{"id":693243,"date":"2026-05-25T19:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T19:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/693243\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T19:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T19:36:10","slug":"the-world-wasnt-ready-for-rey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/693243\/","title":{"rendered":"The world wasn’t ready for Rey"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Women Of Action<\/a>, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a white brunette woman looking to feel represented in the Star Wars universe, you\u2019ve got your pick of the litter. Between Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Padm\u00e9 Amidala (Natalie Portman), Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), Qi\u2019ra (Emilia Clarke), and now Sigourney Weaver\u2019s New Republic Colonel Ward in The Mandalorian And Grogu<\/a>, Star Wars has a very particular image of what empowered women look like. Yet none of those doe-eyed space heroines caused quite the same hubbub as Daisy Ridley\u2019s Rey Skywalker n\u00e9e Palpatine\u2014a likable young lead who somehow managed to generate cycles upon cycles of discourse from the moment she debuted<\/a> in 2015\u2019s The Force Awakens.<\/p>\n

There were Rey lovers, of course, including those who praised her as a \u201cfeminist hero,\u201d<\/a> celebrated that her gender wasn\u2019t any more central to her story than Luke\u2019s was, and admired that she wasn\u2019t first and foremost presented as a love interest in a sexy outfit. A cycle of positive press about how the film (briefly) passes the Bechdel test was followed up by a baffling debacle where Rey was left out of the movie\u2019s tie-in merchandise and Twitter had to start a #WheresRey campaign to get her added. Mostly, however, there was a whole lot of debate about whether or not<\/a> Rey is a \u201cMary Sue\u201d\u2014a term that originates from self-insert fanfic tropes but has mostly just come to mean a female character that fanboys find annoying.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not worth rehashing all the exhausting details, but the argument basically boils down to the idea that Rey being able to use The Force without proper training was so unbelievable that it ruined the otherwise airtight logic of a film where the galaxy still collectively loves Luke, Leia, and Han even though they raised a second Space Hitler. I think the obsession with training seems kind of antithetical to the idea that the Force is an \u201cenergy field created by all living things\u201d that some people have a natural aptitude to access. But, hey, to each their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet while sexism unquestionably drove the anti-Rey backlash, I understand why the character is a little hard for people to process. Both within the Star Wars canon and outside of it, Rey is an unusual female action heroine. If there\u2019s one thing that links nearly all the female characters I\u2019ve covered in Women Of Action, it\u2019s a certain sense of defiance\u2014the kind that manifests in an overt \u201cI\u2019m better than the guys\u201d confidence, or at least an anti-authoritarian streak. Both men and women tend to respond well to kickass female characters like Ripley<\/a>, Sarah Connor<\/a>, Foxy Brown<\/a>, Beatrix Kiddo<\/a>, and, of course, Princess Leia, whose take-no-shit debut in 1977\u2019s Star Wars<\/a> paved the way for so many of the big-screen action heroines who followed in her wake.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rey, however, is a much sweeter, more emotive leading lady. Though she\u2019s visually coded as the Luke Skywalker of the sequel trilogy, her tougher desert childhood gave her a different outlook on life. Where Luke was a farm kid who grew up with someone serving him blue milk, Rey was abandoned and left to raise herself. While Luke managed his boredom by dreaming of flying off to have big, exciting space adventures, Rey survived her crushing loneliness and grueling existence by adopting a sunny, almost willfully na\u00efve sense of optimism that her family would come back for her one day.<\/p>\n

In Disney Princess<\/a> terms, Luke is the plucky Little Mermaid yearning to be part of another world, while Rey is more like a retro throwback to the quietly patient ethos of Snow White<\/a> and Cinderella<\/a>\u2014right down to rescuing BB-8 and making him her \u201canimal sidekick.\u201d Yet in addition to metaphorically singing into a wishing well, Rey also honed an impressive collection of scavenger survival skills, like engineering, piloting, and using a staff as effectively as the lightsaber she\u2019ll later wield.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In other words she\u2019s both capable and guileless, and we don\u2019t really have a shared cultural touchstone for that kind of female action hero, unless it\u2019s in the context of a comedy like Charlie\u2019s Angels<\/a> or a \u201cborn sexy\u201d movie like The Fifth Element. More than her skillset, it\u2019s that unique characterization that makes Rey feel \u201coff\u201d to some people. If she had the same sarcastic, insubordinate personality as Black Widow<\/a> or Katniss Everdeen<\/a>, I doubt the Mary Sue accusations would exist. (No one gets mad at Princess Leia for being too competent.) That\u2019s probably also why so many of Rey\u2019s most ardent fans are women who weren\u2019t longtime sci-fi lovers, but people who jumped into this new Star Wars trilogy because it had a female lead. Without that ingrained sense of what \u201cbadass\u201d action heroines are supposed to feel like, they could just enjoy Rey for who she is.<\/p>\n

It took me until writing this column to fully appreciate just how much naivete is an intentional part of Rey\u2019s characterization and not just the result of the screenwriters failing to make strong enough choices about her personality. Two moments really define Rey in The Force Awakens. The first is that, even after an exhausting day of scavenging has left her with barely enough for a single dinner, she still playfully throws on an old starfighter helmet while she eats. Even the toughest day on Jakku can\u2019t rob Rey of her whimsy. (As Cinderella puts it, \u201cthey can\u2019t order me to stop dreaming.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second is when she\u2019s finally headed towards her first-ever alien planet and earnestly marvels, \u201cI didn\u2019t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy.\u201d Though Rey takes a second to warm up to strangers, she\u2019s inherently open to the wonders of the universe most people take for granted. That\u2019s a pretty clear explanation as to why she\u2019s able to access the Force so easily. Back in A New Hope, Luke is so distracted by his yearning for glory and adventure that he has to be taught to \u201cstretch out with his feelings.\u201d Rey is nothing but feelings. Her yearning isn\u2019t for adventure, it\u2019s for connection, which seems to be what the Force is looking for. (In that way, her closest comparison is young Anakin in The Phantom Menace<\/a>, who was also a bit of a Jedi savant thanks to his openheartedness.)<\/p>\n

Some people make the mistake of assuming that, because The Force Awakens looks and feels so much like A New Hope, director\/co-writer J.J. Abrams is trying to recreate that movie\u2019s character arcs too. But, to his credit, he does a lot of remixing with his central trio. Where Luke refuses and then answers the call within 25 minutes of his first appearance, only to spend the rest of his debut movie slowly growing his skillset, Rey\u2019s journey is much more internal. Her skills are largely formed by the time we meet her, but she spends almost the entirety of The Force Awakens refusing the call and trying to return to Jakku to wait for her family. She doesn\u2019t embrace her destiny until the final 15 minutes of the movie, when she claims the lightsaber that\u2019s been calling to her and accepts Maz Kanata\u2019s advice that, \u201cThe belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the sort of slow burn you can only pull off when you\u2019re confident you\u2019re getting two more installments to tell the full story of Star Wars\u2018 first central (non-animated) female Jedi. The best thing about Rian Johnson\u2019s The Last Jedi<\/a> is how it turns Rey\u2019s naivete into both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. All her childlike optimism about her family\u2019s return gets transferred into an equally childlike belief in the good vs. evil binaries of the Jedi\u2014that heroic Luke Skywalker can simply defeat the dastardly Kylo Ren in one fell swoop if she asks him to. When that doesn\u2019t work out the way she expects, she flips the script and decides Kylo is the troubled hero who will immediately turn good with just a little bit of empathy. She starts calling him \u201cBen\u201d like she knows him better than he knows himself, only to watch in disbelief as he kills Snoke not to help the Resistance, but because he wants Rey to rule the galaxy with him.<\/p>\n

Though Rey gets that much-demanded \u201ctraining\u201d in the second movie, her arc isn\u2019t really about learning to be a Jedi. Instead, it\u2019s about learning to temper her optimism with shades of gray; to accept that Luke isn\u2019t a flawless mythic hero; that Kylo can be something in-between all-good and all-bad; and that her parents aren\u2019t important people who had some grand reason for abandoning her. The movie doesn\u2019t strip her of her earnestness\u2014to some degree she\u2019s right to have faith in both Skywalker men\u2014but it balances it out with a dose of realism. The Last Jedi is about Rey growing up, though Ridley never loses the buoyancy of her performance; the \u201cfiery spit of hope\u201d of a true Jedi.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, of the many, many reasons the \u201csomehow Palpatine returned\u201d twist of The Rise Of Skywalker<\/a> falls flat, the biggest is that Rey is such a fundamentally good person, there\u2019s no real threat of her turning evil just because the grandfather she never knew was a dictator. She has none of the whiny, tortured angst that made that a more interesting question for Luke in The Empire Strikes Back<\/a> and Return Of The Jedi<\/a>. Like most things about Rise Of Skywalker, it feels like the movie is resolving a very different character arc than the one that was established across the first two films. Rey\u2019s story has been about discovering that a complicated but loving found family can be just as meaningful as the fairy-tale origin story she once dreamed up for herself. Making her a lost Empress who draws her strength from all the past Jedi is thoroughly detached from what\u2019s come before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rise Of Skywalker also emphasizes just how male-centric the sequel trilogy is. Like a lot of modern genre stories<\/a>, the Star Wars sequels take the lazy route of introducing a lot of women but then treating them as the sole \u201cstrong female character\u201d of individual storylines. Laura Dern\u2019s Vice-Admiral Holdo enters the picture after Leia winds up in a coma. Naomi Ackie\u2019s Jannah is introduced after Abrams bowed to racist, sexist backlash and all but wrote Kelly Marie Tran\u2019s Rose Tico out of the final film. Keri Russell\u2019s Zorii Bliss technically exchanges a few words with Rey, but otherwise exists to flesh out Poe\u2019s backstory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though Rey gets to have lived-in dynamics with Finn, Poe, Han, Luke, and most notably Kylo, the only female character she has a meaningful relationship with is Leia\u2014and there\u2019s only a single conversation between them that isn\u2019t jerry-rigged from old footage. Even before that, however, Leia plays a bizarrely passive role in the series given that she\u2019s the general of a resistance against her own son who turned evil because of her family blood. As ever, Star Wars would prefer to imagine children simply spring wholesale from their fathers and uncles.<\/p>\n

By the end, the sequel trilogy feels as much like a Kylo story as a Rey one. (He gets big emotional climaxes in all three films in a way Darth Vader never did.) Still, to Rise Of Skywalker\u2018s credit, Rey at least gets to hold onto her defining earnestness rather than succumbing to the same fate as Leia and Padm\u00e9, who all but lost their personalities in the final installment of their respective trilogies. Ridley\u2019s sincere, emotive performance gives Rey a consistency that\u2019s not entirely there on the page. But it\u2019s a waste not to use that openness to do something new with the franchise\u2019s classic battle of good and evil. Colin Trevorrow\u2019s unmade Duel Of The Fates script<\/a> had her reject the dogmatic approach of the Jedi and bring balance to the Force by embracing both the light and the dark. That\u2019s a little more in line with the arc the first two films set up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Disney claims it\u2019s bringing Rey back<\/a> to explore more of her story in a spin-off directed by Ms. Marvel\u2018s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who would become the first woman and first person of color to helm a Star Wars film. Until that happens (if it actually does), Rey\u2019s action heroine legacy is strange. She\u2019s not a trailblazer like Princess Leia, yet she did her fair share of trope subversions. While Leia proved sci-fi heroines don\u2019t need to be damsels in distress, Rey suggests there\u2019s more to female power than just defiance. Perhaps that\u2019s the balance she brings to the Force.<\/p>\n

Next time: Before a new Girl Of Steel hits the big screen this summer, let\u2019s revisit her cinematic debut in 1984\u2019s Supergirl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-693243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}