So when I went to the theater and saw The Force Awakens for the first time, I was excited, but not too much. I was expecting lightsabers, desert planets and unrealistic space battles, but beyond that my expectations were tempered. My mindset was basically “so long as it’s not as bad as The Prequels, I’ll consider it a success,” and TFA definitely was. But – and this is a big but – it was more than that, too. The longer I watched the movie – the longer I watched Kylo and Rey interact – the more excited I became. I could barely sit still. All I could think was oh my god. Oh my god, they’re Bastila and Revan. They’re the same. There’s so many similarities between the two there’s no way this echoing was not intentional.

What follows is an essay-length, in-depth, somewhat disjointed comparison between the two, as I try to order my thoughts. It’s actually a continuation of this thread. Major, major spoilers after the jump, for KotOR and TFA and the Expanded Universe (seriously, don’t click past the jump if you want to keep one or the other a surprise – I basically spoil everything). I’ll be focusing primarily on KotOR I, because that’s the equivalent of where Kylo and Rey are in terms of character development, but there will be a bit of KotOR II in this as well.

So what’s KotOR (Specifically KotOR I)?

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (or KotOR, for short) was a Star Wars RPG released in the summer of 2003. Set 3,956 years before A New Hope, KotOR takes place during the era of the Galactic Republic, when the Sith and the Jedi were much, much more powerful than they are now. The era of the Galactic Republic is expansive, and ancient, and I don’t have the space to discuss it here, but it’s a fascinating time period to read up on if you’re interested. Wookieepedia has a good introductory article on it.

In the game, you play an amnesiac thief/soldier/smuggler who wakes up on a Republic ship – having been rescued by Bastila – with incredibly strong force powers. You train as a Jedi and embark on a quest to defeat the Sith Lord Malak, who used to be the apprentice of Darth Revan – only to discover that you are Darth Revan, and Bastila mind-wiped you (to reform you), creating a Force Bond in the process. Along the way, shit happens, you and Bastila fall in love, Bastila gets corrupted and goes Full Sith (you have to save her or go dark too – your choice), and you kill Malak. This is a really, really pared down version of the plot, and I can’t make it much shorter than that.

Things to remember: Revan is the Sith Antichrist. Bastila is a prodigal Jedi. Jedi and Sith shack up, Force Bonds really fuck people up. Eventually, the two of them have a kid. Good? Good, lets get to the meat of this thing.



Who’s Revan? How are he and Kylo alike?

No, you’re not looking at Kylo. No, really, that’s ReVAn.

THIS is Kylo. Kylo Ren.

As you can see, there’s a bit of a passing resemblance.

Revan – also know as The Revanchist, The Revan, and Revan The Butcher (seriously, this guy was a huge deal) – was a human man who played a pivotal role in the Mandalorian and Jedi Civil Wars, although you can play as a female Revan too (I did both). An incredibly charismatic, intelligent, and moral individual, he was also impatient and had no qualms about using violence to protect the people he cared for, and his quest for knowledge was his downfall. After turning away from the Jedi Order for their refusal to intervene in the Mandalorian Wars on humanitarian grounds, he and his friend Alek (later Darth Malak) led The Revanchist Movement, and later followed a Sith signal out into the Unknown Region of space, where they discovered a full-fledged Sith Empire and were turned to the dark side. Once turned, Revan and Malak were sent back to The Republic to act as the advance guard for an incoming invasion, but they established their own Empire with the Star Forge instead: becoming Darth Revan and Darth Malak respectively. This act jump-started the Jedi Civil War, with Jedi deserting the Order in droves to join Revan’s cause (like they had done for The Revanchist Movement). It was a bloodbath in yet another endless line of bloodbaths, and the effect – so soon after the Mandalorian Wars – was horrific.

During the height of the Jedi Civil War, Revan was attacked by a Jedi task force led by Bastila Shan and simultaneously betrayed by Darth Malak, who fired upon his flagship in the heat of battle. Revan was critically injured in the ensuing chaos, and was captured/saved by Bastila, who formed a Force Bond with him through her healing. She also wiped his mind in order to “reform” him, just prior to the start of the game. This is notable in that it is one of the few instances where you see a Jedi forcing a Force Bond on a Sith. Usually it’s the other way around. This will be important to later meta.

While being reformed/hunting Malak, Revan fell in love with Bastila: he really, really fell in love with her, and I don’t think I can emphasize this enough. This is basically the bulk of their character arc. After Bastila was captured by Darth Malak and turned to the Dark Side, Revan killed Malak, literally saved Bastila through the power of his love, and the two got married and had a kid after the game: a son named Vaner. No, really, I shit you not. I cannot make this stuff up.



While Bastila was still pregnant, Revan started suffering from horrific nightmares of his time in the Sith Empire. Searching for answers, he up and left her for the Unknown Regions of the Galaxy, where he was recaptured, imprisoned and tortured by the Sith Emperor for three hundred years. The torture fractured his mind, and once he escaped he took control of the fanatical Order of Revan and basically went on a rampage, running roughshod through the Galaxy. Cuz you know, dude lost everything, got tortured for centuries, and his One True Love is dead. He has reasons.

This is a very, very abridged version of Revan’s history. There’s a lot of detail I’m missing out on, a lot of nuance, but I’ve tried to keep it contained to what’s important for the meta.

So what’s similar between Kylo and Revan? A lot. A whole lot. In the games and related media, Revan is described as being pale skinned, with brown eyes and dark brown hair that he wore at shoulder/near-shoulder length for most of his life. I don’t want to sound conspiratorial here, but hmmm. HMMM. WHO DOES THAT SOUND LIKE, I WONDER?

I literally spat out my drink when I saw this.

In all fairness, its obvious the TFA team wanted to show a visual connect between Kylo and Han (I still can’t believe how much they look alike), but with the Revan-like robes and Revan-like mask and Revan-like weapon, I find this resemblance to be very, very suspect. And this isn’t even the strongest visual connection I can pull on between the two characters. If I really wanted to go for the jugular, I would talk about his mask.

Let’s talk about the mask, actually, because The Mask is a Very Important Thing for both Revan and Kylo, and by extension, Darth Vader. So lets get some things out of the way first. Masks are not specifically a Sith thing: most Sith don’t wear them (Darth Talon, Darth Maul, Darth Sidious, and Darth Traya all immediately come to mind), but Revan did. I also want to point out that I’m nowhere near the first person to notice the visual similarities between Kylo and Revan. When the first promotional photos of Kylo came out, there was a lot of buzz among KotOR fans that Kylo was Revan reincarnated (i.e. The Revanchist), ready to take names and fuck shit up. Then Disney axed the Expanded Universe, so the direct correlation was scraped.

I’m not going to talk about Vader here, because he needed his mask to survive. For Revan and Kylo however, the mask was a choice. It was a choice, and that makes the repetition of this choice meaningful. During the Mandalorian Wars, Revan found the mask of a fallen Mandalorian female – the only one to speak up against the genocide of the Cathar – and in memory of her, he took to wearing it. He swore he would not rest until he had achieved vengeance and finished what she had started. For Kylo, he took up a mask in memory of his grandfather (from what we’ve seen so far). He talks to his grandfather’s mask, and swears not to rest until he’s finished what Vader started.

In both instances, Revan and Kylo take up masks for symbolic reasons. Both of them talk to these masks, and swear vengeance for these long dead figures. They swear not to rest until this vengeance is achieved, in symbol of their defiance. In both instances, neither man takes off their mask – not until they meet Bastila/Rey – and this is very, very important, because it symbolizes a change in their mentality. A breaking down of barriers. It is history literally repeating itself, or as ol’ Georgie liked to say “it’s like poetry.” The Force works in mysterious ways, and this is not dumb film making.

It is also very, very telling how – out of all the conceptual designs the TFA team had for Kylo Ren (and these are just a couple of them):

They decided to go with this one: the design that bears the closest resemblance to Revan, instead of Vader.

Kylo’s lightsaber is also (canonically) based off an ancient design that dates back to the Great Scourge of Malachor, which occurred on Malachor/Malachor V – a key location in KotOR II, and a Sith planet. Again, there’s callbacks everywhere.

So now that we’ve gotten the physical/visual similarities out of the way, how are Kylo and Revan alike, besides that? It turns out, still lots.

In both instances, each man was impatient, prone to violent acts when outraged (for Revan this was only when he was turned into a Sith – we don’t know enough about Kylo yet to make that distinction). Both men come from legacies that you could argue are too big for them, and you can see them being crushed under the weight of it all at certain points in their lives. They both have sects of people that follow them, some more loyally than others: for Kylo, it’s the Knights of Ren. For Revan, it was The Revanchist Movement, and afterwards, The Order of Revan.



Again, I’m not the first person to make this connection. Amongst KotOR fans, there’s a lot of speculation that the Knights of Ren are a deliberate callback to The Revanchist Movement, because Revan was/is an incredibly prodigal Sith: he’s basically their patron Saint of Darkness, and they’ve deified him.

In both instances as well, Revan and Kylo are accused of being too soft. Too compassionate. Revan was betrayed by Malak for this very reason – he considered Revan’s compassion for the defenseless to be his undoing – and in TFA, we begin to see traces of this compassion-is-your-downfall in Kylo. We see it in how he reacts to Rey, in comparison to others; in how he’s still utterly conflicted after he kills his father. Snoke calls him on this, specifically his compassion for Rey. Kylo calls himself on it. He knows he has too much empathy, and that’s a huge weakness for a Sith – a massive vulnerability that he’s terrified of. Kylo is made from history, and he’s literally drowning in it by this point. You can see him cracking under the weight.

Revan left behind a massive legacy. He was and continues to be a huge influence on the Sith. He also left behind a son. We know that through Bastila’s family line, Revan’s son continued the Jedi/Sith tradition, and this family line spanned the era of the Old Republic. By the time we get to the current era of Star Wars, however, their family line is lost, or killed (thanks, Anakin). The conspiracy theorist in me wants to wonder bUT ARE THEY rEALLY?? – and wants to wonder about the Han Solo’s parentage and Rey’s parentage in particular – but honestly I feel like I’m diving off into the weeds here, so its best to let this particular thread die quietly.

Revan also loved his son – or he loved the idea of his son – but he loved Bastila more. Like he really, really loved her, way too much. He fell in love with her before he found out she’d mind-wiped him, and even after that, his commitment to her never wavered. Their Force Bond never broke. In the game, you can play that he didn’t love her – believe me, I’ve tried – but the mechanics makes it very hard to do so, and you’re punished severely if you avoid it. Which leads me to my next section:



Who’s Bastila? How is she similar to Rey?



So I’m not going to go into too much detail on Bastila’s backstory, because I’m making a direct correlation between her and Rey and honestly we don’t know much about Rey yet. We don’t have all the pieces.

Bastila Shan was a Force Sensitive human woman: a prodigal Jedi who served during the Jedi Civil War. Her mother was Helena Shan, and her father was a treasure hunter (a Han Solo type, if you will). When she was very young, her mother gave her up to the Jedi Order and separated her from her father – something that Bastila never really got over, or forgave her for. Bastila had an innate ability for Force Bonding and a particular skill called Battle Meditation, which allowed her to increase the morale of her allies while demoralizing her enemies. So she was in peoples’ heads all the time, and she could do this very easily with very little training – very, very much like Rey in TFA. She also looked like her.

After letting him run amok through the galaxy for a while, Bastila was tasked with taking Revan down. Accompanied by a Jedi Strike force, she lured Revan to the Outer Rim of the Galaxy, where they attacked. Revan – already at a disadvantage – was hit by Malak’s flagship, and the ensuing chaos killed all the Jedi except Bastila. Revan was critically injured.

Bastila saved Revan, creating a Force Bond with him. She then mind-wiped him, on orders of the Jedi Council, reprogramming him and giving him the identity of a Republic Soldier. Through this Bond, the Jedi hoped that Bastila could control Revan and sway him to their side, but it ended up being the other way around. Revan was the stronger of the two, and slowly, Bastila became corrupted through the link, eventually falling to the Dark Side and becoming a Sith under Malak. She also fell in love with Revan – deeply so – and as mentioned before, this deep, irrevocable love was mutual.

At the end of the game, Bastila is saved from the Dark Side through Revan’s love, and after the game, the two of them settle down and have a kid. Revan leaves while she’s still pregnant, and never returns. Shit turned tragic. And there you have it: Bastila in a nutshell.

So now that we have Bastila’s backstory out of the way, how are she and Rey alike? Not as in many ways as Revan and Kylo (at least not yet), but still enough to make it noticeable. Like Revan and Kylo, Bastila had a passing similarity to Rey in appearance; in the way she dressed, in her facial features and in the weapon she carries:

However, most of the similarities between Bastila and Rey are actually internal, and derive from what they can do and their relationship(s) to the world around them.

So Bastila and Rey were not really alike, personality wise. Bastila was actually more like Kylo in this – brash and impulsive – but I’m pretty sure this switching of roles was intentional, and I’ll mention it again later. Bastila was also stuck up, had a bit of a savior complex, and was desperate trying to prove herself, which she did so by throwing herself into combat time and time again. She was also a Jedi extremist, until Revan mellowed her out.

Now I gotta be honest: I can’t see Rey going down this road. From what we’ve seen in the movies, Rey strikes me as someone whose very practical and understandably wary, but also kind, curious, and mentally grounded – which you’d have to be, to still have hope after being abandoned for so long. Rey’s got a small streak of mental vulnerability stemming from her abandonment – which I’m almost certain Kylo or Snoke will try to take advantage of at a later date – but that’s about it. She’s really, really strong. All this is to say that Rey is not high maintenance. At all. Bastila was. However, they are alike in their youth, and in how they treat their Important People.

In KotOR I Bastila is young, between 18-21 (Rey is 19), and her brashness/inexperience of youth (and in dealing one-on-one with the Sith) was basically what led to her downfall. She got overconfident, made some risky moves, and suffered. We see traces of this in Rey, too. Now Rey is special, character wise. She gets scared, but she’s simultaneously brave – and I absolutely love this about her, because her ability to be both strong and afraid for her life/afraid for others makes her seem so human and nuanced that I adore her to pieces. However, throughout the movie you see hints of her taking on more than she can chew, and this is important.

Rey’s used to being able to just do stuff, and then doing it, because she’s a prodigy – just like Bastila – so when someone tells her “no, don’t do the thing” there’s a certain element of resistance there, and in her reaction to them. Under the right settings, this resistance could develop into a witch’s brew of overconfidence/stubbornness, and if a Sith gets their hands on her, they will immediately try to exploit this. She’ll be too tempting a target not to, but to be honest I don’t know if Kylo will be the one to take the plunge. You can tell throughout the movie that he’s too soft on her – he actually doesn’t rough her up any more than is necessary to maintain his own skin/not raise suspicion – and when you forcibly turn someone into a Sith (which you would probably have to do with Rey) – there’s a lot of torture involved. A lot of pain. I don’t know if he could go through with it. Snoke could, though. Snoke would.

Bastila and Rey are also very much alike in how they treat their Important People: both of them are slow to trust (from what we’ve seen in KotOR/EU and in TFA), but once they start caring about someone they’re fiercely protective of them. In KotOR, Bastila was initially very wary around Revan, and she was standoffish with the rest of the crew, but once she fell in love and decided okay, these are people I can get behind, she became incredibly defensive of them. Almost overprotective, and she would easily fight and kill to keep her own.

In TFA, Rey’s not stuck up, but she’s very wary – again, for good reason. She was abandoned as a child on a harsh, unforgiving planet and left to fend for herself against hostile locals, and she’s been alone for most of her life. So she’s got good reason not to trust Finn right off the bat, and we can see this. But we also see that once she gauges his character – once she sees that Finn’s a good, honest, caring man who genuinely wants to help others – she warms up to him immensely. You see her being fiercely protective of him, and of BB-8 (and in a roundabout way, of Han). You see her taking up arms to protect them. This is a very Bastila-like personality trait, and combined with the Bastila-like weapon and the Bastila-like appearance and Bastila-like abilities, I think this comparison was intentional.

Let’s talk about Bastila’s abilities and how they show up in Rey, actually, because they’re a huge reason why I think they’re supposed to mirror each other. So as mentioned before, Bastila had an innate ability to get inside people’s heads and Force Bond, and she had this ability to preform something called Battle Meditation. Jedi get into people’s heads all the time, but it’s usually a shallow thing, and not really in-depth. The sort of “deep-diving” that Bastila did was a rare gift that required a ton of natural talent – something that Rey also possesses.

In the movie, we see Rey picking up mental Force techniques almost effortlessly. Once she figures out the gist of the Jedi/Sith mind trick – once she’s had a taste of what Kylo’s doing to her when he peers into her head, and she gets a feel for how he’s doing it – she’s able to mimic the technique and push back. She’s able to rifle around through his memories in turn, and she’s able to replicate this mind trick with a trooper. This mimicking (and the ability to deep-dive into a person’s head) is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and something she shouldn’t be able to do, unless she was a Savant – just like Bastila.



Where are things mixed? Where do the two characters and their comparisons overlap?



So there’s more between Bastila and Rey I would like to get into, but I’m not. It’s still too early in the trilogy, and we still don’t know enough about Rey for me to make a firm judgement on this. I will say that not everything between Revan/Kylo and Bastila/Rey is a direct comparison. Sometimes things get mixed, and I’m pretty sure that’s because if everything between the two sets of characters were exactly the same (dynamic-wise) it would be way too heavy-handed. I’ll briefly touch on those mixed things here.

If you were to transport Kylo and Rey into KotOR, the roles they play are basically reversed. Bastila is the one who mind-wipes you – she’s the one who forces the Bond – and once you travel to the Jedi training world of Dantooine, Bastila pushes to be directly involved in your teaching (i.e. the “you need a teacher moment”). Bastila is also the one who’s very, very keen on maintaining the bond, so if Kylo and Rey do have a bond – which I’ll get to in the next couple sections – Bastila is taking up Kylo’s role in this.

In KotOR, Revan is the one who has been mind-wiped. In TFA, Rey is (or I suspect she has). To be honest, I would not be surprised at all if Kylo had a hand in this. Its pretty obvious from his body language and the way that he interacts with her that he knows her from somewhere. But again, speculation.

What’s this “Force Bond” Revan and Bastila shared, why do I keep talking about it, and why was it so important?



So now that we’ve got the direct/indirect comparisons out of the way, lets get to the Force Bond itself, because it’s a crucial part of this discussion and (I think) probably a crucial part of the dynamic between Kylo and Rey. For the purposes of explaining Forcing Bonding, in full, I’m going to dip even further into the Expanded Universe and the parts that Disney has declared “Legends” (i.e. not official canon anymore). I’m doing this not only because Kylo and Rey are being heavily modeled off of it, but because it’s central to the discussion.

So what’s a Force Bond, exactly? At its most basic, it was a link through which a pair of Force-Sensitive individuals could influence each other. Through this bond, they could communicate their feelings, thoughts and images of what they were seeing across incalculable distances. They could also relay instructions, rifle through each others’ memories, and draw on each others’ strengths/grant each other greater coordination in battle by synchronizing their emotions. Force Bonds were sometimes called Force Chains, especially when they were pushed upon one person by another (in the case of Darth Traya), which I’ll get into in just a bit. During the New Jedi Order, a technique called Force Meld also arose, which is based off this concept. It’s too long to explain in this post, so you can read about it in full here (again, Wookieepedia is great for an introduction to these things).



Force bonds were common between Jedi Masters and Apprentices, but they also flared up in near-death situations, when one person poured too much of their life force into the other in order to save them. This was the case between Revan and Bastila, when she saved him from Darth Malak. Extremely powerful bonds were also known to form naturally between family members, which is one of the reasons why Jedi were separated from their families when they were so young, to avoid those families exerting undo influence over them. Force bonds also occurred when one individual was suddenly exposed to the Force by an extremely powerful user of it (and they were already Force Sensitive themselves). This ties directly into the dynamic with Kylo and Rey, so I’ll explain it in the next section.

As for the specifics: the degree to which you were bonded basically depended on the Force Sensitivity of the people involved. The stronger you were, the stronger your bond was. A notoriously strong Force Bond occurred between Revan and Bastila, who were a combination of one of the most powerful Sith/reformed Sith in history and a prodigal Jedi. They were also lovers. Another strong Force Bond/Force Chain noted in EU canon is the one between Kreia/Darth Traya, a Sith, and her connection to the Lost Jedi Meetra Surik, who acted as sort of her unofficial apprentice. They had a contentious relationship, to say the least.

While both Jedi and Sith could form Force Bonds/Force Chains, they mostly happened among the Sith, or Jedi/Sith combinations. When Revan was studying Bonding before the Mandalorian Wars, he theorized the reason for this was because – in order to form a bond – you have to be passionate. You’re basically opening yourself up to the other person, completely, and while the Sith were all for this, the Jedi tended to shy away from it: they considered the risks too great for the payoff. If done correctly, Force Bonds could make you insanely powerful, but they could also make you very, very vulnerable – lethally so. The margin for error is high.

When you’re bonded, you begin to lose your individual sense of self: you start sharing the same thoughts and the same emotions, and you begin to lose track of where one person ends and the other begins. While this “bleeding” effect (as @iseeyourreylo so aptly termed it) could happen both ways, it happened to varying degrees in each individual, and usually the stronger member in the bond would dominate the other. This makes Force Bonded individuals very susceptible to being influenced by the other, which is turn could lead to those members switching sides, in the case of Sith and Jedi pairings. It was a liability.

Breaking a Force Bond could be very dangerous, too, so this is why it was essential for both parties to be okay with it (because if you’re not, you’re screwed). Just like you can gain strength through the bond, you can be hurt through it if one of the members is injured. Force bonds were not easily broken, and they were not broken by choice. Basically – to break a bond – one of the members had to die, but even then the bond doesn’t go away. It was like this huge, gaping wound on your psyche that you could never recover from, so you had to be careful going into these things, because once you were in, you were in deep.

Why is this precedent so important to TFA, specifically the dynamic between Rey and Kylo?



So there are multiple, notable cases where a Force Bond/Force Chain occurs between two powerful individuals in canon, and I’m going to say canon because even though Disney has declassified it as Legends, its very obvious from watching TFA that you’ve got people on the production team that are being influenced by it. You’ve also got an established precedent of Sith forming bonds with individual Jedi, either for personal reasons (in the case of Revan/Bastila) or to gain more power (in the case of Darth Traya/Meetra Surik). You’ve got multiple instances where Jedi and Sith get romantically entangled, usually as a side-effect of power-sharing – Revan and Bastila, again, but there are others. You’ve got records of the symptoms/effects of Force Bonding – the shared thoughts, shared power, shared pain, bleeding personalities – to pick through in further iterations of it, which is all to say that Force Bonding is A Thing, Jedi/Sith shacking up is very much A Thing, and in all cases, the members involved behave in a particular, predictable manner. This makes Kylo and Rey – and the dynamic they share – prime candidates for Force Bonding, if they aren’t already (but I’ll get into that).

Kylo is the grandson of Vader, and a Sith/Sith-in-Training, who – despite his temper tantrums and questionable choices – has a lot of raw power. Snoke doesn’t trust him, but Snoke also says he’s “special,” which for the Sith usually translates to “you have a shit-ton of power and I’m going to milk this cash cow until someone stronger tells me not to.” Rey is a prodigy when it comes to Force; she’s in desperate need of training, which makes her vulnerable to suggestion, and clearly an Avatar of the Light. Both of them are hyper-sensitive to the Force, and in the case of Kylo (before he even met Rey face to face) nascently aware of the other. Even if there weren’t romantic undertones to their interactions, and they didn’t already have a Force Bond going on – which I think they do – they’d be falling headlong into one at breakneck speed. And because of the Force Sensitivity involved, their bond would be incredibly powerful.

This is also why Sith tend to initiate the bond, especially in mixed Sith/Jedi pairings, which is what Kylo is doing. Sith are big on gaining power. If done right, Force Bonds can make you close to invincible. If you take away the romantic undertones, Kylo still has motive in this: he wants to be more powerful/just as powerful as Vader, and Sith almost always try to topple their masters, so that means Kylo will be gunning for Snoke sooner rather than later. A Force Bond can speed this process up.



With the romantic undertones, the motives are more subtle and nuanced, but they’re still there. I won’t go into Kylo’s history too much here, because that’s another discussion for another time, but he comes across as an incredibly lonely person, and there’s a good canonical reason for this. Rey is very strong, but she’s lonely too, and has some pretty big abandonment issues. One or both of them is going to latch on to this, and it’s going to make them even more susceptible to a Force Bond because their mindset is very much a “no one understands me but you” mentality. Isolation can cause obsessive tendencies and odd fixations.

Earlier on, I mentioned that Force Bonds can occur when an already Force Sensitive individual is suddenly exposed to the Force by an extremely powerful user of it, and this plays directly into Kylo and Rey’s dynamic. This sudden forcing of a Force Bond is why I think they already have one going on, regardless of what conspiracy theories about Rey’s past you ascribe to.



Even if we’re going by TFA alone – by the notion that Rey is a nobody, who’s never met Kylo before – the very first time Rey is fully, unequivocally exposed to the Force is through Kylo rifling through her mind. We’re talking about Kylo Ren, here – Luke’s nephew, and Vader’s grandson. There is no bigger legacy than this. If Rey is already Force Sensitive, and mentally vulnerable (not in her ability to fight back, but in the subtext of it – the loneliness, and insecurities she keeps buried), this is going to have a huge predetermining affect on who she gets attached to, on every level. I don’t think that Kylo set out to do this, but Sith are opportunists and Kylo shows signs of being impulsive. I think if he were presented with the opportunity, he’d go for it – almost certainly if he felt backed into a corner, and Rey rifling through his own mind might have done that. I’m pretty sure he’d go to great lengths to maintain one too, because Kylo Ren is prone to obsession (see: Vader).

Why did fandom (specifically Reylo fans) latch onto the idea of a Force Bond so quickly?



In the beginning – when the very first fanfics were starting to make their way onto the net – I’m sure there were some enterprising KotOR fans (like myself) who saw the movie and said “aH HA! Kylo and Rey are exhibiting all the symptoms of a Force Bond (akin to Bastila and Revan)” and decided to put it into action. Because honestly, Kylo and Rey are. They’re able to easily invade each others headspace and share each others thoughts (when this is actually a pretty difficult thing to do); their connection is amplified by physical closeness, there’s an emphasis on maintaining this physical closeness (although one party is always canonically more keen on this than the other), i.e. the “you need a teacher” moment, and there’s elements of shared pain exhibited. All of these symptoms are classic signs of a Force Bond, and a strong one. This moment in the interrogation room, where Kylo basically says “I feel it too:”

THIS. This in incredibly important, and a huge “tell,” because one of the defining characteristics of a particularly strong Force Bond is that it just clicks, and then you feel it. You can’t get rid of it. Some are way more keen on it than others (see: Kylo, being a creep).

So I’m sure all of this played into why fans picked up on the Force Bond so quickly; KotOR was a huge game back in the day, and Force Bonds are very much A Thing. Its pretty natural to think that when those long-time fans went to see the movie, they put two-and-two together. But another huge factor in why fans latched onto this idea so quickly is that the subtext between Rey and Kylo isn’t really subtext. It is as heavy-handed as subtext can be without being text-text, and JJ’s not just gunning for the romantic/Force Bond undertones with Kylo and Rey – he’s doing the screenwriting equivalent of launching a rocket at the audience and telling them to duck, while laughing maniacally.



Specific questions that I’ve been asked (about all of this)



So while I was writing this over the weekend, I was asked additional questions by other fans. I’m going to answer them here (sorry if I’ve missed anyone):

@a-shipper-despite-herself, you asked “when you do take a look at the parallels between the games and the film characters, I wonder if you might also spot any parallels with the character/story of Kreia? I think I read somewhere yesterday that Rey’s character (or what was to become Rey’s character) was originally called Kira… If that’s correct, I find it interesting… Kira + Rey = Kreia

There’s parallels between them, but not in the way you’re thinking of. Kreia was a Sith, Darth Traya. She was incredibly strong and equally conniving, and she was notorious for the Force Chain – or forcing a Force Bond on others, Sith-style. So Rey may possess her strength, and her ability to create Bonds, but honestly they’re nothing alike beyond that. I wouldn’t look too deeply into this.

@zenbrainjam, you said “No but… guys, Bastila and Ben, then Rey and Revan… maybe it’s just me, Idk, but is it just a coincidence? (To tell the truth the telepathic bit about force bond is such a fanfic thing that I don’t know if I really want to see it in canon or not. But force bond itself is ok, I suppose)

Re the names: could be, but again, there’s much stronger connections between the two sets of characters to pick at, if you want to make an argument that they’re one in the same.

Re Force Bond: I hate to break it to you, but Star Wars is basically one big fanfic and has been for decades. Like, Revan and Bastila were literally saved through the power of love like a Disney fairytale, and that was a triple A game with a triple A budget. They’re not even the first couple to get this sappy, and Force Bonds have been around since before you or I was born. Welcome to the grandaddy of all trash heaps, my friend: have fun in your continent-sized dumpster.



Final musings on Kylo and Rey in relation to KotOR



Do I think Kylo and Rey are the direct reincarnation of Revan and Bastila?

No, probably not. I would be thrilled if they were, because wow, what a gusty move – and it would make a fantastic fanfic – but to be honest this would be incredibly messy to pull off, canon-wise. It’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. The KotOR games/Old Republic Era is firmly in Expanded Universe territory, and Revan and Bastila come from an era thousands of years before the films take place, when the Jedi and the Sith were at the height of their power (or at least the height of their power within a cycle). If you introduced a romantic subplot between Kylo and Rey in Episode VIII (although it may end up being the main plot, from the way things shaped up in TFA), only to say “by the way, they’re reincarnations of Revan and Bastila,” you’re going to have a lot of movie-goers going “who the fuck is Revan? What the hell is this Bastila?” You’re going to get bogged down in a ton of exposition that won’t necessarily translate, or translate well.

if they were, because wow, what a move – and it would make a fantastic fanfic – but to be honest this would be incredibly messy to pull off, canon-wise. It’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. The KotOR games/Old Republic Era is firmly in Expanded Universe territory, and Revan and Bastila come from an era thousands of years before the films take place, when the Jedi and the Sith were at the height of their power (or at least the height of their power within a cycle). If you introduced a romantic subplot between Kylo and Rey in Episode VIII (although it may end up being the plot, from the way things shaped up in TFA), only to say “by the way, they’re reincarnations of Revan and Bastila,” you’re going to have a lot of movie-goers going “who the fuck is Revan? What the hell is this Bastila?” You’re going to get bogged down in a ton of exposition that won’t necessarily translate, or translate well. Disney jettisoned most of the EU for this very reason, and as much as I hate this decision, I understand it. There’s also other factors at play in Kylo and Rey’s dynamic here – the Anakin/Padme parallels, the parallels to Hades and Persephone and the Phantom of the Opera imagery – so I think their personal story is going to be a mixture of all these things, with some new content thrown in their for good measure. At most, I believe Kylo and Rey are a heavy nod to the idea of Revan and Bastila – a way for the content creators to say “we got yo’ back, EU fans” – and a way to introduce the idea of Force Bonds to the general public. It’s a heavy, heavy nod, but a nod nonetheless.

There’s a scene in KotOR I that I’m really interested in, by the way, in relation to Episodes VIII and IX. In KotOR I towards the end, Revan gets trapped on board the Star Forge by the Sith. When he tries to leave, he is confronted by a Bastila-turned-Sith. He implores her to come back with him – to come back to the light, but she refuses. She attacks him – three times – and each time, he refuses to strike her down or hurt her. After the third attack where she’s unsuccessful, Bastila begs him to kill her and end her suffering, but he doesn’t, because dude is head over heels in love. When Revan admits how much he loves her, its enough to draw Bastila back to the light. I see parallels for the set up of this scene in TFA, and if we do get a scene similar to this in Episode VIII or XI – regardless of who plays which role – I think it will be safe to say that “yeah, they’re clearing basing this off Bastila and Revan.” That will be The Determining Factor for me, honestly.

One last word (on all of this)



I’m not going to go into too much detail here, because this subject is not entirely related to KotOR/TFA and it could have a whole post on its own, but Kylo/Rey isn’t actually a trash ship. Like at all. There, I said it. As much as I love calling Reylo a trash ship, and as much as I love reveling in the proverbial garbage, this is really inaccurate when we’re describing them, and we should probably stop (although doing so might be difficult).

I won’t go into more speculation as to what will happen in Episode VIII in this post because it will take too long, but I swill say this: this connection between Kylo and Rey? This heavy, heavy emphasis on them and their dynamic, and all the clues that JJ drops along the way? The fans aren’t imagining the romantic undertones – those are real, they’re there – and this isn’t a case of shippers seeing two attractive people and deciding “yeah, I want you to fuck like rabbits.” This is literal, in-your-face-canon-subtext that the creators have doused all over the film like kerosene, and they want you to notice. They’re sitting there with the goddamn matches and they want you to watch the blaze.

You don’t accidentally reference KotOR a million times over, and say it’s not intentional. You don’t specifically reference Revan and Bastila – a Sith and a Jedi who were notorious for their Force Bond and being lovers – time and time again, and say you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t accidentally show what was essentially the same interrogation scene twice in one movie, where the villain rips into one character but treats the other like glass (in context). You don’t accidentally dress a woman all in white (or the equivalent of white), dress a man all in black, then have him carry her out of the woods and onto the threshold of a ship, bridal style, a la wedding night/Hades-and-Persephone, and say “whoops. I didn’t know how that would be interpreted.”

As a writer – as someone who’s written scripts before – if I was going to sit down and say “okay, these two characters are going to fall in love/have a very complex, sexually-tinged dynamic, and I want the general public to notice it right away,” this is what I would do. This is exactly what I would do, and you would never, ever make all these references by accident. There’s just too many of them.

So this Kylo/Rey thing is not a trash ship. It’s not even unrealistic. The age difference between them is not that big of a deal – Rey’s nineteen, and the age difference between Anakin and Padme/Bastila and Revan was greater. To be honest, the only thing off about all of this that could make it trash is the potential of Rey and Kylo being cousins. But again, this is not that much of a big deal, canon wise – this sort of thing has been done in Star Wars before, and on a much more interconnected level. I’m also not sure how plausible the theory of them being cousins is. But that’s another post for another time.

There you go, @kylo-rey-all-day-erry-day - I’m done my homework. Give me an A+ and a cookie.

