Rey is more powerful than the Chosen One, his offspring, any dark side user, everyone

Apart from people rife with "ism's" I don't think people have an issue with her being a stronge female character.

I think what people really have issues with is that Rey really doesn't face many challenges. Certainly I would argue she faces no great challenges that she over comes herself, the force seems to do it for he at times. She never has to really struggle and that is a weakness with the ST films so far.

I guess the only time I can think off was when she goes calm during in light saber fight with Kylo during TFA. Even then it is not clear if is the force or her, but I will give her that one.

 

Believe it or not, I don't dislike the character. I just wish they'd give her more substance and a better reason for her force skills than "just because." The fact that she can stand on her own and isn't a damsel in distress is a good thing and has nothing to do with my issues with the character. Now, IF (and it's a big IF) they make Reylo an actual romance EVER, then I will retract this statement and bash the heck out of her. That would kill any liking of the character for me.

 

ohh man swtor story was good... until they ruined it with the whole eternal empire story arc and the eternal alliance thing

 

@Aglarion @Rellum

*shrug*
I don't have a problem with Rey's abilities.
I don't really have a dog in this race because it doesn't bother me either way at all.

Having said that, here's how I see Rey.

This woman can already fight really damn well, so she's in no need of combat training, so really it's just the Force.
She's like an over pressurized water tank with a faulty regulator release valve.
One day she's just hanging out scraping by and the next thing she knows the Force is spitting out of her and she doesn't know how to control it.
She basically treats it like a wild bull whirling around inside of her and I get the impression that up until the last half of TLJ, if someone had walked up and said that they could remove it from her and reunite her with her parents on farm someplace she would've been pretty tempted to take them up on that offer.

I've seen people talk about the mind trick, but to me I didn't feel like she was all that much in control of it.

Again, I don't care about how few times she had to try and all of that because I don't care about Jedi Force levels, and I got the feeling from Star Wars that the Force was a half pseudo Taoist half Deistic theistic deity force of some kind, and that it never really cared much either.
Keep in mind, I have never read EU material, and never played games aside from X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, KOTOR, and Star Wars Galaxies, and I never took anything going on in those games to be all that informative about the rules of the universe...actually, I don't really feel like Star Wars' Force in the films ever felt like it had rules.​

To me, she seemed to be trying to use what was just piled up in her and kind of controlled it enough to get by...about like trying to ride a motorcycle the first time. It wobbles a bit and you get through alright, but no one would call what you did a solidly controlled ride. More just a ride that didn't end in a crash, so good job.

The first time I felt that she solidly had exacting, calm, and directed control over her Force use was at the end of TLJ when she lifted the rocks, and that, to me, made sense because she had faced her fear and became OK with the idea of being entirely alone (in terms of family) and taking value in her worth only by her own self merit and not through a value hinged on her parents valuing her.
Once she faced that fear, she was no longer "conflicted" (or whatever you want to call it) and off we go. Now the regulator valve has been fixed.

The Force, to me, has never seemed like something that needed hermetic approach like a wizard, but instead was more like auras are viewed by new-ager's to be an extension of the person.
The Force has always seemed to me to be a personality amplifier into physical manifestations, and I always thought of characters as "on the Force" and not "using the Force" like a magical scientific method.
Using the Force always seemed to me to be more about self-control of the mind to control your own will and either keeping them refrained from excited emotions, or trying purposefully to evoke those excited emotions and channel them; like the difference between a Taoist warrior and a Viking warrior.
I took the training to be rather focused on controlling your self on the Force. I got the impression that if someone never ran into a mentor that they would still end up with abilities anyway, but that they wouldn't have any self-control training so it would be wild and the repercussions could be disastrous - something akin to how SHIELD (the TV show) was treating super powers suddenly sparking up in people.

From the bits of dialogue scattered around the ST, I gather that the Force is burping like the Sun going through a solar maximum cycle and so suddenly where before it would present softly and you'd have to kind of mine away at pulling it out of yourself like you were a nearly dry well, it was now just flooding out cracks who were people like solar flares.

But I always saw the Force as an extension of the person. What they were like on the Force; just that the amount of Force they had to work with before was like a stove burner on low, and now the burner's on max.
Someone turned the Force up to 11.

This is what Rey's like on the Force with the Force being set to 11 in the universe:


I've also seen people talk about Anakin, born of the Force, midichlorians off the charts, etc... And I've seen people try to use Anakin for and against the idea of SuperRey, well...I have a problem with this comparison by either side.

Firstly, as far as I've seen, no one's bothered to measure Rey's midichlorian count, so for all any of us know she's practically flat-lined on that count, or she's a googolplex greater than Anakin...no clue.
Second, the idea of the Jedi council back before the Force went into its solar maximum period we're in now saying that something was higher than anything they had seen before could easily be equivalent to someone from Zimbabwe saying they've never seen anyone with more red hair than some kid born in their tribe circa 200 BCE. That doesn't mean the red they saw was anything like the red that a Celtic tribe sees every other year from yet another "ginger".
The point being that the measure ranges they were using could all be relative to the Force levels at that time and be completely useless now - like speed is with cars and planes in our history.

I'm not claiming any of this is the case regarding Anakin and his measures; it's just that I don't see any functional way to actually compare them given that we don't have any common benchmark the Jedi use informing us of the exchange rate.
All we have are what these characters do on the screen, and that's fairly relative to some concept of power level, which hasn't ever seemed to come from the person's skill beyond their skill being how to get out of the way of the Force so they could use it (Taoist/Jedi "flow through/centering"), or to bend themselves so they could use it (Viking/Sith "evoking/channeling").

*shrug*
I don't know. Maybe Luke pulled off what he did with projecting all the way across the galaxy only because the Force is so strong currently?
Maybe if Anakin were still alive, he'd have turned into the likes of Thanos?
Maybe Kylo's not as potent because he's still a mess for the most part.

No clue.

I just get the vibe with Rey that it's a case like Kung Fu Hustle.
That guy couldn't do crap and then his Chi was unlocked and he was suddenly, without really any training to work from, a near demigod.

Anywho...yeah, I'm not trying to convince anyone of any of this. To each their own on how they take the Force.
Just sharing my perspective of how I've always understood the Force growing up through the 80's and how I read Rey as a result.

Cheers!
Jayson

 

Even if we don't agree on much, I can agree with you KOTOR 1/2 are absolutely amazing.

You should check out the restored content mod for KOTOR 2 if you haven't already. Makes the game much closer to how Obsidian intended for it to be.

 

I have (edit)no real interest in trying to quantify what the force is and what characters should and shouldn't be able to do. It is a made up thing that film makers interpret differently. You are always going to get random conflicting rules and uses of the force because of plot choices.

I am looking at it from a film maker/story teller perspective and having the force get her out of situations is just poor story telling.

 

I have no way to help you out there.

I don't see that issue. To me, when I read that my first thought was, "What else would it do?"
Personally, I'd be a bit bored if the Force user in the movie was getting out of situations by not using the Force.

I had that already before. That was Luke. I like the OT. ANH is my all time classic favorite film if I want to get my nostalgia on.
Luke, however, as he was in the films, was not really impressive to me as a kid.
The idea of Luke was, and my action figure Luke went on many adventures and kicked lots of ass.

However, for me as a kid, how Luke was used in context to being an adventuring action hero...he was boring to me.
I always felt like I didn't get enough of what Force fighting could be.

Now, of course, in all reality this was a consequence of the physical limitations of the sabers and Vader's suit.
They got pretty good at it by ROTJ, but it was still nothing remotely close to what I was watching during the day on Zoro or the variety of Errol Flynn style swashbuckler movies.

Then the PT came out and...it was alright. An improvement, but I find the experience of mixing 1940's style camera blocking and cinematography (what Lucas purposefully did on PT) with modern cinematic martial art choreography a tad flat.
I mean, it's suppose to be. There's a reason we moved off of classic blocking and (lack of) camera movement articulation - it was eventually found to be dull by comparison to mixing up the camera shots more, and so as soon as the camera could do it, people did.

PT's fights rolled off to me more like stage play fights. Really impressive stage fights, but still a stage fight. I'm mostly looking at a rectangle medium to wide shot with two people symmetrically squared off on the screen swinging lights at each other in really fast acrobatic arrays.

If you turn off the sound and put on a fight in PT, and flip on a marching band song, it starts to look like a production performance art piece in a parade.
I often wish the fights would have also stuck to 1940's choreography so that it didn't jar so much to me. I don't know. Perhaps it's just because I watched so many old films that it struct me as uncanny. It was like looking at Casablanca with modern melodrama and acting (say, take any scene from Girls) written into the scene blocking. It's just odd, like looking at ... you know...it's actually very similar to how I feel watching a Kabuki play; that almost exactly what it feels like.
Which is really nifty and cool in its own way - it's just not the vibe of the adventure action hero scrapping that always felt just outside the reach of OT, but only just.

I like the PT, by the way. I don't think less of it for not being any of this. Lucas had a vision and he absolutely nailed it and as that vision it's really wonderful to look at his art.
It's one of the most gorgeous pieces he's made since THX. I'd probably say it's quite possibly his technical master work. It makes me sad that we won't get to see more of his art beyond Star Wars, because that man has some really good art whirling around inside!

So I guess I'm just on the opposite side on this.
As soon as Rey fought on Jakku for the first time, I was hooked. I loved that we were solidly in a film that was going to have action and lots of it.
YAY!

I don't know that I would be loving this sequel nearly as much if she wasn't using the Force to get out of problems.

Cheers!
Jayson

 

I'm glad to see new points of view on jedi...howver, rey is not a jedi by any means...I agree that she is a traitor to both the characters of anakin and Luke and most of the jedi order who have trained their entire lives, HOWEVER, I think I feel that way only because we are deliberately not being told the full story for whatever unknown reasons that really frustrates me...I like Rey but I wish we were shown a more natural, human progression of her powers, abilities, and her personality (which has stayed exactly the same) in these two movies.
.

 

No, it really wasn't. Successful games, TV shows, books etc still kept the franchise going. The films are not the whole of Star Wars, people need to quit using this narrow line of thought.

This old video explains why Rey is a good character, but a poor protagonist:

And that's exactly what she is. Nothing to do with the force, it's all to do with writing. JJ dropped the ball with Rey, and Rian Johnson is just providing us with a natural progression of her character (in fact he gives a hand wavey explanation so he can get past that and continue with the story). There's only one true answer: that's what she is, and you're going to have suck it up and deal with it!

 

I am noting saying they shouldn't be using the force, but the characters should be the ones making decisions and taking actions, not the force taking over and doing it for them.

I will get to your fight style comments later as that is where my interest lies. 80's Hong Kong martial arts movies are still the best for me. Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung who did it better than most. It was even a little formulaic at times but it sold what was happening with style and power. I find the old Errol Flynn movies boring to watch as I just see two guys trying to hit each others swords in a very simplistic way.

 

First of all; when RJ states in interviews he had complete freedom in writing his chapter and there were no bases he had to cover by the end of ep8 I believe he is telling the truth ... (wait for it) from a certain point of view.

I think JJ and Kasdan had written out backstories (to an extent) on most of the characters in the ST, especially Rey and Snoke...

When reading this thread it seems that many people here assume we already know all there is to know on both Rey and Snoke's backstory and that more can only be explored in the EU. As if the last chapter will no longer deal with who Rey is and only with what she will end up doing. Her future so to speak.

I'm not buying it guys and girls. I really, really hope she remains a 'nobody' (as that revelation worked so well in ep8, at least it did to me) but have a feeling there is still stuff we don't know (but the people over at Lucasarts do).

Time will tell, but I'd be really surprised if JJ doesn't revisit some of the twists RJ set up in his episode.

 

I still get salty over that unfinished ending (although Mass Effect 3 was almost as eye rolling).

The restore mod was incredibly epic.

 

What did the restore mod do?

 

I never saw something that caused me to think the Force was taking over and making decisions for Rey.

Flynn was when I was 5. I don't think it's good now. Lucas put 40's style camera work with, basically martial arts. It looks odd when paired.
The camera lethargic, the actors highly active.
Flynn-style would at least match the camera work style. That's all.

Cheers!
Jayson

 

That darn broomboi. He's the real threat here.