Oh good lord. To the mind reading: yeah, she’s powerful, and after giving things up in the mind reading interrogation, she began to “see” what he was doing, and, actually possessing the ability to do something about it, DID something about it, taking Ren by surprise.

Towards the end when she was just hacking at his defenses with all her might, it reminded me of Luke hacking at Vader at the end of ROTJ, where he eventually cut off his hand. Probably the closest he came to turning to the dark side.

Nobody said evil; they just said dark side. The stormtrooper thing is a kinda-problematic compartmentalization, but this was a personal fight between two emotional people; the point of duels in movies isn’t fighting, it’s giving us the audience a way of visualizing complex emotional back-and-forth. When Luke wails on…

TL;DR: “I want Star Wars, but without any of that Star Wars stuff.”

Have you considered that maybe you just don’t like Star Wars?

When Ren is down for the count, there’s a brief shot of Rey’s face where she looks like she’s willing to kill him. I noticed it even before I found out the novelization actually had her hear a voice in her head whisper, “...kill him.”