Finn is a human male, raised from infancy by the First Order as the stormtrooper FN-2187, who deserted during a raid on Jakku and spent the rest of the sequel trilogy working out what he had deserted to. He was introduced in Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens (2015), played by John Boyega, and the StarWars.com Databank puts the turn plainly: after the skirmish on Jakku he "decided to desert and make his own way in the galaxy."
The name is the character
He does not name himself. Poe Dameron, in the middle of a prison break, hears "FN-2187", says he is not calling him that, and hands him "Finn" — and the film's whole argument is compressed into that thirty seconds. Personhood arrives from outside, as a gift, from someone who had no reason to bother. Nothing else in the trilogy is that economical.
Where he came from is deliberately blank
His homeworld is not established, and this is the rare case where an encyclopedia's empty field is the point rather than a gap in the research. The First Order takes children too young to remember, and the films never retrieve what was taken. A dash in that row of the table is the honest answer.
Three films, three jobs
He is a deserter in The Force Awakens, a would-be defector talked back into the fight in The Last Jedi, and in The Rise of Skywalker a leader who finds other defectors — Jannah and her company on Kef Bir — and discovers that his private act was not private at all. The last film also confirms what it had been hinting: he is sensitive to the Force, described by the Databank as "moments of certainty about where to go and what to do."
The critical argument
The complaint people make about Finn is that the trilogy kept restarting him — that The Last Jedi put him in a casino subplot and The Rise of Skywalker gave him a Force thread it never finished. That is fair. The defence is that Boyega plays every version of him with the same nerve, and that the character survives the structural churn because his central question never changes: he keeps having to choose the Resistance on purpose, which is more than most heroes in this saga are asked to do once.
Where to read him
The three novelisations are the obvious route, and Rae Carson's The Rise of Skywalker and Jason Fry's The Last Jedi both give him interiority the films skip. Rebecca Roanhorse's Resistance Reborn, set between VIII and IX, is the best prose treatment of what he is actually like to work alongside.
Continuity
Canon only. There is no Legends counterpart — the character postdates the 2014 reset by a year, and the closest thing the old continuity had to a defecting stormtrooper protagonist is a different lineage of story entirely.
