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The Lucasfilm Story Group has literally billions of dollars riding of decisions they make.

Probably the two story elements fans have been eagerly speculating on since The Force Awakens have been

Who are Rey's parents?

and

Who is Snoke?

Yet we have a pattern in The Last Jedi that these questions

were not addressed or were resolved with a potentially surprising non-answer,

specifically,

Nothing about who Snoke is or his origin, and that Rey's parents are "nobodies".

Clearly a lot of thought went into this by the key members of the Lucasfilm Story Group, Rian Johnson and probably J.J. Abrams.

I could speculate that some of the thinking may have been that:

It was too difficult to resolve these elements differently without creating too many plot holes in previous material. Or that it was deemed too risky that any more specific resolutions (Darth Plagueis, Mace Windu, Jar Jar Binks; Luke, Obi Wan, Palpatine) would alienate too many fans and create too much backlash.

What commentary do we have from the key story developers about their choices on these elements ?

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ThePopMachine
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    For the Rey question, we do only have Ben's word for it. So there is still some wiggle room for them to come up with something else. – Matt Burland Dec 18 '17 at 16:44
  • @MattBurland: Yes, true, and of course the backstory Snoke can be supplied later. Neither of those change that whatever they decided was clearly a very deliberate decision and that's what I'm interested in. – ThePopMachine Dec 18 '17 at 17:04
  • It is not true that we only have a story character's word. See https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/176362/ . – JdeBP Dec 19 '17 at 16:37
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    Also, although Rey's lineage was actually hyped up in TFA, Snoke's backstory was only hyped up by fans. Also keep in mind we didn't get Papatine's backstory until, like, 30 years after he first appeared. – Allball103 Dec 19 '17 at 18:19
  • I'm not sure what the downvotes are for. Regardless of whether you think Rey's lineage is settled or not, the fact is that it was a careful choice and I'm interested if we know what considerations went in. – ThePopMachine Dec 19 '17 at 18:23
  • See Sam Hughe's essay about that topic https://qntm.org/mystery – b_jonas Dec 26 '17 at 21:58

1 Answers1

7

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Writer / Director Rian Johnson stated:

Regarding

Snoke: "When I was working on the character of Kylo, I came to a place where I thought the most interesting thing would be to knock the shaky foundation out from under him at the beginning of this movie. By the end of this film, he’s gone from being a wannabe Vader to someone who is standing on his own feet as a complex villain taking the reins."

He went on to add, "That made me realize the most interesting thing would be to eliminate that dynamic between the ‘emperor’ and pupil, so that all bets are off going into the next one."

Regarding

Rey's parents:

For me, in that moment, Kylo believes it’s the truth. I don’t think he’s purely playing chess. I think that’s what he saw when they touched fingers and that’s what he believes. And when he tells her that in that moment, she believes it."

He also explained why he thought it was more interesting to make Rey nobody than to make her a legacy character's descendant. Johnson said,

"The hardest thing for her is to hear she’s not going to get that easy answer. Not only that, but Kylo is going to use the fact that you don’t get that answer to try and weaken you so you have to lean on him. You’re going to have to find the strength to stand on your own two feet and define yourself in this story."

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