'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Novelist Was Forced To Remove Hints At A Finn And Rey Romance

Was a romance between John Boyega's Finn and Daisy Ridley's Rey initially supposed to happen in the Star Wars sequel trilogy?

Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, seems to think so, stating in a recent interview that he was forced to remove hints at a Finn and Rey romance from his book before it was published. Read his quotes below.

Foster has had a long writing career, working on novelizations within several tentpole franchises ranging from Alien to Star Trek, but he's perhaps most famous for writing a novel called Splinter of the Mind's Eye which served as a sequel to George Lucas's original 1977 Star Wars film. His novel came out before The Empire Strikes Back was released, giving him the distinction of being the first person to ever write a Star Wars sequel. He was also hired to write the novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and in a recent interview with Midnight's Edge (via ComicBook), Foster explained that some of his ideas had to be cut out of his book before it could be published.

"I did my usual thing when I do these adaptations of trying to fix things that I think need fixing in the story and fixing in the science," he said. "Some things they said to take out, and some things they left alone...I'm going to tell you one thing they made me take out because enough time has passed, I don't think it matters. The first thing was, there was obviously the beginnings of a relationship between John Boyega's character and Daisy Ridley's character. And I expected to see that developed further in Episode VIII. And zero happened with it, and we all know why zero happened with it and there's no need to go into it in-depth, but that's, sadly, just the way things are."

I think the reasons for the Finn and Rey romance not happening may be more complicated than Foster implies. Part of me knows the world would not have been able to handle an interracial romance between those two characters if Finn's obvious crush on Rey had been reciprocated, and I wonder if that factored into the decision to split them apart in The Last Jedi. (Let's just forget about the whole "No, Finn was ACTUALLY going to tell Rey he was Force sensitive" thing from The Rise of Skywalker, shall we?)

The other change Foster mentioned was that the studio forced him to remove a line of dialogue in which Rey fixes a part of the Millennium Falcon and Han Solo says, "Don't get cocky, kid," because he thought it would be a fun callback to his famous line from the original movie. "I thought that was a wonderful way of connecting the character to the first film and the first story," he said. "I thought fans would love that, and they made me take it out."

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