By denying her past is important to telling her story. If she was some mentor to the main character, her being skilled is a given and we dont need to delve into why she is so strong. Given that she is the main character and past precedent shows the importance of training for any Jedi or Sith, her competence in both the use of the force and her relative skills with a saber (still undefeated) need some explaining which can only be done by delving into her past. Explaining who her parents were (hidden jedi who trained her before dying and leaving her alone and having an affinity to a bloodline that made her unusually strong) is needed. Wouldnt necessarily say its sufficient but better than she is some nobody that randomly became uber powerful.
Here's the thing. Her past
isn't important
as it was used in the trilogy.
Rey's past is crass audience manipulation. It's withholding information
from the audience for the purpose of
getting the audience to speculate about it. Classic "mystery box" design. And it's utter bulls**t. It's not storytelling. It's meta-narrative audience manipulation. Fundamentally, it works on the same level as having Benedict Cumberbatch announce himself as Khan in Star Trek: Into Darkness.
These things are meaningful
to the audience, but -- as depicted in the film -- they are not meaningful
to the characters nor are they meaningful
for the story.
That's not to say that you can't have these kinds of revelations or questions or moments or whathaveyou be built organically into the story so that they do mean something. But the
way in which they're built into these films is fundamentally lazy audience manipulation. They don't earn their importance on their own; they only earn it because the audience is primed to expect it for reasons that have sod all to do with the actual narrative itself.
When Cumberbatch says "I'm KHAN!" the audience is meant to gasp in realization. But Kirk, Spock, & co. haven't encountered him. He might be significant for having been from a history book they knew about, but they have no personal connection to him. It's the
audience that has the personal connection, because they watched another movie where he was a badass, so now they know to expect this Khan to be a badass too. Not because of anything the
story has told us. Just because of what we, as audience members, already bring to the table. So, we end up doing the heavy lifting of story telling and filling in the blanks for ourselves, and the film itself just breezes right the **** past it as if
the film told us what we needed to know.
But it didn't. That's the trick. The
film just had to
say the name Khan, and the audience did the rest of the work for it. The
story didn't do anything to lay any groundwork for that.
With Rey's parentage, it's all presented as a mystery
to the audience. In TFA, we have no reason to expect that Rey doesn't know who her parents were or what they looked like. Or at least who they were to her. Instead, we get snippets of Jim Henson's Rey Babies screaming "Come back!" as a ship flies off, and we're left to wonder "COULD REY'S PARENTS BE WHY SHE'S SO STRONG WITH THE FORCE?!?!?!!1!!?" The film does other stuff to seed this "mystery" too, by having her be extremely competent at lots of different things all at once. That's not because she's a "Mary Sue," though. It's because the film is just ****ing lazy about its storytelling, OR -- worse -- it's trying to get you wondering "But how? How is she so powerful? What's it all about? WHAT'S THE MYSTERY?!!"
Except none of that crap matters for
the story itself. It matters for the audience to make sense of its world, but in terms of what actually happens in the story, you could take 2 seconds and say "Rey's a vergence" or "Rey's a Kenobi" or "Rey's the physical embodiment of the good side of who Anakin Skywalker was" or whatever, and it still wouldn't matter. What matters for the story is what she
does. The
story isn't concerned with Rey's parentage. The
story is concerned with her actions and choices. It's those things that propel the story, it's those things that actually matter to the narrative. Rey's parentage is barely used within the story itself
because it doesn't ****ing matter. We get a little bit in TROS but it's just thrown in to answer the question the films posed
for the audience back in TFA. The answer doesn't really matter to Rey.
And that's because the films do
nothing to make that answer meaningful
within the narrative. When we meet Rey,
who her parents are doesn't matter to her. What matters to her is her sense of abandonment and that they might come back for her. That's why she thinks about staying on, or going back to, Jakku. And it's only when she lets go of "But they might come back..." that she starts to embrace being a hero, which JJ then immediately undercuts when she flies off to Ach-To and hands Sad Luke the sabre. "Yay! I'm the hero! Wait. Take this thing from me." That move, handing Luke the sabre, isn't the move of someone who has accepted her destiny and is now pursuing it. WITHIN THE FIRST FILM ITSELF, the story completely undercuts Rey's journey. And nowhere in that journey does "But hey, who
were my parents, anyway?" come into play. Their identity isn't a crisis for Rey to resolve, it's not a hurdle for her to overcome, it doesn't cripple her emotionally, it doesn't do anything. It's just a question
for the audience to mull over. And otherwise, it doesn't matter.
Then take TLJ where Rey actually has a half a tic where she wonders who her parents are. But even then, the
identity of the parents is secondary to
why she's asking in the first place. TLJ accepts the premise that JJ laid out in TFA: Rey has apparently rejected the mantle of hero, and the responsibility that goes with it, and has turned to Luke to say "You do it. I can't do it myself." When Rey is asking for her parents' identity, what she's really asking for is for someone or something else to tell her what to do and how to proceed. Luke wouldn't do it, so she asks the cave, which also doesn't tell her.
This also sits in terrific contrast with Ben/Kylo Ren, who wants to escape the very-known, very-weighty parentage and obligations that come with it, as he wants to "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to." He wants to be unburdened of the past, of his family, of the
destiny that's laid before him and which denies him the choices he wants to make. And meanwhile, Rey actively wants that, again as a means of avoiding taking responsibility for her own actions. And you get the sense that even if Ben did destroy the past, he'd have....no friggin' idea what to do, because all
he could think to do was to just take the reflexively opposite path from what his "destiny" said he was "supposed" to do. In that sense "Who are your parents/what is your bloodline" matters in TLJ.
But you know what doesn't matter? The
answer to the question "Who are my parents?" that Rey asks.
That question was always purely for the audience. It's not really part of the story itself. That's why it doesn't matter. Not because that question is never important, but because the films never made it important to the story or the characters the way it was to the audience.