Helena 

Animation as a medium of storytelling can be thought to be open to all ages and as I hope my readings will reveal, they could be interpreted as transgender stories.

Despite the film’s efforts to reframe its heroine with modern complexity, a certain emotional distance lingers.

There is a lot of controversy around Q-force. It’s certainly not hard to see why—the series is quite hyperbolic. I will say, that was the first aspect I noticed on my initial watch. Right from the get-go Q-Force barrages you with gay joke after gay joke. This is hit or miss throughout the series.

“It's not ghosts. It's not supernatural. It's... It's America. And it's everywhere.”

The repeated actions, the blood on the petals, the rustling under the floor…An ambient short horror film takes us into another realm.

It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.