his sister, rooting around her mind, and somehow not figure out a connection between them. It requires her to coincidentally steal her own father's ship, then get boarded by him and her dog uncle and spend a bunch of time roaming around the galaxy and watching him get stabbed. All without ever noticing their similar jawlines or whatever.
Hell, some people are so desperate to connect her to an established Force-using character that they think she's Obi-Wan's niece; the daughter of his long-lost and never-mentioned brother. Or she's a clone of Anakin Skywalker. Or a reborn Chosen One, brought about by the Force because Anakin really fucked it all up the first time around.
Are we really so desperate for things to be safe and familiar that we need her to be tangentially related to a character who's been dead for 40 years? Or to further embrace the dumbest parts of the prequel story just so we can say "I told you so!" on Reddit in December?
One of my favorite things about the treatment of Luke, Han, Leia and the events of the OT in these movies is that it's the polar opposite of the way the old Expanded Universe handled it. They're three people who were an important part of events that affected the entire galaxy. Billions of people had a part in the Galactic Civil War, either directly or indirectly. Most of them don't give a damn who actually fired the last shot of that battle.
To most, Luke Skywalker might as well be a myth. Nobody but him made it out of Palpatine's throne room alive, so unless he posted a long blog entry about their confrontation why would anybody care? Hundreds of pilots died, cruisers were destroyed, and in the end Wedge and Lando blew up the Death Star. Luke's private battle for his father's soul had precisely dick to do with anything that was happening outside. It was important to us because he's a character we like, but it's not like Palpatine wouldn't have been sitting in that chair when the reactor blew whether Luke ever showed up or not.
The point isn't that that's a bad story, or that I dislike it. It's that the crew making these movies understands something George clearly didn't when he made the prequels: Relying on your previous works for inspiration results in a story that is stale and uninteresting.
The success of the Force Awakens to me was that I left the theater wanting to know more about Rey, Finn, and Poe. They created new characters who are vibrant and dynamic, and reducing one of them to the daughter or clone of a character we already know being shoehorned in by Destiny or whatever cheapens that success.
(Side note: If you try to tell me Rey is a Mary Sue for calling her dynamic I'm putting you in jail with the Revan fanboys. Luke Skywalker is the Maryest Sue in film history and I'll fight anyone who disagrees)
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| Four years from this shot, this man beats Darth Fucking Vader in a lightsaber fight |
Part of the blame for this falls on Internet culture in general. We comb every frame of everything we like for the secret included message that reveals the entire story, like our favorite creators are going to throw up their hands and say "You got it! We hid the ending to Game of Thrones in a Season 3 Easter Egg, great job."
This is further compounded by properties like Dark Souls or Arrested Development, where watching or playing over and over again and looking for the tiniest detail can actually yield impressive results. Fans are now conditioned to expect subtle nods or unusual word choices that reveal significant plot details, and that's just not always the case. And it shouldn't be! Those experiences are fun and novel specifically because they are unusual. I don't want a Mario game where the description of a Toadstool Rune contains the secret truth of the Mushroom Kingdom.
The line between fandom and obsession has blurred over the last 10 years, and it results in situations like this one. People assume Rey's parentage has to be important because it wasn't specifically stated to us who her parents are. But we never found out who Han's dad was. We don't know what the home Obi-Wan was taken from as a baby was like.
Do you feel less connected to those characters because you don't know that Greg Kenobi sold freighter insurance to Jim Solo back when every important character in the franchise met in the same room for the 400th time?
Luke and Leia's parentage was important because the story made it important. And if the identity of Rey's parents becomes narratively pertinent at some point, I'm sure the director of that movie will let us know. But until then, it baffles me that people actively want Rey's "true" identity to not only be an important plot point, but a shitty one. What does it add to the story if she's Luke's daughter? Or Obi-Wan's niece? Is she any less compelling a character if she's just a girl Kylo Ren couldn't bring himself to kill when he wiped out the Academy?
Is Snoke actually being [Insert flavor-of-the-week fanboy obsession] more interesting than him being a new character whose motivations are hidden simply because it makes the story better, and not because every director must be sitting on a dramatic reveal?
Considering how heavily people criticized the Force Awakens for its near-slavish dedication to hitting the important notes of a New Hope, it's very interesting to me that so many of them seem to actively desire a revelation that Rey is just another Solo/Skywalker keeping this expansive story laser-focused on the same six people it always was.
I say we should let new stories be just that: New.
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