Another_Fool
Sidekick
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2004
- Messages
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@godisawesome While I largely disagree with your assessment on the Last Jedi, I can agree Finn and Rey do have very good arcs in TFA. In fact, they're the only reason I came away decently satisfied with TFA. I love the original trilogy characters, but frankly Rey and Finn hooked me to Episode 7 and were really the only fresh things that TFA brought to the saga.
That said, their Last Jedi arcs were still pretty well written in my opinion. I think it gets awfully overlooked how well RJ properly assessed and built on the character arcs that were left for Finn and Rey at the end of TFA, in a way a lot of the fandom didn't expect. For example, if you look around before TLJ ever got released a lot of us naturally assumed that Finn committed himself to the Resistance by the end of TFA. However, Finn never actually said any of that in TFA, but rather admitted he only infiltrated the Starkiller base to get Rey. Rian picked up on this and felt the natural course of action was to lead Finn's arc to go from only caring about Rey to actually committing to the Resistance's cause. Similarly with Rey, the rest of us viewers thought her arc was about getting training and maybe figuring out who her parents were. RJ took it deeper and actually examined her obsession on basing her identity through other people rather than herself. If we really look deeper at how he handled Finn and Rey at least in terms of their motivations, it actually strengthens their TFA arcs as well. And that's something I feel like the detractors don't either notice or give RJ credit for.
I can go further about TLJ, but I feel like discussing it is like talking about politics, therefore I'm going to start closing it here. I do understand a lot of the fan's complaints about the direction of the characters, and I think they're valid which is why I don't often go back and forth on this movie. However the one thing I disagree on is that the movie is poorly constructed. TLJ is competently made. It just doesn't do things that the fandom would like to see in a Star Wars saga, which alone is fair.
That said, their Last Jedi arcs were still pretty well written in my opinion. I think it gets awfully overlooked how well RJ properly assessed and built on the character arcs that were left for Finn and Rey at the end of TFA, in a way a lot of the fandom didn't expect. For example, if you look around before TLJ ever got released a lot of us naturally assumed that Finn committed himself to the Resistance by the end of TFA. However, Finn never actually said any of that in TFA, but rather admitted he only infiltrated the Starkiller base to get Rey. Rian picked up on this and felt the natural course of action was to lead Finn's arc to go from only caring about Rey to actually committing to the Resistance's cause. Similarly with Rey, the rest of us viewers thought her arc was about getting training and maybe figuring out who her parents were. RJ took it deeper and actually examined her obsession on basing her identity through other people rather than herself. If we really look deeper at how he handled Finn and Rey at least in terms of their motivations, it actually strengthens their TFA arcs as well. And that's something I feel like the detractors don't either notice or give RJ credit for.
I can go further about TLJ, but I feel like discussing it is like talking about politics, therefore I'm going to start closing it here. I do understand a lot of the fan's complaints about the direction of the characters, and I think they're valid which is why I don't often go back and forth on this movie. However the one thing I disagree on is that the movie is poorly constructed. TLJ is competently made. It just doesn't do things that the fandom would like to see in a Star Wars saga, which alone is fair.
