I'm replying to this post nearly ten pages ago because I couldn't respond in full at the time, but this is one thing that I think is worth addressing. The truth is that some fans have been using the 'stop talking about power levels' thing as just a shut down, myself included because I am exhausted to TEARS by this goddamn conversation. There are numerous reasons that all come together as a whole that perfectly justify why Rey is what she is. But I don't want to give the impression that any sort of story aspect is beyond criticism. So...lets talk about how to criticize the force.
First, the Force is space magic. That's the number one thing we need to get out of the gate because some people have literally used "They're just using the Force as some sort of space magic now" as an actual criticism. Which, while silly, is still an indication of how people view force. It is definitely space magic, but what kind of space magic is it?
Magic (of the space kind or otherwise) comes in a lot of flavors. Some magic is just the "mysterious forces of divinity" type of magic. For example, the magic of Lord of the Rings, where we never really are given insight into how Gandalf casts his spells. All we really know is that his power comes from the universe's God. There are levels of power that God assigns to his various servants (and when Gandalf gets a promotion, he gets a boost in his pwoer), but that's basically all there is to it. He is just a magical being and can simply make things happen. On the opposite end, there is magic that functions more like just a made up law of physics, where it's basically a science. Sympathy, from Kingkiller Chronicles, has it that that you can use your will to connect things mentally in order to transfer energy, and the more similar two things are, there is less friction or loss of energy in the transfer. It's really basically just an extra law of physics, like gravity, that only a few learned people happen to know how to use.
Most magics fall somewhere in between, and The Force falls nearly almost in the "mysterious force of the universe". Except where Tolkien modeled his magic system after christianity, with one allpowerful figure being the key source of everything in the universe, including magic, Star Wars is, as has been often stated, to be influenced by eastern religions, like Taoism. I'm not going to get heavily into that, because it's not important and I'm too ignorant about those topics to say anything meaningful except some basic things. Taoism doesn't preach about an allpowerful figure, but an all encompassing....thing. The Tao, translated as "The Way", which is less about emphasizing any rigid rules so much as connecting to everything that exists, which brings a person the ability to perform the 'rightful action', of a sort.
I've mentioned before that the Force has been depicted in a variety of ways. In the OT, Obiwan taught Luke that he can use the force to get what he wants, but that it controls him. Luke, when he listened to Obiwan's advice, got what he wanted when he used the force....allowing it to use him. He went on to use it sparingly before finally deciding to go to Yoda, who showed him that he can achieve feats much greater than anything he could believe at the time, but the force also used him to guide him to Vader and he was not able to win. Finally, Luke in RotJ uses the force to sense the light in Vader, wrestles with the dark side himself, and ultimately wins the day by believing in his father.
That's the bare bones synopsis of what happens in the OT, but what does this actually mean in terms of STORY? Well, when Luke realizes that he needs to change from a simple farm boy, using the force allows him to strive to connect the one family figure that has always alluded him: His father. He wanted to be like his father. Which is why his Death Star run at the end of ANH is as much a personal victory as it is a political one. He has taken the first step into becoming what his father (and his recently deceased friend, Obiwan) was: A great Jedi. That is what the force is to him, something that lets him reconnect to his family (again, literally in the case of Obiwan, who can talk to him from beyond the grave using the Force).
This goes deeper, and is actually a great act of subversion of this journey, in Empire Strikes Back. The Force, or rather his inability to connect with it entirely, denote his limitations and insecurities. The force becomes something of an ominous presence, warning him of Vader, while Yoda, a master, shows off all the sort of tricks he could do if he was just better at using the force than he is. This isn't about power levels, it's the fact that Luke is fearful that he is not good enough to save his friends. All this coming to a head that the greatest force user he has ever seen, his enemy, the person that he, through the Force, aspired to become all this time was the evil bastard he's been fighting all along.
Then in Return of the Jedi, Luke's has far more mastery of the force, but now he has to consider what he wants to do with it. His masters, both of them, tell him he needs to be able to slay vader. But it is the force itself that pulls him away from the path. The oft quoted like "I know there is good in you, I can sense it". As painful as the experiences with the force he's had before were, using the force, he finds something of value in Vader and acts in a way that absolutely no one could really make sense of. He surrenders himself to vader, which is the only actual act that could allow him to foster the light inside him and overthrow the emperor.
See, the force is space magic, but magic in stories, especially good ones, is often just another way to frame characters and character development. This doesn't necessarily have to be magic. In the manga Berserk, it follows the story of Guts, whose life is utter shit. He starts as a child wielding a normal sword (which looks oversized for a 5 year old) and basically just has it scale up as he grows, so he's constantly wielding ridiculous swords. Now, the "How it works" explanation is that because he's been progressively scaling up the sword from when he was a kid, he's learned to fight with a weapon most people would consider unwieldy. But from a story perspective, what the sword represents is Gut's accumulated growth and suffering. As his story goes on, more bad things happen to him, the greater the burden of the sword becomes, culiminating in the largest sword, The Dragonslayer, which is the iconic sword he is shown in most art works with, after he suffered his most horrific act in the series. Do you see the difference? One is just a "How this thing is supposed to work in the context of this universe", the other is what that thing actually means.
Which is why I would argue that the prequels are significantly less faithful to the original vision of the force in the OT than the sequels. You can explain the different fighting styles and so on as them just being masters and better Jedi than Luke, but what does the force actually mean to the characters of the prequels? To them, it's a weapon of war. Almost every Jedi and aspect of Jedi culture is militarized and the Jedi view the force as just something that helps them beat down an enemy. Which, btw, if Lucas didn't completely suck at writing, itself could have been a valid interpretation of the force in that it's how Jedi who have basically become an institutionalized militia with mystic aesthetic, but it came off as less that and more that Lucas unintentionally forgot to make the story with a character focus, so the force instead just happened to become a super power that the super cops use. This is why I brought up the different types of magic. Even though the force isn't explained in much more detail here than it was in the OT, the force was treated by the characters as just another law of physics, another tool in their kit, impersonal. We don't know what the force meant to Obiwan other than that it saved his life by killing his enemies. Anakin might view it in terms of his ambition, his way out of the desert planet and slavery. But...that's really it. It's a very shallow and static reading on what Luke presented as dynamic, fluid, mysterious, and personal.
All this to say, if you're going to criticize the Force, then I'd appreciate an argument that basis itself on how it's not positioned in such a way to help Rey's character. "Don't start this power levels shit" has become the default response because nearly every argument I've seen has been about power levels of some kind. "Luke couldn't do this, so how can she?"
The better question is "What does her using the force to do this mean for the story?" What does this say about Rey? How does this change Rey? What does Rey see the force as? Stuff like that. That's the shit I'm interested in.
Edit: Holy shit, I didn't post at the bottom of the page for once
