imaginary_golux

Part 1: Why I Liked TFA So Damn Much

So there are a fair number of things bothering me about the Star Wars Sequel Series (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, hereinafter TFA, TLJ, and TROS), and I figured I’d write them down so I can stop subjecting my poor Best Beloved to my angry rants.

A little background: I went to TFA in 2015 because Best Beloved asked me to; I had previously seen all of one Star Wars film, mostly because Best Beloved was horrified that I had missed out on such a cultural milestone, and wasn’t hugely invested in it. I came out gleeful, and proceeded to write (let me check now) more than two hundred fic, ranging from tiny little drabbles to the 41K+ “Seek and Ye Shall Find,” most of them in the two years between TFA and TLJ.

I’ve asked myself several times why this movie, of all movies (I don’t even like most movies very much) caught my attention and gave me so damn many plotbunnies. Seriously, my Google Docs folder for TFA still has over a hundred plotbunnies and half-finished stories lurking in it. It’s not as though TFA is an exquisitely perfect movie too good for this world; it has plenty of flaws, and at its core, it’s a Star Wars film: we’re here for the lightsaber battles and things blowing up in space.

So why this one?

Because of the protagonists.

First off, we have Poe Dameron. The Poe we’re given in TFA is a hotshot fighter pilot who runs his mouth at inadvisable moments, but also the sort of man who names his rescuer in the middle of their daring escape, adores his droid, and would follow Leia Organa into hell itself. He’s brave enough to mouth off to Kylo Ren, and stubborn enough to hold out against horrendous torture. He wears his heart on his sleeve and isn’t afraid to make cheesy speeches to encourage his friends. He believes in the Resistance so fiercely it even worries the General. He’s sweet, in a way that macho fighter pilot characters so rarely are; he’s not afraid to be kind, to be affectionate, to be soft in ways that his character archetype so rarely is.

Also he’s ridiculously into Finn, which - well - same, Poe, same.

So then we have Finn: a Stormtrooper who won’t kill innocents. A man raised and trained by the Dark who chooses the Light, and thus a perfect foil for Kylo Ren. Finn is scared out of his mind for huge swathes of the movie - of the First Order, of dying horribly, of his friends being hurt or killed - but he fights through his fear to protect the people he cares about, not just once but repeatedly. He’s brilliant: he comes up with a plan to escape the First Order that works, and manages to improvise a second plan to bring down Starkiller’s shields and free Rey, which, like his first plan, is both batshit insane and completely successful. He’s clearly Force-sensitive (there’s no other explanation for Maz Kanata handing him a lightsaber and telling him he has a weapon), which only strengthens the mirroring effect with Kylo. He’s competent with the ‘saber and the Falcon’s weapon system and the TIE fighter’s guns. He’s enthusiastic and a little dorky and falls in love at the drop of a hat, first getting so attached to Poe that he keeps his jacket and saves his droid, and then getting so attached to Rey that he goes back into his worst nightmare for her.

Which brings us to Rey: feral desert child raised by sand. If Finn and Poe are allowed to be soft in ways that action heroes so often aren’t, Rey is allowed to be fierce. She’s often angry and fairly violent, and is obviously good enough at being violent that she has managed to survive in the harsh environment of Jakku; indeed, we meet her as she is beating up on four adults with her quarterstaff, and winning handily. She’s Force-sensitive and stubborn and whip-smart (she speaks or understands, at a demonstrated minimum, Aurebesh, Binary, and Shyriiwook, a notoriously difficult tongue), a skillful pilot and a gifted mechanic, who can fix the Falcon in flight and steer it through a hulked Star Destroyer with ease. She also gets easily attached - mostly to droids - and is fiercely protective of what she considers to be hers; she’s willing to give up food for a droid she met yesterday. She’s waiting for her family to come back for her. What she gets is Finn coming back for her, into his worst nightmare.

So by the end of the movie we have Poe looking at Finn with hearts in his eyes because Finn brought BB-8 back safely, along with the map to Luke Skywalker, and Rey looking at Finn the same way because he came back for her, as no one else ever has. And that’s one of the things I love about this movie: how much time the protagonists spend being nice to each other. We see it with Poe naming Finn; with Finn and Rey praising each other after the Falcon-chased-by-TIEs scene; with Poe giving Finn his jacket. They’re all small moments, but the reason the fandom latched onto them so hard is because they’re so sweet. No one is trying to look macho and emotionless and stoic; they’re all having emotions all over the place, and a lot of those emotions are love.

Interestingly, the villains are also having emotions all over the place, and all of those emotions are hate.

Kylo Ren is - well, he’s a school shooter. Well-brought-up white boy who decides that slaughtering all his classmates and joining a fascist party is a good life plan. He’s desperate to become his grandfather, but hasn’t got anything like the sort of control over himself or his powers that Darth Vader did. He throws temper tantrums - destructive ones - anytime he doesn’t get his way. He’s a very good villain precisely because he resonates so strongly with our current society: we’ve all met whiny white manchildren who insist that women are ‘meant to be’ with them and then get violent when they’re rejected. His is a ‘hot’ hatred, for lack of a better word, flaring up in violence at the drop of a mask.

Hux (Armitage, apparently, though for a while everyone was assuming he was Brendol Jr) is honestly a nastier sort than Kylo Ren. The thing is, Kylo is a very personal sort of villain. He kills people up close and personal with his very own laser sword, for personal reasons, whatever those might be. Hux is a very impersonal villain. He can order the destruction of an entire planet without blinking, and feel no remorse for doing so. He’s a lot more effective than Kylo Ren is, but Kylo is scarier in the moment, because he’s so unpredictable and flies off the handle so frequently. Hux has a ‘cold’ sort of hatred: he will do the work to get the result he wants, quietly and competently, and then go and premeditatedly murder billions of sapients.

The reason I think so much of the fandom latched onto Kylux as a ship is that despite being on the same side, Kylo and Hux hate each other. They spend all of their shared screentime despising each other as pointedly as they can, tearing each other down and demonstrating contempt at every opportunity. That sort of tension can be fun to play with. It also contrasts fascinatingly with the protagonist trio (precious fluffballs that they are), who spend all of their shared screen time, in whatever configuration, admiring and building each other up, praising and complimenting and generally being good to each other.

Star Wars is, of course, worryingly black and white in its ethics (Light good, Dark bad, shades of grey irrelevant), but this contrast makes it utterly clear to the audience why we should be rooting for the Light side rather than the much more fashionable Dark side, and the answer it gives us is: because they love each other. Because they’re good to each other. Because the only thing the Dark has to offer is constant, bitter competition, with a side of backstabbing and contempt.

Part 2: What Could Have Been Done

Obviously what I wanted after TFA was glorious OT3 snuggles, but expecting Disney to put a polyamorous interracial threesome on screen was...not gonna happen. I wrote a lot of fic instead. But what could Disney have done to do justice to the sweet, stubborn, good protagonists - and the wholeheartedly malevolent villains - it gave us in TFA?

Rey’s fight with Kylo, where she is overwhelmed by her anger and nearly loses, then focuses on the Force and being less homicidally angry and is able to beat the crap out of him, is exactly where her arc needs to go. She’s got a lot of perfectly justified anger in her, but that brings with it the danger of going Dark; learning to set aside her anger would be a perfect Jedi lesson. It also aligns her interestingly with Anakin Skywalker, who was (as I understand it) frequently furious about many things, often with significant justification, which would make Luke helping her overcome her anger and/or channel it more productively a really beautiful way to wind up that whole Luke-Vader-Rey tangle. Luke could definitely be hesitant to train her because she has so much rage, and could talk about his own father’s struggle with the Dark and his own moments of hesitation and error, giving us some glorious flashbacks and some good character development and explaining how Luke Skywalker went from who he was at the end of the original trilogy to a hermit on an island. And he could learn to hope again, because under the rage Rey is good. He could even encourage her to see that although her blood family abandoned her, she has a new family, the ones who chose her: Finn, and Chewie, and Luke himself, and maybe others in the future.

Then if the second movie ended with the Knights of Ren finding Ahch-To and Luke fighting them off to give Rey time to escape, we could have her arc in the third movie being Rey fighting her own desire for vengeance and almost falling to the Dark out of rage, and pulling herself back with Finn’s help and support and in order to make her teacher-mentor-father figure proud.

It would be very nice to have Rey not be from a famous Force lineage, because frankly we’ve got enough Skywalker angst up in this story, but in TFA, for reasons which are never fully explained, Kylo Ren is obsessed with her from the very first time she’s mentioned, and even chooses capturing her over finding the map to Luke Skywalker. This suggests either some sort of Force vision or feeling, or he knows about her ahead of time. A strong fan-theory when the movie first came out was that Rey was Luke’s daughter and a survivor of the slaughter of Luke’s students, possibly rescued and stashed on Jakku by Kylo himself in a fit of remorse, whose loss helped drive Luke into seclusion.

Later research (yes, I did a lot of research to write fic) suggests that Kylo Ren was 23 when he slaughtered Luke’s other students and turned to the Dark, and that Rey was 13 at the time, and had already been on Jakku for eight years. So the Rey-was-Luke’s-student theory doesn’t hold water based on later research; but if going purely off of TFA, it could be made to work. Rey was 5 when left on Jakku, which would make Ben Solo 15 when he went Dark and started his homicidal career. That would give him fourteen years to establish himself as Kylo Ren, rather than six. So that could work; and if Rey is Luke’s long-lost daughter, that would play interestingly with her going to him for training. It would bring up the question of who Luke had a relationship with, but that’s a different problem.

Other possible lineages guessed at included Kenobi (presumably a descendant of Obi-Wan and a youthful fling with Duchess Satine), Qui-Gon Jinn, or even Count Dooku. Any of those would actually be kind of interesting in that Anakin and Luke are trained by Obi-Wan, who is a scion of the Jedi training lineage that goes from Qui-Gon to Dooku to Yoda himself; bringing another blood relative into the Jedi lineage would actually be rather interesting. A famous family name still doesn’t explain why Kylo Ren is obsessed with her, though.

(Her being a Palpatine, however, is patently absurd. Darth Sidious doesn’t want an heir. He plans to live forever, and/or burn down the universe behind him when he goes.)

So that’s Rey’s arc. What about Poe? When we leave him at the end of TFA, he has just led his fighters to a remarkable victory - the complete destruction of Starkiller Base - at the cost of 17 of his 24 fighters. He’s also seen Finn brought in on a gurney and taken directly to medical with a life-threatening lightsaber injury. Poe being Poe, which means he cares about everyone under his command, I’m going to assume that after the initial celebration of their victory, he’s going to be wracked with guilt for not somehow managing to prevent the deaths of his fighters. The Battle of Starkiller also marks the end of several dramatic and stressful days for Poe: finding the map, being captured, being tortured, being rescued, crashing, being rescued again, spending what must be at least a full day panicking over having lost his droid and the map, fighting off TIE fighters on Takodana, and then leading the attack on Starkiller. Frankly, PTSD and immense survivor’s guilt are the least of what he ought to be dealing with.

He’s also a demonstrably competent war leader and the person Leia trusted to find the map in the first place. It would make a lot of sense for her to take him under her wing, with the explicit intention of training him to be her successor: the Resistance needs his energy and devotion. Poe has the heart and the brain and the instincts and just needs the training to become a leader of the entire Resistance rather than just his fighter squadrons. She could also spend time talking to him about dealing with having led people to their deaths, since of all people, General Organa would understand that.

So obviously the Resistance has to be doing something while Rey is off learning to Jedi. Poe could conceivably do any or all of the following: go on a recruiting trip to try to bring new fighters into the Resistance; learn to lead larger groups and/or larger ships as Leia’s new right hand; lead a daring raid on a First Order depot for much needed supplies; have a nervous breakdown; scout for a new headquarters; spend time showing Finn around the Resistance; and/or hold a funeral for his fallen comrades. Or something else I haven’t thought of!

That leaves Finn. Finn is going to wake up in a whole new world - literally, given that he passed out on Starkiller and will presumably wake up either on D’Qar or on a different Resistance base. He’s going to need to recover from a life-threatening injury and from a lifetime of brainwashing. He has no idea what life is like outside the First Order, down to simple things like body language: it’s demonstrated during the scene on Starkiller that he doesn’t understand Han’s head-jerks as an attempt to draw his attention in a certain direction. He’s got a spectacular fish-out-of-water thing going. On the other hand, he’s a brilliant tactician and has a hell of a lot of information about the First Order in his head. That’s not a resource General Organa is going to pass up. So Finn needs to spend the next movie learning who he is when he’s not a brainwashed Stormtrooper, and why he should stay with the Resistance rather than run as far from the First Order as possible. It makes perfect sense for Finn to be terrified of the First Order, and him overcoming that fear - embracing the entire Resistance as his people as strongly as he does Rey and Poe - would make a very good second movie arc. Something like Poe asking Finn to give them a month to change his mind, or something; that seems a Poe thing to do.

For a third movie arc, it would make sense for Finn to gain rank in the Resistance, to begin to use that brilliant tactical mind to lead, coming up with batshit insane plans that work. It would also make sense if Rey, once she rejoins the Resistance, begins to train him in what she has learned, having recognized upon re-meeting him that he has the Force. And finally, it would make beautiful sense for Finn, the Stormtrooper who got out, to find a way to incite and lead a Stormtrooper rebellion. He can be Rey’s anchor to the Light when she goes to fight Kylo and the Knights - possibly even her backup against the Knights. If one wanted to include it, Luke could give Rey Leia’s lightsaber before she leaves Ahch-To, and either Rey or Leia could give it to Finn.

And then the third movie could end with happy trio hugs, because I’m not giving up on that anytime soon.