My thoughts on #Reylo

I was never really a Reylo shipper, but I admired the positivity and enthusiasm of Reylo shippers. There’s a huge “Rey and Kylo in love” community online, and they make the sweetest drawings, cartoons, and paintings. In the wait for episode 9, they were some of my favourite people to follow on Twitter and Instagram, even if I didn’t agree.

I didn’t want Rey to necessarily end up with anyone. I found Kylo Ren to be a toxic monster of a man. His imagery was very much like a combination of a vampire mixed with Beauty and the Beast.



I mean, in The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren stalks Rey through a forest, knocks her unconscious, carries her aboard his bat-wing ship like vampire carrying a “bride”, stares at her while she wakes up strapped to table, says he can take anything he wants and invades her mind. In The Last Jedi, he tells her she’s nothing - except to him, classic abuser “rely only on me” behaviour, and yet when she still offers him a chance to redeem himself, he keeps firing on ships containing her friends and his own mother.

And all of that is leaving aside his complicity in genocide and commiting patricide. Kylo Ren kills his family’s old friend Lor San Tekka, then orders his troops to shoot unarmed civilians. He tortures Poe with the Force. He acts like a Vader fanboy and tantruming edgelord. He flies alongside the ships the blast his mother and Ackbar into space. He turns down offers of redemption again and again. I love the character as a villain for our times, and Adam Driver is compelling as hell, but I’m pretty firmly in the camp of people who didn’t want to see Rey weakly forgive this guy.



Redemption is an important lesson people learn from Star Wars. Forgiveness. Learning to turn the other cheek. As someone who has had toxic people in my life though (as most everyone has, to some degree) sometimes you have to do what Rey did at the end of The Last Jedi, and just shut the damn door. It’s okay to walk away from abusive, dangerous people for your own health. That’s an important message.



Kylo Ren can’t become Ben Solo again until he wants to. Leia calls to him, Rey heals him, but it’s his own memory of his father that ultimately sways him to cast away the Kylo Ren persona. He had to want it.



I know some Reylo people point out that Snoke and the Emperor were reaching out to corrupt him even as far back as when Leia was pregnant, and that’s some valid reasons for some sympathy for young Ben. The Dark Side is often presented in Star Wars like drug abuse: it’s quick and easy, and hard to shake. It affects your eyes and how you perceive the world. We see it on Rebels when Ahsoka cracks open Vader’s helmet, and for a moment, Anakin peeks out. Kylo Ren in these movies is 30 years old by the time of episode IX. This is not a boy anymore. This is a man making decisions. At some point, he is responsible for his own actions. Han tried to bring him home, and he killed him. Leia reached out, and he hesitated but his own troops then fired on her. Rey tried to get him to turn away from the Dark, and he kept trying to destroy the past and his own mom. He wanted to fight Luke, not listen. The Emperor returns, and he wants to fight the threat to his power. This is not a good guy.



Rey is an orphan who grew up in poverty. Ben grew up with loving parents and a super-powered uncle, all of whom are war heroes. And yet she is kind and he is cruel. I want to root for her. We are not our lineage.



Padme loved Anakin despite him killing an entire village of Tuskens. She loved him and wanted him to come away from the war even after he killed Jedi younglings. And this is real too. We can love people who have made mistakes, who have committed the worst crimes, and who are addicted to or influenced by terrible things.



Rey isn’t attached to Kylo in the same way Padme was to Anakin. Padme knew Anakin, not the villain Darth Vader. Rey has only known the villain Kylo Ren, with the tiniest glimpses of Ben Solo. It’s fantastic reversal of the love from the prequels, and one of the ways the movie did it well. They have a kiss, but this is also the end. There’s no happily ever after here.



The Skywalker lineage is alive in spirit, not in genes. I know a lot of people wanted Rey to be a nobody to show how anyone can rise up to be a hero (and Finn and Rose show us that too). But Rey shows us instead the importance of walking away from your toxic lineage, and that’s immensely valuable. I can relate to that and I suspect many people can. We may have to reckon with our family history —or even reconcile it— but we are not our family, we are ourselves and our own choices. Rey understood that wisdom, and I’m not sure even Kylo-turned-Ben ever did.



A further note: as a social media specialist who has grown up before and after the internet’s prominence, I think part of the crushing blow to the fun, positive Reylo community online was from the very nature of the echo chamber they built. It was a wonderful echo chamber! Finding hidden clues they thought pointed to the love story. All the touching little cartoons of Rey and Kylo being sweethearts. It visually amplified some speculation for the story into full-on, very invested fanfic, and when the movie didn’t deliver, it genuinely crushed a lot of Reylo people. There are people hurting, and that sucks.

But the Reylo interpretation of the story was only a part of what has ever been presented by Abrams and Johnson. As I noted above, Kylo Ren in a conflicted villain yes, but one who committed absolute atrocities on both a macro, galaxy-spanning level and a personal level. Yet some fans refer to him as “their soft boi”. He’s a 30 year old man who murdered his own father and helped an army destroy a solar system. Sure, Adam Driver plays him as a handsome and hurt person, but some of this has always seemed to me to be selective interpretation.



In Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beast, the Beast has isolated himself in the castle before he kidnaps a girl and her Stockholm Syndrome lets her restore him to handsomeness within and without. Kylo Ren is waging war across the galaxy and repeatedly being cruel to the girl, physically and mentally. It’s not a direct analogue.