SPECULATION Is Luke Rey's Father? - The Evidence For and Against

oh sh.. you've got 1053 posts in less than a month.
me...70 over more than a year and i consider myself an active user lol

 

This is how I tend to approach this topic as of today...

• While I would personally prefer Rey to be Luke's daughter, for a variety of reasons, that point is not one of my prerequisites to enjoying Episode VIII.
• I simply would appreciate learning more about Rey, who she is.
• I would prefer Star Wars at this point to not to look so often toward familial relationship revelations to drum up drama. The Force Awakens already has invoked this plot device in Kylo Ren being revealed as Ben Solo and (before the film) Ben having learned Darth Vader was his grandfather. Rey would be the third such revelation if she is related to Luke, and I've demonstrated one way they could reveal this quickly while getting on with the greater story.
  
• With Han gone, Luke Skywalker -- Rey's real father or not -- can be not only a mentor but a father figure to Rey as well.

I eagerly look forward to official information on this topic.

JediMasterRobert

 

hahaha ~ blame it on @Ammianus Marcellinus and this Rey's parentage business!!! also FS Finn vs. nonFS Finn. round and round and round.
but i'm kinda done with all that. fully expect to be mostly off the boards before summer due to the spoilers.

the life of a forum mayfly....

 

There is another argument for Rey being Luke's daughter. In quite a few Hollywood movies, the main villain is in some ways the failed or corrupt version of the main hero. Example: Anakin and Luke both came from Tatooine and both were Obi-Wan's students, but Anakin became a Sith Lord while Luke became a Jedi. Another example: in Raider of the Lost Ark, both Indiana Jones and his main nemesis were archeologists. If the ST follows this trope, and since the main villain is a grandchild of Anakin, then it's likely that the main hero will be a grandchild of Anakin as well.

As for Rey knowing Luke only via myth/legend, a possible explanation could be that Rey's mother took off with Rey when Rey was still a baby, and then she abandoned Rey on Jakku a few years later. That way, Rey would have no memory of Luke and no idea that he's her father.

 

Rey being a Skywalker really is an assumption at this point. TFA was so vague about her, I think JJ may have not known who she is while working on TFA.

What makes me doubt this theory is the entire mystery of it - in TFA they were clearly setting up this huge mystery. It seems like her origins won't be fully revealed until IX, based on Colin Trevorrow's comments. Nobody could guess Vader was Luke's father. Anybody can guess Rey is Luke's daughter.

Even if she is his daughter, it's not going to be as simple as 'oh, she's Luke's daughter. ' Why was she left on Jakku? Did she know Kylo at a young age? Who's the mother?

 

Oh boy how's this for a first post?

Star Wars fans are a funny bunch, it was more than subtly hinted at that Rey is Luke's daughter in The Force Awakens. The scene between Rey and Maz directly after the vision pretty much spells it out as much as the vision itself and the fact that she's specifically drawn to that lightsaber, a family heirloom and all the imagery and thematics elements surrounding it that are directly ripped from King Arthur, down to Maz being the sort of lady on the lake that watches over Excalibur while King Arthur (Luke) is away.

Nevermind that Rey is a character with extremely similar beginnings to Anakin and Luke and the fact they clearly wanted to cast someone in the role that resembles Padme and Leia, and nevermind the clearly emotional meeting between Luke and Rey at the end of the film, if you don't accept that the only explanation I can think of is selective memory.

I think it's fairly obvious what we're really waiting to find out is who her mother is and who left her on Jakku, but I don't think the films could have possibly made it clearer that Rey is Luke's daughter unless some character came out and told her plainly, which would have rendered all the time they spent setting up her character pointless with no real pay off.

I can't even begin to imagine how this idea that she's possibly related to Obi-Wan Kenobi persists, but I wonder if these people who come up with these theories even pay close attention to the stories they claim to love so much? Obi-Wan had one love interest that we know about and she died during the Clone Wars. Every other theory is a bunch of even more far-fetched conjecture, it's funny how people still hold on to the most unlikely scenarios when time after time the movies have been released and played everything as safe and expected as possible.

But Lucasfilm sure keeps people going with these sort of carrot on the stick tactics. We still really know next to nothing of what went on between ROTJ and TFA, not because there's really some sort of shocking revelation to be discovered but because there's a lot of money to be made by releasing information very slowly, and even I'll admit it's just a smart way to tell a story and keep fans engaged, what exactly would there be to look forward to in Episode 8 and 9 if we already knew everything about all the new characters other than the inevitable happy ending?

 

Well I'm someone who thinks it is very unlikely that Rey is not a Skywalker. I have my arguments, personal interpretations and even a methodological critiquing apparates to hypothesize about Rey's origins. And I do believe that it would be a satisfying pay-off to the hints we've received, tropes and themes and subtext we've been presented with in the Force Awakens. But I do reckon that many of the arguments against this possibility, like @FN-3263827, make sense from a purely technical an narrative structureal point of view. And I also know that the intentions of Johnson and his intepretation of the story might be very different to the intented interpretation and story direction of Abrams. And really people can't be blamed for presenting extreme theories like "palpatine's clone". This is something the writers want. They want people to guess and discuss it all and even to come up with the strangest theory. Even if the pay-off is Rey being a Skywalker, there will always be people who didn't expect it, people, who did expect and were satisfied by it, and people who would claim that the reveal was too obvious.

And also I don't think "ripped" is the right word when you discuss analogies, tropes and other thematic content taken from other and much older cultural products (like the Arthurian themes and tropes you just mentioned). That's just how culture works: it's selective appropriation, reiteration and reinterpretation. Furthermore I don't think lacunae are intentional money making incentives. Good stories always have lacunae in the characters' personal history and temporal gaps in the narrative which the audience has to imagine or fill in itself. It prioritizes the "smart way to tell the story and keep fans engaged" over

 

how about we look at this a different way..

If Luke does not have any offspring, and the only child that Han and Leia had was Ben.. are we saying that this trilogy will potentially end with no future generations of Skywalkers?

kathleen Kennedy said this to JJ Abrams when trying to convince him to make TFA:
In the context of talking about story and laying out what we were thinking, I said one thing to him, ‘Who is Luke Skywalker?’

Kennedy also said:
“The Saga films focus on the Skywalker family saga,” she said. “The stories follow a linear narrative that connects to the previous six films. The Force Awakens follows Return of the Jedi and continues that generational story.”

i know that there are many (omg so many) different ideas as to who Rey is, but because i believe that the hero at the end of this new trilogy will be a new generation of the Skywalker bloodline... for me, at least 1 of these 2 things needs to be true:-

• Rey is Luke Skywalkers daughter
• Ben Solo rejects the dark side and becomes the hero of the resistance.

Whilst i do believe that Rey is a Skywalker, i don't have my heels dug in about it. if the story is great i'll be happy however things turn out.

 

despite the fact that i think Rey is Luke's daughter... i could go with that outcome @master_shaitan quite happily. i think it would be a challenge for some though.

it's twisted irony that of all the new characters in TFA, the only one that we learned much about was the one wearing a mask.

more irony that a line spoken by Maz during the film has dominated our threads since december...
"Who's the Girl?"

 

OH MY GOD ......

not the left one. But look at the two on the RIGHT, mainly the eyes, noses, eyebrows and lips.

 

i assume you mean the two on the right?

so similar.... you don't reckon they are related? hehe

 

lol. woops. Anakin looks like Hayden.

 

lol, well i should hope so

my day has been like that too

 

I'm not sure they had 100% decided who Rey's farther was when they filmed episode 7.

Abrams has a history of not completely planning out a story before he filmed it(see lost) and star wars has a history of not working out every characters relationship up front(Lucas had no idea Leia was Luke sister when he was filming A New Hope)

So maybe all the evidence means nothing, and JJ left it ambiguous so those following then could make their own mark on the story. So it just depends on which direction Rian and Colin(with guidance from JJ and Kathleen) want to go.

 

while that's an interesting angle, it seems highly unlikely that Disney would take a 4 billion dollar gamble and not know the essential points of what story it's telling.

if that's the case, some may say it proves indisputably that her parentage is actually irrelevant.

 

At this point I lean more toward she is not Luke's daughter. The whole conversation with Maz I think is what pushed me over to that side. Now I wont be upset if it turns out she is but to me I kind of want to see something new and not a complete mirror to the OT. At this point I don't know were they will focus the story of VIII and IX, her past might not even matter, or it could be the key to everything. I'm really just interested in seeing her grow as a character, but I'm reminded of a quote that KK said, something to the effect of "Rey will be this generations Luke Skywalker" and following that up Colin Trevorrow says her origins will be 'profoundly satisfying'. My thoughts are is something that people consider "obvious" satisfying? possibly, but profoundly satisfying? something about that just doesn't sit right.

 

My head almost exploded reading through the thread and honestly I rather not think about this topic to the point of having doubts about what could be true and what will not be true. The less I think of it and when the film comes out...the less expectations I'll have that will play itself out in the film. I want to be surprised and blown away and wanting more as I leave the theater knowing that star wars is still full of awesomeness!