superchunk said:
How was Luke's training any different than hers? Obi Wan talked to him very minimally (mins/hour maybe) before he was blocking shots blinded and calling his light saber back to himself in ESB. Then Luke spent another very small amount of time with Yoda where even right before he left he was still full of negativity, whining, and always assuming he'd fail at everything he tried. Fact is, people are forget / forgive what happened in OT but call out all kinds of crazy shit in all other newer movies. Her character is fine, its the shit show of "fans" perceptions on what a jedi should or should not be that is the problem. Her growth is in reality, no different than Luke. |
One thing we do have to keep in mind with these things, is that movies can only ever give you so much character development time on screen, when you're trying to get everything into a 1.5-3 hour product. There's a lot to get through, and only so much time to do it. I think the main issue here in regard to Rey, compared to say Luke, is that with Luke, you got to see him struggle. Yes, he quickly progressed in the end, because you gotta quickly progress to stack up to the bad guy in the runtime of your movie(s), but he had his share of hardships getting there. Yoda's (little) training came hard to him, Vader toyed with him before taking a lucky shot and removing Luke's hand. Rey pretty much has no external struggle yet in any of these movies. The one time anything was put in her path that she wasn't instantly at least on par with, was Snoke, who was then quickly disposed of.
Rey shows up on the scene and is basically power personified. Say what you want about how little training Luke had....Rey had NO training, aside from Luke being like "yo, if I pretend to give a fuck for 2 seconds, will you leave me alone?" And mind you, that's in the second movie, after she's already showed herself to be ridiculously impressive. In Luke's first movie, he really didn't do shit until the very end when he destroyed the Death Star, which took him several tries, as well as assistance from Han and Chewie so he didn't get his ass blown to hell himself. In Rey's first movie, she displays herself to be a master pilot, adept at physical combat, quick mastery of mind control, resistance to mind reading, does her own mind reading, and overpowers a trained force user for pull of a lightsaber.
So while you're not wrong that in principle this is all nothing new, when it comes to a character quickly ascending, there's still a difference in how it's handled. Still, like Nymeria, I actually liked Rey a lot in TFA, and pretty much excused all her ability as simply having been previously trained by someone before she was ditched in the middle of nowhere, before having her memory whipped or something. This however was unceremoniously dismissed in the TLJ, so.....now she's just OP cus....reasons. Force balance yo. Luke was playing hide and go seek with the force, so the force put all it's power in her to balance out Kylo. Snoke, Leia, and other force sensitives apparently didn't need to be taken into account with said balance, but whatever.
Edit: All that said, Rey is ultimately the least of my issues with this movie
