answered:
- Here’s the one thing you need to remember about Rey: she grew up alone and starving, lonely and unloved, desperate for companionship, hungry for family. She remembers catching sight of her reflection at eight or so: a collection of bones and skin with scabs at the corner of her mouth and dust clogging her hair and bruises on her hands and split-open red knuckles from beating up a thief who tried to make off with her haul (no haul, no food; you die if you don’t eat. She knows this better than anything, she’s seen it happen, she knows what it is to starve
- Anyway: this is a girl who never had a childhood and the instant she meets a child, an actual honest-to-Force child, with big dark eyes and soft skin and chubby cheeks (why does she want to pinch them? is this a normal reaction) she is overcome by a surge of feral, ferocious protectiveness. She wasn’t protected as a child, not ever, and now she’s damned if she’s ever going to let another little one end up with red knuckles and skin stretched hard over the angles of their ribs.
- She says to Leia: I was hurt when I was little, left on my own, left – and the word abandoned stutters against her teeth. And I don’t ever want anyone to suffer like that, not ever and Leia thinks that once there was a boy who felt unloved and alone and drew the absolute opposite conclusion (I am suffering; thus, everyone else must also suffer)
- And, eventually, she learns of the tragic tale of Anakin Skywalker, he who became Darth Vader, and she feels pity for him, for the Force is a cruel mother, and her favour comes with a steep price. And Rey knows what it is to feel the pulse of the universe in your bones. She knows what it is to be so full of power you choke on it, she knows how addictive it is to see injustice and think if I ruled this place, I would be better.
- She knows, that’s the point. And she pities him, and she understands, and then she has a spare evening and plunges into the data-records of the Old Republic and she reads about the massacre at the temple.
- Little ones. Lonely ones. Little ones stolen from their families and given weapons to hold instead of hands, asking Master Skywalker there are too many of them and little ones who didn’t expect to be protected, little ones ready to fight, and did they have bruises on their knuckles as well? Rey understands that training is imperative, that children who are strong with the Force need guidance, but –
- They were children. In his care. He killed them.
- That’s the story, the whole story, and nothing before or after can justify the single evening in the temple. Did he hold his wife after, did he touch her pregnant belly, did he tell his twins he loved them?
- Luke tries to speak of redemption. Rey spits on the floor, because she’s an ill-bred desert girl who would die ten thousand deaths before lifting her lightsabre to an innocent. And good is not always nice, and she tells Luke to his face that his father was a monster and ever shall be. Little broken bodies, she says. Her eyes flare. The Force, around her, crackles with anger: the shining heat of the desert.
- That night, Luke dreams of his father. I’m sorry, he says. Your granddaughter hates you – but Anakin Skywalker smiles.
- Good, he says.