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A long Twitter chat with someone who didn’t like TLJ helped to crystallize one complaint I’ve heard a lot, which is that Rey didn’t receive “training.” I don’t think that’s really the complaint, because Luke’s training was scanty at best; I think Rey breaks the Hero’s Journey.
Probably this has been said elsewhere by others, but it was the first time it occurred to me. The typical hero’s journey has the hero receiving a call to adventure (and temporarily rejecting it) before meeting their mentor and receiving the talisman they’ll need on their quest.
For Luke, that’s obviously Obi-Wan, who gives him his magic sword, and more generally awakens him to his superpowers. Luke rejects the call until his family is killed, then goes off on his quest. By the book.
Rey inverts that. She gets the superpowers first, before finding a mentor. She’s haunted by dreams she doesn’t understand, powers she’s surprised by. (“How did you do that?” “I don’t know!”) It’s that unsettling power/talisman that propels her on her quest for a mentor.
When we meet her she thinks her parents will come back and fill that role. That’s why she rejects the lightsaber; it symbolizes the abdication of what she’d been looking for. She accepts the saber once she lets go of one mentor and begins to seek another.
The audience, expecting a standard hero’s journey, was unsettled throughout TFA, seeing Rey with her talisman (lightsaber/Force powers) before finding her mentor, which is all wrong. (“Mary Sue!”) But at the end of TFA things are back on track. They can breathe a sigh of relief.
...until TLJ, when we find that she STILL doesn’t have a mentor. She goes from seeking belonging with her parents to seeking belonging with Luke to seeking belonging with Kylo, because the problem she has to overcome is how to deal with powers without guidance or understanding.
Instead of the mentor leading her to her talisman, her talisman leads her to seek a mentor. To some that looks like Rey getting free goodies without having to do the work, but look where it leads her: being tricked and trapped and almost executed by a false mentor.
That’s an interesting response to the traditional hero’s journey we see in the OT: the talisman without guidance creates longing for a mentor, precipitates the crisis that leads to the rejection of the call to adventure, and sends her ultimately into the belly of the whale.
Rey tells this to Luke. There’s something inside her, somewhere she doesn’t understand, but it’s always been there. It makes her vulnerable, motivates her, and ultimately enables her to resolve her central dilemma when she realizes she has to stop seeking external validation.
I think that’s a cool take; your mileage may vary.
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