“The most tender way he could think to phrase it” is receipt #573838847739 of why Reylo is a disaster of a “romance”.
Last tweet is interesting though. This may be why there’s a hidden obsession with some fans on wanting Kylo to be considered as the “real” protagonist, as “Ben Solo”. 🤔
if Rey and Kylo were both women or both men, the Force bond wouldn’t be considered sexual.
like, Harry and Voldemort also had an involuntary, unwanted psychic bond, but nobody sexualized it.
take off your hetero goggles.
THIS TEA IS TOO DAMN HOT!
People who are pointing out the harry voldemort shipping in the notes are making a false equivalence. No one was seriously saying Harry and Voldie were going to be/had to be/was canon, no one was harassing creators desperate for “proof” that it was canon. Pottermort or Tomdickharry or whatever that godforsaken ship is called always was and always will be treated as the disturbing crackship it is, as opposed to reylo which is just as disturbing and cracky (if not cracker) but gets treated as though it has actual currency. It does not, except in the context of a heavily misogynistic culture where the violent and abusive treatment of a woman is sanitized and romanticized.
I need to call this post out because this is just some straight up delusional shit.
First of all Ruin Johnson himself confirmed that Kylo manipulatived Rey so that he could be in a position to kill Snoke. This plan had been going on since Kylo smashed his helmet. Since then Kylo wanted Snoke dead.
Second of all Rey is not serving a system that made her wait 15 years. Seriously do these people even watch the same movies?! Rey was left on Jakku! It’s not apart of the New Republic and it’s in the middle of nowhere! It’s like blaming the America for getting abandoned in a uncharted island.
Third of all Kylo isn’t asking her to stop a corrupt government, he’s asking Rey to join a fascist Organization that just committed mass genocide a few days ago! What are you idiots smoking?!
Kylo’s belief system at the end of the last Jedi is that The New Republic, The Resistance, Jedi, Sith, and HIS FAMILY need to die. He is proposing no only to continue Snoke’s work, but cause even more death and destruction than his old master would’ve. Kylo is talking about finishing up what Vader started aka becoming the Empire of the galaxy.
Rey, who had literally just heard from Snoke that Kylo had walked her into a trap and the entire time she had the idea that Kylo had light in him, was all Snoke and Kylo manipulating her. She’s literally realizing that her dad mentor was right and knew all along what would happen if Rey trusted Kylo. She is begging Kylo to not kill anymore people, to just go home to his mom and end this war that he continues to make worse.
Kylo screams at Rey, turning everything on her. He attacks her weakness, her family, information he knows from her that’s her weakness and can break her so she hopefully can lose her resolve.
Kylo exploits her biggest fear, her biggest insecurity, lying to Rey that in the end of the day she never mattered to her family and that she was nothing to anyone.
Rey is absolutely broken by this. She hadn’t been this defeated since she was preparing to die next to Finn in TFA. Seriously she had just been told that she is completely nothing, she comes from nothing. That her parents didn’t care about her and she was sold for drinking money. Kylo realized her moral compass wouldn’t allow her to break, so he’s breaking her spirit instead.
After literally breaking Rey’s spirit down, Kylo tells her to join him. Like I said above, he is asking Rey to join a genocidal, fascist organization and help him kill her father mentor, the man who she cares for and who saved her life from him! And countless billions more. This is as far from romantic as can be. It’s sadistic.
Even Ruin Johnson said himself this was pure manipulation and Rey realized it right here. Every word he had said was wrong. She needed to get off this ship.
What was his reaction?
He tries to kill her!
This isn’t the face of someone in love. Rey is realizing that if she doesn’t get to the Resistance soon, everyone she loves will die. She’s fighting for her life and the Resistance.
What did Kylo do after?
Kylo lies that Rey killed Snoke and goes down to Crait and tries to kill everyone, personally ordering his men to Kill Rey.
One of Kylo’s last lines in the movie is promising Luke that after he kills him, he’s going to Kill Rey.
Kylo is literally the villain at this point and these crazy shippers need to stop acting like Rey is just sleeping on a good man like Kylo. No, Rey is trying to stay away from a literal mass murder who’s trying to conquer the Galaxy and kill everyone.
my god, the delusion of that post. there’s no compassion for Rey here. Kylo just wants someone on his side. He thinks he can turn her to his ideology of rage and burning the past, but when she doesn’t bite he turns cold. Tries to break her down enough that she can be manipulated.
And it does break her, not in the way he thinks though. She is broken not because she’s nothing, but because this person she trusted, that she thought could be saved is someone she was completely wrong about. “Please don’t go this way” is her desperately hoping that this isn’t playing out the way it is.
For the first time, Rey believed in someone. She let herself trust someone after YEARS of only trusting herself. And you know why? Because when she was all alone, when she expected nothing at all, Han, Chewie, and Finn came back for her. Finn, runaway stormtrooper, who she had only just met, came back for her.Despite all his fears he ran straight into the fire, defying all his own self-preservation instincts for Rey. And so she had thought Ben was like Finn. Scared but someone worth believing in.
Or maybe she had thought Ben was like her. Alone, in desperate need of someone to reach out and show him they cared, to show him he was worth the risk. And she thought she could be that. She thought she could be his Finn. But she was wrong. Kylo isn’t changing for her. He isn’t changing for anyone.
She isn’t his hero.
And when he shows just how little he cares for her, how cruel he can be to her, she is completely crushed.
Omg the thought that she wanted to be Finn to someone as lonely as she was… 😭 I think Han was a big part of this, too–she was grieving him and wanted to believe he hadn’t died in vain. If TFA was the story of Rey and Finn uplifting each other with love and friendship, guided by Han and Leia’s caring and Luke’s example, TLJ was the story of both of them realizing not everyone is worthy of trust, with authority figures failed and fallen.
Also I gotta lmao @ the idea that it’s not abusive if the abuser has feeeeeelings and genuinely believes what they’re saying. Guess what? Abusers are people. There are abusers who are completely cynical puppet masters who don’t believe a word that comes out of their own mouths, but they’re not the only type of abusers. The majority of abusers IME actually do believe their own bs, if only because they need to keep their self concept of being moral people while controlling and using their victims.
Our culture really romanticises the idea
of a brooding misunderstood loner who’s an asshole to everyone
but secretly has a heart of gold, so it’s frighteningly easy to meet a guy who treats everyone around him badly and believe without evidence that he has a heart of gold.
Don’t fall for it.
And a lapse in cruelty is not evidence of kindness.
“A lapse in cruelty is not evidence of kindness” Bolded because that line is so incredibly important
Don’t forget that mistaking “a lapse in cruelty” for “kindness” is EXACTLY how Stockholm Syndrome works mechanism-wise. (And personally, since all it really requires is a strong power imbalance in the relationship, I believe that there’s a lot of room to apply it in adult abusive relationships and even in abusive parent-child relationships.)
Don’t ever let yourself think that someone is a good person because of something awful they could be doing but are not doing, right now. When in doubt, imagine yourself acting the same way to a friend, and ask yourself if you’d still want to be friends with you.
It really costs $0.00 to be kind. I spent much of this morning cleaning up after a new employee’s mistakes while another deadline was looming behind me. I had to apologize to four different people. I was extremely irritated, to say the least, and I really wanted to lash out at the employee, ask her how she could be so stupid and didn’t she comprehend my instructions, what was she thinking, why was she wasting my and some very important people’s time. And so on.
Instead I calmed the hell down. I’d been on the receiving end of that tirade many times and I hated it. Yes I was impatient and angry, and yes she could have done better, but she was new to the job and I could have explained things better to her. I figured I could be a raging jerk and get the satisfaction of my own self-righteousness, or I could actually focus on the work and bring her up to speed in a constructive way while starting our relationship on the right foot.
So instead of yelling at her I worked with her. After the immediate damage control I told her where she had gone wrong, but also told her where I had gone wrong. I hadn’t thoroughly explained some of the complex details, and I had simply assumed knowledge on some things because I was so used to them. She apologized for her mistake, and I apologized for not being clearer. We went over the difficult parts again, I gave a clear guideline on things like email etiquette, and she asked questions which I answered. At the end of it she thanked me for being so patient, and I sympathized with how hard it must when everything was so new. I told her that starting something new was always hard but that she would learn and I was confident in her.
I don’t know if this method is more effective than the one I’m used to, which is to be yelled at and be told everything is my fault. I think the way I’m doing it could be effective, because I know that I tend to do better in situations where I’m encouraged rather than berated and feel safe to learn and ask questions. It certainly does not help my job performance when a boss’s shouts are ringing in my ears and I question my ability to improve and do my job, or even whether I’m worth anything at all. Science backs me up that positive reinforcement works better than negative reinforcement, too, so I’m fairly confident this way can be more effective.
You know what, though? I don’t care. There shouldn’t have to be an efficiency-based justification to treat someone with courtesy and respect, especially when they are under my power and made an honest mistake with no disrespect or malice to anyone. What gives me the right to indulge in my supposed superiority at the expense of someone else’s self-worth, especially when that person can’t argue back without risking her income? I’ll call out and argue with anyone if I think they’re wrong, and I did make it clear to this employee that she made a mistake and should do better. That doesn’t mean I’m going to make her listen to me insult and berate her. I have power over her the way I don’t over random strangers I meet on the internet, and it is my duty to be careful with that dynamic.
This is one of the ways I’m trying, little by little, to be the adult I wanted in my own life. Sometimes I’m lost because I didn’t have many people model this behavior for me, but I know I am in full charge of my own responses. No one can make me into someone I don’t want to be, and I can shape who I am through my choices. That makes me feel more powerful than any amount of ability to make people fear me or hate themselves.
I think what reylos fail to realise is that we don’t dislike the shippers because they ship it. We dislike shippers because they entirely misrepresent the ship itself, as well as the movies as a whole.
I, and many people that I’ve spoken to, hold all content to a pretty simple standard: It’s okay to like problematic content. It’s perfectly okay to enjoy media that contains iffy, or even outright offensive, elements – so long as you recognise that those elements exist and are an issue. Be critical of the media you consume, accept that it’s flawed, but don’t think that those problems mean you have to dislike the content.
Take the Star Wars prequels. I love the prequels, but it’s important to recognise the problems it has in terms of racist caricaturing, antisemitism, and the misogynistic way in which Padmé’s story is handled. The same goes for the original trilogy, to an extent – particularly how Jabba is a caricature of Middle Eastern sultans, and the Tusken Raiders are quite heavily islamophobic. And the sequel trilogy, particularly the antiblackness evident in the way Finn is written. These are all hugely important factors to consider when discussing the franchise, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to enjoy the movies. That’s not to say you have to be loudly and consistently vocal about these issues – some people don’t have the time or the energy to do so, some people don’t know how to express it, some people prefer to keep their blogs (and lives) free of discourse and drama. We aren’t expecting everyone to write essay-length meta on how Star Wars is racist, we aren’t expecting the entire fandom to engage in discourse to the same degree, we just think it’s crucial to recognise that the content you enjoy isn’t squeaky clean and problem-free. When you say “I love Star Wars” we don’t expect you to tack “(even though it’s problematic!)” onto the end, but we hope that you accept that it’s problematic.
But this attitude (which is not specific to the Star Wars fandom, obviously) of viewing content in a critical and socially nuanced way is a relatively low bar that most people don’t struggle to meet. If someone told me they loved Star Wars, and I were to go, “Ah, but it’s antisemitic! Remember Watto?” chances are they’d respond with something along the lines of, “Yeah, that’s true. I know that. I still love the films though.” And that’s fine. That’s my stance! I love it despite that too! If I were to tell them that they shouldn’t enjoy their favourite film franchise because of that, they’d likely be outraged, or at least relatively annoyed, and justifiably so. As long as you acknowledge the problems, enjoy away. No one is stopping you from enjoying it or judging you for doing so. You should enjoy content whilst acknowledging its problems. Not by ignoring them, or defending them. And not by misrepresenting them.
That’s why, even if we have a problem with reylo on a fundamental level, most antis don’t automatically dislike the shippers. When we point out that reylo is abusive, we aren’t saying that shippers condone abuse. When we say that Rey’s interrogation scene is a rape parallel (Side note: to those reylos saying we shouldn’t throw the word “rape” around willy nilly and use it where we shouldn’t, we aren’t saying that scene is literally mind rape, we’re saying that the scene is very deliberately mirroring the power dynamics, behaviours, and emotions associated with sexual assault), we aren’t calling reylo shippers rape apologists. Because we know what nuance is. I haven’t seen any evidence of this myself personally, but I’m sure that plenty of reylo shippers realise that it’s abusive and are mindful of that. I’m sure plenty of reylos don’t expect – or even want – it to become canon, and quietly indulge in fan art or fanfiction or whatever the hell else whilst also accepting that it’s a problematic ship. When we point out that it’s abusive (and racist in many respects) we aren’t condemning shippers. It isn’t intended to make people feel guilty or evil for shipping it. It’s intended to raise an important issue which some people, especially shippers themselves (and particularly socially ignorant or uncritical ones), may not have considered. It’s giving reylos an opportunity to view their ship in a more nuanced and critical way, and reach their own conclusions based on that. Maybe some reylos will stop shipping it when they realise it’s abusive. Maybe some will realise that it is, and continue to ship it, whilst also bearing that element in mind and viewing the reylo content they consume in a different way. Many (and this is what I’ve seen from every reylo on this website so far) will completely disregard the abuse and the racism, pretend it’s not a problem whatsoever, continue shipping it, continue expecting it to become canon, and continue wanting to see it play out in the movies. It’s important to hold fandom ships to the same standard as any other element of the media they stem from – enjoy it all you want, but acknowledge the problems with it. Don’t ignore, defend, or misrepresent the problematic elements.
But like I said, I’ve seen fucking none of that in the fandom myself, and I’ve been heavily involved in the Star Wars Tumblr fandom since a little before TFA was announced. And that’s not to say that I’m an authority on the fandom or that I know the thoughts and feelings of every reylo. But in the three and a half years that I’ve been a Star Wars blog, all I’ve seen is people either, A: flat-out claiming that reylo isn’t abusive at all, which serves to both ignore and misrepresent the very much intentional abuse parallels that are present right there on screen (and this is especially true for those reylos who make entire posts about how that one bit of eye contact or a slight smirk mean that his abusive behaviour is actually super duper lovey dovey romance), or B: defending the abuse itself, mostly blaming it on Kylo’s “mental illnesses” and saying he himself is a “victim of abuse” and a barrage of other weak excuses, many of which are ableist. It even goes as far as blatantly misrepresenting parts of the movies which have nothing to do with reylo (like Han’s death, or Kylo’s interactions with Snoke) to suit their ship. And this includes either photoshopping Finn out of scenes he shares with Rey, or whitewashing the ever-living fuck out of him, in order to literally replace him with Kylo. That’s fucked, my dudes.
Accepting content as problematic but enjoying it nonetheless only works if you take the content as it is presented to you, without manipulating or misrepresenting it. There would be far fewer anti-reylos if reylo shippers weren’t either lying about, or deliberately misunderstanding, the films. Bear in mind, anti-reylo doesn’t mean anti-shipper. I, and many others I imagine, don’t give a fuck if you ship it so long as you see it for what it isand are mindful of its problems. We’re only anti-shipper when the shippers themselves fail to meet a very low fucking standard which most people succeed at meeting. And most or all of the shippers I’ve seen fail to meet that standard, which makes me anti-them.
Ship it if you want. If you acknowledge its problems and ship it through a socially aware and nuanced lens whilst also seeing it for what it is, and as long as you keep yourself to yourself and quietly ship it without disrupting the fandom proper and starting needless drama, I have no beef with you. But if you go to dramatic lengths to distort and defend blatant verbal and physical abuse, and racist misrepresentations of the content of the films, or if you completely disregard all the iffy elements of the ship and get angry when people level even so much as mild criticism against reylo, then you can – with all due respect – go fuck yourself.
Perhaps it’s unfair for us to expect everyone to hold content interaction to the same standard that we do. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect people to be critical and nuanced when it comes to media consumption. But given that it’s a standard held and met by almost all reputable content analysis outlets, it doesn’t seem all that unfair.
I remember John posting images of his back training for filming
and he looked incredible. How cool would it have been to have a shot of
Finn shirtless where we see him from the back with a scar tracing all
the way down? To actually see him determined to get stronger and proving
that next time he’ll be ready for Kylo because he knows he’s a dirty
fighter – he’s got the scar to prove it. 2/3
BUT NO, instead we got pasty Kylo being delicately fixed by
droids and wearing waist high pants as our ‘swoon scene’ and are
supposed to believe Rey would get flustered by him, aka the murderer
who’s hurt everyone she cares about and her, and not want to destroy the
force link immediately? GTFOH. 3/3
Also Poe was tortured for hours–under Kylo’s orders and later directly–and it never comes up again because it’s inconvenient to poor widdle Kywo’s woobification lol. Nothing bad the FO did in the prior movie comes up, not the mass murders, not the destruction of an entire fucking star system, they’re just reduced to this group of incompetent space buffoons.
As for Rey, I’m reevaluating her writing in TLJ though I’ll agree the execution was horrible. There’s a comment by Daisy in a cast interview that stayed with me, that Han is always in the background for Rey though he might not come up a lot. We know that Finn was constantly in her thoughts, and from Daisy we know Han was, too. I’m beginning to think Rey’s reaction had more to do with a) wanting to lay down the burden of the fight and get back to Finn, as @jewishcomeradebot discussed (link), b) wanting to believe Han did not die in vain trying to save his son, and c) traumatic bonding, as in wanting to appease and please someone who hurt her badly and whom she can’t seem to get away from now, so that he won’t want to hurt her worse. A form of Stockholm Syndrome, in other words.
Point c) might be counterintuitive and seems to be something a lot of people (reylows and antis alike) can’t quite see, because I think there’s a perception that the natural, or only, way to react to mistreatment is like Rey did at the end of TFA–fighting back in open rage. But the nature of the threat is different now compared to when he was a direct physical threat; he is light-years away and doesn’t know where she is, and she has a chance (she thinks) to win him over.
For all we think of Rey as a fighter the majority of her life on Jakku was actually spent appeasing rather than fighting a guy who had a lot of power over her and used that power to exploit her: Unkar Plutt. When there was a direct physical threat to herself or beings in her circle she fought back, and those are the parts we remember, but when it came to long-term mistreatment that did not pose direct danger she put up with underpayment and starvation for the sake of her goal–waiting for her family to come back. If she was always thinking about and lashing out at the ways he had wronged her she wouldn’t be able to stay, and so would lose the connection with her family forever. Her entire life was an exercise in burying injustices and indignities so she could have a chance at being with the ones she loved.
I’m not in agreement with either side of the fandom on this point, the horrible one that believes her engaging for her own goal with the man who wronged her is a sign of True Love, or the well-meaning but sorta puritanical one that believes there is only one true way for Rey to react to mistreatment, that refuses to accept the varied strategies victims take with aggressors. The writer/director himself pointed out that it was an unwanted and forced intimacy on Rey, and the ways people respond to that can be very different from an immediate physical threat.* There is no clear demarcation between victims who fight back and victims
who appease; the same people can do both depending on the situation.
* People don’t always fight
back even with direct physical threats–some have been taught through brutal experience that fighting back
results in more pain, so they act more passively in hopes of minimizing
the hurt. Just… don’t judge victims as weak or even immoral for not acting as aggressively as you did, or imagine you would. Please.
My home will be a home with no loud anger, no explosive rage, no slamming doors or breaking glass, no name calling, shaming or blackmail. My home will be gentle, it will be warm. It will keep my loved ones safe. No fear, no hurt and no worries. I may come from a broken and twisted place but I will build something whole and safe. I’ll sing in the shower again, cook with a smile and dance in all the rooms. I will heal.
The only screaming in a house should be shrieks of laughter.
This was my dream and I am building it now with my husband and our small child. When I got married it was almost strange, feeling safe and relaxed in my own home. Now I am giving my child the upbringing I wanted for myself, with kindness, empathy, humor, limits, discipline, and above all love, endless love in a peaceful home without fear or violence.
I feared for the longest time I wasn’t able to be a kind spouse or parent, but it turns out I am. I can’t express how freeing this is because my father blamed me so often for “making” him blow up, “making” him so anxious that he had to control me. He said I would understand him when I was a parent myself.
But no, it really was him and not me, it wasn’t my fault, I am not broken or abnormal, I am capable of happiness and of making my loved ones happy. And now that I am a parent, if anything I am more mystified at my father than ever. How could he look into his children’s eyes and even conceive of treating them with anything but gentleness? He remains a warning to me, the path I could take if I give in to anger or fear, but I know there is nothing inevitable about it. I am responsible for my actions and reactions, and no one can “make” me abusive.
For everyone made to doubt themselves like I was and fears they can’t make a better home than the one they grew up in, it’s not true. It was never true. You can do better and you will do better. It might take a lot of work. You might have to face and unlearn unhealthy patterns and messed-up beliefs to replace them with better ones. You can do it, though. I believe in you.
L.J.'s Obsessions 