The Reylo Ship and the new Star Wars

[igenlode]

I've just worked out why I'm so instinctively opposed to the 'Reylo' movement in "Star Wars" -- not because it's a 'problematic ship', not because it's not canon, but because it's a case of turning everything into sex.
It's taking two characters who have a complex antagonistic relationship as part of canon events, and reading this as yet another 'they hate each other because they love each other' Mills & Boon trope :-(

And all right, there's precedent for that in the Leia/Han relationship (which is pretty much classic belligerent sexual tension), but those two weren't actually trying to kill each other...

I'm perfectly happy to see Kylo redeemed, and given the precedents of this series I assume he will be, even if only in death (but more likely in life). But I sincerely hope the writers don't decide to do it by having Rey realise that she Has Been In Love With Him All Along (or Really Loves Him). She has a lot of legitimate reasons to hate him, and if she is going to forgive the actions of someone who has behaved like a psychotic toddler then I'd really prefer it not to be because of the irresistable call of sex.

---

I never got round to writing my thoughts on "The Force Awakens", which were basically that it reads like fan-fic... escept that fanfic would have been more original. In particular, the Death Star trench-run at the end was really, really unnecessary. The film had a lot of good points of its own -- and Harrison Ford pretty much stole the show; I admire him doubly for not only stepping back into stereotype, but doing it with such a good grace and so successfully -- so why try to insert so many laboured parallels with the original "Star Wars"?

Kylo Ren appears to be far too young to be the son of his supposed parents, unless he was born very late in their marriage: his mother has to be pushing sixty and he appears to be in his early twenties (and behaves like a teenager...)

Why on earth would anyone construct an elaborate join-the-dots map to a person (hint: people move), and why wouldn't you be able to identify and use just the relevant end section of it (the galaxy has computerised maps; surely someone can locate the star names/patterns?) rather than having to follow the route on the missing sections all the way from the beginning?

And I didn't really understand how the New Order (who have no official status at all, so far as I could gather) get away with behaving like Darth Vader's galaxy-spanning Empire when they are the rebels and the erstwhile Rebellion is now the government. Again, it felt like fan-fic where these things were just happening because the authors wanted to see their favourite bits revived/repeated, without any particular justification plot-wise :-(
Possibly if you had read and watched all the tie-in material over the last thirty years some deep-laid rationale would have been revealed, but I'm afraid a mass-market 'reboot' needs to be able to stand on its own two feet for a casual audience; people like me, who saw the first films in the cinema and haven't seen them again since.

All in all, I quite enjoyed the film. I enjoyed it more than the rebooted "Star Trek", which I found actively annoying in many ways. I loved it when the crashed pilot turned out to have survived after all (because, like the characters, I'd genuinely assumed that he had died in that escape). I loved Han; Leia was a bit lacklustre for someone who is supposedly a commanding general. I'd be inteerested to watch the sequel, but I thought it fell a long way short of the stellar reviews that recommended it to me :-(

Comments

[pedanther]

The trend of making any intense relationship be about sex is a problem I have with a lot of popular ships, come to think of it.

My hope is that the point of all the parallels to the original trilogy (and particularly of repeating the Death Star yet again with the knob turned up to 12) will turn out to have been to get all that out of everyone's system so they can do something more original with the next one.

Having read and watched all the tie-in material of the last thirty years wouldn't have helped much, because the filmmakers did understand about it needing to stand on its own feet, and one of the first things they did when the new movies were confirmed was to announce that all that stuff is non-canon now and that the movies will be ignoring it all. (In the old tie-in novels, for one thing, Han and Leia have multiple children, none named Ben; it's Luke's son, more plausibly, who bears that name.) Mind you, since The Force Awakens came out, there's already been a whole stack of new tie-in novels, some of which reputedly contain details that either ought to have been in this movie or had better be in the next one if they're supposed to matter.

I gather there was an entire subplot that was filmed for The Force Awakens but cut for time, that would have clarified the political situation regarding the New Republic, the Resistance and the First Order. There's one trace of it in the final film: when the seat of the New Republic is about to be destroyed and all the people are standing on the balcony looking up at the sky, the camera lingers on a young woman we've never seen before; she's the protagonist of the excised subplot.

[igenlode]

Yes, "Death Star with the knob turned up to twelve" pretty well summarises it!

It's not just the fans (and in particular the slash writers) who have taken to making every intense relationship all about sex; I could insert a lot of bitter comments about a society that uses 'sexy' as a generic term of approbation and genuflects before the Holy Orgasm (or is it medicinal, to be administered x times weekly? Or merely an obligatory expression of psychological good health, to avoid Repression and Fixation?) That's one reason why I was/am really hoping that the friendly partnership between Peter and Lesley in the "Rivers of London" series is not going to be taken down the stereotyped route of spilling out into a passionate unacknowledged attraction...

It sounds very wise to declare all the previous tie-in material officially void, since it gives them a free hand without the stultifying weight of all that prior continuity adhering raggedly around the edges. (And they couldn't possibly use all of it, if the timeline has already been written well into the next generation -- so you get the question of which bits of development are still valid and which aren't.) As someone who has taken to writing fresh backstories for every plot (after previously taking it for granted that all my fan-fiction shared a common universe -- although SF world-building is a little different) I can sympathise :-p

Given what became of the political sub-plots in "The Phantom Menace" et al, it may have been a wise choice to skip that for pacing/length :-( I'm definitely not happy with the idea of having important details only revealed in tie-in novels/novelisations, though -- not least because in the nature of things, people writing novelisations are generally working from early copies of the script, and they inherently need to embroider all sorts of extra background motives/history onto their characters to fill in the gap between observing people on the screen and inhabiting them on the page. (Alan Dean Foster's novelisations of 1980s SF are interesting in that respect - it's what happens when you give a hack writer's task to someone who is a novelist in his own right.) But none of that necessarily has any basis on what was intended in the making of the film and planned for a sequel, so it becomes very dubiously 'canon' - it's more or less extrapolated fan-fic.

Personally I'd always assumed for some reason that 'Ben' was a 'particle' in the formation of Obi-Wan's weird futuristic name (like the Jewish Bar- or Bat-), rather than a mundane inserted 'Benjamin' :-(

[butterflydreaming]

I am wishing *so hard* that Kylo Ren and Rey are brother and sister. It does require an awful explanation to pull off, but their first scene together read so clearly as sibling wrestling to me that I want that to be the reveal. The "I felt it too" connection could be twin link!

My personal headcanon: Leia in cahoots with Luke to lie about Ben's twin sister, in order to hide her to save the jedi (and redeem her brother). Luke showed precognition in Empire Strikes Back; he could have seen enough future to set up the ruse.

I don't expect it to actually play out that way, but until I'm proven wrong, it pleases me to think it's true!

[igenlode]

Twins are in the family... but really, that's taking lack of originality too far :-( Surely they can't do that one again?

(I find it hard to believe that Leia or the impulsive Han would deliberately abandon a daughter of theirs to such an existence, as well: at least Luke and Leia both ended up with loving foster-parents, rather than scavenging for starvation rations since childhood and believing themselves deserted...)

[pedanther]

Personally, I'm hoping very hard that Rey doesn't turn out to be any kind of Skywalker. I want for her to be important for her own self and her own decisions, not who her parents were or what some mystic years ago foresaw her doing. When Maz tells her that there's no point looking back to Jakku for her answers and that she should look forward instead, I know some people think that means she's going to run into the truth about her parentage somewhere else, but what I want it to mean that where she comes from isn't as important as where she goes from here.

(Possibly I'm influenced by my childhood reading having included things like Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, where the hero is an orphan who, despite at one point spending an entire book looking, never does find out a single thing about who his parents were.)

[butterflydreaming]

I have this idea that Luke put jedi-whammy on Han, and that Rey was originally put into the care of foster parents. Then something went wrong, such as being chased by villains, leaving Rey behind on Jakool while the guardians tried to draw off the scent. They're dead, while Leia thinks Rey is safely hidden still.

Remember the old guy from the beginning, who has Luke's map? I think he (like Ben Kenobi) was watching over Rey, and her condition was withing parameters. (It's a big stretch, but a lot of the good guys seem not very good at being good guys. Such as the all Jedi, in the prequels.)

I'm sure I've thought about this 1)too much at all and 2)not enough in depth.

[igenlode]

Personally, I think I'm with pedanther; I'd rather that Ray turned out to be no relation at all to any of the Skywalkers. (There must be other Force-sensitive families in the galaxy!)

[(Anonymous)]

(It's Wild Concerto/cosette-giry by the way, I'm on here since I don't have a Dreamwidth account)

*cracks knuckles*

It’s been a while since I last checked your LiveJournal/Dreamwidth, so I thought I might add a little imput because, obviously, I don’t agree with everything, but I see some very interesting points here that are worth discussing.

First off, you do have a very good point about you saying that people nowadays have to turn everything into sex. Ultimately, I agree with you. But I also have to say I personally don’t see the Reylo relationship as “they hate each other because they love each other”. I don’t think anyone who ships it does. We crack jokes going along those lines, but that’s it. I think at the end of the movie, Kylo might have a crush of some sort on Rey (you can look at his look of awe when she catches the lightsaber instead of him, and when he’s finally on the ground with his face slashed and they’re separated by a precipice, he doesn’t even look mad at her. Heck, he had tons of opportunities to kill her during the duel, and he didn’t! If you observe closely, he was either defending himself against her attacks or trying to disarm her. Not to mention his offer of teaching her doesn’t really say he wants to harm her), and Rey overall feels confused towards him since she has trouble understanding him. She might have some sort of complex attraction towards him, but I really, really don’t think she loves him in any kind of way, at this point. It might change, but it could also remain one-sided. We’ll see.

I think there is a case of belligerent sexual tension between them in their scenes, but it’s also very subtly done. A lot of critics picked up on it. I could even elaborate on it if you want. I think we’ll see more of that in Episode VIII since Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley did film together in Ireland, but hey. It’s definitely not a case of BST/UST comedy like Han and Leia had, and they are indeed a classic example, but it’s something else entirely because they’re both Force sensitives attracted in a way or another to the other partly because they’re equals, and together, they represent a balance. There’s the theory going around that they might have a Force bond. So yes, there is a sexual element to them, because I think this trilogy is going to be partly a story of coming-of-age for both of them as well as for Finn (albeit in a different way), since the movie is titled The Force Awakens, after all, but I think it’s going to go far beyond that and that it will be spiritual before anything else. If it was only sexual, I would be disappointed, and a lot of people would be as well.

I don’t think Rey is going to eventually fall in love with him just because she’s attracted to him. It’d be cliché, and it’d be poor storytelling. It was basically what happened with Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala, and with poor results. Kylo will have to undergo quite a bit of character development before she’d actually grow on him. And I believe they have more in common than the general audience is led to believe, but that’s a subject for another day.

The subtext is there, though. I see it, and I’m not the kind of person who sexualizes relationships a lot.

You’re definitely not the only one to complain that The Force Awakens is a A New Hope rehash. I’ve complained about it myself. Thing is, The Force Awakens was pretty much… comfort food. You have the Prequel Trilogy, done between 1999 and 2005, which was overall pretty poorly done. It actually ruined Star Wars for a lot of people, including hardcore fans. Disney buying LucasFilm in 2012 was the last straw for a lot of people, and when the Expanded Universe (with all the characters like Mara Jade, Thrawn, Jacen Solo/Darth Caedus, Jaina Solo, Darth Revan, Darth Bane) was declared non-canon (Disney and LucasFilm didn’t really have a choice, since not everyone is acquainted with the EU and it’s pretty messy, at times), a lot of people were very angry.

So TFA is basically a nostalgia trip, and it’s there to reassure the general audience and the hardcore fans that the new take on the franchise will not be as bad as what happened in the Prequel Trilogy. And it worked.

The issue is that there are quite a few hardcore fans who want a rehash of the Original Trilogy for the Sequel Trilogy. But again, it’s a subject for another day.

Thing is, TFA was comfort food, and the only thing that was *really* new was the Reylo dynamic (even though you can still make parallels with that with the Hanleia and the Anidala dynamics, but again, I’m getting out of topic). And it’s part of the reason why so many people pick up on it.

I agree that Harrison Ford was absolutely excellent: he has asked for Han Solo to die in a beautiful and sacrificial way ever since The Empire Strikes Back, and he finally got it. He obviously gave his 100%.

For what is of Leia and Kylo’s ages… Okay, I’m going to do a timeline of sorts here. This can all be checked on Wookieepedia.

The Battle of Endor (the battle at the end of Return of the Jedi, during which the Emperor and Darth Vader die) happened thirty years prior to TFA. Ben Solo/Kylo Ren was born a year after Endor, which makes him 29 in the movie (yes, I know he looks young). Leia was in her early twenties during ROTJ, which makes her in her fifties during the movie. She might look older, but let’s just say life hasn’t exactly been kind with Leia. Han is in his sixties since he’s ten years older than Leia, and he believably looks like it. Rey is 19 (interestingly enough, while Rey is 19 when she first meets Kylo, who is 29, they have the same age Han and Leia had when they first met.)

Never really understood the thing with the map either… heh.

I agree that the whole New Republic/Resistance/First Order matter is pretty blurry. They didn’t go too much into politics in TFA because again, they had to play safe, and since the Prequel Trilogy was full of politics and it was overall poorly done, they decided not to go that way. I know Rian Johnson (the director for Episode VIII) is keeping himself some political material for himself, and we do get a good explanation for the political situation in the Bloodline novel (which I recommend, even though I have to say it’s pretty expensive):

What happens with the New Republic government is that it’s divided in two factions: the Populists and the Centrists. The Centrists want a more centralized government, and it has among its ranks a few young people who never knew the Empire but have a very idealistic vision of it. Some Centrists are actually secretly linked to the First Order, which hasn’t risen yet (the novel takes place six years before TFA). The Populists want each planet to have more autonomy, and Leia, when she was still Senator, was part of that group. A lot of stuff happens (spoiler alert coming), Leia is discovered to be Darth Vader’s daughter and it ruins her political career, and things get so messy some Centrist planets are talking about leaving the New Republic, and it’s heavily implied they eventually joined the First Order. Leia, in the meantime, knows that the New Republic won’t do much (as I said, shit happened, and it’s a bit of a long story), so she founds the Resistance, which is more or less an illegal organization.

And as I said above, they didn’t give that political explanation because the whole political aspect was done in the Prequel Trilogy, and not very well. People are therefore more or less “allergic” to it, so in order once again to play safe, they didn’t include that in TFA. Obviously, it doesn’t help the general audience very much, but the powers to be stated that Episode VIII is going to take more risks and be darker and edgier, so we can hope. Not to mention they hired a director who’s more the indie film type than the blockbuster type…

I was very happy Poe survived, since I quite liked him, but I thought his comeback was clumsily done. It’s just my opinion, though.

As much as I hate to admit this, and as much as I love Carrie Fisher, I have to say that while she has her moments, she does get a bit lacklustre at times. She was pretty good playing Leia the leader in The Empire Strikes Back, though. I’m not too surprised, though: she has health issues, and her role apparently got reduced for Episode VIII because of them.

I thought the Death Star 3.0 Only Bigger was pretty ridiculous, too. Not to mention I was trying not to laugh at General Hux’s speech before Hosnian Prime got blew up. I think it was meant to be laughable, but still. Not to mention the Nazi analogy didn’t really impress me, for some reason, since it was a very unsubtle and lazy way to show: “Look! They’re the bad guys!” But that’s just my opinion, though.

I do like very much that Kylo Ren’s real first name is Ben: Harrison Ford asked that he’d be called that way since it’s the name of his son in real life. But what’s also very interesting is that not only it’s a tie-in to Obi-Wan, more or less ironic, depending how this trilogy is going to unfurl (“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” [Leia in A New Hope]), it also means “son” in Hebrew…

I *really* don’t think at this point Rey is Kylo Ren’s sister. There is absolutely no mention of a lost daughter in Bloodline, and that novel is written from Leia’s point of view. If Rey was a lost Solo, they would have mentioned her. And knowing Leia, if her daughter had been taken away from her, she would have searched everywhere for her, and so would have Han.

And anyway, what kind of parent leaves their child on a desert planet for her to starve for years, get forced to work in a way that it looks quite a lot like child enslavement, with a horrible creature like Unkar Plutt who’s heavily implied in the movie’s novelization to lust on Rey? And even if she was given to a foster family who eventually had to abandon her on Jakku, why the heck doesn’t Leia know anything about her daughter disappearing or anything? Didn’t she try keeping contact at the very least? That doesn’t speak very well for her as a parent, and she already has issues with Ben/Kylo…

As I said above, Kylo and Rey can’t be twins: it’s canon there’s a ten-year gap between the two of them.

Rey Solo is dead, though, since Daisy Ridley confirmed in an interview she wasn’t Han and Leia’s anyway.

I really don’t want Rey to turn out to be a Skywalker or a Solo. SW is all about the Skywalkers, but having Rey as *another* Skywalker would be repetitive, and there are certainly a lot more Force-sensitive families. It wouldn’t make much sense anyway: Daisy Ridley did say once that Rey’s lineage wasn’t actually that important, and her being Han and Leia’s, or Luke’s is certainly the contrary. My guess right now is that she has Dark Side origins, and the reason why it isn’t important is that she’s going to be given the choice of going back to her relatives or staying with her friends. She’s going to choose the latter.

[igenlode]

*checks*

Well, the article did get cross-posted to LJ, so you could have replied there :-p
To be honest, I prefer Dreamwidth...

I haven't really been reading the Reylo analysis on your Tumblr (unfortunately there isn't a filter to *avoid* certain tags -- not if you're not a registered user, anyway -- so it's a matter of a lot of skimming), but I happened to see an article on reasons not to give Keylo a redemption arc which was interesting, because it echoed a lot of what I have felt but not put into words. The "hackneyed and unwelcome" element; the sex-specific element of "a man who has an unwelcome fascination with a woman" as opposed to a powerful leader who is simply trying to eliminate a threat (Vader/Luke); the issue of building up "a sense of resentment beforehand".

I'm not a dedicated fan and the idea of Vader's forgiveness and redemption at Luke's hand was never a major trope of the original films for me; it was a bit tacked on at the end. In fact, the entire "I am your father" thing felt like a ret-con at the time, as I recall it, so I can easily accept that Vader gets an unearned free pass at the end of the story despite his deeds :-p

Again, I haven't watched "The Force Awakens" over and over again and analysed it -- but when I say that Rey has a lot of legitimate reasons to hate Kylo Ren, I wasn't limiting that to "because he is trying to kill her". (Frankly, I don't at this juncture remember any more what they were, apart from hunting and capturing her, killing her friends and wreaking havoc among the allied and the innocent -- but I don't remember getting any impression that Rey owed him anything simply because he hasn't actually executed her. He is The Enemy.)

I think it's entirely possible that rather than killing her, he wants to turn Rey to the Dark Side with himself as her tutor -- indeed, this is a pretty common trope in the sort of fantasy/swashbuckler adventure that "Star Wars" is based on. (The Evil Overlord captures the hero and, impressed by his skill/power, tries to persuade him to join the Forces of Oppression in exchange for riches and position.) On the other hand, heroes who refuse this kind of offer, which is to say all of them, tend to find themselves sentenced to death anyway -- so I don't think that from her point of view this makes her feel safe from him at all.

I'm not sure that Han Solo *did* die in a beautiful and sacrificial way: I certainly don't think he intended to get killed (if he had been offered the theoretical choice of 'would you die to redeem your son' he might have said yes, but the lesson Kylo draws from that encounter at least in the short-term is that it's idiotic to love or trust anyone, which, while it's a lesson that Han might well endorse on many cynical levels, is *not* the impression he wants to make on his son when he is the one being regarded as the vulnerable idiot!)

Kylo looks ridiculously young for twenty-nine, and I'm assuming that's deliberate, in order to get the shock/comedy factor when the dreaded Kylo Ren finally takes off his helmet: but Adam Driver is evidently one of those people who can get cast playing teenagers into his thirties. (I had an English master at school who was tall and raw-faced and gawky and looked about seventeen, though he must have been pushing forty :-p)

Luke is presumably in his fifties as well, and he looks pretty old... [edit: I see that Mark Hamill is sixty-four; he looks it.]

I think it was the right decision not to put a lot of political exposition into the film, but I don't think that putting important plot details into tie-in novels is a valid approach :-p

Yes, I can see that being Darth Vader's daughter is not necessarily going to do Leia's political influence a lot of good -- particularly if it has been seen to have been hushed up, rather than being known all along.

I rather liked General Hux :-p
That is to say, the actor stood out to me in the way that Peter Cushing does in the original "Star Wars"; he's not someone I know of, but he caught my attention the way that Benedict Cumberbatch did ten years ago. (Red hair evidently helps :-p)

There was actually a strong father/daughter feel between Han and Rey during the few scenes they had together; I think their characterisations had a lot in common, and she definitely felt as if she was adopting him as a father figure (I would have liked to have the chance to see more of that; Rey is looking for a family and somewhere to belong, and Han is looking for a protégé/apprentice, having lost his own son) so I can see why people would want them to be related from that.
But that attachment of course gives her a *major* reason to want revenge on Kylo... and an awful lot to forgive.