#reypatine

[frumfrumfroo]

Your position on redemption stories is well documented. But how do you feel about stories where a character is offered redemption and rejects it?

I can't think of one that's like.. notable? It's so commonplace in thriller, adventure, and high fantasy that it's basically a ticky box. I would hazard a guess more superhero movies (and comics) have such a moment than don't. It's paint by numbers and it's the most boring option. It's also usually the reactionary option.

To introduce a redemption arc and then subvert it by having the character explicitly, wilfully shoot it down while going on to be evil forever is most often done in a way that is intentionally shitting on the entire concept of redemption being possible. There are certainly exceptions, but those are mostly found in formal tragedy and are basically never about commitment to evil. Genuine rejection of goodness per se will always result in a flat character.

'Haha, you fool, I just love being evil!' is never an interesting answer to the question posed by a redemption narrative.

[tros-for-dinner]

(The original post was getting too long so I’m starting a new one.) I found these tags on one of the reblogs about a possible minor fix to the TIE backflip scene:

#the fact that even op's soultion look like paltry bandaid says something#honestly there LITERALLY NOTHING one can do to make this scene moetionally compelling#how could you compel people to root for anything here when there is no conflict between Rey not wanting to Kill Ben and then violently#trashes his ship which rolls like a ball on a cliff like that?!#like JJ handwaved it away when Ben saunters away from it like it was a minor inconviniences#and we laugh at it now#but when i actually saw it first time it honest to god look like Rey genuinely wanted Ben dead and doesn't care#so her little tear and pity party in death star looked like big joke (tags via @ainomica) 

First of all, you’re right and you should say it!

The main purpose for this blog is my efforts to run a post-mortem on this movie. The above tags made me think as I hunt for the root of the problem in this movie.

1. JJ wanted a retcon but didn’t put in the work to reestablish the characters as different from the previous movies. This is fanfiction 101: you have to establish the new assumptions. He was relying on the audience’s lizard brains to make the assumption that Ren is the Bad Guy and Rey is the Good Guy, and further make assumptions about their motivations, based solely on their costumes and voice tenor. Then, without firmly establishing the characters’ new roles in the story, JJ threw them together into situations thinking, “He’s the Bad Guy and she’s the Good Guy so of course there’s inherent conflict!” Newsflash bro: it didn’t work.

((2. If JJ wanted to make a retcon so bad, why did leave in a plot thread that is obviously a reference to TLJ, and even more specifically, Reylo from tlj?! (”I offered you my hand once” is what I’m referring to here). It boggles the frickin’ mind.))

3. The lack of emotion in this movie is death from a million cuts. The lack of believable emotion I point out in the original post is just one microsecond in a movie full of these missed opportunities. Yeah, one shot isn’t going to fix the movie (my suggestion really is a paltry bandaid solution).

4. JJ didn’t want a compelling emotional narrative. He wanted a David-and-Goliath shoot-em-up in which the Bad Guys are mercilessly punished.

5. The internal inconsistencies are what make the movie incomprehensible. Aside from the core theme of the movie being rotten, it’s probably the worst thing about the movie. I’m going to do a post about this as I think about it more, because this is a huge part of why the movie was so bad.

5. Frankly, Rey does want Ren dead in the TIE backflip scene. There’s no other way around it. You don’t cut the wing off a TIE and not expect to kill the pilot inside. As a result of that, her sorrow during the Ocean Battle absolutely feels like crocodile tears. This is a really good example of how the internal inconsistencies of the movie cause it to shoot itself in the foot. And I’ll reiterate: this juxtaposition could have worked, if there had been groundwork done of ‘oh, Rey looks conflicted/sorrowful’ during the TIE backflip scene.

6. .....I literally just had a thought others have definitely said first: Rey Palpatine truly is her grandfather’s heir. She: - infiltrates the resistance and plays to their expectations of what a Jedi Hero should be in order to gain their trust -cons Leia into trusting her -tries to get her ‘friends’ killed and/or captured by the FO (by wandering away and delaying Poe from launching Ochi’s ship) -tries multiple times to kill Ben and when that doesn’t work, cons him into trusting her - by telling him what he wants to hear (“I did want to take your hand - Ben’s hand”) - to the point he gives up his life for her ((not gonna lie, this section is the worst part of the realization for me)) -kills her grandfather so he can’t betray the truth of her machinations to the galaxy (i.e. can’t reveal that his goals are her goals) -gets as much semi-valuable junk from the Resistance as she can (i.e. the Falcon and the ‘sabers: the Resistance was being held together with spit and glue there at the end) -traps Luke and Leia’s spirits on a planet they both hated (?to get revenge for the fact they were hidden from Palpatine when Anakin became Vader?) -then leaves to presumably spread her poisoned doctrine (the veneration of Luke Skywalker Jedi Hero) to the universe and people will listen to her because they assume she’s a Jedi

 ....Holy shit, this really is a horror movie.

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Oh don’t go saying Jane > Rey just yet, when we know Jane is coming back in the next Waititi Thor movie 🙃

[brawltogethernow]

There's literally nothing wrong with this one post addition, but I've seen it like seven times now and every time I’m like, “SURE, those are ALL the genres in the story where a young man raised on a farm unaware off his greater destiny finds out his father was a KNIGHT from a kooky and mysterious old WIZARD and practitioner of a STRANGE RELIGION who saves him from a DRAGON, goes to rescue a PRINCESS from a DARK WIZARD KNIGHT, ultimately defeats the EVIL WIZARD KING, finds out his mother was a QUEEN, has prophetic visions, etc. Okay. It’s totally most important that it’s a war epic western, yeah.”

[buffshipper8490]

My thoughts on the Palpatine x Rey TROS Theory

Kylo: But Rey! Why are you leaving me? I thought we had something special! A Force Bond, chemistry, and two movies worth of eye-fucking!

Rey: Sorry, Kylo sweetie, but I'm a scavenger girl first and this crusty old fossil is sitting on a goldmine!

Palpatine: Rey dear! I got my Space Viagra and denture cup ready!

Rey: Coming, Palpy Walpy!

Kylo: ...

[emeraldspiral]

In your opinion, does Rey be a Palpatine reduce to as a vessel for man's legacy? How does this contrast to Luke and Leia, the children of Vader, a powerful man?

Luke was introduced at the start of his journey as the son of a powerful Jedi and wanting to feel closer to the father he never met and avenge his and Obi-Wan’s deaths at the hands of the traitor Darth Vader by joining the order they were a part of. Revealing that Darth Vader was Luke’s father didn’t change anything previously established about where Luke’s power came from, but it did turn his whole worldview upside-down when he realized the hero father he looked up to was actually a monster and the monster he hated was actually the father he’d longed to know and emulate all his life.

Leia being Luke’s sister only happened because Lucas originally planned for a new character to be revealed as Luke’s sister who would star in her own trilogy, but got burnt out by the time they started making ROTJ and decided to just end the trilogy without any sequel hooks and leave his ideas for prequels and sequels on the back burner. But he’d already included the line “there is another Skywalker” in ESB and didn’t want to introduce a new character at the last minute, so he made Leia the promised sister. It was still revealed a bit too late to really matter. She never got to hone and develop her powers or really deal with the fallout of the revelation, and it did retroactively make moments from the previous films incestuous.  But she was already a princess, a senator, and a Rebel leader, and none of those were retconned into being owed to her relation to Luke or Anakin and her newfound Force Sensitivity didn’t suddenly erase everything that was special or powerful about her before. Furthermore, the sequel trilogy actually turned this awkward, last-minute twist to its advantage by having Ben be the one and only Skywalker child of his generation. If Leia had been unrelated to Luke, then Ben wouldn’t have been targeted by Snoke/Palpatine and we wouldn’t have had a story. If Luke had been the one with the child turned to the Dark Side, then the audience would only care about how that affected Luke, and Han and Leia’s importance in the narrative would be greatly diminished. People wouldn’t care half as much how Ben’s turn affected Han and Leia if they were just his aunt and uncle or his dad’s best friends.

Reypatine is a completely different story. Rey was introduced as somebody who wished she had a secret heritage that would bestow her with power and a purpose, but more than that, justify how her parents had abandoned her and her choice to remain in miserable conditions instead of moving on. She rejected Han’s offer of a job even though she saw him as the father she never had and Finn’s pleas to run away together and kept looking to them as well as Luke and Ben to step up and be the heroes the galaxy needed instead of doing it herself. The entire point of the Rey Nobody reveal was forcing Rey to confront her unhealthy coping mechanisms, stop relying on other people to give her permission to be Somebody, and recognize that she doesn’t need Luke or Ben or anyone else to be the Hero, she can be that herself.

Rey Palpatine was explicitly said by Terrio to be an explanation for where her power came from, which was completely unnecessary because Jedi being nobodies was already the rule and the Skywalkers were the exception. There is no “Kenobi” or “Windu” or “Jinn” family, there’s just the individuals, so Rey having the Force at all didn’t need to be explained as coming from a linage. Rey knowing how to USE the Force didn’t need explaining either. TPM established that expert piloting skills may indicate Force sensitivity because the pilot may be unintentionally using precognition to boost their reaction times, but even non Force sensitive ace pilots are a dime a dozen. Rey already knew how to fight with a melee weapon and real life swordsmen will tell you that victory is more about luck and guts than formal training, and Kylo was badly wounded, tired, and deliberately didn’t take advantage of multiple openings Rey gave him because he wasn’t aiming to maim or kill her. As for Rey knowing how to use Jedi Mind Tricks and lift rocks without much effort, the only reason Luke needed training from Yoda to do that was because he’d never even heard of the Force before he met Obi-Wan. The entire point of Yoda’s “Do or do not, there is no try” line is establishing that mastery of the Force is mental, not physical. Luke struggled to lift the X-Wing because he didn’t believe he could. Rey, by contrast, grew up with stories about Luke and the Jedi which were probably way more fantastical than anything that ever happened, so she had no mental hangups causing her to fail from doubt. She also canonically siphoned Ben’s knowledge and training through the Force bond.

The only other reason cited for making Rey a Palpatine was to give her conflict in the story, which was lazy retread of Luke’s arc with no comprehension of what made it work for him. She’s never met Palpatine before and has no personal rivalry with him, but ends up usurping Ben and the rest of the Skywalkers’ roll in the narrative as the primary victims of Palpatine’s manipulations. She says she won’t hate him despite how he killed her saintly, martyr parents, but she doesn’t actually have to put her money where her mouth is by putting down her saber and enduring torture or the threat of death to stand by her principles. In fact, she was about to give in when Ben arrived and completely removed that moral dilemma and then ends up getting to melt his face off with zero consequences. She doesn’t have to make any hard decisions to win. She doesn’t have to choose love or compassion or reject hatred and vengeance. She just has to be a “vessel” and “conduit”.

It steamrolls over everything Rey’s arc had been about before for something tepid and half-baked. Suddenly, it’s good that Rey wasted her life on Jakku waiting for her dead parents because it turns out they were saints after all who “sold her to protect her” by leaving her screaming for them out in the open in broad daylight right where the guy looking for her can see and providing him with the brilliant cover story of “she’s not on Jakku anymore”. Suddenly, it’s not about how you don’t need to be related to someone to be special, it’s about how your genes, rather than your trauma, determine your struggle with darkness, but you can overcome it, but only if you’re not Ben Solo. Suddenly, the linage that caused Ben to be targeted his whole life by Palpatine is a desirable moniker akin to a super hero mantle, despite having just as much baggage attached to it as the Palpatine name.

It’s sexist, it’s loaded with plot-holes that make it nonsensical at the most basic, technical level, and it’s completely incoherent and incohesive as part of a theme or message regardless of whether you’re looking at it as part of a stand-alone film, a trilogy, or part of the greater nine-part Skywalker Saga.

[benperorsolo]

TROS would still be completely unwatchable if Ben had lived but the rest of the Saga would be fine. That’s the difference for me. Things like Reypatine, Rose erasure, racist Poe backstory and the abysmal editing all ruin TROS irrevocably, no way to salvage the movie as a movie even with a HEA, but if Ben had lived the rest of the Saga wouldn’t be as tainted by TROS’ mistakes. But Ben’s death makes all nine movies utterly miserable and unsalvageable in hindsight.

Exactly. Everything else fucks up the ST, but Ben’s death fucks up the entire Skywalker Saga, because it destroys a theme that’s run through nine movies.

[save-ben-swolo]

I haven’t read the novel but another blog said Palpatine was a clone in tros? Is this true? I’m so confused now. Also, how did they explain Rey’s lineage when it literally makes no fucking sense. Is her grandfather the clone version of Palpatine?

It IS true that TROS Palpatine was a clone according to the novel, which is funny because just when I thought the narrative couldn’t POSSIBLY get more muddy here they are adding more nonsense to the mix.

For reference, here is the excerpt from the novel talking about him being a clone (it’s not a page shot because I took this from screenrant and it’s what I had quick access to, but I’ve seen the page shots on Twitter and it’s legit.)

I will say I appreciate the “Ben is a nerd” call out in that passage but aside from that.... great. Glad things got even more confusing SOMEHOW.

“How did they explain Rey’s lineage when it literally makes no fucking sense?” Preach.

I don’t own a copy of the novel (and I never will) so idk if they TRIED to make Reypatine make more sense but my general feeling is.... there’s no way they could really make it make sense, if you ACTUALLY critically think about it, so they probably glossed over the issue just like the film did.

Bonus: That whole conversation gets immediately uncomfortable because it makes you consider Palpatine’s sperm. Do clones have sperm? Can a clone have children? If not we must accept that super old Palpatine banged and that his sperm is apparently mega potent. Seriously... he was already pretty damn old when Ben’s grandfather was a child and Rey’s parents were arguably younger than Leia, so conception would have happened during his force lightening disfigurement years.

Some people think (probably so they can sleep at night) that he didn’t -actually- bang someone and artificial insemination was involved, but that just raises more questions.... Did he freeze his sperm when he was young? Why did he want a kid if he was just going to effectively ignore them until after his consciousness entered a clone body and he ordered them to be stabbed for... basically not letting him visit his granddaughter I guess?

Maybe he didn’t care about his offspring if they weren’t force sensitive (and that’s what he hoped for) but then his granddaughter turned out to be strong with the force so he wanted to prey on that and take her from them? But if he could sense Rey is force sensitive, his own blood, why couldn’t he find her when he could find Ben Solo to groom for YEARS so easily? We saw he had many Snokes to deploy so why didn’t Rey get her very own Snoke buddy to hang out in her head?? Fuck it’s messy.

[finns-poe]

tbf I wouldn't mind Rey Palpatine too much since it's established that he can create life by influencing midichlorians the same way he created Anakin. I'm up for reypatine IF he doesn't fuck

i think it’s all fake anyway so palpatine does NOT fuck. 

[herejects]

things i don’t acknowledge on this blog 2: electric boogaloo

hey i���m awake and angry again so here’s some more shit from tr/os i don’t acknowledge or tolerate here that may or may not pertain to my character, but still pisses me off and will make me hesitate to interact with you.

spice runner poe. i feel like this is self explanatory, why i won’t acknowledge a latino hero having space drug smuggling being thrown into his backstory out of nowhere, but here we are, having to deal with canon. keep that shit away from me.

rose tico being reduced to tech support. ha ha ha ha! ha ha ha ha ha! Fuck You. this is self explanatory, the movie did her dirty! where was my girl, damn it!

rey’s parentage. i personally love rey nobody and always will. rey palpatine was about as much of a crack theory to me as blood-related reysky. i don’t exactly have a problem with people who explore reypatine, but god.... damn it i hate the “THEY SOLD YOU TO PROTECT YOU” bs. nah, fuck that.

if you put rey on tatooine for the rest of her life, though? i don’t trust you. rey left one desert planet for another one? fuck that. my girl deserves flowers and greenery, jj.

i flat out won’t interact with blood related rey solos or reyskys. you don’t need blood to be a family, period. and the whole “rey’s power depends on her lineage shit” made me angry in tros. the true crime of this movie was insinuating that palpatine fucks and i Will stand by that.

dead leia will never be canon on this blog in the context of tros, just like dead han. god that was bullshit. the organa-solo clan is alive and chaotic as ever, including their one braincell son.

[frumfrumfroo]

Do you think Rey Palpatine could have worked if they set it up from the beginning? What do you think of fanfic AUs where Rey is a Palpatine and on the Dark Side instead of Ben?

No. It drastically alters the narrative landscape and themes to make sw into a dynastic power struggle rather than the personal journey of one family as a metaphor for how to grow up into ethical adulthood. It’s not a story about duelling lineages and it severely cheapens it to make it one. Palpatine shouldn’t have offspring at all, that’s deeply symbolically wrong in the fairy tale logic of sw.

Making Rey any kind of legacy or heiress makes her a completely different character and totally defeats her arc. Her foundational dilemma is that she is in denial about her aloneness and will have to forge her own identity because no one is going to hand her one; as soon as you change that it’s no longer possible to pretend she has a coherent characterisation.

It’s obviously fine for fanfic because it doesn’t have to play by the rules, but role reversal for reylo doesn’t work in canon because the entire justification for Rey’s position in the narrative is that she will rescue the fallen Skywalker scion. The ST was, pre-tros, about ‘loose ends’ and the unresolved trauma the Skywalker family hadn’t dealt with resurfacing in the next generation. If it’s not about that, it shouldn’t be part of the saga and RotJ should remain the ending.

[mandaloriangf]

I think the Reypatine idea is that it's the whole "tainted legacy" thing done in OT up to eleven, like how Starkiller base is Death Star but BIGGER-that hero's ancestor is an evil prick with addition this time he's the worst person possible with no inner goodness.

it feels like they just took the stuff that happened in the ot and went “what if we did this but bigger”

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Daisy Ridley confirmed that Bens death was the only CoNsIstent thing which was planned. From the very beginning (doesn’t say which beginning but yeah). I don’t know whether to fully believe this as we have evidence of them intending to have Ben be the adolescent and belonging of protagonist before tros. As if they were that cruel...

I don’t believe a word they say about anything in tros being planned. Maybe ‘consistent’ as in all three hacks hired to work on the epIX trainwreck lacked the imagination to do anything else, but not in the sense that anyone ever conceived of or set out to write that ending at any point prior. We know they didn’t. This is the same company now claiming Palpatine’s return and Reypatine were planned (demonstrably false). I assume DR means the beginning of epIX, which is Colin’s DotF.

Also, putting aside the well-documented fact that nothing in that dumpster fire was actually picture-locked until literally the day it premiered, there’s the fact that Rian- who has been consistent for years and has never lied to us about anything afaik- said there was no plan for the ST whatsoever. He went to lunch with JJ to discuss the story and JJ told him basically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just the interviews with Kathleen Kennedy (the one person in a position to know everything about the ST’s production start to finish) make it readily apparent she thought things were going in a very different direction than tros.

They would never have done things this way if they had anything like that ending in mind. It’s so embarrassing for them to have not even thought about where the story was going or how it would impact the franchise that they would rather tell easily verifiable lies than admit it.

[lordbhreanna]

Inspired by WTForce’s episode about Dark vs Divine Union (which you should listen to right now because it's SO GOOD). Tried my best to draw a young Sheev with Matt Smith's face. 

This is reypatine I guess?

[frumfrumfroo]

So I finally read the Rise of Kylo Ren comics (because I'm weak and couldn't help but give money to our corporate overlords just so I could see my boi) and literally a character says to Ben that it's never too late, that Ben can turn around at any point on this path he's on and do good for the galaxy for the rest of his life and it will matter regardless of the evil he's done. I just. Why did they release this after TROS?? I don't understand why they killed him. I just. They're cowards. They're evil cowards who don't even understand the irony of what they've written. I can't.

Yep, Soule understood the character but still somehow thinks it’s okay for sw to be a bleak miserable nightmare about predestination and nihilism. About how only being born perfect makes you worthy of life, your striving is always pointless and empty. Victims are tainted unless they are totally unaffected by their trauma. I just... I don’t know.

I’m so disgusted by it. The attitudes on display are sickening.

[frumfrumfroo]

So Luke and Leia trained Rey knowing she was a Palpatine and Anakin’s voice was heard with the other Jedi in the climax encouraging Rey to rise, but none of them could properly support Ben when he was young and innocent and struggling with the dark huh. Innately-moral-innately-good JJ does it again, I guess you only deserve support when you’re one of the people who are born good and are always good

All of this while Ben is in a pit. Ben whose parents and uncle completely failed him because they were afraid of Vader’s blood in his veins. Unprecedented levels of soulless fuckery.