My apologies for disappearing for so long.

Also, yes, this is the DISNEY Trilogy fix. Disney's Episodes 7, 8, and 9 are about as canon to me as The Force Unleashed 2 is to Disney's Lucasfilm division, and probably to most of you too (even if you're fans of the first one, like I am)!

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Hello and welcome to a four-part journal series, in which I make a case that, even as-written, the Disney Trilogy is ACTUALLY SALVAGEABLE. The fixes I intend to generate are going to be either minor tweaks to characters (which is discussed in this document), or the rewriting of singular scenes. The goal of this journal is, first and foremost, to show that all these people at Disney's Lucasfilm were so high on their own farts that they never once considered that the first draft is NEVER the final draft. To show that, with minimal tweaking and a little care and forethought, a trio of absolute bombs could be made to stand ABOVE the Prequel Trilogy, AND IT'S NOT EVEN THAT FUCKING HARD.

In short, I see wasted potential out the wazoo, and the concept of wasted potential, and for a Star Wars trilogy at that, honestly infuriates me in a way that even the most heinous bullshit of the past ten years in American politics doesn't. For those who know about my political rages, you're already worried about my eventual aneurysm mid-typing.

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Part 1: Broad Strokes of the Sequels

The following is a series of broad strokes in terms of characters and their abilities, personalities, and personal arcs.

Rey
Rey, as it stands, has an equal amount of personality to Bella Swan from Twilight. Yes, I went there. Search your feelings; you know it to be true.

Don't worry, though, we're gonna fix that. She is, of course, going to have that driving overall goal of "find out who I am by way of who my family is; find my future by learning my past." That changes eventually, but that's later on.

Rey does seem to have an ability to get people to like her very quickly. I'm picturing that as a sort of Force ability, and not one she can control. In fact, when she leaves, people tend to notice that something was a bit odd about how nice they were to her right off the bat, though they do dismiss it as simple charisma. Han Solo, not so much; but we'll get to him later.

Now, unlike the beautiful and tragic and GLORIOUS rewrite by a dinosaur with a one-of-a-kind nomenclature - no really, watch his video, it's part of the reason I'm doing this and it's amazing - I'm not going to yoink from KotOR 2 (though I wonder if his yoinking was purposeful or accidental. Doesn't matter). In short, Rey is not a Wound in the Force or anything, she just has a natural talent with Force Persuasion.

The thing is, she becomes extremely self-conscious if she doesn't have access to this ability for whatever reason, and she kinda panics; she's been in that situation a few times, and it always ended up with her getting hurt and having to run and hide, so it's almost like she feels naked without that particular suit of armor. With a little time and patience, though, she slowly comes out of her shell enough to actually stand without that Persuasion - and in fact, by letting it rest, she discovers that when she uses it, it's actually way stronger suddenly. Picture it like spending 72 hours doing light-to-medium exercise and only getting minimal breaks; you don't notice a difference and are tired and achy. But when you do finally rest and get aspirin, your muscles stop aching over the next 24 hours, and you realize your stamina's like 2.5x'd its previous level.

However, Rey is only extremely good with raw Force abilities. She is, for plot reasons, utter garbage with a lightsaber, at least at first. She eventually becomes decent, but never quite to the level of...

Ben Solo
The problem with Kylo Ren is twofold. One: (THE CONTAINED SECTION IS AN EDIT)He isn't a threat, at all. In Ep 7, Rey whips him like it's South Carolina during 1856, and we can't take him as a serious concern thereafter. If your hero can beat the bad guy at the start of the trilogy, all dramatic tension vanishes.

Two:(END OF EDIT SECTON) When you see him suffer a setback, he throws a tantrum. If he wants to be like Darth Vader, even if he is maybe one-fifth as experienced, he's going to need to actually have some basic self-control. Whenever you see him slashing up computers in Ep 7, it's not intimidating, it's COMEDIC. Why the actual fuck is a Dark-Side Force-User antagonist comedic on our very first introduction to how he handles a setback?! That's stupid, JJ Abrhams was stupid for writing him like that, and he needs to stop being stupid.

No, I am NOT sorry for linking that. I don't know if I should be and I don't care. It fits me vs Abrhams to a tee, except that that dumbass cannot, in fact, go blond, and so he'll never beat me...or break me like a Kit-Kat bar.

But on point, he will still have visible reactions to sources of frustration...but I intend to make them FAR more intimidating.

Consider the following: in the Expanded Universe, the revived-by-possessing-clones-of-himself Emperor Palpatine was able to use the Force to open wormholes that ripped things apart using the Dark Side. My understanding is that these Force Storms were essentially a utilization of his talent with Sith Lightning, but I could be wrong. Here, however, I take a different lens to it: rather than being a deadly Black Magic of Sith Ritual power from Force Lightning, a Force Storm is essentially the ultimate realization of a particular power that Kylo has: Gravitas. What is Gravitas, you ask? Essentially, it is a form of telekinesis - but rather than creating kinetic force, the user directly grabs the fabric of space-time.

And much like how Rey has a hard time not using her Force Persuasion due to trauma, when Kylo Ren gets particularly frustrated and loses control, his Gravitas suddenly creates a dent about three meters in diameter and three centimeters deep...in durasteel flooring. If he's on something less solid, like stone tile, shards fly everywhere, and sometimes people get hurt purely on accident.

And we see Kylo use Gravitas in the very first scene we see him in: when he freezes that massive laser cannon blast from Poe. I'm counting that as high-tier Gravitas; if it helps, picture the Skill Prerequisite (in Skyrim terms) for Hold Laser Cannon Shot as Gravitas 50, and the Prerequisite for Force Storm as Gravitas 100. (On a related note, teleporting objects of no greater than a lightsaber's mass is Gravitas 75 or 80. So no, Kylo can't create a Force Storm. That said, Luke mentions in Ep 8 that such a thing is possible, and he doesn't know if Kylo can do that yet.)

But on a related note, let's go to the non-Sensitive side of Ben's family tree.

Han Solo
Han may not be able to use the Force, and for the longest time he didn't believe it was real. That said, being around Luke and Leia (yes, she still gets some off-screen training in the Force) for so much of his life, he's developed the instinct to listen to his gut when it comes to weird things. I'm picturing him being mildly scientific in his way of examining new and clearly-Force-based phenomena. It's basically his way of figuring out how to deal with rogue Force-users when he doesn't have Force-user backup himself; he finds a way to observe the power in question and works around it.

This leads to him being surprisingly effective at dissecting a Force ability: what it does, how it manifests, etc. Leia's "Marry Poppins" scene still happens, but before she passes out, we see her look at Han's dice and clutch them, smiling and remembering fondly - perhaps in a flashback - how he helped her learn Kylo's Gravitas techniques for just this kind of purpose, before passing out. It also leads to him realizing very early on after meeting Rey that she's got her Force Persuasion up 24-7, and it scares him a bit.

This fear leads him to inform Finn and Chewie of what he's discovered, within earshot of Rey, with the intent of disrupting it by shaking her confidence in that ability. She then has to explain that it's basically armor for her and she really doesn't like being without it because of some bad scrapes she's gotten in without it. She ends up showing them a large, round burn scar from someone's blaster pistol, a scar right in the small right of her back. With that being open, Han apologizes, saying he was worried she was hiding something nefarious rather than trying to stay alive; this also helps her come to grips with her trauma, just a little bit.

Finally, when Han confronts his son, I'm not entirely sure what I want him to do...but what I know I want is a gut-punch, not just for the audience but for Kylo.

Right now, I'm picturing that, instead of trying to feel his boy's face and falling into the pit, his last actions are...to spit a bit of blood, and say, "Not...quite what I...h-had in mind, kiddo." Then, with a smile, he pushes forward, to Kylo's frozen shock...and when the lightsaber deactivates, he hugs Ben. "But...you're still my boy. Even you stk" (a spit of blood onto Kylo's shoulder) "...stabbin' me doesn't...change that."

Finn
Everyone knows it: As a character, Finn got shafted hard. The obvious """reason"" for this is that he's black and Disney wanted to sell this movie to China, since that tends to be their real target audience anymore. And honestly, that infuriates me, because Finn probably has the most potential and basically all of it was wasted. Stormtrooper with a face, he defects, he has glimmerings of Force Sensitivity in Ep 7...and he's comic relief. Show me a person who can tell me, with a straight face, that they're not disappointed by that, and I'll show you someone who's either a dirty liar or a sociopath, and in either case should be shunned from all societies forever.

So, in this fix, Finn is a Sensitive, but he's a very mild Sensitive. That said, he's also way better a fighter than in the original, and while his Force Powers are nothing to write home about, he takes to the art of the lightsaber like a duck to water. Basically, he's the anti-Rey in this regard.

Another way in which he's an Anti-Rey is his somewhat stunted social ability. You know the "sanitation" joke in Ep 7? Instead of being a joke, he is actually bewildered by Han's anger, shock, and dismay. He has to take a moment to consider, and then says, "I...okay, lemme clarify. I ran sanitation. I helped the engineers set up the sanitation department on the bases I helped build, and Starkiller Base is the same. I know every pipe, every in and out, every trash compactor, I have the schedules memorized for Pete's sake. I didn't just work sanitation, I get it now, no wonder you're freakin' out." And Han has to blink a few times as his brain restarts in the middle of that explanation as he realizes that they had a total failure to communicate.

That way, it's a moment of needed comic relief, but it's also - dare I say it - a subversion of expectations for a comic relief moment. That's right, I went there. Rian Johnson is my bitch and I can't even be arsed to fuck him, too much effort for too little a man.

The Pachydermal Tit with the Green Milk in the Room
Luke will still be a hermit, but rather than a cranky curmudgeon, he's more snarky. Some of Han bled into him over the years, we'll say. You'll get the sense that he's still a bit tortured by the very end of the war, and the emotional trauma of his own father dying in his arms like that does leave a mark in a sense, but he was a fairly strong character and person. He still wants to help, but the problem is, he's not really sure HOW to help...especially knowing what he knows about the role both he and Snoke played in turning Ben Solo into Kylo Ren. There is a great deal of guilt there, and it results in trepidation about taking on a student...

...but he will actually take the time to train Rey, as well as Finn - since (spoiler alert) they end up going to find Luke together, both to train in their specialties and to get some bitch-basic training in their weak points.

Rey's Parentage
The whole Rey is descended from Palpatine thing is totally fine, but it should have been in Ep 8 and we all fucking know it. It would have been way more powerful then. And that would have made Rey gain a new mission in Ep 9, much like how Luke gained a new mission in Ep 6.

But while Luke was set on saving his father, Rey was set on rising above her lineage. After all, Rey's whole thing has been about her need for family, to be someone, to be from somewhere, to be something...so this curveball makes her re-assess her quest. She decides that she will be Rey Palpatine, but that she will be in the Light, and strive to be better than her lineage would suggest...because in the history of Sheev Palpatine, there is no room nor desire for redemption.

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Alright, mentlegen, that'll do it for now. I'll post more in the coming days, so watch this space...battle.

!!Link to Start!! !!Link to Ep 7!! !!Link to Ep 8!! !!Link to Ep 9!!