The Symmetry of The Last Jedi

Now, I'm going to address something that no one may have caught as missing from the opening post, and it's a big omission.


So, I covered the Christmas Carol (I'll just call it that for quick reference) structure of the story, and how everyone makes one kind of moral choice on one end, and the opposite on the other; except for DJ who makes the same moral choice on both sides.
We also went over some symbolic actions that took place on both sides in counterpoint position of each other.

However, though we talked about actions, we never examined Rey.
I noted Kylo's moral arc, but not Rey.

Woops?
No. I left her out on purpose. By why? (OK, I'll stop with this style...it's getting old, lol)

REY AND THE SYMMETRY OF THE LAST JEDI
(or, "How to throw a curve ball right down the middle")

So I left out Rey because she doesn't fit the structure formula, and I hadn't finished completing my mental notes regarding her relationship to this symmetrical structure.

First, let's just recap Rey's basic plot sequentially to refresh our memory.

• Rey is away from her friends and looks to Luke to go save them, and is surprised by his denial to do so.
  • Rey doubts her abilities.
    • Rey empathizes with Kylo and begins to open communion with him.
      • Rey doubts her worth and hinges her worth on lineage; fearing her worth by lineage is none.
      • Rey faces her fear and accepts herself as her own worth.
    • Rey empathizes with Kylo but begins to close off from him.
  • Rey has faith in her abilities.
• Rey stops waiting for a hero and takes action into her own hands and goes to save her friends

Now let's dig in.
It's tempting to look at this and think that she fits right in because she's making opposite decisions and choices on both sides.
True, she is.

Here's the interesting part. They aren't moral choices.
She doesn't have a moral dilemma.
Let's be clear, however, and define, "moral", because the image that strikes various minds may arrive at a different definition out of colloquial use of the term.

Moral: concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.​

Everyone else is going through a moral issue, however, Rey is going through an existential crises and not a moral one.

She doesn't make bad moral decisions that have damning consequences in one half, and then good moral decisions which redeem her in the other half.
She's not even making decisions; actually just doing one thing: accepting who she is.

Her entire arc is <don't accept self><ineptitude><accept self><aptitude>.
(To be champ you have to believe in yourself when no one else will. - Sugar Ray Robinson)

However, she's like our Tiny Tim. Throughout the entire story, she has exactly the same compassion and moral bearing. She's unwavering. Note that she has exactly the same empathy, compassion, and moral position to Kylo when she's opening up to him, and when she's regretfully closing him off.

And just like Tiny Tim, she's also entirely alone in that way.

Rey is learning to stand on her own in this story, and that's all the story revolving around her is devoted to doing.
Her entire issue is self-doubt, much like Luke in Empire Strikes Back.

But she stands entirely alone by, not only never changing her moral position, which DJ does as well, but by also not having a moral decision to even make.
While everyone else is wrapped up in figuring out what's right or wrong (in the Christmas Carol, everyone's busy judging Scrooge and the reactions to Scrooge and whether these things are right or wrong), she's only working on worth with no thoughts at all about right or wrong (like little Timmy, who isn't working on self-identity, but hasn't any problems with right or wrong concepts in his head).
Rey, regardless of where you look in the story, is being openly compassionate (again, just like Timmy).

It will undoubtedly pop into some minds reading this that her beckoning to Kylo to not "do this" in the throne room is about right and wrong, but really to Rey it's just a matter of can and can't. She's pleading to Kylo because it is Kylo who is the one making the decision to force things into an either/or position when they had the opportunity right there to end the juxtaposition of the two.

Kylo makes the move; Rey remains static in this regard.

As such, Rey is thematically ... alone.

Her narrative structure actually mirrors her presented dilemma - to be OK with being alone.

The "curve ball right down the middle"...

We've looked at a variety of character developments in context to morality, but now let's outline those groups according to the priority of the character to the story.
We basically have four tiers:

1. Hero
2. Bad Characters
3. Neutral Characters
4. Good Characters

And here's how this lines up in the story:

• Good Characters Making Bad Decisions
  • Bad Character Making Good Decisions
    • Neutral People Making Neutral Decisions
      • Hero Doubts Self
      • Hero Believes in Self
    • Neutral Characters Making Neutral Decisions
  • Bad Character Making Bad Decisions
• Good Characters Making Good Decisions

Now it should make sense what is meant by, "Throwing a curve ball right down the middle."

The entire story is like a moral pyramid on top of which Rey stands.
Rey, like Luke in ESB, doesn't do much by comparison to everyone else's amount of activity and action, but the entire story is nevertheless entirely centered around her gaining self worth.

She is literally the center of everything just as she is, and that is her worth; just what she is already as evident in her position among everything.

And this doesn't change if suddenly we find out in SWIX that Rey's parents are actually somebody because in this story, even if she actually has notable parents, she first needed to value her self for her own value inherently before anything else.

This fully realized the motif of this structure as the following:

Code:

      DOUBT | BELIEF
    NEUTRAL |  NEUTRAL
  GOOD      |        BAD
BAD         |         GOOD

So really, the entire structure of the whole film is built around one central theme:

Faith.


Yes, there's the other themes as well, like its central refrain of destroying idols for what is actual (no good or bad, only what is; no one and nothing is like your idea of them; reality is things are mixed, etc...).

And those are important because those leave us with a rather nihilistic position: nothing matters because everything is as it is.

However, Rey's narrative arc pushes this past nihilism and over to optimistic existentialism* because her position basically allegorically states that you're on your own and what you value is what matters.
*existentialism, being rooted from France, is traditionally pretty moody about being "free" to imbue value and meaning into life - some even declaring the condition to be something we are "damned" to or "condemned" to. So Optimistic existentialism just means we're happy about the idea.

If you pile that together, your full theme is something like:

Your impressions of what is right and wrong, and who someone is, are wrong.

There is no inherent good or evil in anyone or anything; this is not their value.

It is up to you to put the value into everything and everyone.​

What you choose to put value in is what defines your worth.​

Place your belief and own yourself. Don't receive your belief and doubt yourself.​

So, to close things up.
Rey is truly entirely alone in this story because she is the representative of the story's allegorical direction to be independent with judgement and value; that the world is full of both sides of the coin - good people making bad choices, bad people making good choices, and everything in between, but you unto yourself are entirely truly alone because whatever ideal you are narrating for yourself, the reality is that you put the value in what you do and you are your agent of your fate in morality. Everyone can rise up, and everyone can fall down.

So...what do you want to do with your life in this mess?

Rey's answer: Take care of my friends.


I think you can see why I held off on doing Rey until later.

Cheers!
Jayson

 

Quick Note of Update to the OP:
I added a link to Part 2 (post#22), and also added a link to @JediMasterRobert thread
LUKE IN TLJ: A MICROCOSM OF THE HERO'S JOURNEY for suggested further reading, because the two threads - in my opinion - are a great pair to read back to back.

So to keep things a bit tidier, I've moved my thanks to King Chewie to this post so the link to Part 2 from the OP doesn't confuse anyone by looking like it's only a response to one member.

Thank you very much, @King Chewie!
That's some high praise there, as there's a lot of great posts on this forum!


Cheers!
Jayson

 

Quite right that it is lumped together, but that's not a problem.
I went into this a bit before when I outlined the Canto Bight thematic relationships across the other films, but the thing is that the Ring Theory (referring to the site by that name, which is an impressive body of work) takes a very literal and rigid approach to examining the chiasmus relationship of Star Wars.

I don't. The main reason is that Lucas himself doesn't hold strictly to that idea of a literal Film 1 against Film 3 exclusively all the way through.
For the most part he does, but there are blurs here and there (like I showed in the Canto Bight discussion post) that overlap.

The reasons are usually because of narrative logistics.
For instance, you are exactly correct in noting that TLJ is ESB + ROTJ (and by proxy that means it's also related to AOTC + TPM), and it kind of has to be because the ST is about completing the circle and ending the cycle - thematically. It's the final conclusion.

The chiasmus of Star Wars is employed to be a living incarnation of Lucas' main philosophical query in writing the show: can we escape the cycles handed to us by previous generations, or are we stuck in a behavioral loop - doomed to repeat our failures and successes over and over, but only slightly differently?
As such, the final act (SWIX) has to draw to a conclusion and answer that question. It either has to say yes, no, or yes and no.

The final act needs, also, to be free to draw from any and all themes to wrap up a conclusion and not be stuck trying to echo just ROTJ + TPM because that won't work out right to conclude the whole saga. That would only work out if they were concluding just this trilogy.

So there's fudge room, and there is tolerance for it in Star Wars (the closer you look at the parallels across all of the films, the more you'll see bleed-over here and there) because the themes have their place to generate the right meaning and message, and sometimes it doesn't squarely fit in a literal opposite position of where it was before, but in a thematically opposite position of where it was before.

For instance, even in the OT, ROTJ is the mirror of ANH, but you'll see plenty that mirrors off of ESB and not ANH, such as Luke taking off Vader's helmet so that Vader can see the true version of Luke, which is a mirror back of Luke seeing his own face in Vader's helmet on Dagobah, which wasn't the true face.

So the Ring Theory site is quite right that the main body of Star Wars generally, and at times pedantically, mirrors film to film, but it's not an absolute lock-in.
There's some wiggle room in some places.

I hope that helps,
Cheers!
Jayson

 

I'm not sure. I tend not to speculate about what's going to happen specifically in future chapters of the story and stick to very broad narrative projections; such as noting that TLJ technically accomplished all required chiasmus chains thematically, so does stand possible for IX to break the chiasmus structural method and do something different. That might be in the form of ditching the entire chiasmus structure concept completely and doing something new, or it might mean dabbing from all of the previous 8 films as desired, or some other variation. What I do know is that there's more freedom available to IX's narrative structure than there was for VIII.
I think VIII had probably the most restrictive set up for the narrative structure considering it had to mirror two prior films' themes as well as be symmetrical within itself (because ESB and AOTC were).

Glad to help!

I cannot grant the axiom that chiasmus narrative structure implies a weakened copy, so I cannot agree that the new trilogy is therefore pointless.

I would have to be shown that the chiasmus narrative structure is implicitly and inherently weaker as a narrative method against other narrative methods.
Given that we have a vast volume of ancient literature which was written using the method, such as Homer's Iliad as but one example of many, I'm not confident that such a case can be made.

More directly, I disagree with the notion that the new trilogy is pointless as if you do look at Star Wars through the chiasmus lens and take all narrative allegories together into account, along with what Lucas has said about one of his central philosophical explorations regarding the films (that he was exploring whether we are stuck in cycles of the same behavior or whether we can break free from the same kinds of events of the past repeating themselves), then they are very much right in step, as this third chapter is an end cap to that philosophical question.
In the prequel trilogy we had the events and allegories take place that happened in the original trilogy, but with slightly different results.
For example, the PT was about the rise of evil, whereas the OT was about the rise of good. The old generation was good and the young generation is bad in the PT, while in the OT it is the opposite.
The ST puts the same generation as both good and evil, and rises them both at once; which ends the cycle and teeter-totter back and forth over generational good and bad flip flopping.

In the PT, the champion emotions and philosophies are hatred, vengeance, and doubt. In the OT, the champion emotions and philosophies are love, hope, and faith.
In the ST, (so far) the champion emotions and philosophies are none. Instead, both are currently struggling equally and both are failing to win at this point.
In the second act of PT, the bad guys are against a wall and failing. In the second act of the OT, the good guys are against a wall and failing.
In the second act of the ST, both are failing and succeeding equally.

ST basically neutralizes every theme cycle of the past two trilogies, and that is far from pointless, as it has to happen to close the loop that was started with the chiasmus structure in the OT and PT, and to draw a conclusion to Lucas' philosophical examination.

I understand that if you look at Star Wars as if it's just any other film out there, and that it speaks the same cinematic and narrative language as other films out there, it could seem like we could sit around and make long laundry lists of things we imagine they could have done and should do.

All are free inherently by default to ingest Star Wars as they do, but I would encourage people to not treat SW like it's any other film that speaks the modern cinematic language, and instead to treat it as our modern Iliad - not just a sci-fi film with magic and lasers.

For the above reasons, they couldn't just start up a whole new Star Wars because they hadn't finished the saga. It was left dangling; entirely unfinished.
Lucas has been wanting to do 7 through 9 for quite a long time. He mainly gave up because he grew tired of the backlash that he received from people back with the PT, and he has kids and a family and other interests which he would rather move on to instead of adding further stress to himself given what he went through in the aftermath of the PT (he may be quiet, but he's a pretty sensitive person, and he can shrug and act like it didn't matter to him, but every ounce of his body language and his subsequent actions screams just the opposite).

This part of the saga had to have the hand off from the old generation to the new because that's in every SW trilogy. We just happened to meet the middle generation first because Lucas wrote things down in medias res (literally "into the middle") where you drop an audience right in the middle and work out the edges later.

So I understand where you are coming from, and how it could feel that way, but I can't agree on your propositions or conclusions due to my awareness of the meta-structure of Star Wars, the point of doing it, and what's required to complete the structural form.

The good news is that they've been peppering in between each saga with stand-alone films which are not required to apply the chiasmus structure, and it's all but a certainty that there will be a new saga kicking off after this one ends, and that new saga has no prior rules governing it.
They could make it chiasmus as well (which, personally I would think to be cool, but we wouldn't know until act 2 if that were the case because they would be starting from scratch), or they could dump the chiasmus structure and move on to standard modern narrative structure format (there are some attractions to that approach from a business angle, as it's easier to manage the content without having to abide by a form of themes being mirrored). It all depends what Disney ends up deciding defines a Star Wars saga (not to be confused with the "Legends" saga we're currently in; but what they define a saga as after this one).

Anyways, here's to hoping you get the Star Wars that you're looking for!

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I"m not entirely sure what primary plot elements will exist.
I would say that based on VII & VIII, and reflecting on the entire allegorical tangent across all films, that it seems like a natural step to end this all with a metaphorical clap of the hands - that is, we zero out the bad and good alike.

However, I can't fathom how JJ Abrams is going to accomplish that. The only way my mind can imagine, short of Kylo & Rey sitting down for a spot of tea and ending on a truce (don't laugh...we had tea time in SW before ), is if they kill each other. However, American cinema is not savvy in the mainstream currently with tragic endings to epics. We're not Greece.
Our epics have to have a win that is enthusiastic and triumphant at the end or people tend to not like it, or lose their minds and hate it viscerally.
I know JJ is aware of these things because he's very good at making mass crowd pleasing films; like Spielberg before him.

So I don't really know. For all I know, some third threat pops in unexpectedly and the opposing two sides have to band together and fight the new and more important and dangerous third threat...and probably in that form, Kylo dies and Rey is sad, or something along those lines.

Whatever happens, they likely will be neutralizing the two sides.
Or not. I'm running on the assumption that the motif will be to end the cycle, because that's where everything's pointing to, but there's no rule that says they won't just whip out a M. Night Shyamalan and have it whip right back to the teeter-totter good, then bad, then good, then bad, etc... in a "what a twist" moment.

And then there's the option that someone does the Colorado college grad "Woah...Yin/Yang, man" approach - which imagery has alluded to in the films so it's not entirely a stretch. That is, that there's no "escaping" the cycle of tottering back and forth from good to bad, bad to good, etc..., and that they also don't have to escape the cycle - because ultimately there isn't a cycle, but only what is and that you just work with what is at hand and not try to yank it to good or to bad - something of a mix between what DJ was saying and what Luke was saying.

I'm pretty exited about the next one because I really don't know what I'm going to get; at all.
Up to now, I've always know roughly what I was going to get due to the chiasmus leads, like, I knew I was going to get an ESB tangent and a correlated dashing of AOTC going into LTJ. I didn't know anything more than just that layer of the thought, but that much I did know.
I was surprised by getting an ESB + ROTJ in one shot, and that immediately made perfect sense in the long-view of the chiasmus narrative, but I now that there's technically no chiasmus lead for the next one, I haven't the faintest idea what they will do.

Cheers!
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 5, 2018, Original Post Date: Jan 5, 2018 ---

Thank you for the wonderful post!

I don't think our two thoughts are at odd from each other for the most part at all.
I wrote about the moral symmetry exclusively, and you're (mostly) writing about action and role position (a person's place socially) symmetry.

And you are very much right - this film is incredibly ambitious! It is incredibly pedantic (very specific to an amazingly small detail) and it even runs the symmetry through to the Camera Shots themselves.

I love all of your citations (examples)! That's a great listing!

I'm more in the opinion that it was successful, and not partially failed, but that's up to taste.
I'm really thrilled that it's all in one movie and not spread out. It's more pound-per-square-inch...that is, more connections per minute, and that's great for me!

I don't agree that Rey's aloneness is akin to what Star Wars has always been about because unlike Rey, Anakin and Luke were literally defined by their traumatic experience with their families.

Rey isn't. She doesn't have a family to be traumatized by and then defined by that event. She doesn't have a mother who was killed, after which she goes on a rampage and kills everyone. She doesn't have a father who is the evil tyrant of the galaxy which she goes on a campaign to save.
Or mix those up in any way you want
Mother who's evil tyrant, whom she needs to save. Dead father whom she goes on a rampage to kill.
Dead mother and father whom she needs to save from bad reputation - clearing their name.
etc...

She doesn't have the traumatic motivations that the others do. She stands entirely reliant on her own self to define her purpose and direction.
Luke and Anakin consequently rebounded off of things that happened to their family.

Rey gets to choose who she cares about because she doesn't have a family (so far, at least).

That's a pretty important change.


Regarding Kylo Ep6, and Rey Ep5... Yes!
I wrote this in another thread yesterday somewhere...I've lost track.

Basically Kylo's tangent runs ROTJ dashed with Anakin themes, and Rey runs ESB dashed with Luke themes.
And in that way, they squeeze ROTJ and ESB into one film.
I thought that was pretty clever!

Thank you again for a great post!

Cheers!
Jayson

 

In that sense, yes. That is true of all allegorical based literature; regardless if it has a chiasmus structure or not.
There's a huge gap in Jesus' story we know nothing about in Matthew.
In Mark, we know practically nothing about him prior.

Achilles, by modern character narrative driven structure, has practically no believable motivations and we can hardly empathize with him beyond a token for hubris.
Odysseus, by the same comparison, neither has but one motive we can relate with - to go home, but beyond this we don't see any relationships fruit in detail or anything. Odysseus stands as a token of cunning, and uses it to weave in and out of subsequent trials along his trek back home. Each instance carrying with it an allegorical lesson.

More recently than these examples, Robin Hood is about as flimsy as it gets. The details in that story are as thin as is really possible, outside of the Bible - which probably takes the trophy for lacking character development by today's standards. Robin is straight forward, and unwavering. He's basically there to deliver the message of justice between the people and government - a token of moral right which is illegal juxtaposed against moral wrong which is legal.

Then you have, further, the Arthurian legends. Again here we have very little development in story in regards to - oh, let's say, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, or even Dr. Strange. The Arthurian legends, like all the rest, serve to teach moral lessons and so we don't see a love of development into the characters beyond what's essential for serving the allegory.

Allegorical stories are not character studies. Most every modern film today is a variation of character studies.
This is a consequence of the 1960's existential explosion in cinema and literature.
With a few exceptions which preceaded and influenced this wave, previous content hardly developed characters much, and many that did flopped at the box office (for example, It's A Wounderful Life was an absolute dud that was gone and forgotten about until TV started a regular seasonal rotation and a post-60's audiance was finally ready for that kind of film).
This all came about mainly because of WWII. After WWII folks who were in the war, and also artists (like for example John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens) were so displaced mentally by what they saw and experienced that they shifted their attention from plot to character driven stories and began to study the person over the situation.

Before this, it was the norm for a character to be so that plot was served, and that's all they would ever do. Why was the hero heroic? Because he was the hero.
Why is the lead male unreachable and distant to the pining female lead? Because he's unreachable and distant to the pining female lead.

The primary difference between the 20's to 50's narrative form and allegorical tales was that the allegorical tales had a message, while most films of the cited period for comparison did not. Most didn't even have what we, today, would consider to be a "proper ending". They would just often abruptly end (in fact, this kept up and bled over into nearly even the early 80's in ever dwindling numbers and by the late 80's it was all but gone and the 90's would radically reshape the third act of story telling in cinema).

TV shows during the 50's, and early 60's however, were very much like allegorical tales; unlike most films.
Think of the original series of Star Trek, or Bonanza.
We never explored the character motives, nor knew much about their backgrounds at all. We knew their personality and their general moral (or in the case of Star Trek, ethical) position, and that was pretty much it.
Each episode explored one central theme or question, and in all TV shows (except for Star Trek, which is partially why it was so profound for the time) the end of the episode would answer the posited question leaning to some asserted moral right choice.
Star Trek was a bit different here, in that it would end the episode in ethical ambiguity; leaving it to the audience to determine the answers to the dilemma's themselves.

There's a reason that MASH came along when it did and not previously.

My point is that our modern mind is absolutely entrained into character study narrative structure.
Look at Superman movies. We no longer have a Superman who just saves the day and maybe preaches justice along the way.
We now have a Superman whom we must watch suffer all sorts of existential dilemmas and self-discoveries along the way to the point that it's entirely consumed by the character examination.

If you look at any writing lessons by leading industry professionals they will currently all state that you let the story develop out of the character and that the focus is always what's going on in the character's mind. There is never a professional screenwriter to be found who will suggest that you start with a moral or ethical point and figure out how to work your character into it so to facilitate the moral or ethical narrative.

And that's great. We have modern cinema in part as a result of that way of thinking.

However, that's 180 degrees from allegorical epics.
Allegorical epics do exactly the opposite. You start with the philosophical/moral/ethical question and explore it through token representatives of different aspects of examining that theme, and then you move those token characters through to (generally) answering the question.
You don't stop along the way to ask how likely it is that any person would behave one way or the other, nor do you stop and figure out the character's existential motivation and backstory.

That's just not part of the genre because doing so absolutely destroys the capability of the genre to articulate its points.

Imagine if Star Trek started off right out of the gate entirely focused on just Kirk, and his relationship with Spock and Bones, and the space escapades were just a backdrop for situations which would pit these three into situations where they were forced to grow their characters and wrestle with each other's preferences in life.
Well, it wouldn't be Star Trek anymore. It would be ... well ... it would be Star Trek Discovery, but it wouldn't be what made the original series what it was.

Star Wars has character development, because character growth is part of its moral examination, but the character developments are very linear and uncomplicated.
It's not like we're watching Girls or Breaking Bad, so we're not going to get fleshed out three dimensional character exploration and motivations.

We're going to get about no more than one character growth line per character, and it won't be mixed up or socially and politically tangled with anyone else's development for confusion, because it's not examining the nature of character growth in context to the reality of a complicated world.
Each gets one trajectory and the only question is which side do they land when they do; heads or tails.
They aren't a 20 sided die of probability; they're all coins being flipped in the air.

So, in one respect, from a modern character study and driven narrative point of view, yes. Allegories are weaker at studying a full character study.
However, in the other respect, from the point of view which favors allegorical and philosophical prose, Allegories are far stronger and more articulate (and I would argue more aesthetically pleasing) than character studies.

If I walked into a Star Wars and saw the likes of Saving Private Ryan in space with laser swords, I'd probably walk out.
That's boring. There's no allegorical tale there; no epic. It's just another study of humans whom we're all supposed to be capable of relating to.

I don't want to relate to Snoke anymore than I want to relate to Lucifer or Odysseus' Sirens.

I only need to relate to Rey on the most basic levels. I don't need to know her thought process on everything; nor do I need such for Finn, or Han, Leia, Luke, etc...
They're all pretty 2 dimensional, and the fanbase knows far more about these characters via books on the side (which write in the modern form of character studies) than from the films (which, again, do not).

So I can't quite agree that it's inferior. It depends what the point is.
I would say that if you set out to write a story where we full well know the character as deeply at we know Walter White, then writing with an allegorical narrative form would be the wrong choice, just as much as I would say that if you're point was to examine a philosophical, moral, or ethical dilemma through allegory and you chose to write in the form of a character driven narrative, then you would have also made the wrong choice.

I don't think this has anything to do with chiasmus structure, however.
You could pull off chiasmus structure in character driven narratives if you want to. It just happens in allegorical narratives dominantly because allegories rely on symbolism more than character nuances to make their points.

Lucas is pretty much a walking antithesis to character driven narrative storytelling.
Watch THX if you haven't. It speaks volumes, by example, of how his mind on storytelling works when it's left unabridged.

Cheers!
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 5, 2018, Original Post Date: Jan 5, 2018 ---

Thank you! Glad that you enjoyed it!

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I'm not sure on that actually.
I hold it that way due to what it currently is, but perhaps he will save himself where Anakin required someone else to save him.
They have definitely leaned on Kylo to be the tragic figure, and he's clearly on the power trip and monster path of Anakin before him.
But the path of Anakin was one where at the final end, he is actually saved by his son.

Does our AnaKylo stay damned, does he get saved by our LuRey, or does he save himself?

As I said before, I don't prefer speculating too much about intentions in great detail, but I do think (given the current trilogies history of killing one OT character per film) that there was something vaguely floating around the concept development level of Leia dying in IX and either AnaKylo pulling a pure Anakin and just losing his control, or (and I think this one was the more likely case since it's a chiasmus relation, a reversal, and Kylo already did the lost parent of Anakin's path as part of Rey's lost mentor moment in a chiasmus reversal of him killing his parent rather than someone else, etc...) Leia may have been on her way to being developed to have been the one to save Kylo because last time Anakin was saved by his son while Anakin died - it would have been poetic to have had the Mother save the son this time around while she died. Because salvation in Star Wars has never been about the Force. It's always been about compassion and love, even when there should be none. I can imagine the moment of Leia laying on the ground and saying something that triggers an epiphany in Kylo emotionally which just wakes him up to himself; made impactful by the exclamation point that is his Mother's death in his hands.

However, that possibility seems entirely derailed so I'm not entirely sure what's going on next.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

That is an interesting conversation to have, and one that I don't entirely disagree with, nor do I fully agree with it either.
However, that's not really the scope of this thread.

It's a bit like walking into a conversation about how well thought out the iPhone was for the time, and saying that that's all well and good but Jobs is still a jerk.

As I said at the beginning, I won't engage in discussion (in this thread) about general dislike of the film(s) unless it is specifically that one does have a problem with the symmetrical form or chiasmus structure of LTJ.
Rey's general growth across the series is not within that range of conversation.

I'm sorry the films are not working for you regarding Rey, however.

Cheers,
Jayson