But not today. Today I wanted to be happy because this week has been pretty long after coming back to work after the holidays. It's Thursday. It's only Thursday. I didn't really feel like complaining on a Thursday, so we're gonna switch it up and talk about some of the things that The Force Awakens did right for me.
The key words here are "for me". This movie is many things to many people, but I still stand by the fact that we all experience stories differently - even if we're all watching or reading the exact same thing. So these are my opinions and feelings, and I just want to share 'em as sort of a...well, another type of therapy. Just not the whiny "I was gonna go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters" or "It's worse. He's overly critcal. He never listens. He doesn't understand. It's not fair!" type of way.
So the warning. Again.
What TFA Did Right: Rey
Perhaps I'm somewhat obligated to start here considering I'm looking at this from a female perspective, but first let me say one thing - I never had a female hero that I looked up to when I was growing up. I was notorious for picking heroes like the Lone Ranger, Indiana Jones, John Wayne, and Luke Skywalker. Those were my main four - the characters I dressed up as, made up stories about and dreamed that I was them. What I'm trying to say here is that my brain didn't have a rule that said "you're a girl - you can't like boy things". There were simply no girl roles or characters that caught my attention the way these other characters did.
Fast forward a bit - life moves along, the world change a bit, everyone changes a bit, and of course, I grow up a bit, learn a few new things, and find really awesome female characters that I can like. All of a sudden I have new things like Harry Potter, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Firefly and Doctor Who. I have heroes and villains that I can go "YES! OMG I WANT TO MAKE THAT COSTUME" (Hermione, Bellatrix LeStrange, Asajj Ventress, Zoe Washburne, River Song...the list continues to grow).
Thus - as I enter my 33rd year of life on this planet - enters Rey of the Star Wars Universe.
Who is she? We don't know. Where did she come from? Is the accent is a clue? Is she a Skywalker? A Kenobi? A Solo? An unknown? Conceived of the Force and all the midichlorian crazies? WHO KNOWS! The beautiful thing in all of this confusion is that Rey is bad ass. That's just what it comes down to. She is a breath of fresh air in an age where we really need a character like this in the Star Wars Universe. After all, since the Expanded Universe was eradicated, you basically already killed off Mara Jade (again), so you had to give us someone we could respect.
There has been a lot of talk about Rey being a "Mary Sue" - a character who is perfect in everything, able to do no wrong, and admired by all. However, I don't subscribe to this theory because I see her failings and her downsides. She's flawed, by no means "perfect" in any manner. The biggest of these failings is her wanting to stick with what is familiar - even if it's not what's best for her. She keeps wanting to run back to Jakku to wait on her family who is coming to get her (or so she says). In her mind, she knows these people are not coming back (Maz Kanata tells her so in the movie), but she keeps wanting to turn tail and run because that's a lot easier than stepping up to the big scary plate that is the entire galaxy.
Oh. And lest we forget she turned off the wrong set of fuses when trying to save Han and Chewbacca aboard their smuggling freighter, releasing a set of rathtars upon everyone. Yeah. Oops?
That's what makes her likeable to me, though - what makes her relateable. She has a few things that she's really good at, and that's great. But then she has these insecurities and fears that keep threatening to drive her back, keeping her from everything that she could be and more. I get that. The world is scary, and even if we're good at things, we tell ourselves that it's not enough. That we can't be better than what we currently are. Rey basically embodies that, and she has to struggle throughout the entire movie to finally overcome it, branch out, and set out on her own personal adventure.
You can bet if I had seen this movie as a little girl, my mother would have been helping me put together a Rey costume for Halloween (and whenever else I felt like wearing it). I would have been running around trying to use the Jedi mind trick on people or wielding a little blue lightsaber or Force pushing stuffed animals off the edge of my bed. It would have been a thing. A huge thing.
That's why I think this is so amazing - that we have a character like this now. So little girls like me who didn't have a female hero they could relate to finally have someone they can relate to.
I can't wait to see where she's going next.
And that's not to say that I won't build my own Rey costume, run around using the Jedi mind trick on people, wielding a big blue lightsaber and Force pushing my cat off the edge of my bed.
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