On the True Popularity of Reylo, and the Goal of the Sequel Trilogy Lia Allaf Follow Mar 18 · 10 min read

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

Reylo. The ship that launched a thousand death threats. To most of the general audience, it’s just a fun enemies to lovers ship, in the same vein as Delena, Spuffy, Captain Swan, or Vegebul (though much, much more vanilla than any of these). But in the fandom world, it’s one of the most polarizing ships in existence. After the release of IX, Twitter seemed so full of equal amounts of love and hate towards the ship that it gave me whiplash. When I remembered how every GA member I spoke to either shipped Reylo, or was neutral on it, the whiplash and annoyance worsened. So one day, I decided to gather some data, which turned into a thread, which turned into a hectic amount of notes, which turned into this piece. The research for this article was initially done with just one question in mind: just how popular are Ben Solo and Reylo, really? And what I found has provided me with an answer: despite what loud, angry haters online would have you believing, Reylo is, without a doubt, one of the most popular heterosexual ships in the Western world. People hiding behind their screens may lie, but data never does. As I said earlier, I initially began this research with one question in mind. But the more I researched, the more another question began to surface in my mind: did the Sequel Trilogy successfully birth a new generation of Star Wars fans? I often hear very mixed responses to this, and I’ve had my own opinions on it as well. But again: data doesn’t lie, and I’ll explore that question throughout this piece, and in it’s conclusion.

This article gathers data from Tumblr, Ao3, Twitter, TikTok, and several other platforms into one place, so that you may come to your own conclusions as well. So without further ado: let’s get into it.

On Polls, Pageviews, and Parodies

A poll posted on the official Star Wars website on December 13th, 2019 posed the question, “Who do you most want to see in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker?” As of March 17th, 2020, 64,745 votes have been cast. And 86% of those votes went towards Kylo Ren. 4% went to Rey, 2% went to both Rose Tico and Babu Frik, and 1% went to Leia, Finn, Poe, Lando, Chewie, and R2-D2.

Of course, if you’re going to be talking about polls, you have to bring Buzzfeed to the table. A Buzzfeed quiz posted on December 21st, 2020 included two particular questions: How did you feel about Ben’s Death? And how do you feel about the Reylo kiss? Out of the 75.7k votes that were cast, 70% of the voters chose “Hated it!” for Ben’s death. Then out of the 76.6k votes for the question about the kiss, 60% of the votes were for the option “Loved it!”

Another poll to look at is one that was posted by Buzzfeed on December 17th, 2017 as part of the article, “So, How Do We Feel about the New “Last Jedi” Romance?” which discussed Reylo as a new romance that had been put forth by The Last Jedi. The poll at the conclusion of the article asks “How do you feel about the new romance between Kylo Ren and Rey?”. Out of the 78.4k votes that were cast in the poll, 57.6k were for “I am Reylo trash & proud of it.” That’s 71%.

Fandom (not the tumblr account, the entertainment site that runs Wikis for literally everything) released data on their most viewed Star Wars character pages from 2015–2019. Kylo Ren came in first, with 11.8M+ pageviews. Next up were Snoke, Anakin, and Ahsoka, with 10.3M+, 7.3M+, and 5.9M+ pageviews, respectively.

The 2018 MTV Movie Awards were held on June 18th, and they included a particularly Reylo-heavy Star Wars sketch. In this sketch, Rey was Ben’s girlfriend, and she shot Tiffany Haddish in the boob for trying to steal him from her. So that’s a sketch that includes romantic Reylo being broadcast to over 3.4M viewers on a Monday night, with no public outcry from a “large” base of fans who are against the ship in all it’s forms. And if you’re talking about Reylo parody videos, you have to talk about the awesome Nerdist “A Star Wars is Born” video from February 2019. This video puts a hilarious “A Star is Born” twist on the star-crossed lovers from a galaxy far, far away. The video is currently the 11th most viewed video on Nerdist’s youtube channel, out of 200 videos. The unabashed Reylo-ness of these two very public parody videos, combined with the 57.6k votes for “I am Reylo trash & proud of it” in December 2017 hint at an interesting fact: Reylo is pretty dang mainstream, and has been since 2018.

Tumblr

Anyone whose been involved in any fandom in the last 13 years knows what Tumblr is. But for those who don’t, here’s a quick history: Tumblr is a wildly popular microblogging and social media platform. As of September 2019, it was the fifth most popular social media platform, in terms of the amount of users. 69% of those users are ages 18–35, and an estimated 43% of internet users ages 18–24 are Tumblr users. As Fandom, a Tumblr account that provides weekly and yearly data on the site’s most popular topics put it in a 2019 post: “Shipping is Tumblr’s favorite sport, and this is the Big Game.” Well put, Fandom.

In 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, Reylo was the #10, #19, #2, and #7 ship on Tumblr, according to Fandom. But 2016, 2018, and 2019 all had something in common on Tumblr: Reylo was the #1 heterosexual ship on the website. It wasn’t ranked as high in 2017, but it still ended up being the #5 het ship on the site. Not too shabby. But what do these yearly ranking translate into on a weekly basis? To find that out, I took some time to look through the weekly ship rankings for every week that Fandom has analyzed since the first weekly analysis they did in 2018. From then to now, 101 weeks of shipping activity on Tumblr have been analyzed and recorded. Out of those 101 weeks, Reylo was ranked as one of the top 20 ships of the week 99 times. Out of those 99 times, Reylo was one of the top 10 ships 66 times. Out of the weeks recorded from 2018-the present, Reylo was one of the top 3 het ships 90/101 weeks, and the #1 het ship on the site 63 out of 101 weeks.

Ao3

Archive of our own (Ao3) is a nonprofit organization, dedicated to providing access to fanworks. One of the biggest components of fanworks is fanfiction. In 2019, Ao3 won the Hugo Award for Best Related Works, a huge win for the community. Every year, Ao3 does a ranking of it’s overall top 100 ships. In 2019, this was done on July 24th. On the list of 100 ships, Reylo was #29 overall, and the 3rd het ship. It was actually the #2 Star Wars ship, falling behind Kylux at #28. Next was FinnPoe, at #98. But over the next 9 months, this would change. As of March 2020, Reylo is the 15th most popular ship on the website overall, and just like Tumblr: the #1 M/F ship on the site. Kylux is still at #28. Now let’s look at some of the other Star Wars ships on the site.

Reylo- 18,002 works Kylux- 13,600 works FinnPoe- 6,700 works HanLeia- 3,697 works Anidala- 3,247 works Damerey- 1,779 works FinnRey- 1,798 works FinnRose- 1,082 works

Now let’s look a little bit deeper. This chart from @blessmycircuits on Twitter provides a look at the hits, comments, word counts, and Kudos for 15 Sequel Trilogy ships, based on the public fics from each pairing, as of February 14th of this year.

Reylo fics are the most popular by a landslide, with 68.8+ million hits. Next are Kylux and FinnPoe, with 24.8M+ and 20.2M+ hits, respectively. The two other Rey ships that I’m discussing in this article, FinnRey and Damerey, come in at 2.9M+ hits and 3.1+ million hits, respectively. That puts Reylo at 24x more popular than Finnrey, and 22x more popular than Damerey on the Archive.

Twitter

Twitter has become more and more popular for fandom activities since the Great Tumblr Purge of 2018, and the Star Wars fandom is no exception to this rule. In the Reylo fandom, if you want statistical data on something, you turn to Katie, aka @informalmajesty. She’s done lots of twitter data analysis in the past, and I’ll link you to some of her work, but for the sake of this piece, I’m focusing on two particular charts.

The first chart covers a representative sample of mentions of official Star Wars twitter hashtags from 11/20/2019–12/28/2019. As you can see, the top five hashtags are Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, Rey, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo.

What this chart shows is the popularity of Reylo vs. FinnRey on Twitter, between December 2015 and September 2019. The word “Reylo” was mentioned in 331,932 tweets, and the term “FinnRey” was said 17,348 times. So “Reylo” was used 19x more than “FinnRey” was.

Trending on Twitter

On January 24th, 2020, #BringBenSoloBack trended in Russia, Peru, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, worldwide and in the US. At its peak, it trended at #4 in the states. The hashtag was used over 45,000 separate times that day, in 45k+ tweets. The next day, January 25th, brought a similar occurrence. #SaveBenSolo trended in multiple countries, worldwide, and in the US. At its peak, the hashtag was the #2 trending topic in the states. That day brought 50k+ tweets using the hashtag. On Valentine’s Day of this year, the hashtag #ReyloLove trended in Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, Brazil, Russia, Australia, Puerto Rico, worldwide, and in the US. At its peak, the trend was at #11 in the US. The tag was used 50–60k times that day. On February 29th, #WeLoveBenSolo trended in the US, Argentina, Russia, and Italy, with the hashtag being tweeted 30k+ times that day. Huh. It seems almost like…people really love Ben Solo.

The Gram

Instagram isn’t as huge for fandoms as Twitter and Tumblr, but it is still a platform worth checking out for fanart and the like. As of 3/4/2020, here’s how the ST ships line up on Instagram, when you search the hashtags that have to do with each ship.

Reylo- approximately 661,200+ results FinnPoe- approximately 97,840+ results Kylux- approximately 58,320+ results FinnRey- approximately 25,760+ results Damerey- approximately 1,540+ results

So yet again — Reylo takes the W.

TikTok

TikTok is a video sharing social media platform that was launched in September 2017. TikTok quickly became massively popular, and despite being launched only two years and three months before 2020, it ended up being the 7th most downloaded app of the 2010s. As of February 2020, TikTok has become a larger and more active and popular social media platform than Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, and Pinterest, despite the four having been around since long before TikTok’s 2017 birth. It’s currently the 9th most popular social media platform. 41% of TikTok users are ages 18–24. And despite there not being a large fandom presence on the app, the community on TikTok seems to really, really love Star Wars. #StarWars currently has 4.3B+ views. So let’s take a look at the tags for some of the characters, and for some of the ships.

Approximate Character View Counts, as of 3/17/2020

Ben Solo/Kylo Ren- 667.2M+ Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker- 390.8M+ Rey- 232.4M+ Padmé Amidala- 72.3M+ Leia Organa- 62.9M+ Han Solo- 36.3M+ Luke Skywalker- 29.5M+ General Hux- 23.5M+ Finn- 46M-83.9M* Poe Dameron- 16.6M+

*Finn’s numbers are a little harder to determine, since there’s lots of crossover with Finn Wolfhard, and Finn the Human. So for him we have a range, rather than a single number.

These numbers are clear: Ben Solo is TikTok’s most beloved Star Wars character. The second most popular character is still a full 276.4M views behind him. Something that surprised me is how high Padmé was ranked. She’s above the OT trio, plus every character from the ST, excluding Rey and Ben. Too bad the Sequel Trilogy didn’t mention her name (or Anakin Skywalker, for that matter) a single time. But I digress.

Now, lets look at the ST ships.

Approximate Ship View Counts, as of 3/17/2020

Reylo- 58.8M+ FinnPoe- 4.2M+ Kylux- 2.6M+ FinnRey- 117.6k+ Damerey- 7.3k+

Reylo is leagues more popular than all the other ST ships, just like on Ao3, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. If you want to break it down even more, and compare the Rey ships even further, look at it like this — on TikTok, Reylo is 500x more popular than FinnRey, and 8,054x more popular than Damerey. And like I said earlier: there is not a major fandom presence on TikTok. Meaning that the majority of Star Wars TikToks that we’re seeing are coming from members of the GA. So again: Reylo for the win!

In the End

This data paints a clear picture: Reylo is mainstream, and one of, if not the most, popular het ships in the Western world. But did the Sequel Trilogy inspire a new generation of Star Wars fans? My answer, based on the data that I’ve collected, and my own personal experiences, is yes. The ST did indeed inspire a new generation of Star Wars fans, made up of kids and adolescents from Gen Z, and the young adults that proudly call themselves Millenials. And these new young fans? They like the prequels. They like romance, star-crossed lovers, and redeemed villains. They’re inspired by Padmé. They enjoy the original trilogy, but that’s not what captures their interests the most, nor what makes them willing to open up their wallets. So it truly is a shame that IX became what it is: a nihilistic nostalgia fest that sacrifices the beloved characters of the ST to focus on the “golden generation” that came before. So in conclusion: If Lucasfilm would like to keep the new fans that they so desperately need, they’re going to have to make some adjustments.