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labingi…in which I ponder the ups and downs of the characterizations of Rey and Kylo but end up being fannishly mostly pleased. SPOILERS through TLJ.
Rey
I like Rey yet I have had trouble connecting with her deeply. This is because Rey has a backstory that doesn’t match the character we see, and so it’s hard for me to know what to make of her. We are told that Rey’s parents sold her when she was a child and she lived the rest of her life up to TFA in a dog-eat-dog world as something like an indentured servant. In TFA, she lives alone and seems not to have any friends, at least not close enough to ever mention after leaving. There’s no evidence that anyone treated her horrifically. Nonetheless, this is traumatic childhood, typified by neglect, which is arguably even more psychologically damaging than many kinds of more active abuse.
Yet Rey behaves like the well-adjusted girl next door. She behaves, well, much like Luke after a lifetime of being raised by a loving aunt and uncle. She has conventionally good values. She tends to trust people and has an instinct to look out for others rather than just herself. She makes friends easily. She’s polite and friendly and well socialized. She’s reasonably patient and dutiful (at least in dealing with Luke’s various rejections of her). This doesn’t mesh well with her background.
Admittedly, some of it makes sense. Her desire to find a place to belong and a parent figure goes a long way to explaining her attachment to Han, Leia, Luke, joining the Resistance, and even the strength of her will to redeem Kylo. And being an indentured servant might have taught her to be patient and demure with authority figures. But where did this abandoned girl learn to be so trusting? Where did this loner learn to be so conventionally gracious, so good at conversation? So huggy (ex. Leia, Finn)? And why is someone whose background would almost certainly give her gargantuan psychological issues so stable in using the Force? Why is her use of it so consistently appropriate: toward helping people, defending friends, fighting evil, showing restraint in not attacking Luke when she has the advantage, etc.?
Anakin may have been poorly written in the prequels, but his psychology makes more sense: he has loss issues and this causes him to use his power inappropriately to avoid loss. Rey has abandonment and belonging issues, and this causes her to…? Connect easily to the people around her? Handle Luke’s prickly attitude with a reasonable mix of patience, forbearance, listening, and seeking her own answers? Take a good swing at redeeming Kylo but appropriately give up and stick to her core values when it’s clear he’s not going to join her? Something doesn’t track. It’s like there’s a huge source of basic psychological stability that is present in her psyche but has no detectable origin.
So what’s the origin of this stability? There are two possible answers: 1) there’s some great stabilizing factor in her in background we just haven’t seen: ex. some parent figure in her youth who then died. 2) She was just born amazingly, freakishly stable, like a Dalai Lama.
In the absence of evidence of the first possibility—and I may be missing details from books or throwaway lines, feel free to tell me—I find the second possibility interesting to unpack. Why would she be born this way? Does she just have an inherently amazing personality, as George Orr in Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven is described as the perfect balance of yin and yang, Mr. Either-Or? Maybe, but a possibility I find more tantalizing is that she’s a reincarnation.
Now, to be clear, I don’t think the movies intend this. Reincarnation has not been a thing in the Star Wars universe, and I don’t think it’s going to start now. I’m talking about how my head canon is coping with this disconnect. If one thinks of Rey in terms of karma, she could fit very well into the mold of a spirit that has accumulated significant age and wisdom being born with no explicit memory of any past lives. Now everything makes sense. On one level, she’s young, fairly ignorant, eager to embark on her life’s journey, grappling with her abandonment—but on another level, she has the core instincts of someone who has been through all these crucibles before and profited from various kinds of prior supports and teachers. This also helps explain her virtuoso laundry list of skills, from using the Force with no training, to piloting, to languages.
In my mind, I rather want her to be a reincarnation of Obi-Wan. She has much of his stability, selflessness, courtesy, balance, and, of course, skill in using the Force. But in some ways she supersedes him: she’s stronger in the Force; he was a reluctant pilot, she’s an eager and brilliant one. This would be consistent with the idea of moving forward through “good karma.” Throughout life, if we live reasonably well, we improve ourselves. Reincarnation stretches this process across lives: Rey could be Obi-Wan leveled up. Bonus points: being his reincarnation adds an additional psychological reason for her investment in redeeming Kylo. Now, obviously, this is my fantasy. It’s not a fan theory that’s going to come true. But it does meet my needs in making sense of Rey. I’d be interested to hear others’ interpretations of her.
Briefly Finn
Finn suffers from the same backstory problem as Rey, only in his case the disconnect is even more extreme. We’re told he was raised in a dehumanizing, totalitarian setting in which he didn’t even have a name, only a serial number. Yet his behavior is that of the boy next door: friendly, nice, good-hearted, conventionally moral. That’s not going to happen unless life as a stormtrooper has a lot more background normality (camaraderie, mentorship) then we’ve been led to believe. Finn does have a good arc in moving from being a man who runs to a man who stays to help the cause, but it still doesn’t fit the excessive nastiness of his backstory.
Kylo
In terms of backstory, Kylo makes a lot more sense than Rey (and Finn). He comes from a fundamentally supportive and loving background, and this shows. Like Rey, he’s good at conversation and relates to people, on a superficial level, in a relatively easy, well-socialized way (when he doesn’t have a particular reason to be horrible to them). He is instinctively a loving and connected person: we see this in his conflict over whether to kill both his father and mother; we see it in his rapid and intense attachment to Rey. Unlike with Rey, however, this stable foundation makes sense for him. We know exactly where he learned it. His psychological problems obviously run deep, but their origins in a mix of loving support, confusion, bad influences, and betrayal generally make sense.
TLJ explains the trigger that caused Kylo to turn on Luke and kill most of his students: he thought the uncle he trusted was going to kill him. At risk of taking a fantasy text too seriously, I’ve tried to think how I might respond to a real-world equivalent of this. My parents have always completely supported me; they have been my safest refuge. How would I have felt as a teen if one day I heard them say they were going to throw me out of the house? Even if it were a misunderstanding or they quickly said they’d decided otherwise, it would have brutally battered my trust. Really. It hurts even to write these lines. Certainly, that type of betrayal can be devastating. But I probably wouldn’t have leapt to the conclusion that they’d totally turned on me and, say, run away that night. I probably would have gone up to them and said, “What the hell?” Now, when you think someone’s going to kill you, you need to defend yourself. But burning down the whole temple and killing a bunch of other people is a little bit extreme as a response to one bad break of trust.
Which brings us to Luke’s initial concern that Kylo had already succumbed to the Dark Side, apparently due to Snoke’s influence. And this is where Kylo’s backstory falls apart a bit, though novels might help elucidate it? We don’t have any clear sense of how this seduction began or why he was so susceptible to it. It’s not implausible; it’s just not explained up to TLJ. For now, I can only say it can’t be easy to grow up as Darth Vader’s grandson and, more broadly, to grow up with this vast array of unanswerable questions about the nature of the Jedi and their fall (most records having been purged), to grow up with a master you can’t entirely trust as an authority because he himself doesn’t have access to much historical continuity, he himself is a product of foreshortened training and has a very small window into the what it means, historically, to be a Jedi.
In any case, his psychological development appears to have been arrested about the time he fell out with Luke. He was presumably an adolescent at the time and, however many years later, is still an adolescent, filled with angst and a sense of not being understood and a desire to prove himself against his elders, make his own way, and find his own people to connect with. [1]
Overall, I find Kylo to be the best developed of the new generation of characters in terms of having a fairly detailed backstory that tracks with who he currently is. But I would enjoy getting more of the details filled in.
(As to where he’s going in the next film, we obviously don’t know yet, but many seem convinced that he’s had his chance at redemption and is now just going to be the bad guy who needs to be defeated. That seems reductive to me, both in storytelling terms and human psychological terms. In psychological terms, there’s nothing irredeemable about him; it’s just likely to take a lot of time, pain, and having to face moral culpability. In storytelling terms, it will be tricky to give him much of a developmental arc in one movie while keeping the focus on Rey as protagonist, but my partner made a good point that Rey could defeat him in a way that leaves him unreformed but alive for potential future development—in movies, books, or just the fan imagination—rather like Vader at the end of ANH.)
Briefly Poe:
I have no complaints. I’m told he is the son of a badass rebel, and that’s exactly how he behaves. :-)
[1] Arrested psychological development seems characteristic of falling to the Dark Side. Certainly, the typical Palpatine, Snoke, Dooku-like evil master is trapped in a pre-adolescent fascination with being king of the hill for no discernable purpose other than enjoying imposing his power. The atypical figure here is Vader. Anakin, prior to his ultimate fall, was a messed-up young man, but he got a sharp wake-up call in the form of being told he’d inadvertently killed his wife and child(ren), as well as losing much of his body. Thereafter, he seems to be at least partly aware that choosing the Dark Side was a mistake, but he feels trapped into the service of the Emperor. He doesn’t see a way out: “It’s too late for me.” My partner has observed that Anakin never learned to be anything other than a subordinate: he went from slave to Qui-Gon’s apprentice to Obi-Wan’s apprentice to Palpatine’s apprentice. Until the end of ROTJ, he doesn’t seem to have much of a concept of acting as an independent agent. His development is certainly arrested, but perhaps in a somewhat more sober, resigned way?
Rey
I like Rey yet I have had trouble connecting with her deeply. This is because Rey has a backstory that doesn’t match the character we see, and so it’s hard for me to know what to make of her. We are told that Rey’s parents sold her when she was a child and she lived the rest of her life up to TFA in a dog-eat-dog world as something like an indentured servant. In TFA, she lives alone and seems not to have any friends, at least not close enough to ever mention after leaving. There’s no evidence that anyone treated her horrifically. Nonetheless, this is traumatic childhood, typified by neglect, which is arguably even more psychologically damaging than many kinds of more active abuse.
Yet Rey behaves like the well-adjusted girl next door. She behaves, well, much like Luke after a lifetime of being raised by a loving aunt and uncle. She has conventionally good values. She tends to trust people and has an instinct to look out for others rather than just herself. She makes friends easily. She’s polite and friendly and well socialized. She’s reasonably patient and dutiful (at least in dealing with Luke’s various rejections of her). This doesn’t mesh well with her background.
Admittedly, some of it makes sense. Her desire to find a place to belong and a parent figure goes a long way to explaining her attachment to Han, Leia, Luke, joining the Resistance, and even the strength of her will to redeem Kylo. And being an indentured servant might have taught her to be patient and demure with authority figures. But where did this abandoned girl learn to be so trusting? Where did this loner learn to be so conventionally gracious, so good at conversation? So huggy (ex. Leia, Finn)? And why is someone whose background would almost certainly give her gargantuan psychological issues so stable in using the Force? Why is her use of it so consistently appropriate: toward helping people, defending friends, fighting evil, showing restraint in not attacking Luke when she has the advantage, etc.?
Anakin may have been poorly written in the prequels, but his psychology makes more sense: he has loss issues and this causes him to use his power inappropriately to avoid loss. Rey has abandonment and belonging issues, and this causes her to…? Connect easily to the people around her? Handle Luke’s prickly attitude with a reasonable mix of patience, forbearance, listening, and seeking her own answers? Take a good swing at redeeming Kylo but appropriately give up and stick to her core values when it’s clear he’s not going to join her? Something doesn’t track. It’s like there’s a huge source of basic psychological stability that is present in her psyche but has no detectable origin.
So what’s the origin of this stability? There are two possible answers: 1) there’s some great stabilizing factor in her in background we just haven’t seen: ex. some parent figure in her youth who then died. 2) She was just born amazingly, freakishly stable, like a Dalai Lama.
In the absence of evidence of the first possibility—and I may be missing details from books or throwaway lines, feel free to tell me—I find the second possibility interesting to unpack. Why would she be born this way? Does she just have an inherently amazing personality, as George Orr in Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven is described as the perfect balance of yin and yang, Mr. Either-Or? Maybe, but a possibility I find more tantalizing is that she’s a reincarnation.
Now, to be clear, I don’t think the movies intend this. Reincarnation has not been a thing in the Star Wars universe, and I don’t think it’s going to start now. I’m talking about how my head canon is coping with this disconnect. If one thinks of Rey in terms of karma, she could fit very well into the mold of a spirit that has accumulated significant age and wisdom being born with no explicit memory of any past lives. Now everything makes sense. On one level, she’s young, fairly ignorant, eager to embark on her life’s journey, grappling with her abandonment—but on another level, she has the core instincts of someone who has been through all these crucibles before and profited from various kinds of prior supports and teachers. This also helps explain her virtuoso laundry list of skills, from using the Force with no training, to piloting, to languages.
In my mind, I rather want her to be a reincarnation of Obi-Wan. She has much of his stability, selflessness, courtesy, balance, and, of course, skill in using the Force. But in some ways she supersedes him: she’s stronger in the Force; he was a reluctant pilot, she’s an eager and brilliant one. This would be consistent with the idea of moving forward through “good karma.” Throughout life, if we live reasonably well, we improve ourselves. Reincarnation stretches this process across lives: Rey could be Obi-Wan leveled up. Bonus points: being his reincarnation adds an additional psychological reason for her investment in redeeming Kylo. Now, obviously, this is my fantasy. It’s not a fan theory that’s going to come true. But it does meet my needs in making sense of Rey. I’d be interested to hear others’ interpretations of her.
Briefly Finn
Finn suffers from the same backstory problem as Rey, only in his case the disconnect is even more extreme. We’re told he was raised in a dehumanizing, totalitarian setting in which he didn’t even have a name, only a serial number. Yet his behavior is that of the boy next door: friendly, nice, good-hearted, conventionally moral. That’s not going to happen unless life as a stormtrooper has a lot more background normality (camaraderie, mentorship) then we’ve been led to believe. Finn does have a good arc in moving from being a man who runs to a man who stays to help the cause, but it still doesn’t fit the excessive nastiness of his backstory.
Kylo
In terms of backstory, Kylo makes a lot more sense than Rey (and Finn). He comes from a fundamentally supportive and loving background, and this shows. Like Rey, he’s good at conversation and relates to people, on a superficial level, in a relatively easy, well-socialized way (when he doesn’t have a particular reason to be horrible to them). He is instinctively a loving and connected person: we see this in his conflict over whether to kill both his father and mother; we see it in his rapid and intense attachment to Rey. Unlike with Rey, however, this stable foundation makes sense for him. We know exactly where he learned it. His psychological problems obviously run deep, but their origins in a mix of loving support, confusion, bad influences, and betrayal generally make sense.
TLJ explains the trigger that caused Kylo to turn on Luke and kill most of his students: he thought the uncle he trusted was going to kill him. At risk of taking a fantasy text too seriously, I’ve tried to think how I might respond to a real-world equivalent of this. My parents have always completely supported me; they have been my safest refuge. How would I have felt as a teen if one day I heard them say they were going to throw me out of the house? Even if it were a misunderstanding or they quickly said they’d decided otherwise, it would have brutally battered my trust. Really. It hurts even to write these lines. Certainly, that type of betrayal can be devastating. But I probably wouldn’t have leapt to the conclusion that they’d totally turned on me and, say, run away that night. I probably would have gone up to them and said, “What the hell?” Now, when you think someone’s going to kill you, you need to defend yourself. But burning down the whole temple and killing a bunch of other people is a little bit extreme as a response to one bad break of trust.
Which brings us to Luke’s initial concern that Kylo had already succumbed to the Dark Side, apparently due to Snoke’s influence. And this is where Kylo’s backstory falls apart a bit, though novels might help elucidate it? We don’t have any clear sense of how this seduction began or why he was so susceptible to it. It’s not implausible; it’s just not explained up to TLJ. For now, I can only say it can’t be easy to grow up as Darth Vader’s grandson and, more broadly, to grow up with this vast array of unanswerable questions about the nature of the Jedi and their fall (most records having been purged), to grow up with a master you can’t entirely trust as an authority because he himself doesn’t have access to much historical continuity, he himself is a product of foreshortened training and has a very small window into the what it means, historically, to be a Jedi.
In any case, his psychological development appears to have been arrested about the time he fell out with Luke. He was presumably an adolescent at the time and, however many years later, is still an adolescent, filled with angst and a sense of not being understood and a desire to prove himself against his elders, make his own way, and find his own people to connect with. [1]
Overall, I find Kylo to be the best developed of the new generation of characters in terms of having a fairly detailed backstory that tracks with who he currently is. But I would enjoy getting more of the details filled in.
(As to where he’s going in the next film, we obviously don’t know yet, but many seem convinced that he’s had his chance at redemption and is now just going to be the bad guy who needs to be defeated. That seems reductive to me, both in storytelling terms and human psychological terms. In psychological terms, there’s nothing irredeemable about him; it’s just likely to take a lot of time, pain, and having to face moral culpability. In storytelling terms, it will be tricky to give him much of a developmental arc in one movie while keeping the focus on Rey as protagonist, but my partner made a good point that Rey could defeat him in a way that leaves him unreformed but alive for potential future development—in movies, books, or just the fan imagination—rather like Vader at the end of ANH.)
Briefly Poe:
I have no complaints. I’m told he is the son of a badass rebel, and that’s exactly how he behaves. :-)
[1] Arrested psychological development seems characteristic of falling to the Dark Side. Certainly, the typical Palpatine, Snoke, Dooku-like evil master is trapped in a pre-adolescent fascination with being king of the hill for no discernable purpose other than enjoying imposing his power. The atypical figure here is Vader. Anakin, prior to his ultimate fall, was a messed-up young man, but he got a sharp wake-up call in the form of being told he’d inadvertently killed his wife and child(ren), as well as losing much of his body. Thereafter, he seems to be at least partly aware that choosing the Dark Side was a mistake, but he feels trapped into the service of the Emperor. He doesn’t see a way out: “It’s too late for me.” My partner has observed that Anakin never learned to be anything other than a subordinate: he went from slave to Qui-Gon’s apprentice to Obi-Wan’s apprentice to Palpatine’s apprentice. Until the end of ROTJ, he doesn’t seem to have much of a concept of acting as an independent agent. His development is certainly arrested, but perhaps in a somewhat more sober, resigned way?
no subject
Date: 2018-01-04 01:27 am (UTC)[goes to read post] I do like capiocapi's comments and I see they thought of that too. I also agree with your point that she had to be awesome as a female lead.
Off topic but I was disgusted after TFA that one could buy action figures of all the males but not her. Again with the assumption that all fans are male. >:-(