Lucasfilm Confirms Rey And Kylo Ren Are Linked By A Mysterious "Connection"
Here's what happens when Star Wars fans start getting thirsty for news and start poking around in the desert: they find tiny updates in the official StarWars.com biographies for two major characters and start to wonder what it all could mean. In this case, two small additions to the pages for Kylo Ren and Rey tease something that fans have been wondering about since Star Wars: The Force Awakens: a mysterious "connection" between the evil son of Han Solo and the mysterious desert scavenger.
Heroic Hollywood noticed the update and since the Star Wars news landscape looks a bit like Tatooine or Jakku at the moment, it's worth examining. Let's start with the updated paragraphs. Here's an excerpt from Rey's page:
On Takodana, Skywalker's lightsaber called to Rey, who experienced a Force vision. She rejected this call to destiny, but was captured by the dark side warrior Kylo Ren, with whom she shared a strange connection. Kylo took Rey to Starkiller Base, where he tried to understand her rapidly growing powers. With Finn in peril, she escaped and took up Skywalker's lightsaber – and the quest to find the Jedi master.
And here's a paragraph from Kylo Ren's page. While adjectives differ, this one also teases a connection between the two characters:
Snoke warned Kylo that there had been an awakening in the Force, and his apprentice would face a test when he confronted his father. Kylo swore his loyalties were only to Snoke. But he was intrigued when he captured Rey, a Jakku scavenger whose Force abilities were raw but very powerful. A mysterious connection seemed to link the two.
So, what could this strange and/or mysterious connection be? Can someone hand me my Theorizing Hat? I left it under my Speculation Bathrobe. Next to the Ranking Gauntlets.
The most obvious connection, and the one that I hope turns out to be demonstrably false, is that Kylo Ren and Rey are somehow related by blood. The Star Wars universe is small enough without these two characters belonging on the same family tree...although them both having Skywalker blood in their veins would explain why Rey can hold her own in a lightsaber duel with no training. I'll be happy to be wrong if this is the case and Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson nails the reveal (provided that he's the one tasked with revealing it).
Another possible theory involves a little bit of stretching. As Heroic Hollywood notes, the canon novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens features a line of dialogue not present in the final film. When Finn is struck down and Rey uses the Force to retrieve Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, Kylo Ren says "It is you," implying that she may be someone from his past that he is just now recognizing. What if (and this is entirely based on nothing beyond flights of fancy) Rey was one of Luke's students, maybe someone Ben Solo knew from Jedi Knight training? And maybe he spared her life during the massacre that killed off the rest of the school? And maybe Luke wiped her memory? And maybe Luke then left her on Jakku for some reason?
Those are a lot of "and maybes," but they're certainly not crazier than some of the theories floating around out there. What do you think? This kind of discussion is the reason they invented slow news days and internet comment sections.