it’s canon that the blaster han gave rey was adapted to fit a smaller grip – he chose it bc he knew it would be the easiest one for her to use. its obviously not chewies and its been on board since before he lost the falcon. han gave rey leia’s blaster.
so i was wondering where rey learned to understand binary (the language of astromech droids) because she’s a lone scavenger living on a desert planet and i was thinking that mabe sometime in the course of her star destroyer spelunking adventures, let’s say she’s 14 years old; she finds part of an astromech droid that’s still functioning just enough to talk. so she decide not to trade it to untar platt for portions and takes it home instead, cleans it up. hooks it up to an old comm screen so she can see what it’s saying while she’s still learning all its beeps and whistles. and then at the end of a long day, when she gets home, she scrubs the sand off her face, pours the sand out of her boots, and just sits and talks to her barely-functioning astromech droid, whose knowledge is thirty years old: coruscant, the seat of the empire (what empire?) updates on the construction of the death star. bounty notices for han solo, smuggler. the imperial senate, disbanded (but what about the new senate?)
the hot, dry air of jakku, making mirages of old memories just outside the shell of her AT-AT. the desert so quiet that you can hear sand sliding down the dunes, in soft silky layers. rey, scraping crumbs off her plate with her fingertips, pressing her droid with more questions. what’s naboo? what’s a forest? how big is a forest? what’s a tree? how many trees are there? (no one else tells her about these things. no one else talks to her.) the droids go everywhere, she realizes. they see everything and keep everything, scavengers of memory and information, of events and people and ideas. she learns binary until she gets good enough to detach the comm screen and just listen; during the day she quietly practices binary to herself, whistling each beep and tone as she hikes the dunes to the star destroyers, her calves aching. when she gets home, the droid greets her with a happy beep. for a few months, it feels nice, strange, hopeful. it feels odd to have someone waiting for her. refreshing, almost.
and then one day rey comes home and the astromech droid doesn’t beep, no whistle of greeting. the light in its glassy round eye is dark. the fuel cells are dead. her heart sinks. she searches the star destroyer endlessly for another working fuel cell, tries to trade for them at nima outpost, but to no avail: the model is too old, any fuel cells that could work are all being used for other things. that night she wears her x-wing helmet and sniffs, watching the stars, wrestling with hope and despair in equal measure; in the morning she drags the droid to untar platt and trades its parts for twelve portions. the first portion is bitter and tasteless, more so than usual, but it’s alright, rey thinks. her friend even fed her.
and now she talks to all the astromech droids that pass through nima outpost. they don’t mind talking to her. they’re happy to tell her how hyperdrives work, what a compressor does, how to fix an acceleration compensator. and every time she hopes that maybe, the droid will end up on a distant planet somewhere else, and it’ll mention a girl on jakku, a girl who polished its casing and oiled its hinges, a girl who’s been waiting for a long time, and someone will look up with a twinge of recognition and realizeit’s time to go back. it’s time for her to come home… it never happens. but rey tries anyway, because the droids go everywhere, see everything, meet everyone… she stays, and waits.
There’s something infinitely wrong when society watches a movie about mysterious forces and light swords set in outer space and they take away that a girl displaying technical/mechanical knowledge is “too much” and “unrealistic.”
I’ve been seeing a disturbing amount of articles, posts, and comments saying that Rey is “unrealistic” for knowing tech/mechanics. One review, which I’m still really hoping was a joke, implied that Disney probably had a female STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) agenda or group sponser them because there really wasn’t another reason why Rey would have STEM-like skills. What’s even more upsetting is the fact that, while I’ve seen people rush to defend her force ability and fighting skills, I’ve seen no one defend her STEM-skills.
If Rey spent years scavenging material and sewing clothes, you’d expect her to be proficient in that. You probably wouldn’t even doubt anything she did with those skills. So why doubt her STEM knowledge? The comments saying that Rey’s technology and mechanic skills “come out of nowhere” aren’t exactly true. Rey has been on Jakku for about fourteen years, where she likely spent most of that time finding tech and working with machines, learning what each device did and what parts were valuable, finding and fixing things up for payment. Are you telling me that in her years and years of work experience, you really think she retained absolutely nothing? Why is it that the thought of a girl who knows tech and mechanics is able to make some so uncomfortable? In The Phantom Menace, Anakin was about half Rey’s age and a skilled pilot who was building C-3PO and, curiously enough, I’ve never seen a comment doubting his skills. So why are Rey’s skills so wrong? I agree that the writing/exposition didn’t overly explore or explain all of Rey’s skills, and I understand that the audience wasn’t shown much detail, but in a universe where there’s planet-blasting bases and music-making aliens, saying that
Rey being able to have tech and mechanic skills is “unrealistic" is downright insulting.
All of this. To add –
Not that we should need ‘proof’ to defend Rey’s proficiency in tech and language skills, but the cute little book “Rey’s Survival Guide” is perfect for it. In it she details how she spends her time studying everything about the ships she scavenges in. She keeps detailed notes and schematics. She pulls things apart, puts them back together, she learns how every part works, and what it’s purpose and value is – she has to, otherwise she won’t know what parts are best to trade for rations. She built that speeder from scratch and booby-trapped it so that no one can steal it (and calls it her baby!). She works hard at learning everything she can – her knowledge certainly didn’t “come out of nowhere”.
She lives INSIDE AN AT-AT
That is just such a great bit of characterization, she is so into technology she lives INSIDE a huge derelict machine and goes home and jams a republic pilot’s helmet on her head!
Tumblr: No she isn’t! There is a perfectly logical explanation as to why she mastered everything she touched perfectly on the first try.
Star Wars fans: ….how then?
Tumblr: She used the Force.
Star Wars fans:
that is literally how the force works if you can use it have you never seen a star wars movie before or
anakin never finished a race, then wins one first time out
anakin never flew a starship before and manages to do what the other pilots couldn’t: blow up a droid control ship
let’s not forget luke
luke never used a lightsaber or piloted an x-wing before, then the second he uses the force, bam, perfect first time out
lmao look at this person tryin’ to call rey a mary sue like it’s 2004
[ Image in the OP is Han saying “That’s not how the force works!” in The Force Awakens; images in reply are of the parts of previous movies being discussed. ]
That and like. She has better reasons for knowing this stuff than the above dudes do.
Like, of COURSE she knows all about mechanics- she’s been scavenging starships for parts most of her life, so knowing what’s what and how it works is a crucial life skill.
When she handles a lightsaber, she’s very obviously using it like she would a staff (and spends most of the fight running away from Kylo anyway). You know, like the staff she carries with her all the time for self-defense in the desert hellhole she grew up in.
Everything we see her do with the Force is stuff Kylo did in front of her- he invades her mind, and she invades his and then mind-tricks a Stormtrooper (which still takes her three tries). He Force-holds her and later tries to Force-pull a lightsaber, and she Force-pulls it to her instead.
Practically everyone in the Star Wars universe is casually multilingual, and the only character in TFA who’s shown to be unable to understand at least one of Chewie or BB-8 is Finn, who was raised and brainwashed as a Stormtrooper (and neither the Empire nor the First Order seems to be much of an equal opportunity employer when it comes to species). Given her scavenger history, Rey having met astromech droids before isn’t just possible, but likely.
Her skills are better-established than either Luke’s or Anakin’s before they matter, but nope, she’s the Mary Sue, apparently.
For god’s sake, if you take Episode 1 at its word, Anakin was a goddamn virgin birth caused by the will of the force, and has an extensive prophecy about him being the Chosen One.
so one of the things i loved about star wars was how much rey could do.
fix busted spacecrafts? well she’s been scrounging for parts literally to feed herself so that’s not hard for her to work out.
fly? she’s clearly got some piloting in her, plus all the mechanical/electrical knowledge. it’s not just coming out of nowhere?
use a lightsaber like a kickass mofo? did you see her with that staff in the beginning? that’s a hell of a lot more of a transferrable fighting style than a blaster.
even resist kylo ren’s force shit? well she’s been on her own for a long time, surviving in a desert while waiting for years for her family to come back to her to no avail. that takes some hella strength of mind and will.
they gave her all these skills and power, but they were things that she had cultivated, not things she was graced with.
I know I keep raving about Before the Awakening, but seriously. Rey learned to fly from old flight training simulators, pretty much the only entertainment she had. By the time she left Jakku, there was nothing the simulators could throw at her that she couldn’t sail through. She started deliberately making the simulations as hard as possible because she was bored.
As far as the Force goes, people keep comparing her to Luke, but she had one major advantage that Luke didn’t have: she KNEW the stories. She knew what the Jedi had supposedly been capable of. After she managed to keep Kylo Ren out of her mind (which was, I think, her first experience using the Force), there was a whole world of things waiting for her to try. You can see it in her scene with the stormtrooper, her basically going “welp, I may as well TRY”, and it takes her a few tries to get it right.
Luke required more training because he didn’t even know what the Force was. (Also: he was WAY more immature and had less raw force of will.) Rey knew all the stories, she just needed to realize they were true and she had the potential.
