Sunday 31 January 2016

Who is Rey?

In this blog post I hope to explore a number of the questions that came up in the film “The Force Awakens.”

Some of the most important questions that came about in the film are:

Who is Rey?

Why is Leia not a Jedi?

How and why did Ben Solo fall to the dark side?

Why is Luke Skywalker really hiding?

To explore these questions we have to go back to the beginning or to the end of the first trilogy ‘The Return of the Jedi’. At the end of that film Darth Vader had turned to the light side and the Emperor was destroyed. We would have assumed that the Empire was also destroyed or broken without a leader. ‘The Force Awakens’ takes place 30 years after ‘The Return of the Jedi’, and it is clear that the character Ben Solo/Kylo Ren is about 29 years old according to the novels and of the age of the actor.

So we can assume from this that Princess Leia immediately got pregnant almost straight after ‘The Return of the Jedi’. She may know the Jedi are not allowed to marry or to have children, because it is believed the emotional connections may lead down the dark side of the force.
It is something that was explored in depth with the fall of Anakin to Darth Vader, when he let his emotions run riot due to the death of his mother and then later on when he had the force visions of the death of his two children. Maybe this answers our first question why is Leia not a Jedi? Possibly because she became pregnant and decided to have the baby. She was therefore persuaded by Luke not to follow the path of the Jedi. She probably agreed to this as didn’t want to fall down the same path as her father. She did not want to gain great Jedi abilities and slip to the dark side through fear or worry of protecting her own children.

So Luke Skywalker goes off to set up a Jedi Academy and probably finds a number of force sensitive people to join. At some point Ben Solo would have joined. As shown in previous films, when a force sensitive is discovered they are taken from their parents at a young age and put into training. Ben would have shown force sensitive traits at a very early age and probably been taken from Leia and Han and given to Luke to be trained.
He would know that Luke Skywalker is his uncle. Maybe the Jedi Academy was on the same place that they all live together, so he remained with his mother and father. Or maybe he was separated from them.

Ben Solo would have been a very powerful Jedi and probably shown the most promise of all the other students at the Academy. He also knows Luke Skywalker, the master of the Jedi, is his uncle. And that his grandfather Darth Vader was the chosen one. It’s fair to assume that he would have considered himself very important and the heir to the Skywalker crown. He would have probably been the most talented student, picking up the Jedi skills more quickly than anybody else. He would have excelled at all the training and he would have been the number one student and given a lot of attention by his uncle Luke Skywalker.

Let’s move on to Luke Skywalker. Luke is the master of the academy and would have come into contact with a number of people. It is possible that he may have met a female Jedi during this training. He may of fallen in love and had a child. Jedi are not allowed to have children, and he could not keep that child around him. He would have worried it would lead him to the dark side, as it had his father. Also other people would have been upset to know that he had a child and broken his Jedi code, including his sister, as he had insisted previously not train as a Jedi and had to give up her son to him.

I would assume Luke’s lover went away or she would have agreed to leave and have the child elsewhere. This would save Luke Skywalker the embarrassment and prevent a rift within the Jedi Academy and the resistance. However, a child of Luke Skywalker and another Jedi was going to be powerful in the force and after a few years her powers manifested. Other people would have noticed that she was a force sensitive. The dark side were looking for other Jedi, may be looking to turn them over to the dark side or looking to destroy them. It could be that this woman then returned to the Jedi Academy with her daughter and asked Luke to protect her. At this point no one would have known it was Luke Skywalker’s daughter, apart from Luke and her mother. It was safer to bring a potentially powerful force user to the light side, than to leave them to be killed or turned into a powerful dark weapon.

Luke Skywalker’s daughter would have excelled at the training, possibly better than Ben Solo had done. If we look at the time line to say she arrived when she was five years old and Ben Solo would have been 15 years old. At 15 years old he would have been full of teenage angst and hormones, and considered himself the best in the Academy. If a  young girl turns up at the age of five and starts picking things up very quickly, it would be noticed that she is doing better than Ben did at a similar age. Therefore better than Ben when fully trained. This may push Ben to feel threatened or embarrassed or concerned that what he considers his rightful role as the new master of the Jedi to be under threat from this unknown female. This may start Ben on his slide to the dark side. As the daughter of Princess Leia and the grandson of Darth Vader, he feels it is his right to be the best student at the academy and one day the Jedi master like Luke.
This is how I think his slide to the dark side begins. But what we must consider is how does his dark side slide continue. How does supreme Chancellor Snoke find him, talk to him and introduce the dark side? Can only surmise that somehow Snoke sneaks into the Jedi Academy in disguise, or had someone else working there for him. As Ben’s was nose put out of place by the strength of the new student, they slowly groom him to join their side. As time goes on the young female gets better and better and continues to improve over the next five years until she is 10 years old and Ben becomes 20.
In the film “The Force Awakens”, it makes the point that the Jedi Academy was destroyed 10 years ago and then Luke Skywalker went into hiding, so we can assume that when the Luke’s daughter reaches 10 and Ben was aged 20, was the point of the academy’s fall. The dark side Jedi destroy the Academy and join Chancellor Snoke and the First Order.
Obviously with this young female being Luke Skywalker’s daughter, he protects her, and I believe takes her to the ocean planet you find him on at the end of the force awakens. Rey mentions in one of the scenes that her lasting memory of home is a planet full of oceans. Yes, you guessed it, I believe Rey is Luke Skywalker’s daughter.

I believe Luke used a memory mind wipe on Rey in order to protect her. This technique was seen in the Knights of the old Republic with Revan. The Jedi Council use it to wipe his memory but through contact with the force the powers came back again. We’ve already seen that they are using much of the expanded universe to create a rich new set of films. They are borrowing from the Knights of the old Republic and the story of Revan. The outfit Kylo Ren wears is very similar to Revan’s. Rey’s memory has been wiped but through contact with the force, in respect of Luke Skywalker’s light sabre and the mind interrogation from Klyo,  the force has awakened in her. She doesn’t remember how she was trained, she just knows how to use the force. This is very similar to the Darth Revan character in the Knights of the Old Republic prior to him remembering that he was once a Jedi.
Therefore we could see a similar scene in the second film when Luke Skywalker completely repairs her memory, or she remembers everything. I would imagine this is going to be very early on in the film and that we will have a series of flashbacks explaining exactly who she is and how she ended up on the desert planet.

Also during the film when Klyo Ren heard it was a girl that escaped or a girl that did the various actions that could be associated to a force user, he seems to react in a particular way. That reaction is not because it is a female, but as he knows of a girl that could be of a danger to him. Maybe he had a vision of a girl that will destroy him or beat him.

So I’ve answered the question of why Leia is not a Jedi, because she had a child and it would have been against the Jedi rules.

I’ve answered the question who is Rey. I believe her to be Luke Skywalker’s daughter.

I explained why I believe that Ben Solo falls to the dark side of the force. I believe that was due to jealousy of Rey’s ability and her being more powerful in the force than him and more likely to take the mantle of the master Jedi. He may have even discovered she was actually Luke Skywalker’s daughter and therefore been annoyed by the fact that he was training her directly, when he cannot be with his own family. This is may be why he’s so disappointed that his father hadn’t fought harder for him. Maybe he is disappointed in Han Solo because he’s not a Jedi.

The final question was why is Luke Skywalker really in hiding. I think it is because the destruction of the Academy. But he is also hiding because he’s very embarrassed about the fact that he had a secret daughter and then trained her at the Academy. Maybe he spent too much time with her at the expense of the other students. I think he knows the reason Ben Solo went to the dark side, because of the jealousy that Luke was training his own daughter or favoured a student. A student that would be stronger than him one day and the Master Jedi of the new order. If only both his parent were Jedi’s. Ben is annoyed at Luke for being such a hypocrite.  

I think Luke blames himself through his actions of having a child and then training her as part the Jedi order, when Ben wasn’t allowed to be with his family. Luke probably kept Rey a secret from Leia and Han Solo was well. With Ben Solo being a powerful Jedi, he managed to detect the feelings between Luke to Rey and worked out the real relationship between them. Luke is really hiding as he feels that he is responsible, not with the lack of proper training and guidance, but from his hypocritical actions as the Jedi master.

However, this all could be wrong, we have to wait until the next film to find out the truth. I hope you enjoyed reading my fan theory.