Rey and Finn are undoubtedly some of my favorite characters in the Star Wars franchise. Their stories would end up being yo-yo’d all over the place as different creative minds came together to create a trilogy that sometimes doesn’t feel that cohesive. Such as Finn’s Force-sensitivity.
It seems pretty blunt in The Force Awakens that Rey and Finn both had the Force, only Rey was more powerful than he was, but that doesn’t mean he’s supposedly weaker. He was just where Luke was at the beginning of his journey in A New Hope.
The Last Jedi completely eliminated Finn’s potential chance to grow in the Force-sensitive realm which Abrams had to pick up in The Rise of Skywalker, leading to what felt like a wasted opportunity for Finn’s chance to be a Jedi alongside Rey.
For this week’s concept, I’m sharing a piece my sister did a while back showcasing Finn and Rey as Jedi Knights. It’s expectedly pretty awesome.
What if we actually got to see this one day? I don’t know what I’d do! It would undoubtedly be one of my favorite things to ever happen in Star Wars. So, let’s hope Disney understands the greatness of this and decides to make this dream a reality as well.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a fantastic day. May the Force be with you.
Annlyel Online 
Yeah… this is one of many, many threads that the sequels could’ve gone with, and didn’t. Frankly, I would’ve been totally okay if even Rey hadn’t truly claimed the mantle of the Jedi and had found her own truths with the Force. She clearly needed to work through her own affinity for the Dark Side, but the fact remains that, frankly, Luke’s very dim view of them in “Last Jedi” not only is spot on, it frankly is only a good start. They didn’t just let Sidious create the Empire and wipe them out at the height of their power, they helped build the means to do it, and led the infrastructure of war — along with all the dark human rights implications of growing a clone army for warfare, which strikes me personally as basically being a high tech child soldier force that’s at least as morally questionable as the Empire and First Order’s recruitment techniques for the stormtroopers that replaced the clones. Between that and the rigid dogma that prevented them from helping Anakin or his mother and their slavery-riddled past (let’s be real: Anakin TOTALLY had direct reasons to hate the Jedi when he turned that we don’t have to pretend happened off screen)… there’s a lot of mess to clean up in there. And that’s before you even think on Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Mace’s observations that more and more Jedi students are becoming highly arrogant in their attitudes in the prequels.
I would’ve liked it better if Rey had simply gone her own way. Acknowledged the legacy of the Jedi, but recognize Luke’s perspective that part of that legacy was a failure, and begin carving out a new path that recognized their contributions to understanding the Force but also their flaws in not seeing its practitioners as human beings whose feelings might need to be overcome, but in a way that doesn’t pretend they don’t exist. Ahsoka recognized the flaws of the Jedi by the end, even if she didn’t recognize those of Anakin until she cut off part of Vader’s mask. I wish Rey had done something similar.
Maybe the yellow lightsaber suggests that she is. Ahsoka’s white ones were her hints that she had gone a different way. But I would’ve liked this called out more.
And yeah, that’s just the part about where they went with what they DID show. Sweeping Finn under the rug just compounded the error.
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Let me tell you something, the sequel trilogy is a wasteland of missed opportunity. It could’ve easily gone on to become one of the greatest SW trilogies, if not the greatest, SW trilogy of all time but Disney was afraid to tell a different story and it bit them in the butt.
Johnson tried to but he was given a story and characters that pretty much derived from A New Hope. What can you do with that?!
I like the Sequel Trilogy but my last viewing of The Rise of Skywalker after a partial SW marathon (I watched Revenge of the Sith, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Force Awakens, and The Last Jedi, I was following the crucial pieces of the Skywalker story) I was reminded very harshly why Disney failed miserably with their attempt at making a solid, emphasis on solid, Star Wars trilogy.
Let’s hope their next trilogy starting in 2022 has a plan from the get-go, otherwise it’s going to be another hodgepodge of great characters with potentially great storylines bogged down by behind-the-scenes destruction. 😦
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“Wasteland of missed opportunity”… that’s a pretty bleeping brilliant way to put it succinctly. Oh, the gallows humor I could drop here.
“Hey, look at the bright side. It’s the third best trilogy, that’s one of the greatest, right?” 😜
“Wow, you’re giving me really mixed messages here. Tell me how you really feel. Give in to your anger… the hate is swelling in you now…” 🙃
But… yeah. I can’t really disagree with any of that. I’ve felt this way for a while. Rey and Finn had a lot of potential as heroic characters, and Kylo Ren didn’t HAVE to be a near self parody of what happens if you let a fangirl create a villain Sue built around the concept of a Darth Vader knockoff with elements of Edward Cullen sprinkled in, right? (Poe? Yeah, no… he’s a frat boy caricature who’s trying way too hard to be the successor to Han Solo and got waaaaay too cute with it, yet of course all the otherwise mature woman like him in an unattainable, semi creepy “I wish I were 30 years younger” sort of way… geeky old me weeps slightly.) With a few better narrative choices and maybe a little more follow-through and consistency, there could’ve been some really good stuff in there. Rey goes her own way and finds a new truth with the Force over time? Finn continues to develop as well and we actually get two Force users in the trilogy? Rose doesn’t disappear with very little trace in Ep9? Palpatine mercifully stays dead? The entirety of Episode 8 isn’t “a chase scene that lasts almost the whole movie, with some dark reflection on the Force, a painfully rendered gender struggle between two tertiary characters we mostly wish would get off our screen, and a melodramatic casino trip all mixed in somewhere on the side”? The “Holdo maneuver” doesn’t happen?
The sad thing is, this didn’t have to happen this way. I was telling my coworker yesterday that the last four episodes of the Clone Wars was the best western action animation I’ve ever seen in my life. The Mandalorian was really good and will continue to be good. There’s room for good Star Wars in the Mouse House… or maybe it’s just when Dave Filoni is involved. They just… got way too timid, and way too fan fiction-y with their billion dollar budget. They made money back, and with the theatre business on life support there’s a strong chance that “Force Awakens” is going to be sitting at the top of the domestic gross leaderboard for a long, looooong time. I mean, if “Endgame” didn’t do it, there might not even be enough surviving theatres to put that sucker down when we come out of the plague, unless some combination of great luck, the perfect film, and maybe a big post-lockdown surge to the cinemas. But I honestly don’t see what would draw it in… and I’m not even all that confident the theatres are going to still much be there in a year unless they pivot back to drive in really, really soon.
And, at some point… movie making is about drawing a paying audience at the end. It’s the prime directive of show business, after all. But… they left sooooo much on the table, that it’s kind of sad. Ten or twenty years from now it seems at least plausible that someone’s going to be pulling the Roman numerals off these or, at least, seriously treating them like they don’t even belong. It could’ve been better. But it wasn’t.
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I loved this joke. “Hey, look at the bright side. It’s the third best trilogy, that’s one of the greatest, right?” 😜 HA!
If the movie theaters close I’m going to be very miserable. (I’m a movie theater nut.)
Yeah, Poe is pretty nice looking.😌 I actually like him as a character but yeah, he is the fraternity ripoff of Han Solo.
Yes, those last four episodes of The Clone Wars were AMAZING!!! Absolutely incredible. Maybe they should get smart and have Dave Filoni be the Kevin Feige of the Star Wars franchise. Just saying.
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