“It was her. Her face, her form. Cold and dark, wearing a Sith cloak, whole at last. Horrified, she watched as the dark mirror Rey swung her blades apart, forming a long, fiery quarterstaff. It was the very saber she’d tentatively begun designing in her mind. This couldn’t be real. It was a vision, nothing more. But the dark Rey’s steps echoed when they met the floor, and her lightstaff reeked of ozone. Her power was incredible, intoxicating.”
Via Tumblr
STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019) dir. JJ Abrams
Dark Side Rey was interesting to me. She had something to her that her light side counterpart didn’t. Even though we have seen Rey losing composure before and this happened mostly when she was fighting Kylo Ren, perhaps that isn’t what was really happening.
As one, Kylo Ren and Rey were the Dyad – a force as strong as life itself. This means the force is in balance; Kylo Ren representing the dark side and Rey the light. But what if it wasn’t Kylo Ren that Rey was fighting? Since they are actually considered two sides of the same “coin”, this would mean that Rey wasn’t really fighting Kylo Ren but fighting herself. And this was also true for Kylo Ren.
Imagine if Dark Side Rey had won? All those moments that Rey spent trying to resist Kylo Ren and the dark side could have been spent ruling the galaxy alongside Kylo Ren as the Supreme Leader. We would have had a very different movie and one that would be almost too appealing to deny. Almost but not quite.
As we all know, this is a Disney IP. Everything must end in rainbows and light. We can’t pretend we don’t know how this story goes, it’s the same for almost every single film we see. Test audiences just don’t respond well when a film ends on a downer. And that equates to money that won’t be made if the film is released.
And that’s annoying because sometimes you want things to go bad. Sometimes you want to see the other side, the dark side winning even for just a little while. How can everything be balanced when the powers that be are always pushing for the light side to win?
So for that reason alone, I was thrilled to actually see Dark Side Rey in The Rise of Skywalker – and so was most of the Star Wars fandom, at least it seemed like that on Tumblr.
As a character, I think Dark Side Rey should have had more time to evolve on the screen. She was just so much more interesting to me. Did you feel this way about Dark Side Rey in The Rise of Skywalker? Or did you think that Dark Side Rey was a waste of resources and time and shouldn’t have been featured at all?
Let me know in the comments!
Stay safe out there, keep creating and I’ll catch you in tomorrow’s post!
darksiderconfessions.blog 
Hi Julie, the idea of Rey turning to the dark side and a trilogy of films from a dark side point of view based on her, had been suggested but as you point out SW is a Disney franchise now and we probably wouldn’t have gotten such a project on screen. However it isn’t just Disney that don’t like dark or downbeat endings to films. Warner Brothers were famous for demanding a reshoot to the end of the film Lethal Weapon 2 in which Riggs (Gibson) dies at the LA docks during the attempt to capture Jos Ackland’s character Arjen Rudd. The audience of the test showing were in uproar that Gibson’s character was killed off and so a reshoot of sorts was done involving the ambulance driving away from the dockyards with a voiceover by Danny Glover and Gibson to show Rigg’s survived his injuries.
But back to Star Wars and Darkside Rey, you may like to take a look at this I posted around the time the trailer for TRoS came out and we saw that staff….
https://ftsabersite.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/rey-of-darkness-the-movie-clip-for-tyeth-animations/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I know that there are the powers that be that control big movie productions and they often get what they want if they throw their weight around. But I think with Disney, even when the story starts off dark like Maleficent, they always find a way to work something good into the story or the script and it ends up ending on a positive note. I guess the closest we got to traumatic in the SW universe was Revenge of the Sith and The Empire Strikes Back and I guess those movies were both exceptions. And that’s awesome how you dissected Rey’s lightsaber 🙂 I am not too sure how I feel about that lightsaber on her but on Darth Maul, it was magnificent 🙂
LikeLike