because something just reminded me of the scenes where Rey, as the audience pov, is supposed to be Appalled and Wrongfooted at Luke's survivalist routine, like milking a domestic animal and using a pole to vault over a ravine

when we first saw her rappelling through a fallen war machine scavenging scraps while wracked with hunger??

Luke's rural domestic life is a paradise in comparison. He has plants! Water! Fish! Weird puffins! Fire!

There should be no world in which he gives her that smug "lol you're so green and naive and I'm going to enjoy your discomfort" look over doing a common domestic chore humans have done for millennia and she doesn't give him a deadpan "....and?"

end of gripe I'm just so annoyed that RJ was so determined to shred TFA that he completely ignored Rey's foundational skills and experiences

it's as if Empire Strikes Back was about Yoda smugly beating Luke at speed-racing

like Rian lifted Luke's discomfort about Yoda's swamp life (a physically uncomfortable environment with heat and muck and tangled jungle and bad-tasting food) and copied it to Rey without adjusting for how Luke's living the hermit's dream basically

there aren't even any evil power-brokers hoarding resources in exchange for his labor!

I could accept a scenario where Luke tries to replicate in Rey the humbling experience he had with his own mentor, because this version of Luke might well do that,

and there might be something to be done with her survival experience having been in a different biome with different expectations of the environment, but expecting her to be all squicked and oh-no-I-might-break-a-nail in this situation just doesn't fit.

Luke's trying to drive home that he has nothing to do with anything outside the island anymore. She wants fighting lessons? He throws away the lightsaber. She wants advice? He's busy foraging and he LIKES it and wants her to KNOW that her quest is HILARIOUSLY POINTLESS.

She wants a mentor? He wants to teach her that she's so insignificant she can't even irritate him and should go away. But he's expecting her to react like a spoiled, comfortable middle-class citizen who wouldn't know what to do when faced with real want.

Maybe if he hadn't turned down his Force-sensitivity, he would have realized how alike they are.

And how her upbringing was, in several ways, a lot worse than his.

(ha I guess the gripe was not over but it is now)

Addendum: the more I think about it, the more I feel there's an argument to be made that Rian was handling Rey as an Audience Insert POV whose previously established characteristics were not there to inform her thoughts or actions but to be handwaved or recontextualized to make sure the story being told was entirely of his own making,

but it'd take a bunch of canon review so in this ted talk I won't. XD

AND ANOTHER THING
the whole back-and-forth about whether Rey did or didn't have chosen-one/BBEG legacy lineage was so stupid. The secret third thing should have been "yeah, we found out who your family is and they were regular people." Not "worthless nobodies." People. It's not a cruel disappointment and indictment to have a family tree of average folks.

(Whatever led to her being abandoned as a child was the cruel disappointment.)

People who are not galactically important ARE STILL PEOPLE (and there's a huge range between "so insignificant they had zero impact on any other person or thing" and "kings and kingmakers").

Kylo's contempt in dismissing whoever he thought was unimportant in Rey's lineage should have been the wrong thing that gets refuted, not "nonono it's OKAY though she was ACTUALLY speshul ALL ALONG so you don't have to be embarrassed about liking her!!"

If she had a last name the kingmakers around her had never heard of, than the first time they heard of it is her.

Give us a new name that is now a cool legacy name because of her.

This post brought to you by Why Didn't They Hire Me I Obviously Would Have Written It Better (In My Objectively Correct Opinion). XD

yeah honestly the story should have been that her parents were nobodies, just some randos, because that's... who basically everyone is, and it's not a good measure of worth

anyone i know on plurk could have done better than TRoS

her vision in TLJ made sense: from the perspective of her journey as a force sensitive, her heritage is irrelevant

she isn't bound up with an archnemesis who is closer to her than she realizes like with Luke's vision of Vader; she's very much self-made and has to take ownership of her own past and future and let go of the idea that some family history will define it for her

her vision doesn't even make sense with stuff from TRoS

also her skills and competence were all over the place in TFA, too, from what i remember

All of this. "The belonging you seek isn't behind you; it is ahead."

it's been so long I can't remember specifically, but yeah, wouldn't be surprised