Ranking Star Wars Sequel Trilogy Characters Based on Their Wasted Potential
The sequel trilogy wasn't good for many reasons, but it had the opportunity to be good. This list ranks all the characters that had the potential to be very cool, but were just written/used poorly.
Supreme Leader Snoke is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise. Snoke served as the mysterious leader of the First Order. Supreme Leader Snoke is a CGI character voiced and performed by Andy Serkis. Snoke should have been the main antagonist of the Sequel Trilogy. Honestly, if they made his actual size the giant version of the hologram we saw in Episode VII, he would have been so much cooler. Imagine a lightsaber duel against a giant who has a giant lightsaber.
But they ruined him in Episode VIII, and then deleted all of his importance by making Palpatine his puppet master. Not cool, Disney.
General Armitage Hux is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise. First introduced in the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he is portrayed by Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson. Remember when Hux ordered the execution of billions of people on Starkiller Base, only to then turn around and join the side he hated simply because he hated Kylo Ren more? That was a bad choice on Disney's end. I feel they just wanted to throw a surprise spy in and chose the character everyone would suspect the least.
If they had stuck with Hux's original design as he was in Episode VII, he might have been a better character.
Kyle Ren, also known as Ben Solo, is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise. Kylo Ren commands the First Order with a temper as fiery as his unconventional lightsaber. Ren first appeared in 2015's Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Ben Solo, the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia, was... read more Ah yes, Kylo Ren. What a shame. A new generation "Sith" who idolizes his grandfather, Kylo Ren had a backstory that could have made him great. Sent away by his parents to train with Luke, only to wake up and see him standing over his bed with a lightsaber activated. That sounds like enough motivation to turn to the Dark Side.
But in all seriousness, Kylo Ren had a unique lightsaber and had the motivation to be different. His rage made him a very different character than Vader, which is something that I appreciate. If Disney had just committed to this character becoming "Darth Ren," he could have been a pretty good character.
FN-2187 (Finn) is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise. He first appeared in the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens in which he is a stormtrooper for the First Order who flees and turns against it after being shocked by their cruelty in his first combat mission. He is portrayed by English... read more A runaway stormtrooper, Finn had the potential to be cool, and he was a good character in Episode VII, but he got worse as the movies went on. Unless the point was that his battle with Kylo altered his mind in some way, this was a hit and a miss.
Captain Phasma is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise, portrayed by Gwendoline Christie. Introduced in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Phasma is the commander of the First Order's force of stormtroopers. The dollar-store stormtrooper equivalent of Din Djarin, Phasma is known for just showing up, doing nothing, and then dying. They sort of redeemed her character in Episode VIII with that fight against Finn, but it just wasn't enough.
Rey is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise, portrayed by British actress Daisy Ridley. First appearing as the central character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Rey is a scavenger who was left behind on the planet Jakku when she was a child, and later becomes involved with the Resistance's... read more *sigh*
They really just looked at Luke Skywalker, copied him, but made the character worse. A Jedi abandoned on a sand planet in order to keep their location a secret from the dangerous Sith lord? Control C, Control V. Not to mention the Sith relative reveal.
Not only is Rey one of the *weakest* Jedi characters ever, but they also have no character development that makes them unique.
What even were these characters? We first see them in Episode VII, only for them to not show up at all in Episode VIII, and then make a surprise appearance in Episode IX where they get destroyed faster than the younglings by Vader's hand.
An army of rewritten Inquisitors, they were just lazily thrown in without much design at all. So much potential gone to waste.
Maz Kanata is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise. Introduced in the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, she is a CGI character voiced and performed through motion capture by Lupita Nyong'o. From a figure almost as old as Yoda, we should have seen more from her character. She made a brief appearance in Episode VII, holding the Skywalker family lightsaber, and then she disappears. This character could have been used better.
Star Wars Rebels is an American 3D CGI animated television series produced by Lucasfilm Animation. Set fourteen years after Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and five years before Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Rebels takes place during an era when the Galactic Empire is securing... read more We all saw the Ghost in Episode IX, right? We should have had some explanation or at least something more than just a cameo. The Mandalorian sort of explains things with Zeb, but that is pretty much it.
Can someone please explain to me her importance? It would have been cool if the loss of her sister made her step up as a leader and actually do something, but all she really did in the sequels was... well, nothing. The biggest thing she did was stop Finn from destroying the cannon in Episode VIII, resulting in Luke having to step in.