Now, 2 years of waiting and wondering and 9 viewings of The Force Awakens later, we finally have answers.
And I would like to go on record and say...that I was not correct.
But I wasn't entirely wrong either.
Warning: Major Spoilers Ahead
Still with me?
Ok, here we go....
Rey's Parentage: Revealed
In the midst of all the battles and the struggle of Dark and Light and overall wonderfulness, The Last Jedi makes several pointed attempts to answers the age-old (well, 2-year-old) question about Rey's parents. Who were they? Where have they gone?
When Rey is sucked into the Dark Side cave and sees the mirror thingy, first thing she asks to see are her parents.
And she almost sees her parents.
Almost.
But, not quite.
At that point, I was beginning to think we'd be left hanging with more theories and mind-dominating obsession until Episode 9...if we ever truly found out the answers we so earnestly hoped for at all.
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| Whoever made this image, you are amazing! |
And then, Kylo Ren and Rey make their ying-yang Dark-Side/Light Side connection thing, and bits of them are revealed to each other.
Rey sees Ren's future and is therefore convinced he will turn to the Light if she helps him.
Ren, in turn, sees Rey's parents.
And also her future, which makes him think he can convert her to the Dark Side.
And thus continues their complicated relationship.
The movie then proceeds to spend an exuberant amount of time going back and forth. At first it sounds like Ren is going to tell us, then he insists that Rey already knows the truth, and we begin to think they're going to leave us high and dry forever when Rey finally says what she apparently knew the whole time but has to now actually say out loud for the benefit of the billions of people worldwide who are literally on the edges of their seats:
"They were Nobody."
Rey Nobody
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| This is still my favorite TFA pic! |
Finally.
Two years of waiting and wondering and distracting ourselves by watching IT multiple times (another topic for another blog post), we finally have answers.
Maybe not the answers we were hoping for, but we have them nonetheless.
Kylo Ren elaborates for our benefit, because Rey probably already knows the rest of it as well:
Her parents were some random junk traders who sold their five-year-old daughter to an overweight, greedy, manipulative, smelly creature on a barren wasteland planet that hardly anyone knew about.
Finn, all those many 2 years ago, already asked, "Why does everyone want to go back to Jakku?"
The point is that nobody does want to go back to Jakku. Especially the Nobody family, who have (within the last 15 years) reduced the size of their brood from 3 to 2 while also coming into a certain amount of money they fully intend to spend on alcohol.
They got what they came for.
They have no reason to go back.
It is at this point that I would like to point out that I was right about Rey being sold to Unkar Plutt.
In my post Who [The Heck] is Rey?, I state several times that I suspected Rey had been sold rather than left there for her own protection. Episode 7 and it's companion book aren't explicit on this matter, but there are little hints throughout that indicate as much.
I did not, however, think it was her parents who sold her.
I didn't think they were capable of such evil, operating under the theory that they loved their little child and had every intention of going back for her.
"What kind of loving parents leave their 5-year-old with a guy like Plutt on a planet like Jakku?" I asked.
The Answer: They weren't loving parents.
They sold their own daughter for drinking money.
Which makes you wonder...what the first five years of Rey's life were like?
We can speculate about this all day, but we will never fully know because Rey is a fictional character and therefore we are only told what we need to know about her life in order for the story to move forward. If, one day, it becomes necessary for Rey to talk about those blocked memories of her early youth in order to move the story forward, we will find out.
And, yes, I do think those memories were blocked, not by her parents or a Jedi Master who conveniently set up shop a few towns over on the same planet. Rey blocked them herself because they were too painful for her little five-year-old self to reconcile.
Maz points out in TFA, "I see in your eyes. You already know the truth. Whoever you're waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back."
Rey already knew they weren't coming back because she already knew who they were and why they left her there. She just suppressed the memory of it in favor of the more hopeful, "Oh yeah, they'll totally come back for me!" attitude.
Kylo Ren says as much. You know. You just suppressed it.
And she all but gives it away herself earlier in the movie, during one of their initial Force Mind Link Things.
In confronting Kylo Ren about Han Solo's death, she blurts out, "You had a father who gave a d--n about you!" (Or "You had a father! He gave a d--n about you!" It's hard to tell.) The point is that I don't think she's just angry about Han being dead, I think she's also angry about the fact that Han still clearly loved Ben and Ben (who is now Kylo Ren) just totally drove a light saber through him. In comparison, Rey's own father literally dumped her on a planet that is pretty much nowhere. He clearly didn't give a darn about her, so watching Ben/Kylo Ren kill his own father who actually loved him just exacerbated her swirl of post-Han's-murder emotions.
She doesn't just hate Kylo Ren for killing off the only father figure she can remember ("You think Han Solo is the father you never had," Kylo Ren says while Forcefully reading Rey's mind in TFA). She hates him for not appreciating or taking for granted the father Ben/Kylo Ren clearly did have. I would even go so far as to speculate that she hates Kylo Ren for hating his father enough to kill him.
Anyway, the fact that she says this line at all kinda implies that, as Kylo Ren points out later, she does already know the truth.
Rey has known this whole time that her parents didn't and probably still don't give a darn about her. She knows her parents sold to Plutt, though maybe her young mind wasn't able to process exactly why at the time. She knows they're not coming back for her.
Is it possible that Kylo Ren is lying to her? This is Kylo Ren we're talking about, so it is possible. But seeing as this information was gleaned from a Force Mind Link Thing AND since Rey doesn't try to refute it, I kinda doubt it.
A Peek Into The Lives of The Nobodys
I'm going out on a limp here, and there is absolutely no evidence in the written and visual Star Wars materials we have thus far, but I think I can speculate a little about what Rey's life was like leading up to the unfortunate events that led to her life on Jakku.
Best case scenario, her parents were mildly neglectful drunks cruising the galaxy with their five-year-old.
Best case scenario, they went through all of the motions of being good parents, but when they got stranded on Jakku with a huge debt and no money and probably a hankering for some whiskey, the only solution they saw was to sell their daughter to a fat disgusting alien creature dude.
They settle their debt, get some extra cash to boot, and try not to think about how they just sold their five year old on that planet. They try not to think about what her life might look like because of what they did.
Maybe they did actually think about going back for her. One day. When they had enough money. But whiskey is just so delicious.
Worst case scenario, they weren't nice people at all. Having a kid running around totally foils their plans to hop across the galaxy selling junk and getting drunk and whatnot. She's an annoyance, and they're actually happy to get rid of her. Maybe they even went to Jakku for the purpose of getting rid of her.
Sell her off to an uncertain future, get some cash, kill two birds with one stone.
The "your parents gave a d--n about you" line she gives Kylo Ren in the movie seems to indicate, to me anyway, that the truth is somewhere in between.
They maybe weren't horrible parents but they obviously didn't care enough about her to stop them from selling her off when the opportunity presented itself.
Maybe if they'd known how special their daughter was, they wouldn't have sold her? Or maybe they did know and they just didn't care.
But since Rey doesn't really ever sit down and divulge large chunks of detail about her early life, we may never know. And maybe we don't need to know.
(I still want to know.)
The fact that Rey seems to have repressed her memories about her parents selling her may also mean that she's also blocked out other bad childhood memories before that. She doesn't remember them being drunk neglectful junk traders because she doesn't want to.
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| "I see it. I see the island." - Kylo Ren, TFA |
"At night, desperate to sleep, you imagine an ocean," Kylo Ren gleans from her mind in TFA. Maybe the reason she can't sleep is because the memories of her parents, their possible degrees of neglect culminating in selling her off to Plutt keeps playing over and over in her mind, in her dreams, and she lies awake at night with tears in her eyes wondering if things would have been different if she'd tried harder to be a better child. Too young and confused and hurting to realize that nothing that happened to her was in any way her fault, she tries really hard to think about something else, anything more pleasant.
And what would be more pleasant right now than a big beautiful ocean with a pointy green island and a weird-looking tree that happens to contain some ancient Jedi texts?
And since she doesn't yet know about her Force powers, she doesn't realize that the Force is providing these images for her, perhaps as a way to give her hope.
Would I Like Rey to Find Her Parents Again?
Heck, yes, I would!
I imagine maybe one day she might run into them in battle, at a familiar Cantina, or at the grocery store. And I imagine her shrieking at them with Jyn Erso-esque passion, "YOU DUMPED ME!"
*Force chokes them to death.*
*Effectively turns to the Dark Side by accident.*
Kylo Ren: Told you.
But, seriously, there is a part of me that wishes she could find them and show them who she is, what she is, if for no other reason than to make them feel guilty for selling their little daughter for drinking money.
"Hey, you guys totally dumped me. You sold me off like a commodity to that Plutt guy. But I rose above my circumstances and became one of the most powerful Jedi in the universe. Now, I would love to stay and chat, but I gotta go fight for the freedom of the galaxy. Buh-bye!"
All things considered, there is still a part of me that wants this to happen.
Some Final Closing Thoughts
I hear and read about a lot of people complaining about how Rey's nobody parentage doesn't make sense. They have to be somebody because there is no way for Rey to be that strong with the Force if it's not hereditary.
I would argue that the fact that Rey's Force powers aren't hereditary and that she does come from nothing and her parents are nobodys, that would encourage ordinary folks like you and me.
You see, we don't have to be somebody to be somebody, if that makes sense. Just like Rey doesn't have to be a Skywalker or a Solo or a Kenobi to be one of the most powerful Jedis in the galaxy.
We have Kylo Ren who is hereditarily Force sensitive, and Rey who is not. The Force isn't necessarily passed down, although it can be. It doesn't single out famous legendary family lines and create dynasties. It chooses, seemingly at random, those it wants -- whether they be the grandson of Anakin Skywalker or the lonely slave girl abandoned by her parents on Jakku.
Just like God doesn't exclusively call strong, powerful people to follow him and act on his behalf.
There was King Solomon who was hereditarily the king of Israel and who is still considered to be the wisest guy ever to have lived despite his many failings (and there were many).
But then there was King David. David was a shepherd, the youngest of 7 sons, and yet he became King of Israel (he's even got a few cities named after him). Joseph was not only one of the youngest of his 12 brothers, he was sold into slavery and spent time unjustly imprisoned before he became the 2nd most powerful guy in Egypt and eventually saved his own family from starvation. Jesus, himself, didn't choose to be born into a rich family when he came to Earth. Instead, he was born to the fiancee of a poor carpenter who had to bunk down in a stable in a foreign town because there was no room for them in the inn during a mandatory census.
Along this same line, another interesting thing is the connection between Rey, Anakin, and the little slave boy at the end of the movie.
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| Remember me? |
Remember him?
At the very, very end of TJL, this kid walks outside, glances around, then reaches for a nearby broomstick AND IT COMES TO HIM.
A lot of people miss this the first time, but it's there. Next time you watch the movie, keep your eyes peeled for it.
I have read elsewhere that his name is Temiri Blagg, so I hope we see more of him in subsequent Star Wars movies. However, this is also the franchise that has a thing about naming random characters and then expecting you to somehow know all those secret names, so who knows. I really do hope we get to see little Temiri again, though.
If you think about it, these three characters -- Rey, Anakin, and the little boy -- have a lot in common.
All three of them come from nothing.
Anakin and the little boy are (or were) slaves, and Rey was technically a slave as implied by the fact that she was sold to Unkar Plutt.
Both Rey and Anikin came from miserable desert wastelands. Luke did as well, though I will argue that Luke had it pretty good compared to his father and Rey. Luke wasn't a slave either, so that's where that comparison ends.
Anakin doesn't have a father, and neither Rey nor the little boy have any parents -- Rey for the reasons mentioned in this blog post and the little boy for reasons unknown. Maybe he, too, was sold by his parents for drinking money?
The point of this, I think, is that hope comes from the most unlikely places -- the very "least of these" rise to become the greatest, not because of their circumstances, but in spite of them.
That, I think, is what we are meant to take away with us when we leave the theatre.
But, since TLJ's novelization isn't due for release until March (Why, oh cruel writers and publishers? Why???), it is entirely possible that there is subsequent information on this topic that we don't yet know about. Anything is possible.
Thanks for reading and may the Force be with you!
