I was going to post this as a reply to a Youtuber, but I thought I would make it more visible and permanent.
There are plenty of people who complain about Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens being good at everything. This is to be expected, as it’s a new character with no training suddenly going toe-to-toe with an enemy who is presumed to have great training. So why is Rey the victor in the fight on Starkiller Base?
A sucking abdominal wound that’s still bleeding profusely tends to distract just a tiny bit. This isn’t even to mention the fact that in every lightsaber fight Kylo Ren is seen engaging, he is clearly using a very clumsy and under- or untrained lightsaber combat.
Within the movies, lightsaber combat is, at best, inconsistent. Until TFA, it was assumed that a normal humanoid with no real connection to the force would be unable to wield a lightsaber without losing a limb. TFA clearly shows that anyone can use one, even a washed-out stormtrooper. Kylo Ren, on the other hand, is supposedly a weakly-trained jedi padawan who fell to the dark side through some yet-unspoken means. It’s likely that his training never progressed to lightsaber combat, and that his master is not well-versed in said combat either, thus his relative inexperience with the weapon, as is heavily evidenced by the poorly-constructed nature of his own lightsaber. Not only does Kylo Ren’s lightsaber waver abnormally, but he had to redesign his lightsaber to include vents for excess plasma, leading to a “crossguard”.
So, we have a severely injured, emotionally-conflicted dark padawan wildly swinging his poorly-constructed lightsaber around being defeated by a confident nascent Jedi with significant weapons skills learned over years of personal protection. This isn’t even a first.
Luke’s training on Dagobah was initially exposing him to the ways of the force. He learned about the nature of it and its great power, though he himself didn’t believe. He had nothing in the way of actual lightsaber training before running off, well before his training was over, to Cloud City to rescue his friends. Despite this, he held his own remarkably well against a man who was already understood to be skilled with a lightsaber. Granted, Darth Vader was “more machine than man” at that point, and likely had delayed reactions to typical combat, but he still knew what he was doing far more than Lukedid, or likely ever would.
Kylo Ren was never a master of the lightsaber. He used it largely as an intimidation toward those who didn’t use them. It was likely seen as barbaric and excessively brutish. Every time he’s shown using it, he has little in the way of flair or competence, relying on brute force and the darker emotions involved in accepting the dark side instead.
Despite all this, he was clearly able to outclass a relatively normal human using the force, and generally maintained the upper-hand against an untrained force-sensitive. Rey is naturaly gifted in many ways, though. She was able to unwittingly pilot the ancient Millennium Falcon after getting used to the old girl’s eccentricities, was able to glean an understanding of subtle mind-tricks through stories handed down, and realized that she was force-sensitive. While I hesitate to bring up the prequels, it was stated that the reason Anakin was so good as a pod racer was the fact that he was so strongly force sensitive. This could easily translate to Rey being extremely talented at whatever she wants to do. Remember that Luke, a pretty average force-user, was able to fly a relatively-unfamiliar X-Wing with minimal training, and was even able to land the killing blow on the Death Star using his nearly-untrained force abilities. He was also, again, able to hold his ground against a trained lightsaber combatant, his father, relatively well, despite having almost no lightsaber training.
We really have to step away from the EU now, because it makes storytelling nearly-impossible for new writers. TFA is based almost entirely on movie canon, and not at all on books. They may borrow ideas from the EU, but Mara Jade and Kyle Katarn do not exist here, nor does Luke’s eventual mastery of the force. We have a Jedi who is barely trained, finding his own way, and now training new force-sensitives. The complex ways of the Old Republic are now gone, simply relying on the limited training he received from Yoda and the unimpressive support he’d be able to gain from the force ghosts of his father, Yoda and Obi-Wan. Luke would have never experienced a trained lightsaber battle, and probably never learned much about the different forms.He’s going off instinct and a vague idea of what the Jedi stood for to make his new order.
Ultimately, Luke is not the best teacher, and Supreme Leader Snoke doesn’t seem like the purist sith type. Kylo Ren’s ability with a lightsaber is likely to be barely above what the average Stormtrooper might know, and possibly even worse. Rey developed a martial art style all her own, surviving in the desert against violent, angry competitors, while Finn most certainly was trained in hand-to-hand combat as part of his stormtrooper training. Had he no affinity toward the force, apparently granted by his mother, Kylo Ren would have likely had his ass handed to him by either Finn or Rey, both of whom were proficient in melee combat. He was beaten by an untrained girl because he was equally untrained. His form was not dissimilar from Luke’s untrained brute-force wailing in Episodes V and VI. There’s no grace or finesse here, on either side. The force is the only advantage, and it requires some level of concentration, which is easily disrupted when you have a gaping wound in your stomach.
Give The Force Awakens a little credit. The acting was certainly better than the original movie, they easily mixed practical and CGI effects, and the story isn’t the same as A New Hope. It has callbacks to the original series, but it is wholly its own, and it stands up well. Starkiller Base is more than just a Death Star on steroids. It’s an offensive weapon being used against an enemy proactively, rather than as a show of power. Rey is well-aware of the legends of Luke Skywalker an Han Solo, while Luke himself was vaguely aware of the Rebel Alliance and barely knew anything about the Jedi or the force. Jakku is a desert planet with a struggling population, not a dual-sun outer-rim planet ruled by the Hutts. There were callbacks, but that’s to be expected. They don’t harm the story, and ultimately, the characters are taken in new directions. Is it the best Star Wars movie? Of course not. Is it a fitting sequel to the original trilogy? You bet. It was played very safe, but still did some things that could have ruined it, but it worked very well. Taken on its own, TFA is an enjoyable movie. It may not be the best out of the series, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Rey winning a lightsaber fight against a powerful force-user who has nearly no real training isn’t that impressive. What is impressive is that the whole scene is very well-done, despite the possible failures. In the end, it’s the force. Learn to enjoy a movie for what it is, even if it isn’t the most accurate portrayal based on the EU. That’s the past, and entertaining movies are the future.
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