I’ve seen this argument, though not in so many words, over and over from that side of the fandom so if anything the honesty is refreshing.
I’ve seen this argument made in exactly these words. I die a little each time, because mostly it’s not even ironically.
They go on about how war means you can do whatever the fuck you like to unarmed prisoners, or how Kylo was merciful to kill the villagers, and I just pray I never ever meet them in real life…
I really never actually wanted a ship to die in the past, mostly because I never thought things could get that bad.
But holy hell Reylow is the worst ship I’ve seen in my life and honestly the shippers are to blame. Every ship has bad apples, but it feels like this ship is a bad tree. The worse of it all is that while most ships I’ve seen in this fandom, crack, rare, or canon, try to improve and build from canon, Reylow changes it. Mostly because Reylow can’t exist in canon. It’s a crack ship that went rogue.
I really hope a knight of Ren is a woman. Just so these people can abandon ship and leave Rey out of their objectification rewrites. I don’t mind a shipper and I’ll never harass one, but I only know one truth…it’s for Reylow to end.
It’s honestly for their own good. The Kylo they want doesn’t even exist and they don’t care about Rey at all and Finn and Rey are the protagonists. That’s just it.
I don’t mind people who stay in their lane either, but this ship needs to be hit with the canon truth and join insane crack ships of yesterday.
Every ship has bad apples, but it feels like this ship is a bad tree.
It’s their way of convincing themselves that they see a truth no one else does. Like any cult, diehard canon Reylow depends on constructing a reality divorced from the the real world. An affect of absolute certainty and assurances that the leaders have some deeper insight that no one else has, with any detractors said to be ignorant or evil or both, is a major way of discouraging followers from offering dissent or seeking out information on their own. Why should they when these opposing opinions are obviously inferior, uninformed, and unworthy? This helps disguise the fact that a lot of what’s being peddled is unadulterated bullshit, and it’s precisely because it’s bullshit that this kind of pretensions are necessary to keep the charade going.
Yeah it’s distasteful to make her a tool of carrying on the Skywalker name at the expense of her character development and happiness. I’ve been noticing more and more similarities between diehard canon ReySky and canon Reylow, and this treatment of Rey is one of them.
I really hate that. As someone who is a fan of the theory it hurts to let go, but if it’s not there, not there. I didn’t like Rey because she might have been a Skywalker.
My feelings can be summed up by Mark’s words to Daisy: “Luke would be lucky to have a daughter like you.”
It’s a sweet idea, because of what it would mean to both characters, but just wanting it for the sake of warning it doesn’t do anything for anybody. I want Mandalorian Finn, but if it didn’t happen I still would love Finn. I don’t like this whole trend that if what some people want for a character doesn’t come true, they’ll hate the character.
And I don’t mean like how Rian destroyed canon for TLJ, I mean that if Rey isn’t a Skywalker, Finn isn’t a Mandalorian, or Poe isn’t gay, people will hate them. At the end of the day if people love these characters, they will love them even if their origins don’t line up to what you want. I hate characterization of almost everyone in TLJ, but I still love them S characters.
There are people who would hate Rey if she weren’t a Skywalker? These people are like actually siding with Kyle’s blood supremacism and his insistence that if her parents weren’t important, neither is she? Imagine being like Kylo Ren. Don’t be like Kylo Ren, people.
It boggles my mind that there are like communities of antis? That coordinate and go into tags they know will upset to complain about things they could easily avoid and dedicate discords to talking about how much they hate shit?
Just, imagine going to your family brunch and they ask you how your social life is doing and for a brief instant it crosses your mind that spend your time online intentionally submerging yourself in an echo chamber of anger instead of in a way that makes you happy?
I mean,,,it’s just incredible in its own way…
Funny, because a group of reylos just screencaped a response I made to a post about the treatment of Lando that was never in any reylo tag, or any tag period, for the express purpose of twisting my words, making up my point of view to make me look as unintelligent as possible, and generally ridicule me, as they frequently do. Never to my face, though, and when i inevitably find their anti posts about me and respond, they block, no doubt at the warning of other reylos that I’m too dangerously unstable to interact with.
I’m a CoC/race and fandom blogger, by no means devoted to stalking reylo shippers, though I assure you I’ve been stalked by reylo shippers myself.
That kind of behavior stopped boggling my mind a long time ago.
Same here, I’ve had coordinated efforts from shippers of direct Antisemitic harassment. And I know that @lj-writes have had campaigns orchestrated against her as an Asian fan.
Like, imagine what it takes for shippers to directly target fans of color and Jewish fans for harassment. Imagine them going to family brunch and them asking about their social life and then having to consider that they’ve spent their online time throwing Antisemitic and racist harassment at fans simply for daring to fandom while a minority and not be overjoyed that a neo Nazi allegory is being worshiped.
But then I can see you’ve already blocked @diversehighfantasy and deleted her answer.
What was that you said about echo chamber again? Maybe you should be careful with those stones, your house looks a mite bit made of glass to me.
Yeah at least one BNF reylow has been known to explicitly direct people to get into my notes, and whenever she brings me up to try and look like a victim I get flareups of anons who use the exact lines of insults she fed them. Strangely enough I’ve had more antiblack shit in my inbox than
anti-Asian stuff, maybe because I talk about Finn so much. Not that
anti-Asian racism would work, because I simply don’t have the
internalized experience of being a minority. I have had an antiblack
slur land in my inbox and that could have been a lot more hurtful to
someone who has lived trauma associated with that word, which
demonstrates the kind of pressures minority fans such as Black fans and
Jewish fans are under just existing in fandom.
Also Reylow
stuff is not easy to avoid, that’s half the problem. I used to come
across their posts because they’ve been crosstagged/overtagged, and even
after filtering became available in mobile I look ot grey box after
grey box in the tags I frequent, weighing whether it’s worth the energy
of actually looking at their content and block. I see arguments that
can’t be filtered because they’re not tagged #reylo and the op didn’t
have the self-awareness to tag #war crimes apologism or #racism. Reylows
also derail posts that have nothing to do with their ship (example),
so I often get eyefuls while looking through the notes of a post I
like. Is it so hard for them to stay in their lanes? I have blocked the
worst offenders, but there are vast numbers of shippers and they don’t
come with convenient “future asshole” tags that I can use as a guide.
So…
at minimum, in order to completely avoid reylow content I have to block
thousands of people and stop looking at the notes of any fandom posts.
And I’ll probably have to turn off anon to avoid the harassment.
Expending significant energy and changing my blogging behavior don’t
sound that “easy.”
Canonically it is. We have watched Kylo abduct, torture, gaslight, isolate, and manipulate Rey for two movies straight. She tried to show kindness to him, risked her life on there being good in him, and he repaid her by using her as a tool for his ascension, tearing down her sense of self to try to make her turn to him. killing the people she was trying to protect, and attempting and promising to kill her.
As a fanon ship it doesn’t have to be toxic. There can be AUs, there are canon continuations where he genuinely sees how wrong he was and makes amends. There are ways to ship it in fun and respectful ways without flooding unrelated tags and while acknowledging Kylo’s canonical war crimes and abuse.
In fandom behavior the shippers are frequently and extremely toxic. They harass people–including each other–off their blogs, they derail conversations about fandom racism, they are heavy on war crimes and abuse apologism, they erase and demonize Finn, they have been known to be racist and antisemitic. Also, as a matter of personal experience, most of the shippers I’ve interacted with are underhanded, dishonest, or just unreasonably aggressive. There are individuals who are lovely but overall I strongly dislike that section of the fandom.
I mean make no mistake, there absolutely are antis who are abusers and harass people over a ship, and I don’t associate with people who act this way. I can’t speak for all antis or an anti “community” assuming one even exists; all I can do is take responsibility for my own actions and curate my interactions. And I’ll continue to be critical and analytical of the canon text and opinions that have currency in fandom. Assholes who try to paint that as inherently harassing or abusive can go take a hike.
The claim that antis let abusers a free pass is rich coming from an anti-anti too, seeing how I regularly get troll anons jeering at me about my age, have received a blitz of racist anons including the n-word (that one was… confusing), and how a big-name reylow fan very transparently tried to set a harassment gang on me while hiding behind a block. I did get a few anons and notes using the exact words she fed her followers, though not as many as expected–she must be losing her touch. And this shipper herself was temporarily harassed off her blog by fellow reylows for very mildly calling out the demonization of Finn, showing just how normalized harassment is in that part of the fandom as a tool for silencing dissent. While antis who are harassers and bullies definitely exist, I have not seen a big-name anti blogger purposefully use their platform to direct harassment at someone, nor have I seen antis driven off their blog by fellow antis.
Things have gotten to the point where most of the blogs of any prominence that discuss fandom racism and are critical of reylow and reylows have turned off anon or their asks altogether due to harassment. That probably accounts for the amount of activity in my inbox, since more than one anon has cited the fact that I’m one of the few “antis” who allow anon. Reylow shippers have, in a very real sense, managed to choke off an important route of communication on Tumblr by harassing people who disagree with them.
If this anti-anti focuses exclusively on harassment by antis while ignoring what a massive problem it is among shippers, then they don’t really care about harassment as an issue. They’re using it to score points against people they don’t like.
It is run by a r3yl0 and had all sorts of f1nnl0 content on it as well but thank you for your misinformation
Just a quick heads up for everyone. The other blog is named finn-appreciation (a dash in the middle).
And because someone inevitably will get their knickers in a knot. I’m not going to tell anyone else what to do. I’m telling people the name of the blog so they can decide for themselves how to act.
Like… they’re blatantly trying to confuse people with their url, and they’re even using an event run by @finnappreciation as their header to further the confusion. Luckily I’ve been around long enough to know having unconditional ship inclusivity in the description is generally code for asshole, including possible support for pedophilic ships. Forget reylow, I’m blocking for the dishonesty and potential ick.
*pst* did you know that attacking interracial ships to promote your one white ones makes you garbage and racist? yeah…
The tags alone belong in a museum of racist fails.
*psst* did you know that assuming people ship Finnrey just to get “the credit of shipping an interracial couple” is really fucking racist? yeah…
Anyway here’s the shitpress, a.k.a. @thesovereignempress, purposefully interacting with me after she blocked me (and while my own block was undone because she deleted and remade) and encouraging her fellow shippers to harass me over a properly tagged anti post. Come at me with your “but you’re 39 million years old lol” anons, bros, I’ll roast you for fun like always.
These people are like actually siding with Kyle’s blood supremacism and his insistence that if her parents weren’t important, neither is she? Imagine being like Kylo Ren. Don’t be like Kylo Ren, people.
L.J.'s Obsessions 