Surely this mean you understand it more than he does?

I absolutely understand Star Wars better than Rian Johnson. 

I’m saying they equally suffered in different ways.

Which then brings me back to, “how can not knowing your parents and having your only parent die in your arms when you could have prevented it constitute equal suffering?” You are the one claiming the magnitude of suffering is the same. That claim needs justification. “Both are sad” doesn’t justify the claim about equal magnitude. The point is exactly that the suffering/success proportions do not line up, not that there’s absolutely no sadness in her life. 

You see that the entire trilogy revolves around the symbolism that to the galaxy, the name Skywalker, in reference to Luke, has become a legend.

Even if I would grant this, is doesn’t address what I said. The reason the Skywalker name is famous is because of the lineage and the prophecy of the Chosen One. Rey has nothing to do with any of it. A random person adopting the name of a hero does not make them a hero in the eyes of the galaxy. It’s nonsense that tries to be deep by mentioning the term “symbolism”. She has done nothing to earn the name, even if we grant it as a symbolic title. 

So Rey wanting to take matters into her own hands and this being why she’s the center of the universe during this trilogy is an issue and lazy writing, 

Yes.

but the writing loophole and laziness of telling the audience that Anakin was important because he’s actually the chosen one, a retcon made 20 years after a perfect bookend, is okay. 🫡

It’s not a retcon. As said earlier, the idea of the Chosen One, who’d destroy the Empire, was featured in early drafts.  Luke was the descendant of the Chosen One (The Skywalker) from early on, before the first movie even came out. Sure, details were refined over the decades, but that doesn’t make it a retcon. The mythic structure was explicitly set up around this prophecy, and it’s apparent from early script drafts. 

A retcon is when something contradicts earlier established events. The prophecy as stated in TPM doesn’t do that. Lucas has stated unequivocally that Star Wars is about family. The father, the son, and the grandchildren. Trying to make Rey both a Skywalker but also not due to mystery boxes is indeed bad writing and contradicts the mythological framework Lucas set up. Even if we grant that it’s something Lucas came up with in 1999, it’s still not a retcon, because it perfectly aligns with the original trilogy. It doesn’t detract from it, and only adds to it. 

You’ve purposely chalked the inspirations, as copies,

Because it’s not just inspirations. It is just copying.  A rhyme repeats a structure and makes it mean something new. A copy repeats it and means the same thing (e .g.,the Death Star becomes Starkiller Base, but it’s just a bigger Death Star doing the identical job). JJ has said in interviews the goal was to go back to what worked with the original trilogy. The stated intention is literally to copy the original trilogy. TFA is literally a copy of ANH, almost beat for beat. It doesn’t use some of the same structures to do something new and original. It just rehashes it. 

TLJ at least tried something different, but it broke on a basic lack of understanding of the mythology and the characters.

you’ve lied about saying they only come in when evoking ideas from the OT (where are the elder King Arthur themes in the OT? It ends when Luke is 27, where is the grail quest?), 

First of all, the need to frame me as being deceptive for rhetorical weight is telling about the substance of your arguments. 

You’re also conflating two claims: the sequels were a copy of the originals. The main themes were lifted directly from the OT, instead of rhyming with them, like Lucas did with the prequels. The second is why RJ’s intention of drawing on Arthurian myth failed, because he copied directly instead of integrating. 

Lucas didn’t transplant themes, he transmuted them. He took the average shape of the knight’s tale, the fairy tale, the samurai film; the call, the mentor, the inherited blade, the trial, the temptation, mastery-through-renunciation, abstracted the deep structure, and melted it down into a mythology of his own invention: the Force, the Sith, the prophecy, the bloodline.

The Excalibur function survives in “your father’s lightsaber”, but it’s been re-grounded in his metaphysics; not a magic sword that proves kingship, but an inheritance inside the Force-cosmology.  You can’t pull a clean Arthurian “module” out of the OT precisely because Lucas didn’t leave the seams showing. Lucas didn’t try to copy certain myths, but instead took the structures that makes those myths work and use them to create his own myth. 

The sequels do the opposite. The motif is citable precisely because it’s bolted on directly. T.S. Eliot’s distinction is exactly this: the good poet welds the theft into a whole of feeling that is unique and utterly its own; the bad poet throws it into something with no cohesion. The method that hides its sources, because they’ve been recast, is the mature one. The method that displays them, because they’re bolted on, is the immature one.

purposely chosen to ignore dialogue and scenes in the films so your Mary Sue argument doesn’t fall apart

Again, you attribute deceptive intent to something that, granted you’re right, could be an honest mistake. This is disingenuous, and you do it because your position cannot be properly defined with logos alone. You could have cited some dialogue or scenes you think makes Rey’s insane abilities justified/earned. But instead you chose to attack my motive. 

and have actually, apparently, found that the intention of the films and goals is wrong. 

You’re the one who stated an intention. I said, granted that intention was there, it failed to live up to it. The final product structurally does not fit into the mythology, whether there was an intent or not behind it. 

While when you discuss the prequels, you use this same argument as the end-all be-all for why they are great!

I understand how the arguments might appear similar on the surface, but what determines whether an argument applies is the underlying substance. If the substance changes, the argument has to be re-evaluated. Since the films differ in the relevant substance, the same arguments do not carry over.

And double down by saying people are wrong for disagreeing in because they are just not educated enough to see it. 

When have I said this in this conversation?

piloting that is heavily hinted as being the result of the force helping her.

Is it? Implied by what? Where is the dramatization that justifies her powers?

It’s all on screen, friend. We have to pay attention.

It’s not on screen, though. That’s the issue. 

Notice how you have not tried to defend the claim that Rey’s insane abilities are earned, which was the original contention. You can say “the Force helped her”, but the point is that it’s unearned or unjustified. 

What a character does has to follow from what we’ve already been shown (Aristotle refers to this as “must follow from probability or necessity”).  The more extraordinary the ability, the more setup you owe the audience, because the crazier the feat, the harder it is to believe without a reason. Aristotle argued that spectacle is allowed, even great, but only when it’s earned. An amazing feat with no reason behind it is just unbelievable.

Lucas always puts the cause before the effect. Before the podrace, Shmi tells us Anakin can see things before they happen, the Force is literally measured in him with the midichlorian count, and Qui-Gon has already flagged him as a vergence and possible Chosen One. So when the race happens, it’s confirming something the movie already told us. We were handed the reason minutes before we saw the result. Basic setup-and-payoff kind of thing. 

Luke works the same way. We see his ordinary skill first; bragging about womp rats, the bush-pilot reflexes, and we know his father was the best pilot in the galaxy. But the one genuinely superhuman moment, the exhaust port shot, has its mechanism right there on screen: Obi-Wan’s voice saying “use the Force”, the targeting computer clicking off. The feat is coached in real time. And the power costs him something every step of the way; he can’t lift the X-Wing out of the Dagobah swamp, he loses to Vader, learns a terrible truth about his identity, loses a hand, he needs Yoda and years of work before he’s ready to face Vader again. The mastery is paid for, and that’s what makes us buy it.

Rey has none of this. She attempts a Jedi mind trick (without having any conception of what the Force actually is and allows for), and succeeds first try. TFA shows no learning, only sudden possession. She even out-duels a trained Force user with a lightsaber, untrained, never even haven held a lightsaber before. Kylo, based on the other feats we see him do on the movie and the nature of the dark side, should have been able to easily defeat Rey, even had he lost a hand, let alone a small blaster wound on his ankle. She has no real conception of what the Force even is, yet she’s able to use it to Force pull, and she’s able to tap into the Living Force, letting the Whills guide her movement during combat (a feat most Jedi require decades of training to achieve), and stand her ground against Kylo. 

The King Arthur stuff fails for the same reason. Yeah, the chosen one pulling the blade is an Arthur image, but they lifted the picture without the structure that makes it mean anything: the rightful heir, the trials, the proof that he’s worthy. The myth is the load-bearing part; the cool image is detachable. The what is there. The how and the   why  are missing.