Rey's Parents Are Revealed In 'The Last Jedi' & The World Is Shocked

In Star Wars, everyone has westernized dual names, not unlike a world on Earth far, far away from it. For example, there's Han Solo, there's Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Ben Kenobi, and Poe Dameron. Heck, Kylo Ren is such greedy bastard, he has two, with Ben Solo being the other. Everyone has two names... that is save one: Rey. Rey does not have a second name because her heritage is a mystery, one that we're waiting to be cleared up when Rey's parents are revealed in The Last Jedi. Warning: Spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi follow.

For those who are wondering if Rey's parents are revealed in the latest installment, it's not a spoiler to tell you they will be. Director Rian Johnson has been open about that. But he downplayed that announcement by adding the caveat that "they don't matter."

Wait, what? What do you mean her parents don't matter? They do matter, at least to her. When you are a possible orphan, with no idea who your people are or where you come from, that's a very lonely feeling. It's an emotional hole that's hard to fill. It is important for Rey to find out who her parents are (or were) for her own peace of mind. It's just that it's not something that will change the outcome of the adventure.

So, who were Rey's parents?

Would you be shocked if I told you they really were nobody? Because it's true.

Rey isn't a Skywalker. Any hope that the series might hew to the expanded universe novels were dashed. Rey's parents are not Han And Leia, who had (for reasons unknown) sent her to safety. When she looked inside her heart, she did not see that Luke was her father, or Kylo was her brother, and know it to be true, or anything like that. There was no great familial reveal that she was related to this unfortunate clan.

Instead, Kylo looked inside her heart and saw her parents... and she looked inside herself and knew the truth, too. Her parents were a couple of nobodys — poverty-stricken junk peddlers who had turned to drugs and booze to numb their pain. Rey wasn't put on Jakku for safety and she wasn't given to Unkar Plutt to keep safe.

They sold her for portions so they could buy booze and drugs.

Seriously: Rey, the brightest Jedi of her generation, was basically the child of space crackheads who sold their own kid into slavery for a fix.

But while I'm sure some fans are disappointed, this is actually in keeping with the spirit of the idea behind the Force. While some fans dislike the prequels and find them frustrating (when not outright terrible), one of the ideas that Lucas was trying, in his muddled way, to get across was that Anakin was no one. The man who was one of the most powerful to ever wield the Force was born a slave on a remote planet in the middle of nowhere. If the Jedi hadn't found him, he probably would have gone on to become an ace racing pilot and think himself having made it.

The Force doesn't necessarily run in families. It's a spirit that surrounds everyone in the universe, and it's inside all of us. It's just that some are lucky enough to be able to tap into it and some are not.

Ben Solo was strong because he came from those who had the ability. But his rise on the Dark Side meant somewhere, the Universe would randomly choose someone to help balance it out for the Light. That choice was Rey, someone who, like Anakin, is the child of nobody, who comes from nowhere. And she's here to save the galaxy.