family annihilators and the FO on fascist regimes. The fact that they are fictional doesn’t suddenly negate the parallels. If it’s true that the Jurassic Park guy wanted to put Poe and Rey together, the storyline would have supported it in some way, probably as I suggested (1)

with Rey deciding that her attraction to Poe oustrips her
attraction to Finn. Also I don’t get why you act as if there’s no
precedent for this in SW. Before George decided to make Luke and Leia
twins, Leia clearly was more drawn romantically to Han than to Luke. It
was suggested in the prequels and tie in material that Captain Panaka
was deeply in love with Padme and that she was attracted and receptive,
but then Anakin came along and that was that. They’re fictional, too,
fyi. (end)

You’re conflating two very different questions here. The first is whether saying “this is bad story” is the same as saying “this character had no right to make that choice.” The second, which you’ve just introduced, is about whether real-life parallels can inform the reading of a fictional story. They are two very different things and the answer to the first is “no,” while the answer to the second is “yes.”

Rey and Poe have zero romantic buildup in the first 2 movies and a rushed one-movie romantic subplot will be pretty weak compared to Finnrey. That’s judging the merits of a story involving fictional characters and has nothing to do with shaming Rey for not marrying her high school bf or whatever. Like I said in response to your previous ask, if we think of Leia like a real person she has every “right” to fall in love with Admiral Ackbar or Wedge or Mon Mothma. Does that make it a good story? No.

“Before George decided to make Luke and Leia
twins, Leia clearly was more drawn romantically to Han than to Luke.“

Pretty sure you meant “more drawn romantically to Luke than to Han,” and I’d dispute that. Luke and Leia had great rapport, yes, but even though I liked Luke/Leia better prior to the sibling reveal I still had the annoying suspicion that Han and Leia would end up together because they had the whole Slap Slap Kiss thing going on, a trope I dislike but is real nonetheless.

“It
was suggested in the prequels and tie in material that Captain Panaka
was deeply in love with Padme and that she was attracted and receptive,“

Um. Padmé and Panaka were never shown romantically on screen–idk what movies you watched–and, judging by their actors’ ages, Panaka was nearly 30 years older. I mean I really hope you’re not suggesting this supposed romance started in The Phantom Menace when Padmé was 14. Are you seriously comparing this nonexistent-on-screen and potentially horrifying “attraction” to Finn and Rey’s love built up over two movies?

Reylows are harassing that author and saying her attitude leads to reylows of color being slurred and doxed and that fandom should be for everyone and not to punish others just because they like a character you don’t. Are these people for real? They say this when antis of color are continually slurred and these roaches crawl all over reylo content to talk about Kylo and downplay Finn every moment?

EDIT: Sorry! I meant finnrey content. They can have their ooc reylow fantasies

They’re out to silence people who talk negatively about the series’ villain, particularly people who might be construed as “official” and therefore a threat to the imagined canonity of their crackship. Reylows are a pox upon this fandom.

there’s stuff i need to correct about an ask you answered about oscar’s benefit concert. 1) it was a benefit, which was why the cast showed up, to support oscar’s efforts to help with the situation in guatemala, you guys don’t need to make it sound like a social call & 2) the person that posted the pictures of adam and daisy is a poe/oscar stan that hates reylo and doesn’t give a shit about adam, she was just trying to be nice to the people asking her questions and got bullied for it anyway.

lj-writes:

Thank you for the correction. I was getting so many conflicting reports about it and was having a hard time finding information for myself. This was London for Guatemala, right? I think people may have been confusing it with an earlier benefit event, LA for Guatemala, which was a private show. Doesn’t mean John had any more obligation to attend than if it was a private event, of course, but it’s good to know the facts. And since it wasn’t a private event it was wrong of me to call the person who took pictures a stalker. I’ll find and delete or correct those posts. I’m very sorry she was harassed, no one deserves that 😦

Mmkay, on being shown some of the pics I’m still going to have to go with
“stalker.” I’m not spreading that shit around but Daisy was clearly
surreptitiously filmed at times without her knowledge. Also maybe it’s because I haven’t seen all the pics (some of these posts were since deleted, thank goodness) or there are different sets of pics floating around, but this Oscar stan evidently took no pictures of Oscar? Not that I’d be okay with that if they were taken without his consent?

I mean how ironic in this context that “stan” originally comes from “stalker fan…”

Angry, haunted needy eyes? Was this author in hard drugs? This ugly man killed a whole village, his father, and countless others. Why is he being described like he’s Edward Cullen? I didn’t see tlj because I heard enough to love myself and not do it and I thought people might have been exaggerating a little about Kylo being made to lol like a sympathetic hero but what the fuck is this?

I see it, personally, as the continuation of Kylo being a very human villain–and a very human abuser. I’ve often heard of people talking as though abusers are without feelings or vulnerabilities, and that was not my experience with abuse at all. My own abuser constantly made himself out to be the victim, and he had genuine fears, hurts, and yearnings. He just chose to soothe and fulfill them by tearing others down and making them serve him, and that’s what made him abusive.

I see Kylo the same way. I think he is angry, haunted, needy, I think he felt genuine loneliness and fear and threat. What makes him a war criminal and an abuser is that he used others as tools to help himself feel safer and in control, whether as victims of his violence or his manipulation. I believe it was his genuine insecurity and feelings of vulnerability that led him to reach out to Rey, but the abusive part is that he refused to do it as an equal. He had to be the one in control and she had to be the one reliant on him, or he wouldn’t feel safe. His abusiveness came from a very human place, making him understandable in his drive and evil in his choices.

Why was Kylo’s shirtless scene necessary? I’m still puzzled. Rey’s reaction was odd to it. It’s the reaction I’d have if I did a video conference with my boss and he was shirtless. I’d be mainly confused. Was Daisy supposed to have another reaction? I don’t want to waste time or money on the tlj novelization where it might be explained further so interested in your thoughts.

Here’s the relevant part of the novelization, from Chapter 21:

I can see why reylows want to say this is Rey being overwhelmed with attraction at Kylo because of course they would, but it can just as easily be interpreted as discomfort. Taken together with the way Daisy acted Rey’s reaction on screen and the totality of the story, to me it reads clearly as her being thrown off balance and discomfited.

Rey’s discomfort is the point here. Kylo refusing to cover himself despite her request is his way of setting the tone of the conversation, purposefully disregarding her and taking control of the interaction. Even if we say for the sake of argument that she felt attracted at the sight of him, she still requested that he put something on in a situation where she can’t avoid interacting with him and he simply ignored her.

It’s like Lyndon B. Johnson taking a dump with the bathroom door open while members of his staff were outside; a deliberate show of power by violating personal boundaries, intended to humiliate and dominate. I mean I guess we should be happy the Force Bond didn’t catch Kylo on the can, but to me it would have been about as sexual.

This domination move is immediately followed by an even more significant one where he changes the conversation from Rey’s questions about his father to turning it back against her, deliberately upsetting her by invoking her greatest and most central trauma. This threw her off balance and made her easier to manipulate.

So that is how I read the shirtless scene. It’s not presented as sexual or romantic. It’s part and parcel of Kylo Ren’s continuing efforts to control Rey, and it was ugly on every level–intentionally so, I believe.

Re: Rey has already seen what a handsome man looks like: in the novel, in Rey’s internal monologue when she tells Finn she’s never met a Resistance fighter before, in her head she reflects on how now that she’s gotten a good look at him, he’s quite… We don’t get to hear the rest of that thought because they have to run but I’m pretty sure that’s the exact word she was going to use.

That’s when she pledged to end the First Order once and for all, because they interrupted her ogle session of the dreamiest dude she had ever seen.

Remember that post you made about Kylo being a handsome villain as something new and fresh for the franchise? I just saw a reylo say that Kylo’s not a villain because he’s not ugly.

Oh yes, that’s been their line for a loooong time. They claimed that when Kylo removed in the interrogation scene and showed a normal, non-disfigured face (handsome to them, I guess), that showed he wasn’t a villain. It would take a while to unpack the layers of ableism and missing the whole damned point in that line of thought. Reylow meta is truly another level of hell.

Rey agrees with me, by the way. In the TFA novelization she doesn’t see him as handsome but unexpectedly ordinary-looking. I mean she has already Seen the face of Finn at this point, folks, she knows what a handsome man looks like.

The last anon said about women being look as sex toys is not surprising but also very irrataded disgusted. Bc similar goes to Natalie Portman, back then when she film sw she received a fan Mail and it said sexual uncomfortable things to her and that was a shock when I read that but anyway. It’s best that Daisy won’t return to social media maybe never.

I mean Natalie’s very first fan mail as a child (after Léon, which… yeah) was evidently a male “fan’s” graphic fantasy of raping her, not that it would have made later such instances of sexual harassment easier. I think Daisy leaving was the right choice, too, though it’s sad and unfair because social media can be a powerful tool and it’s not right for women to be driven off it by harassment.

I just remembered Ackbar is dead and screw Rian Johnson for mentioning his death offhand. Was it so hard to have Ackbar in the shot when the bridge was blown open? But I disagree with Ackbar replacing Holdo. A guy named Ackbar doing a suicide run has unfortunate implications.

I agree, in fact I don’t think Ackbar should have been in TLJ at all if RJ wasn’t going to do anything meaningful with him. Then Ackbar and Lando could have met in IX and reminisced about the Battle of Endor. Y’know, the battle where Lando defied the order to retreat and destroyed the second Death Star. Because bosses aren’t perfect gods or something.

Would Han, Chewie, and Lando show up in your Episode VII?

I’ve been thinking about that. Outwardly Han would be similar to his Bloodline self, running charity races, maybe teaching pilots, with a legitimate business on the side. Unlike Bloodline he is also deep in the Coruscant social web, both legitimate and less legitimate, in support of Leia’s agenda. He serves as an unofficial spymaster for Leia, basically, in contrast to Poe who has an official rank though Poe’s work may also be frequently off the books. Han could be Leia’s channel to the underground of Republic space and beyond, where she might turn when she can’t get things done through legitimate channels–which is a lot of the time, with the Senate so deadlocked. Leia would not be unlike Vader in this regard, recognizing that she needs to rule and use not only the Republic’s daytime life but its buried night realms as well, its criminal and illegal elements. If personal principles and Republic protocol don’t allow her to get too deeply involved, well, that’s where Han comes in.

That’s a long prelude to saying Han is likely to be the man to turn to when the Republic’s system quickly starts to fail and careens toward war. When Rey helps Finn and his surviving crew escape the Republic military, they obviously can’t ask the authorities for help. Enter Han, who helps them disappear into the back streets of Coruscant with the hope that they can smuggle Finn in to testify before the Senate and avert a war. Alas, Ben’s attempt to rescue Leia causes chaos and death, Leia is forced to go on the run, and war breaks out in earnest.

As for Lando, I was thinking he could play a role in the war or rather the attempt to stop it and find out the truth. Han could contact him to get a ship for Finn and Rey, and Bespin’s security forces could cover Leia’s retreat from Republic space. Maybe in a later pivotal scene Lando’s fleet approaches the evenly-matched Republic and Mandalorian forces, with some suspense which side he would join–but instead he gets between them and orders them to stop firing at each other.

I’d like to see Chewie not solely at Han’s side but at Kashyyk leading his own life as a leader with his own family. Ben and Leia could flee there to seek refuge, and maybe this is where the nature of the threat becomes clear–a group of ex-Republic and ex-Empire officers had been kidnapping children, mainly Mandalorian, to pit Mandalore and the Republic against each other. This could also be where Ben decides this group makes sense and he will join them because the Republic is irretrievably broken. Chewie and Leia would try to stop him but Ben seriously wounds Chewie, saying he didn’t want to. He has had enough of the Republic and thinks the only way forward is to destroy it. He tells his mother that he loves her and she will understand someday.