The Reylo Ship and the new Star Wars

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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.

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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

[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.