Omegonthesane wrote:
Your claim appears to be that Star Wars adequately establishes that literally no entry level Force user, ever, anywhere in the entire universe, no matter what can Mind Trick.
This is a dishonest exaggeration designed to make the claim seem more extreme than it is in an effort to make your refusal to acknowledge the rules of narrative seem less obviously wrong. My claim is that Star Wars adequately establishes that entry level Force users do not typically manifest mind trick as their first conscious use of the Force. Rey can be an exception, but the rules of narrative demand you establish that in act one, not act three.
The rest of your post is complaining about power levels. This is not how non-interactive narrative works. Powers are level-gated according to their significance in video games and tabletop RPGs in order to preserve a sense of steady progression, because dead levels suck and a level at which the only power you get is something that's less useful than what you already have, that's basically a dead level. In real life, it is
frequently the case that mastering a very difficult ability may not give you a significant power-up at all, and it's fine for movies or novels to do the same. A bicycle kick is both much harder and far less useful than a roundhouse kick. It is perfectly fine to establish that affecting a living being's thoughts is more difficult than affecting inanimate matter even if it's the least useful trick the Jedi have. Undercutting the rules of your setting isn't bad for
game balance, it's bad
for the setting. The power of mind trick is irrelevant, founding your argument on it just serves to illustrate that you have no idea how the medium you're discussing works.
The narrative principle you're refusing to acknowledge here is slightly more obscure than ubiquitously known things like "foreshadowing" which other people have tried to assert don't count when it's inconvenient for them, but not undercutting the significance of earlier scenes by trivializing their accomplishments is still inarguably a bad thing. The super saiyan transformation was trivialized almost immediately after it happened, and that was bad for DBZ. That the scene establishing mind trick as the sign post that Luke was a Jedi knight was less critical to the plot makes overturning that precedent without warning
less bad, but doesn't make the problem go away completely. You're no longer trying to argue that no one else but me noticed it was weird that Rey could perform mind trick as her first usage of the Force, so it's not surprising that you're now retreating into a weird misunderstanding of how the medium of film even works to try and defend your point. If people noticed it was weird that Rey can use mind trick so quickly, and if that weirdness could've been defused by just establishing Rey as an exception to the heretofore established rules
in advance and not as soon as she uses that power to further the plot, then
not establishing that exception in advance is objectively a flaw in the film. Full stop. That's how creative projects work: Their success is measured in the impact they leave on people, not what impact the creator
wanted to have on people. Any argument that includes at any point an accusation that the audience consumed the media wrong is automatically invalid.
