This actually brings me to a point that I've been wanting to make for a while: that most audiences, even female audiences, seem uncomfortable with the idea of a woman acting as a moral guide, or teacher, to a male character. Because let's be clear, that's what Rose is. She's a moral guide to Finn, helping him achieve his arc of becoming less selfish. In screenwriting terms, she's an "anchor character," a person in a story who does not change their beliefs, and who, through their interactions with the protagonist, helps them become a better hero, usually by highlighting a flaw they have. A classic example of this type of character is Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs. He doesn't change at all over the course of the story, but his interactions with Clarice Starling allow her to become a more effective detective by forcing her to confront her own fears and her own sense of inadequacy. Rose doesn't change over the course of the film. She starts off a committed Resistance fighter and ends a committed Resistance fighter. It's her consistency, and selflessness that convinces Finn to stop thinking of only his needs, and stay to help. In other words, she did exactly what her character was supposed to do, but audiences don't seem to like that.

In his video essay "How The Last Jedi Defies Expectations," the Pop Culture Detective points out how women in fiction who act as guides or teachers to men are often labeled as annoying or preachy, and the sad thing is that's true. Most mentor/anchor characters in fiction— Mr. Miyagi, Uncle Ben, Yoda— are men. Women very rarely get to fill that role, and when they do get to act as teachers, it's almost always exclusively to other women. Just look at Awkwafina's character in Crazy Rich Asians. She doesn't change, and she helps improve the heroine, both in terms of her personality and her wardrobe. She basically performs the same function as Rose, but to a woman, and audiences like her. Which leads me to ask, why? Awkwafina does a lot more of the things that people typically describe as annoying than Rose— she has a weird manner of speaking, lectures the main character, and disrupts the illusion of the film by giving a far more over-the-top performance than her co-stars. So why do people like her and not Rose? Why has she been labeled a standout, and Rose annoying?

The third and final series of complaints center around the last scene in which Rose appears. In this scene, Rose stops Finn from going on a suicide mission, says that the only way to win a war is to focus on saving what you love, and not killing what you hate, kisses him, and then passes out. The reaction to this has been all over the place. There are people who are angry because Rose kissing Finn ruins their fantasy of seeing him and Ray get together. There are people who are angry because a woman stopped a man from having a big hero moment. There are people who claim that this scene proves that nothing she did in the film mattered, or had consequences. Then, of course, there are the hyperbolic statements (which I'm not even sure if people genuinely believe) like the assertion that because she didn't ask Finn for consent before she kissed him, it qualifies as sexual assault, but I'm not going to address those because honestly, I still want to have hair by the time I'm thirty. First of all, just because a movie doesn't give you what you expect doesn't mean it's bad. By that rationale, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, or any film with a twist ending is terrible, because they didn't give you the answers you were anticipating. On top of that, who's to say that Finn and Ray won't get together by the end of the next movie? JJ Abrams may have a very different view of where he wants the story to go than Rian Johnson. Plus, who cares if they don't wind up together? They aren't real!