Reylo discussion

[sabotabby]

Hey lovely folks! This is a genuine "asking for a friend" research question. Said friend posted about this tweet. Our responses were both "damn, good for them" but also neither of us understand the appeal of Reylo. Obviously there is and people are into it, and absolutely no judgment or squee-harshing at all—this is absolute curiosity.

I'm not in SW fandom at all, though I've seen most of the movies, and am only aware that there is some fandom drama around the issue. So if you ship it or a ship with similar dynamics and feel comfortable talking about it—what's the appeal? What about it does it for you?

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

I'm not really in Star Wars fandom, but I have a casual interest in Reylo, which mainly comes from their Force communication plotline in The Last Jedi. 'Two people who are at odds, but are forced to communicate and slowly come to understand each other better' is a dynamic I find really interesting. You'd get a similar effect if you forced enemies to work together to achieve a common goal, or if you trapped them in a room together for a long period, both of which would probably also make me likely to think about shipping them.

The Force aspect adds a 'this is something outsiders wouldn't understand' dimension, too. There's something slightly claustrophobic about it, which fascinates me.

So, in my case, I suppose the main thing that makes me ship Reylo is the circumstances of the characters, rather than the characters themselves. I do think they have chemistry, though; even if you put characters in shippable circumstances, I won't ship them if they don't have any spark at all.

[sabotabby]

Thanks for this!

[pict]

This comment is the most you thing ever.

[commoncomitatus]

I am also pretty unfamiliar with Star Wars as a franchise (and het ships in general, TBH), but from my understanding of the Reylo dynamic it's a pretty standard enemies-to-lovers, good girl/bad boy ship.

The 'good girl as catalyst for redeeming the bad boy' trope has always been incredibly popular in shipping circles, and coupled with the added 'psychic bond' trope and the fact that Star Wars already had a massive built-in fanbase even before the new movies aired, it ticks pretty much every popular ship box in existence.

[sabotabby]

Apparently I don't pay enough attention to het ships, lol.

[beatrice_otter]

As someone who is deeply into the Star Wars franchise and is not a Reylo: if people liked Reylo because "enemies to lovers, good girl redeeming bad boy," then why the FUCK did so many Reylos spend so much time insisting that Kylo was a pure cinnamon roll who'd never done anything wrong and Finn was the evil abuser?

I'm not joking. That was a constant in the ST heydey. Reylos would come into other Star Wars spaces and attack Finn as evil while switching Finn and Kylo's plot points. Finn holding Rey's hand as they're trying to escape the Imperial attack on Jakku? Proof he's evil and a rapist because he was "forcing" himself on Rey. Kylo kidnapping Rey to torture her on Takodana? Proof that he's the romantic hero--he was saving her from Finn, and the fact that he was carrying her is PROOF that it was romantic because obviously romances are the only stories that have tropes where men carry women!

Reylo circles are and were huge, and the people who ship Reylo are varied. But my interest in the ship was killed fairly early on by how vicious Reylos could be to anyone who didn't agree with them, and how much racist crap a lot of Reylos dumped on Finn fans in particular and SW fans of color in general. (And how willing the general Reylo fandom was to cover for and excuse the outright racist attacks some of their group regularly made.)

And anybody who pointed this out was accused of "squee harshing."

[pict]

I've not seen Rise of Skywalker all the way through because I hated it, so my answer will be largely The Last Jedi-oriented.

I found the emotional connection built up over the course of the film quite intriguing; I've always loved it when characters divorce their ideological conflict and their interpersonal dynamic, and when that divorce inevitably crumbles. Rey and Ben were a very good example of that. It also culminated in a very telling combat scene, which felt like the SW version of Drift Compatibility. Even if they didn't agree emotionally or in terms of their goals, they were synchronized physically.

I also have a weakness for enemy to lovers pairings where it's clear the two parties take each other seriously. I find that a very necessary first step toward respect, and respect is very important to me in what I like in a pairing. I'm not entirely sure this particular sentiment is Reylo-related, but it could be. See again, my not finishing ROS.

[sabotabby]

Hah, I think I watched it twice (and also hated it).

I had not made the connection to drift compatibility!

[tei]

I'm not in SW fandom, but I remember seeing the movie where... I think he had tied her to a chair and was very In Your Face about "you'll come over to me eventually" kind of thing? Er, I also have a terrible memory, but I think that was the moment where I was like "oh, I see the appeal." But ultimately my other would-kidnap-and-torment-each-other interests were stronger than my nonexistent interest in Star Wars.

I heard there was something about reylo fans harassing the actor who plays Finn on twitter? Not sure of the details, but it seems like that has affected the general perception of reylo fandom. If there's drama about the actual ship I don't know about it, besides I assume plenty of the standard-issue "but it's an Abusive Relationship!" stuff 😂

[sabotabby]

I'm only vaguely aware what the drama is, and since I'm not in the fandom didn't really investigate. I just know it's there!

But ultimately my other would-kidnap-and-torment-each-other interests were stronger than my nonexistent interest in Star Wars.

So valid.

[ironymaiden]

I am NOT a fan of mundane AUs, which is what these were. I've read The Love Hypothesis, which is a fun contemporary romance novel with a trope I enjoy (fake dating). What it completely erases is that Kylo Ren has done truly terrible things; I do like Reylo fic if they deal with that.

In the romance novel he's just an exacting scientist. Also holy shit they didn't file the serial numbers off of the MMC. Not only is it clearly Adam Driver from the descriptions, there's an eight-pack joke and the character's name is Adam.

[sabotabby]

I clicked over to GoodReads and the discussion was an utter delight as people realized that no, the cover art wasn't just a coincidence.

[arcanetrivia]

I cannot address the actual question as I am not in SW fandom (I've seen the movies except for Rise of Skywalker, but have never looked for fanmade content), but:

am only aware that there is some fandom drama around the issue.

Is just... funny to me somehow. On Tumblr I followed like one person who was into SW in a fannish way, by chance as I had originally followed them way back for different content, and even so I couldn't avoid the drama peeping onto my dash. (The drama seems mostly to be of the "anti" variety, a kind of "HOW DARE YOU SHIP THIS TOXIC THING".)

[sabotabby]

I think it's mainly that my friends in said fandom are all really chill. So they'll mention there's drama, but it's thirdhand by the time it gets to me.

[gingicat]

Since I was the Rey in that kind of relationship where the boy never made any attempt to grow up and never properly made amends, I run screaming from fictional examples.

[sabotabby]

Oh yes, same, which is probably a large part of why it doesn't appeal to me. But I assume people who are into it wouldn't necessarily want that IRL.

[sholio]

I think it's a pretty classic enemies-to-lovers/lovers-on-opposite-sides, Batman-Catwoman dynamic, and mix in that it canonically has a psychic bond and the two of them teaming up at one point vs. a bigger villain, I don't think the popularity of it is a surprise at all. I've read these tropes a zillion times in fic in other fandoms.

Edit: Sorry, that came out a little dismissive-sounding; I didn't mean it to! Basically I think it's a very classic type of enemies-to-lovers dynamic with a lot of catnippy tropes. :D

[sabotabby]

Haha, fair.

[fleurviolette]

Personally, as a Star Wars fan who was disappointed with the disney sequel trilogy, I thought that the ship was terrible.

[sabotabby]

Hah well, I liked the first two well enough and hated the third. But I'd assume a lot of people want to fix canon if they like the characters.

[melannen]

I pretty much agree with all the comments above! But I also think - especially in AUs that remove most of the enemies aspect - there's a bit where Ben/Kylo is basically (possibly literally) royalty, and Rey is an orphan who comes from nothing and never believes for a moment that he's better than her and convinces him the same (With a little help from Destiny). Especially post-TLJ when I think a lot of this was written. It's the peasant-girl-and-prince (or billionaire-and-mail-room-girl) thing.

[sabotabby]

Makes sense.

[sathari]

Ah, you asked, rather open-mindedly, about what is not just my favorite ship but a particular favorite ship dynamic of mine! Wheee!!!! Thank you for the holiday present!

I've been shipping fem-dom hero(ine)/male-sub villain since before I hit puberty much less knew that D/s existed, though possibly the earliest I started actually writing it was S1 of Heroes. And specifically the fem-dom hero/male-sub villain trope that also hits another favorite thing that I didn't have words for until I came to the part in Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign where Ekaterin thinks of Miles, "He comes with a house where I don't hit the walls when I stretch out. Even if I stretched out forever." This is not least because my impression of most hero/heroine ships tend to be that the woman is expected to make herself smaller for the man and support his dreams and life and so forth... and then over thataway on the villain side of things there are dudes who would be likely to encourage a partner in developing her talents, if only because having a badass partner helps further their goals, and sometimes their ideologies by reason of first principles.

So I've been writing this pairing in canons where I really have to go full AU to make it happen.

Claire/Sylar in Heroes? Find various ways to throw them together when they're on the same side.

Tifa/Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII? What if Tifa's the protagonist and Cloud who? and she and Seph bond before Jenova starts fucking with his head? Or what if Tifa follows Cloud to Midgard and successfully joins SOLDIER and becomes the great general's right hand man with benefits (and also de facto HBIC in ways that have a lot to do with her being basically Team Mom in canon and Seph having equally canonical Mama feelings)?

Vayne/Penelo in Final Fantasy XII? Introduce them when Vayne's still the consul at Rabanastre and sincerely trying, albeit for his own selfish reasons, to do right by the people of Dalmasca and have him and Penelo make common cause around that and then things go from there.

Hell, I've written a "Final Fantasy IX: The After Years" equivalent where a grown-up Eiko makes common cause, and love, with Kuja. I've written Mrs. Darling/Captain Hook. And this is before we talk about my "everything's better with Black Jewels universe mechanics", and specifically the one where badass and frequently terrifying dudes joyfully submit themselves to the control of stronger women.

Basically if you give me a villain dude who can have a good reason to want to give a lady hero the world and opportunities to come into her own, and do her bidding into the bargain, I'm there. And Star Wars already had some of that with Anakin/Padme (you cannot convince me that he didn't want to put her on the throne of the galaxy), not to mention that it's very much right there on the screen that Ben|Kylo idolizes his grandfather.

So when The Force Awakens came out I was all excited because for once it was there in the canon. He calls her "strong" and "dangerous" and offers to share his knowledge of the Force--- which, let's face it, has probably been central to most of his own sense of his identity, not to mention that it's also his inheritance/family legacy--- with her! And she scars his face! I was there like, "Yes, I am about to have a whole fandom worth of canonical fem-dom hero/male-sub villain." (Not to mention that in the next film, we have him upping the "give her everything that anyone has thought is important about him" game by offering to rule the galaxy with her--- and I still think they both missed a bet by not doing the deal where Rey joins Ben|Kylo in ruling the galaxy... on the condition that they open peace talks with the Resistance and work toward making their galactic government something that the Resistance won't want to resist. And then in the final installment, Ben just basically gives up all his other loyalties and turns his cloak for her, which by the way is what his grandfather did twice over for his family.)

And then, of course, rather a lot of Reylo fans went in... not that direction. (I joke that the only thing that annoys me more than anti-Reylo folks who insist that their relationship MUST be abusive are the subset of my fellow Reylo fans who tend to prove them right.) (Seriously, though, I sort of took it for granted that the two of them as a canon couple is more or less predicated on him turning back to the light, and at that point he obviously would also be changing his worse behaviors? Or... okay, it's Star Wars fandom, it's huge, so there probably are people who think that a redeemed Anakin would have continued torturing and dismembering his descendants in fits of pique or something. But I don't, and I likewise take it for granted that a redeemed or even just halfway-so Ben, a la the end of TLJ, would treat Rey better than he does on the Dark side, though for my money, offering to share knowledge and power with her is really not all that terrible. But then again, I also see echoes of his parents' relationship in some of the things he does to her to which some subset of fandom particularly objects... and something I've noticed is that Star Wars fandom generally, or at least the parts of it I encounter in the wild, seems not to share my opinion that Han, Luke, and Leia were really not going to be in a good place to deal with co-rearing a kid together post-ROTJ and that Ben Solo|Kylo Ren is actually a logical product of his probable upbringing even without Snoke|Palpatine's involvement.)

(Oh, and speaking of my fem-dom/hero male-sub villain shipping? When Knives Out--- also written and directed by Rian Johnson, who did The Last Jedi--- came out? I was delighted, because I finally did get not only the fem-dom hero/male-sub villain pairing of my dreams, but either I'm getting much better at AO3's search terms, or a significant majority of Marta/Ransom fandom agrees with me. *hums happily*.) (Also, Marta/Ransom has so much in common with Reylo--- dude with grandfather issues and lady who inherits his family legacy? Yo.)

[sabotabby]

Yooo, thanks for that level of detail. That is hella fascinating.

I still think they both missed a bet by not doing the deal where Rey joins Ben|Kylo in ruling the galaxy... on the condition that they open peace talks with the Resistance and work toward making their galactic government something that the Resistance won't want to resist.

I would have liked that so much more than what we got.

[beatrice_otter]

As someone who is and has been a Star Wars fan for decades but is NOT a Reylo, I'm having a hard time thinking about what to say about the ship that does not include judgment or squee-harshing, because there was a large and active faction of Reylos who constantly and consistently made racist attacks against Finn and people who liked him. While taking all of his good points and applying them to Kylo, and taking all of Kylo's bad points and applying them to Finn, to prove that Kylo was perfect and innocent and had never done anything wrong, and anything that it looked like he might have done wrong was only because of other people, and Finn was a terrible abusive rapist that Rey needed to escape. And if you dared to point out that several of the major tropes they used to portray Finn and/or talk about him were racist, it was because you were evil and an abuse apologist and hated fandom. I know people who got driven off tumblr and/or out of fandom entirely by Reylo attacks. And then the rest of the Reylo fandom would either not notice the racist abuse some Reylos were doling out, or they'd cover for them and agree that obviously anyone who objected to the racist abuse and harassment was out of line. (What was particularly irritating was, in 2020, watching people who had coordinated harrassment campaigns against Finn fans and John Boyega sanctimoniously declare that "black lives matter.")

Why was Reylo popular? It was a juggernaut, so there are a SHITTON of reasons, as with any juggernaut pairing. One of those reasons was because it was the only all-white het ship possible in the ST. So anybody who had problems shipping a white woman with a dark-skinned black man or a latino went Reylo.

[sabotabby]

Wow. I wish I weren't so jaded that I could be surprised by that, but that is super gross and shitty.

(I'm not generally in juggernaut fandoms or into most het shipping and somehow I totally missed that. I didn't miss Boyega's activism, but then the main reason why I watched the sequels after hating the prequels was because I'd loved him in "Attack the Block." He deserves better.)

[to_do_list]

I am mostly a silent reader and I wouldn't even call myself necessarily a Reylo fan although I have read a fair share. To me, it's entirely a kink/Id/dark-fic thing where Kylo is definitely a villain and the whole dynamics is terrible and unhealthy, with complete awareness of it being this way. Redemption arcs are more likely to be absent. It includes both canon-based fics and multiple modern-times AUs. This particular Reylo sub-genre also seems fairly popular. I think there are hundreds if not thousands of fics that fit these patterns.

I see those as basically using het fics to process a lot of painful gendered patriarchy baggage, similar to Harlequin bodice-ripper novels yet often enough, with much more self-awareness.

[sabotabby]

Hmm. Sociologically, I'm interested in the tension of "I can fix him" vs. "I can make her worse."

[feast_of_regrets]

I am only in the Star Wars fandom in the sense that I love Star Wars; I don't interact with other fans much outside of reblogging interesting Star Wars posts on Tumblr. The drama around Reylo is a good example of why. The whole controversy soured me so much on the new trilogy so much I still haven't actually watched the third one. That said, I still like Reylo a lot and if I ever get back to the first two movies it will be for this ship.

For me, the appeal as much as anything is the possibility that Rey would be "evil" by the mythos of the proceeding movies. Like if she rocks up to the Jedi order and says no, actually, I'll be keeping your holy books and your sweet force moves but you can keep the state owned organized religion, and oh by the way I'll be taking your designated representative of the Dark Side here on my way out the door. We are going to burn both sides down and find a new road out of hell thanks. (That of course didn't happen, but it's what should have happened.) This is all helped along immensely by the fact that Rey and Ben were equals from the beginning and it was obvious from the filmography that they were. (Look at those lightsaber fights!)

Oh, and that moment where they defeat Snoke and then Ben zigs and Rey zags and the betrayal in both their eyes? That is the makings of a beautiful love story right there. Forcebound and pissed at each other? Yes, please.

[sabotabby]

You aren't missing anything! The last one was a garbage fire.