Overly Devoted Archivist Uncategorized rey, star wars, tfa spoilers, the force awakens 0 Comments

praxid:

I love so many things about The Force Awakens. One of them is how we meet the characters. Let’s start by looking at Rey.

We learn about Rey almost entirely by what we see. We aren’t given a long backstory. We don’t get a speech setting up who she is or what she wants. Instead, we’re given a series of moments that make us understand her–make us love her.

She scrubs at the parts she’s scavenged all day–and her attention wanders. She looks at the withered face of an elderly woman, doing the exact same thing, beside her.  And so we learn that Rey is afraid that she’ll be doing this her entire life. Her future is there in front of her, written on the face of that wrinkled, withered old woman.

Then we see she’s keeping track of time. Each day or week scratched onto the wall of her little hovel. The wall is covered in those lines. And so we learn she’s been abandoned. She’s alone, and she’s counting the days until that isn’t true, anymore.

Then she sits outside. Eats her food, and watches a ship fly up through the sky and fade away into the stars. She yearns for it. We learn that she wants something different. She wants to be on that ship. And she takes an old helmet–tries it on for size. Pretending she’s the pilot, speeding away. Like a little kid, playing pretend–or like Kylo Ren, playing Darth Vader with his own helmet, later on. We learn she’s still a kid. Whatever she’s been through, it hasn’t destroyed that part of her.

She saves the droid–says the creature who was trying to capture it doesn’t have respect for anyone. That shows us she does. Like Finn, no one taught her what was right. She figures it out for herself. There’s an inner voice–one she listens to. One Finn listens to. One Kylo Ren tries desperately to ignore. In this moment, we learn Rey will fight for right things, just because she feels it. And that’s what starts her adventure.

It all means something–all gets straight to who she is. And the story does this in a matter of a few minutes, while barely speaking a word.