REY

The first true female protagonist in the Star Wars universe is anything but boring

SHE’S STRONG. SHE’S capable. She’s resilient. She learns the Force too easily, too quickly. She’s too much of a natural. She defies the order of things. These are all, apparently, Officially Bad Things About Rey. Or at least, things that Might Make Rey A Bit Boring.

Yes, she’s a good pilot. Yes, she can fix stuff. Yes, she is most possibly the most powerful user of the Force there ever was, ever has been, without an Obi-wan (though let’s not forget that in A New Hope Luke goes from first touching a lightsaber to using the Force within the span of about two-and-ahalf hours). The key to Rey, though, lies in her humanity, the things that give her her character, her texture.

She’s an orphan: she’s had no-one to rely on, ever, other than herself. She’s had to rely on her wits and her smarts. Her intuition. Her skills as a scavenger in the junkyard of Jakku. The skills that saw her survive.

Emotionally, she’s, well, human. She struggles with abandonment, with finding her place in the world; finding her people. In her dynamic with Kylo Ren we see the battle within her between light and darkness; the deepest, blackest parts of herself and that which she knows, instinctively, to be right. It’s a humanity that’s only reinforced when her parentage is so casually discarded in The Last Jedi. We feel her guttural pain when Ren reveals her parents were “filthy junk traders who sold you off for drinking money”.

How human, how normal. She’s like us. Our face, our voice, our flesh in the Star Wars universe. Her history is hers and hers alone and her future