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beskarfrog · 1 year ago

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Din leaned against the door to the school house, his boots muddy from having walked through the streets of Sundari. The door was left open as usual to let cool air and the occasional frog in. It was officially monsoon season on their part of Mandalore and not for the first time, Din wondered why the Jedi couldn’t have built his school on ground that was a little further out of the floodplain.

Inside the little school, the Jedi was sitting on one of his weird little pillow mats with all the children crowded up around him. Grogu was sitting in Ragnar’s lap, Rey and Finn on each of his sides. Paz had been infuriated when Ragnar had first asked to go with the jett’ike for lessons after regular training. He had been won over eventually when the Armorer suggested it would be a good opportunity for Ragnar to learn how to fight against a Force-user.

“Alright, how about a story for our history lesson today?” the Jedi asked and got a positive reaction from the kids. Din let the soft drone of his voice wash over him as he considered the scene before him.

He hadn’t expected to see the Jedi again after Grogu had come back to him. Much less had he expected the Jedi to show up two months after they’d retaken Mandalore and Din was trying to figure out how to run a planet. He’d arrived in a beat-up pre-Empire ship with a handful of children. They had all been brought before Din and his newly formed council.

“The school was attacked. The New Republic isn’t safe for us anymore. They have…expectations for how the Jedi should benefit them,” the Jedi had explained, his face impassive and cold. The children lingering in the shadow of his dark robes looked both nervous and defiant. Din wondered if that was how the Jedi felt too.

“Why come to us?” Bo-Katan asked, a few chairs down from Din.

“What is that saying you have? A Mandalorian is both hunter and prey. Your people understand what it is like to be hunted for what you are,” the Jedi said, gaining a thoughtful nod from the Armorer. He had looked at Din as he said it and Din knew that there were layers to that statement. Yes, all Mandalorians knew what it was like to be persecuted for their allegiance to a nearly dead Creed, but Din specifically understood what it was to be hunted for having a child with strange powers.

Paz and Bo-Katan had gotten into a rather vicious argument about the situation, but the Armorer had been of the same mind as Din. Children in need were children in need, even if they came with an ominous wizard attached to them. Paz had wanted to kill the Jedi and keep the children, but eventually he had been convinced that the kids would need training for their magic. Din was relieved because he was becoming concerned that, be it Bo-Katan or Paz, his council was about to become one person smaller if the argument dragged on any longer.

In the end, Din had told the Jedi, “We will let you build a school here, but you’ll live as we do. The children will be raised with the other Mandalorian ade. No one will be required to swear the Creed. That is not the Way, but we are trying to rebuild our culture.”

“I understand,” the Jedi had grimaced, “The Jedi used to live in community too. We had a similar sense of culture once from what I am told, but that was before I was born.”

“I…I will do what I can to make sure your children are safe here,” Din had said and that was the end of the matter.

The only person who was completely satisfied with the arrangement was Grogu. Din was shocked to find out how much the kid liked the Jedi - Luke, as he’d introduced himself. He had expected some animosity since Grogu had left, but Luke had been surprisingly happy to see the womp rat again. At first, Din had been reluctant to let the kid join the other little sorcerers in training, but they all seemed to like him.

That was the real problem. The Jedi and his jett’ike liked everyone, even Paz. Luke was always willing to accept ade or even adults into his weapons training sessions at his little school. He brought homemade uj’alayi to all the community meetings, complete with little paper wrappers the kids had decorated. His sister and her smuggler husband visited often enough that it was obvious that the Jedi cared about his family. Luke was a better Mandalorian than half the people Din had met on Mandalore and he hadn’t even sworn the Creed.

It made it incredibly hard for other Mandalorians not to like the strange little sorcerers back and there had been a lot of talk about adopting the Jedi and his children into a clan. He was a proficient warrior, good with children, and after the first month, it was clear that he cared about the community they were trying to build. He was the perfect riduur, but it made Din want to grind his teeth any time anyone talked about challenging him for his hand.

It hadn’t taken him long to figure out why. It was made all the worse when the Jedi had started to befriend him in earnest. At first, it was just mutually commiserating about the problems of raising Force-sensitive children, but it slowly became something more. Luke opened up, shedding the persona he seemed to wear like his billowing black cloak. Din caught glimpses of the darkness that lurked within him, the turmoil he went through to fight back against those impulses. Din knew how painful it was to peel off your armor in front of another, even if you wanted them to see you as you really were.

And Luke let him see.

So, now Din leaned against the door to the nursery as the children ran out past him to play in the yard. Grogu was too enthralled with the game Ragnar and Rey had started to even notice him in the doorway.

“Here to pick up Grogu?” Luke asked as he rose up from his mat. Din nodded but waved his hand in dismissal as Luke went to call for him.

“He can play. I don’t have anywhere to be for a while,” Din said as Luke walked over to join him in the doorway. “The story you told. It wasn’t very happy.”

“The story of the Jedi has never been a happy one,” Luke said, his smile soft and touched with sadness. His hair had a little extra wave in it due to the humidity. Din wanted to reach out and run his gloved hand through those waves, “But it is full of hope. Foundlings are the future, right?”

“This is the Way,” Din inclined his head, which pulled a more genuine smile out of Luke. Something sharp twisted in Din’s chest and he swallowed, thankful for the millionth time that his helmet obscured his face.

He needed to get this over with, to do what he actually came here to do.

“Do you…Would you want to spar? Not right now, but some time. Maybe tonight?” Din asked, tamping down the impulse to twist his hands together. He was a Mandalorain. He should be bold with his feelings, not the awkward nervous thing that Luke seemed to turn him into.

“Mand’alor,” Luke's smile turned blinding as he pressed his gloved hand to his chest, mockingly scandalized. His blue eyes were sparkling, even in the grey overcast light of the rainy day, “If I didn’t know better that sounds like a date.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Din mumbled, his heart sinking. He knew it was unlikely for Luke to reciprocate his feelings, but the Jedi’s sister had made some comments last time she visited that had given him the courage to at least find out.

“I’d like it to be, Din, if that's alright,” Luke said and gently reached out to catch Din’s hand. He threaded his fingers between Din’s, giving his hand a firm squeeze. Din returned it, a flash of hope rising back up in him. If this went well, he was going to send Senator Organa a whole case of tihaar.

“We’ll have to find someone to babysit, though,” Luke continued, tugging on Din’s hand to pull him a little closer, “You’re my go-to person for watching the kids, but you’ll be busy, obviously.”

“Paz said he would. Ragnar’s been wanting to have everyone sleep over at their house,” Din said, grateful that he’d planned ahead for that problem.

In the yard, the kids had gotten into a mud fight next to the frog pond. Grogu was practically a brown blob while Finn was doing his best to avoid the mud that Rey and Ragnar were slinging at each other. Din knew he really ought to intervene, but if Paz was watching the kids for the night…

“The Force bless that man,” Luke shook his head, squeezing Din’s hand again.

#dinluke #ficlet #text post #the mandalorian #clan of three #I haven't really been writing much lately but i wanted to do something quick and cute #might put this up on ao3 later who knows

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darthmaclunkey · 1 month ago

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seeing last jedi again was so good. i will be fighting in the last jedi trenches until i die. if last jedi has no fans left on earth then i am dead etc etc. some very rambling and incoherent thoughts under the cut:

i love luke so much in tlj. luke skywaker is my all-time favourite character from anything, because he really embodies one of the core messages from star wars: being good is a choice, and it's a choice you have to keep making. right from the start of new hope, we see how luke is just constantly thrust into situations where, time and time again, he's given the choice of the easy way out, or tempted by the dark side. but luke always chooses to do the right thing, even when it's hard. in rotj we do get a glimpse of him as this aloof, emotionless jedi, but then it all unravels in the finale when he is forced to confront vader. i know a lot of the vitriol around last jedi is from people who think it ruined luke's character, but to me, his arc makes perfect sense. sequels luke is a man who has spent his whole life making sacrifices and working hard to do good, until it's all torn away from him by the dark side - a dark side plot specifically designed to undermine luke and the light, mind you - yet he still blames himself, because a fleeting temptation from the dark to take the easy route out and save the galaxy from what he saw in ben almost got him, but it didn't. and he paid for that temptation dearly. i would have hated to see a sequels-era luke who was just some epic version of the distant, quasi-mystical jedi knight we see in rotj (as i've seen some people saying that's how he should have been). what kind of character arc is that? he gets to the end of the OT and then never changes? i'm drawn to luke because of his humanity, the fact that you still see the tatooine farmboy in him years later. his sacrifice at the end of last jedi is so beautiful and poignant to me; a lesser script (cough tros cough) would have had him jump in an x-wing and show up to plow through the first order with his lightsaber. i love what we get instead: his moment with leia, her touching his hands and realising he's a projection - his knowing wink to threepio - the image of him emerging from the dust and smoke, unscathed, and how it clearly puts the absolute fear into kylo ren - the way he doesn't even attack, just dodges and blocks - then, finally, the shot of him on ahch-to, watching the sunset, and, once he's gone, the image of his cloak blowing away in the wind, symbolic of his spirit joining the cosmic force. that's my jedi master luke. funny, powerful, human, flawed, but still, after all this time, making the choice to do good and fight for others, even if it's the hardest thing he'll ever do. whew. luke skywalker i love you.

i love how last jedi looks. with the exception of maybe empire, i think it's the best-looking of all the films. it's stuffed with references to absolutely classic cinema, like the shot in canto bight that's an homage to the café dolly shot in wings, or the classic hitchcockian dolly zoom as finn and rose look over the cliff, and the opening sequence with the bombing run is just a straight homage to old war movies, which is just what the OT did with the space battles being shot-for-shot remakes of ww2 dogfight footage. original-flavour star wars was a love letter to to so many other films and tv shows, so this feels so natural. at the same time, there's a lot of sequences that feel really innovative for star wars, like the montage that accompanies rey's connection to the force on ahch-to, or the film's extensive use of close-up shots and slow-mo. the lighting is gorgeous. finn's fight with phasma looks astonishing on the big screen - the colour grading and visual effects really go off in that scene.

i love all the force skype sessions with kylo and rey, but especially the scene where she's out in the rain and, when they disconnect, you see kylo running his hand over his face then shaking the rainwater from his glove. something I hadn't appreciated before is how well the film sells you on the idea that they are both present in the same space, despite seeing them both shot against different backgrounds. the intimacy of the rain-on-glove thing gets me every time.

i love everybody's arcs. every single member of the main trio has a full arc in the film. rose tico is such a lovely addition to the main cast, i hate how she got totally shafted in rise of skywalker.

on a completely superficial note: the main cast are all at their hottest in last jedi. especially poe dameron. especially poe dameron.

the throne room fight scene is one of my favourite movie scenes ever (and in star wars, it's only beaten out by the binary sunset scene from new hope). i WISH i could relive the first time i saw it at the midnight screening i went to in 2017. i may have been sitting politely, but i was hooting and hollering internally.

rian johnson, they could never make me hate you.

#just wanted to ramble #it was a bummer going into the last jedi tag and like immediately seeing negativity 3 posts in

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dalekofchaos · 7 months ago

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Context

Context for choice 3.

Here is what I mean about The New Republic and The First Order.

What happens after you win a war? How do you not make the same mistakes or become the thing you fought. What happens in a power vacuum? The New Republic should have been the dominant emerging power, and the Remnant should have been a small, secretive, unknown order, striking strategically from the Unknown Regions where they hid, and causing fear and panic to spread in the NR. After the Galactic Civil War, The New Republic commanders the Imperial Fleet and starts protecting systems who join the NR, all while chasing down and fighting any of the Remnants (Moffs, Warlords, Crime Lords, etc) who have grabbed power in the resulting vacuum. We could have seen an evolution of ships from Old Republic to Empire to NR ones. They could have renamed Star Destroyers into Star Defenders. Hell, they could have had a Republic of independent systems, each with their own sizable military, so that power isn’t centralized.

But no, instead of telling an interesting story, we are force fed the recycled poorly written rehashed Rebels vs Empire and the Rebels are made to be weaker than The First Order. The First Order are a terrorist movement, they should not be reigning after Hosnian Prime’s destruction, ESPECIALLY AFTER LOSING STARKILLER BASE!

Choice 4. Here is how I would give Kylo Ren motivation as to why Ben Solo fell and his main motivation as Kylo Ren.

Choice 6. I don't think there was absolutely no need for a Palpatine clone and eventually Palpatine himself(🙄) we all knew what was happening around the time this trilogy was being made. Trump. Base Snoke around the mango Mussolini and his lunatic fringe followers. An Alt-Right cult leader who cultivates the worst people imaginable. All The First Order needed to be was pointing out The New Republic brought the galaxy to an age of scum and villainy. A lawless state that usurped the rightful rulers that brought law and order. Basically "Make the Galaxy great again with Imperial Greatness"

You see, originally Lucas was going to make Palpatine JUST a politician and base him around Richard Nixon.

“George Lucas has spoken on various occasions of the way that the Nixon administration and the Vietnam war had an important influence on how he shaped the plot of the early films in the saga. The impact that these two events had an American in the 1970s started him thinking about the ways in which democracies can sale and how they deteriorating to dictatorships when corruption goes unchecked. He’s quoted as saying that Nixon - Who he viewed as having subverted the Senate and as acting an increasingly imperialistic way - what is the direct inspiration for Emperor Palpatine the supreme leader of the evil Empire in the first Star Wars trilogy”

So I don't see why they couldn't do something similar with the CLEAR FUCKING EVIL going on in the world at the time this trilogy was being made. No Sith master was needed.

In this scenario, I would call The First Order, The Imperium

Now you might have questions. What about the Stormtroopers and Kylo?

Stormtroopers? Don’t abduct kids, nationalize and recruit them willingly. Abducting children and training them to be Stormtroopers instantly made The First Order out to be cartoonishly evil from the start. So what do you do instead? Use propaganda. Nationalize them. Make them believe The Empire was right and convince them that the life of a Stormtrooper will help bring order in a chaotic galaxy. We’ve seen cults do something similar, Far Right Wing groups do it and we’ve seen Trump radicalize and nationalize white supremacists, so it’s not impossible for The First Order to do the logical thing.

Finn only leaves because he sees they are murdering unarmed civilians and chooses to leave. He is an example that it isn't too late to leave harmful fringe cult movements.

So how would Ben turn in this scenario? He's radicalized by Snoke. Ben starts hearing passionate speeches in the senate and Ben is moved. "I know he opposes my mother, but he's making a lot of sense" "He's right, we need to bring order to the galaxy" and Ben is radicalized by this Imperium movement and what he believes is Snoke's righteous cause. To Snoke, Ben represents everything great about the Empire. Snoke collects Sith Holocrons and uses the holocrons to turn Ben Solo into Kylo Ren.

In this scenario, I wouldn't redeem Ben. He is far too gone. He's committed atrocities in Snoke's name, for The Imperium and to bring order to the galaxy. While Finn represents those who could break away from Right Wing movements and Cults. Kylo Ren is far too gone, he's radicalized to the point where he's a die hard believer like Hux and Phasma and he's willing to fight and die for this indoctrination.

Choice 11. The Episode IX rewrite with Ben living and Reylo ending

Choice 12. The original plan for the Sequel Trilogy was to just get three young directors together to direct the Sequel Trilogy. It was supposed to be JJ, Rian and Colin Trevorrow, but Colin's IX was bad and his Jurassic World trilogy was terrible. So I would make either Matt Reves or Greta Gerwig as the director for Episode IX and ideally they would plan the trilogy out together instead of JJ setting up Mystery Boxes and expecting Rian and others open said mystery boxes and Rian subverting expectations.

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starblightbindery · 6 months ago

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Binder's Note for Forms by Trebia

How Forms fits in the long tradition of Star Wars fanfic.

My hope is that this project captures a snapshot in time from Star Wars fandom het shippers between December 2015 and December 2017, before the franchise confirmed any emotional intimacy—if you can call it that— between Rey and Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017).

Trebia, then aged 24, wrote and published the first chapter of Forms on Archive of Our Own on December 18th, 2015—the exact release date of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. When posting this first chapter, Trebia noted, “I’m just working off of memory from the one viewing I saw last night.” The entirety of the fanfic was completed and posted an exact month later, making this fic historically significant in Star Wars fandom as one of the earliest published “Reylo” stories.

A serialized novella that was churned out in an astonishingly short time frame, Forms is notable for predicting many elements of The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019), including the Reylo Force bond, Rey walking away from her training with Luke Skywalker, Kylo Ren pleading with Rey to join him, and Kylo Ren pushing his Force energy into Rey to save her life.

Throughout the story, Trebia mashed new and old Star Wars elements together—characters like the Mandalorians and Admiral Daala, settings like Illum and Kuat⁠—evincing her fondness for the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Forms has classic tropes from this franchise, like stealing a uniform to go undercover in an enemy base and the forced proximity of a “Slow Boat to Bespin.” Present in Forms are scads of fan theories from between the release of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. These included the theory that—echoing a Legends plot line from Dark Empire (1991) where somehow Palpatine returns and Luke Skywalker joins the dark side to try and take him down from the inside—Kylo Ren had strategic reasons for his apprenticeship to Snoke. Like many Reylo fan-works set in-universe, Trebia lends justification to his many antisocial acts, part of shipper efforts to make the character more self-relevant and sympathetic.

Forms weaves in tantalizing threads that were tossed around by fans and concept artists but ultimately not pursued, including Dark Rey, Stormpilot (Finn/Poe Dameron), and Rey's saberstaff. Trebia even predicted the Kuat Drive Yards plot line started in The Last Jedi (Rose Tico’s contempt for weapon's manufacturers on Canto Bight) and continued in the abandoned Episode IX: Duel of Fates script by Colin Trevorrow. Forms also addresses loose ends that probably should have been covered for a more cohesive nine film saga, like the Chosen One prophecy and direct interaction between Anakin Skywalker and Kylo Ren.

No discussion of Forms can be complete without also placing it in the context of Star Wars fandom in 2016. Reylo was a fringe pairing that made intuitive sense to many Star Wars fans, particularly women; however, prior to The Last Jedi, the ship was dwarfed by the popularity of slash ships like Finn/Poe and Kylo Ren/Hux. At the time, many fans theorized that Rey was Luke Skywalker’s long-lost daughter, making her Ben Solo’s first cousin, making Reylo an incest ship.

As noted on the Fanlore wiki, the tags on this fic changed over time. In addition to “Riding the bus to hell either way” Trebia joked with tags like “Possible incest?” and “Not incest until proven guilty in the court of law.” Following the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Trebia celebrated by replacing those tags with a celebratory “IT AIN’T INCEST.”

The story's strong influence in early Reylo fandom reflected a hunger for more Star Wars romances about the pull between light and dark. After all, the sequel trilogy did not set up Kylo Ren as a horned, alien-appearing monster or a wrinkled geezer. Unblemished by the ravages of the dark side, Kylo Ren was depicted with pillow lips and a fabulous, voluminous coiffure unencumbered by his helm (which really should have flattened it to his scalp.) The groundwork for a lightsider/darksider romance was previously explored in other Expanded Universe stories. At the forefront of these were watered down lightsider/darkside romances like the tepidly written romance between Luke Skywalker and former Palpatine agent Mara Jade. Given Mara Jade was hardly a champion of the dark side, there was no risk of corrupting Skywalker. But the Expanded Universe also boasted stories that played with this dynamic, like the twisted connection between Fable Astin and Jaalib Brandl by Patricia A. Jackson for the Star Wars Adventure Journal (1994), the conflict between Jaina Solo and Zekk in Kevin J. Anderson's Young Jedi Knights (1996),or the passion between Darth Revan and Bastila Shan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003). In this respect, Forms and the rest of the Reylo fan fiction oeuvre continues the grand fan tradition of Star Wars villain fucking.

“Darksider and lightsider conflict is one of the most fascinating points of Star Wars,” Trebia said in 2016, when interviewed by Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic. “Rey and Kylo represent the fight to find the balance.” Yet, at the time, the fledgling “Reylo” ship was abhorred by affirmational Star Wars fans who despised the emphasis on shipping with a female gaze, as well as scorned by media commentators who found the ship to be “problematic.” In male-dominated, established fan spaces like Reddit and Jedi Council Forums, discussion of Reylo was effectively banned by moderators through the freezing of threads. In other fandom spaces like Twitter and Tumblr, discourse about Reylo mirrored larger purity culture. The ship became a convenient target for alt-right misogynists, and also for anti‑shippers concerned that the ship “romanticized abuse.” Productive and unproductive debate arose around media consumption construed as agreement or approval, whether a sympathetic Kylo Ren lends people to give more latitude to real-life white right-wing men with anger management problems (or if it's the other way around), and if shippers can tell the difference between a fictional antihero and the same dangerous thing in real life. Critiques of Reylo fandom also included the implicit racism inherent in the sidelining of John Boyega’s heroic character Finn in favor of white whiny fascist Kylo Ren. (It did not help that 2016 also saw the election where white American women voters decided to displace a competent Black man with a white whiny fascist.)

In the September 2020 issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies, Andrea Marshall notes that Reylo “fan fiction acts as a locus of resistance to gendered oppression as feminist authors construct selves that critique the source material and the fandom for gendered oppression within tropes and attitudes.” By having Rey actually interact with and befriend a woman other than Leia, Forms already improves on the source material. It's a delight to see Forms depict older women over age fifty who are plot-significant and interact which one another, if only because Star Wars movies are fairly gender regressive. On the other hand, Rey's strategy to convert Kylo back to the light is to uh, suck the badness out of him. It's Padmé Amidala logic—sure, he arranged the wholesale slaughter of an entire village, but he can also deftly finger you to orgasm! Granted, Star Wars is infamously a franchise of excuse making, where really shitty dudes manage to turn it around and do the right thing at the last minute. Forms also doesn't push all that hard to actively resist the neo-fascist allegory in the sequel trilogy, particularly in Trebia's appendix, which dissatisfactorily explains that all of the First Order war criminals in the story ended up as instructors in military academies. (Who would even hire them, Albus Dumbledore?!)

Fics like Forms led to “ship wars” discourse, which led to the publication of ozhawkauthor's “The Three Laws of Fandom” meta essay on January 1st, 2016. “Laws” is a bit of a misnomer since there is no enforcement body; the essay is more of a request for courtesy in fandom spaces. The laws were also meant to apply specifically to shipping, not fandom or media criticism as a whole. “It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create,” wrote ozhawkauthor. “That’s censorship. Don’t do it.”

For fans conscious of fandom history and the impact of censorship in spaces like FanFiction.net and Livejournal, ozhawkauthor's guidelines—(1) Don't like; don't read, (2) Your ship is not my ship, (3)Ship and let ship—felt intuitive. This is reflected in spaces like my bookbinding guild, Renegade, which—similar to Archive of Our Own—takes a hands off approach to policing content. This did not prevent widespread handwringing about Reylo content. Star Wars fan ughwhyben reflected on the “gigantic fandom that is suddenly experiencing a renaissance, where an influx of mainstream folk are trickling into (or running into) the fic side for possibly the first time right now and don’t have this training. It’s like we’re flickering back and forth between the modern evolution of fic side fannish culture and what things were like in, for example, 2001 when I first stumbled in.”

Decades ago, in May 1981, Lucasfilm reacted to the publication of “Slow Boat to Bespin” by Anne Elizabeth Zeek & Barbara Wenk by declaring a ban on smut in fan fiction. I've included in the errata of this binding a letter from 1981 written by the Star Wars fanclub president to circulating fanzines threatening legal action. While slash was also caught in this net—disproportionately targeted given non-explicit gay romance was not okay even though Star Wars has non-explicit het romance—it was this fairly tame (by fic standards) heteronormative fic, featuring Han Solo and Princess Leia, that signaled to Lucasfilm that smutty fanfic was no longer on the fringes and now needed to be addressed to protect the “wholesomeness” of the franchise. Subsequently, fanfic writers had to make a conscious decision to flout Lucasfilm’s policy and go forth with propagating their smut.

And, in 2016, of all the ships in all of fandom, it was the Reylo Star Wars pairing, featuring this specific heteronormative female power fantasy (of being able to leash a villain by the dick to drag him back to the light) that led to a communal reaffirmation of these fandom norms. In her interviews with the The Atlantic, Trebia directly quotes from the Three Laws of Fandom, endorsing “ship and let ship” as a basis for creating Reylo fanworks. “I am fully involved in the garbage compactor that is this pairing, and I love it,” Trebia said. “No matter what way it goes, I will stick with it.”

After studying early romance novels from the late 1600s and early 1700s, Ros Ballaster observed a polarity between didactic love fiction and amatory fiction. Didactic love stories are sweet—aspirational, moral, and idealized—while amatory fiction is spicy—erotic, transgressive, untethered from social sanction. We do see representations of didactic love in Reylo fan fiction, particularly in contemporary romance “Modern AUs” like Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis (2021)where the Kylo's homicidal Sith rage is sanitized to a more socially-acceptable grumpy academic brooding. One can comfortably bring Adam Carlsen, Ph.D home to meet Mother. But certainly, the majority of Reylo fic written by fans gravitate towards and come with the self awareness of the amatory. For one, Trebia loudly proclaims in her Chapter Two author note: “MORE TRASH FOR THE TRASH GOD.”

Discourse over the “morality” of Reylo fan fiction tends to overlook the distinction between the didactic and the amatory. As compelling as the idea of a “Force dyad” is in fantasy, this relationship is not meant to be aspirational in a literal sense. Yet, readers of Reylo fiction were and continue to have to defend their interest in the archetype with disclaimers—yes, it's trash, yes, I know it's problematic—while men in fandom are not held to the same standards when it comes to “problematic” media they consume or enjoy, whether it's a Michael Bay blockbuster film or male-gaze pornography.

As Deborah Lutz notes, “The Dangerous Lover Romance” is a centuries old, conventional way to represent erotic desire and romantic love. The “sublimely tormented Byronic hero” is hardly groundbreaking, to the extent that Rian Johnson's depiction of Reylo in The Last Jedi subverts the trope—at the end of the film Rey isn't enchanted, she's repulsed. The same way Star Wars replicates Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey monomyth, Reylo stories like Forms reflect the broad appeal of the “how-the-turntables” Dangerous Lover romance—where the woman protagonist, initially subjugated by the debased, restless misanthrope, ends up subjugating him through her strength of will and the power of love. Trebia's Kylo even sports malevolent scars like so many Gothic male romantic leads before him—always on the face. In the Gothic romance, the heroine accesses socially undesirable aspects—power, rage, craving, desire—as expressed by her double, the Dangerous Lover. His presence in the story provides a basis for her disinhibition. The Reylo ship follows a well-trodden cultural script of transgressive female desire.

Forms the fan fiction novella is a notable cultural artefact reflecting a distinct period of time in Star Wars fandom. At the time, Reylo fanfic held all the promise of improved representation for women characters, crossed with the instinctual, regressive insistence that maintains a white male character in the forefront. Reylo fan fiction produced in early 2016 also led to the reification of anti-censorship values in fandom. Seven years later, a fandom that was once derided has gone fully mainstream, as fic writers like Ali Hazelwood, Ashley Poston, and Thea Guanzon top traditional publishing bestseller lists. What Trebia knocked out, hours after her introduction to the characters, is now it's own Star Wars literary tradition.

#fanbinding #bookbinding #reylo #reylofanfic #fanfic binding #ficbinding #star wars history #holocron #jedi holocron

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i-am-the-oyster · 3 months ago

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I was tagged by @notgrungybitchin and @javelinbk thanks!

Tagging five people I want to get to know better: @jarsfullofstarrs, @thecoleopterawithana, @royaltyisshe64, @beatlepaul4ever, @tavolgisvist

Three ships:

So I never got into fandom and shipping, but now that I've been around here for a while I can recognise that there were other pairs I've had similar (though much less intense) feelings about. The first one the comes to mind is Poe/Finn from The Last Jedi (a curse on the houses of everyone who ruined Finn in later movies). I was also a big fan of Xena/Gabrielle, and Mulder/Scully back in the day.

First ship:

Probably Madelyn/David (from Moonlighting).

Last song:

(side-note: You're So Vain is a great song @notgrungybitchin, did you know Klaus Voorman plays bass on it?)

My last listened to song was I Should Have Known Better.

Last TV Show:

I really haven't been watching much TV. But I did rewatch the Elijah Wood Dirk Gently at some point this year.

Currently watching:

I am a bear of very little brain at the moment, and <whispers> for some reason my fatigued brain loves clips of TV shows where doctors remove cysts. My only comfort is the view counts. I'm clearly not alone.

Currently reading:

Yes to Heart of Glass by @javelinbk! I'm also slowly working my way through The McCartney Legacy.

Currently eating:

Gonna have a stir fry in a few minutes

Currently craving:

Coffee. It triggers migraines for me now, and I have a sad about it.

#thanks for the tag!

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piglet26 · 11 months ago

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Reylo Scenes: TLJ

Rian Johnson gets loud vocal dislike for trying to make part 2 to JJ Adams film and his treatment of Luke Skywalker. Now I'm going to be honest..... Star Wars fans complain. That's part of the passion of it all. I guess. One area that he did succeed in was Reylo. He dealt with it with complete mastery. His invention of the forceskype or forcetime which allowed the protagonist and antagonist to actually talk was genius.

To add, I read the novelization which does expand on the story overall and it's great to read. There are comics as well. All which expand on the story.

Rian Johnson also is due a thank you for this moment.

We'll call this no-more-daddies-Ren. That face should not be covered up.

Romance has always been apart of Star Wars. Yet, in the sequel trilogy there was this hyper paranoia of anything feminine and so anyone who sensed a romance happening I guess was just an unhealthy fool.

From a pure storytelling stand point, the dynamic between the hero and the villain is genuinely interesting. The fact that they are Ying Yang, alike but different, bonded yet on opposing sides and they attracted to one another only adds to the drama. It's the richest dynamic of the sequel trilogy.

So to all the Reylo haters

In the first forcetime scene the rules of the forcetime get established. Rey can't hurt him physically (yet) and Ren can't jedi mind trick her.

The production team continued to show their balance yet opposition. When Rey wakes up the warm sunlight is on her face and her smooth cheek. In Ren's scene the light on his cheek is mechanical and the skin is scarred. Rey is surrounded by nature. Ren is surrounded by technology. They both have a childlike innocence to them. Something is happening to them that had never happened before. Something unique even amongst force users. Ren is curious. Rey is just pissed off.

Ren is a man who feels very let down/betrayed by everyone in his life so by the time we meet him in The Force Awakens he doesn't want or need anybody. Within his comic Ben Solo is described as someone that everyone, including his peers, watched for signs of darkness. He's a bitter, hurt and jaded young man.

Rey is the denial queen. She has a childlike way of thinking that is purely optimistic. She latches onto people very quickly Finn, Han Solo, Chewie, Leia, Luke on and on. She understand the stories of the resistance, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, but doesn't understand any of the complexities. She's a very 'this is the truth as I know it so it must be the truth' kind of person.

When we arrive at the second Forcetime.

Rey overlooking the ocean. Ren overlooking the first order. Ren begins hearing the ocean waves. Rey begins to hear the snap of electricity. Ren sensing her turns and Rey, sensing him, adjusts and there they are.

Rey, understand that she can't physically act out her anger against, verbalizes it. She's angry, but she wants the anger to be simple and it's not. He is tied to her in a way in some way.

What's interesting is Ren is very open to her in wondering why the force is connecting them. In the book Rey describes his eyes as hungry. Also, Ren wants to be understood by her. He uses this moment to reach her and get someone to understand a portion of how he became the man he is. The audience sees him approach her, get into her space, challenging her emotionally, physically and her ideas about him.

"ah, you do" if it's possible to verbally create a orgasm....Adam driver accomplished it for women. It doesn't hurt that these two seem to always be eye fucking each other. The intensity in which they lock onto each other and don't pay much around them any mind. The actors writers dream of.

The scenes serves a purpose though. Kylo is once again shift from simple bad guy to complicated bad guy/human being. She doesn't know everything. In the mix of all of this is her experience with Luke. She disillusioned and she's disappointed with Luke. Her experience is shifting her to understand Kylo's position more.

Which leads to their third forceskype aka shirtless Ben

Rey, girl, you're not asexual. It's the first where we see she does have a reaction to him physically. She opens herself to understanding. She wants to know if he had a good reason for killing his father. She also expresses her jealousy of him. He has a family, he had a father who loved him. She would give anything for that. Kylo is also expressing his pain and how relates to her. They both feel abandoned by their parents. Kylo wasn't abandoned in the way Rey was, but he feels abandoned. Kylo looks at Rey like 'hey you don't see the similarities between us?". You also being to understand Kylo Ren's need to embrace the dark side because everyone on the light side failed him.

Part of her journey in The Last Jedi is about embracing her womanhood. After the force bond with the shirtless Kylo Ren. She goes to the dark sided vagina cave. She jumps in and when she emerges her childhood hair buns are gone. Rey enters in this vision and looks for answers as to who/where her parents are. Nothing is revealed to her. She didn't find the answers she was looking for and the hope that she will find them goes out of her. In this moment she's desperately lonely. Here our hero spiritually seeks out through the force bond the one individual she feels will relate to her, our villain.

Why do people call this scene "The Finger Touch Love Scene"

Cause the level of intimacy these characters reach without many words and without being lewd. Rian Johnson, bravo!

The way Kylo Ren is just present, reassuring and nurturing as Rey relays her trip into the dark cave. This is a moment where he could stoke her negative emotions to the dark side. He doesn't though. He's completely emotionally present for her. Kylo Ren sits within his ship in a area that's lit with a soft blue light as he reaches towards her he's in the warm of the firelight. Now he is physically present for her.

Rey is completely raw. She's allowing herself to be seen emotionally naked. This is the first scene where she gives him something with free will. She gives him union.

She reaches out from underneath the blanket. He takes his glove off and they slowly, innocently, reach for each other. The eye contact they maintain as the force theme begins, we as the audience understand something profound is happening. Within them, in this moment, there is a balance in the force.

They both have a vision of one another. Ren sees her past. Rey sees a glimpse of his future. This is the moment for Reylo, they both said to themselves "we're never letting this go". Rian Johnson confirmed it's from this moment that Ren decides to kill Snoke because that's the only way to protect Rey from him. Rey shift her belief system to complete Team Ben. She doesn't have a plan when she goes to meet Ben within the First Order. She just has complete faith in him that when the moment matters he'll stand by her.

We arrive at the elevator scene and just prior when she arrive onboard the supreme in a coffin from the Falcon that has his calligraphy on it. It's their first interaction after that intense force bond.

She expresses her faith in him and the possibility of a future. This is the first scene where she walks up on him. She wants that closeness and connection now. He's closed off we come to understand later, he's become he's protecting his mind from Snoke understanding his true intentions. They both express what they saw in their vision and conviction that one will join the other. It's canon that in this moment Kylo Ren wanted to kiss Rey.

Snoke - It's not his story. Kylo Ren looked like a badass killing him. That's all we needed you for boo. However, I did enjoy the internal dialogue of Snoke that the novelization affords. Through the force Snoke can feel Kylo Ren's need for approval which is something that frustrates him. He can feel his conflicted nature for Rey and for the light. He can feel his pain and confusion when Snoke says he bridged their minds (he didn't). That was enlightening.

My favorite moment is right after Kylo kills Snoke and Rey and Kylo looks at each like

"You with me?"

"Yeah, I'm with you"

And they turn to face the pretorian guards. They are with each other, but they do have a misunderstanding on what that means.

The fight scene is great and beautiful. Kylo Ren is a supportive partner to her and she to him. Kylo support her body with his and he takes on the majority of the Pretorian guards. He has a moment when he checks in on her, she get's hurt, he's upset and scared but then centers himself. When he's in trouble she supports him. It's described in the novel that they can feel each other's emotions through the force.

(Couldn't find the gif of her getting cut)

#star wars #ben solo #reylo #finnrey #rey skywalker #rey star wars #kylo ren #kylo x rey #ben solo deserved better #ben solo x rey #ben solo lives #rey

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swsequelsalt · 10 months ago

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"Why The Last Jedi Isn't Just Bad - It's Toxic" by M. Krasava

DISCLAIMER: This editorial was originally published on Scavenger's Holocron, a sadly-now-defunct Star Wars news site. I feel like it's a tragedy to have it deleted from the Internet and only accessible to dedicated parties who know about it via the Wayback Machine, so I'm reposting it here as a form of greater preservation/availability.

Currently being regarded as the most controversial Star Wars film to date, fans of the popular franchise seem to have settled into two groups: this is either the best Star Wars film ever made, or the worst. Cinematically speaking, the movie has stunning visuals and a great cast of actors, but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that while The Last Jedi is being branded as the most feminist Star Wars film to date, its “feminism” seems like a cheap marketing ploy to appeal to a wiser audience and downplays some of the key problems within the film itself: it’s built on a foundation of sexism, misogyny, and racism. In other words, if you’re anything other than a white male, this film isn’t made for you.

And director Rian Johnson hasn’t exactly been shy about his opinion regarding the film’s white male villain, Kylo Ren. Rian told Empire Magazine that, “We can all relate to Kylo: to that anger of being in the turmoil of adolescence and figuring out who he’s going to be as a man.”

The only problem is that we can’t. Despite Rian’s insistence that this film is about the “transition from adolescence into adulthood,” Kylo Ren is already a well-established adult with a history of bad choices. We know from the canon Star Wars novel Bloodline, written by Claudia Gray, that Kylo Ren was at least 23 years old when he destroyed Luke’s Academy. At this point, he’s already an adult capable of making his own choices.

The film reveals that the final push towards the “dark side” was when Ben Solo awoke to see Luke standing over him with his lightsaber while he was sleeping. Without considering the possibility of a miscommunication, Ben Solo brought the roof down on the last Jedi, and then systemically went about converting or eliminating the rest of the students in Luke’s school before burning it to the ground. From there it can be presumed that he officially took on the role of Snoke’s apprentice, dubbing himself Kylo Ren as he joined the ranks of the First Order.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing relateable about being a white adult male who decides to sign up with a Nazi organization and the very premise that we should try to have sympathy for such a character is chilling, especially when you consider that he murdered Han Solo not more than a week prior in film time.

(PUTTING THE REST UNDER A CUT)

But there’s another element to Kylo Ren that makes him harder to relate to. He comes from a place of privilege in society. Ben Solo was born to two war heroes, and while those might be big shoes to fill, there’s nothing that would indicate that Han and Leia were terrible parents to their son. In The Force Awakens, Leia admits that she sent Ben to train with Luke because she feared Snoke’s growing influence on her son (turns out, she had a right to be concerned). In Chuck Wendig’s canon novel, Empire’s End, from the Star Wars: Aftermath series, we see Han excited, if not a little daunted, about the possibility of becoming a father.

In other words, there’s nothing relateable when you think about a wealthy white male growing up sure of his place in the world and deciding to leave it all behind to join a fascist organization.

Compounding on this, there is someone who is relateable: Finn. Finn was not born from a place of privilege. If anything, we still know very little about Finn’s origins aside from the fact that he was abducted from his parents and raised to be a Stormtrooper. Despite years of conditioning and being ranked as the top cadet in his class, Finn was able to maintain his sense of self and when it came down to his first battle, he decided not to shoot and kill an unarmed villager.

This is the character that most people should be able to relate to. Finn is a character that isn’t sure of his place in the world. He grew up with the First Order and left everything that he knew behind him in order to try to do what he thought was right. Although he initially planned to seek a quick exit from the conflict at Maz’s castle, he didn’t hesitate to rejoin the struggle when he discovered that Rey was in danger. Finn spent most of his time in The Force Awakens running away from something – the First Order, from Jakku, from delivering BB-8 to the Resistance, but we see his progression throughout the movie to the point where he risks his life for Rey and helps the Resistance destroy the Starkiller base. At this point, Finn has rightfully earned his status as a hero.

Until The Last Jedi where Finn is again painted as selfish and cowardly, and the film does not shy away from this fact. Initially branded as a traitor by Rose when he tries to get the beacon as far away as possible to prevent Rey from falling into a trap, he is consistently belittled by Rose throughout the film. She consistently calls him cowardly and self-centered, and Finn’s characterization seems to shift in order to fit this description. When Finn is explaining his plan on hyperspace tracking to Poe, he is excited and confident: he can do this. When he gets to Canto Bight, he suddenly regresses, becoming immature and distracted by the glitz and glamour all around him. Finn knows what’s on the line. Rey is on the line. Poe is on the line. The Resistance has less than 24 hours, and yet he suddenly becomes bumbling and distracted.

This becomes Finn’s character throughout the rest of the film. Brash, impulsive, and worse, being frequently portrayed as the butt of everyone’s jokes. When we first see Finn, he is wandering about the halls of the Resistance in nothing but a bacta suit, as if Finn has suddenly forgotten how to care for himself. The film plays into the stereotypes that many people have about black male individuals. Instead of being treated as the hero of the Resistance, Finn is relegated to a comedic side role based on slapstick humor and unfunny comedy that ultimately doesn’t contribute anything to the plot.

In other words, Finn’s side plot reflects the film’s stance of diversity: we’ll wave it in your face for a few minutes before we wave it aside to make way for the two white protagonists. It’s a bold statement, but not untrue. Rian Johnson first joked that it would be “funny” to leave Finn in a coma for the entire film: “We did at some point joke that it would be great to just have him be in a coma for the whole movie and keep cutting back to him.” He explains that each of these cuts back to Finn would have him uttering some nonsense in his unconscious state, and at no point in the entire run time of the movie would the former Stormtrooper wake up.

When John Boyega first accepted the role of Finn, JJ Abrams told him that he was going to be the new star of Star Wars. Rian Johnson blatantly admitted that it would be “funny” to simply delegate the black lead to the sidelines, where he doesn’t have more than a few scenes of incoherent babbling to serve as comic relief.

Not to mention, it’s Rose who ultimately has to teach Finn about the seedy belly of Canto Bight and how it operates: through slave labor. Another character shouldn’t have to explain to Finn, of all characters, the tortures and ills of slavery. After all, that’s the only life Finn’s known, taken as his family and raised in a life of servitude as a Stormtrooper to the First Order.

The underlying racism in The Last Jedi does not, unfortunately, stop with Finn’s character. We know a lot more about Poe Dameron’s character from the popular Poe Dameron comic series that highlights Poe’s adventures with Black Squadron before they find Lor San Tekka.

In fact, Poe’s arc is highlighted by its racism, as Poe’s character is reduced to a mere stereotype of his ethnicity. From the Before the Awakening, piloting flight logs, and comic series, we have a complete picture of who Poe is as a character. He tells L’ulo, “I’m the best. But you’re the best too” which highlights who he is as a person. He is a gentle soul that sees the best in people, trusting Finn not only to help him escape, but to lower the shields on the Starkiller Base when he said he could. Poe is a genuine nice guy who would give the shirt, er, jacket off their back to help a stranger.

And we see absolutely none of this in The Last Jedi.

Poe is described as rash, dangerous, and aggressive by Vice Admiral Holdo, played by veteran actress Laura Dern. She’s dismissive of him, and while a part of it does play into more harmful stereotypes that I’ll get into later, in this instance, it’s hard not to. In the opening first scene, Poe is prepared to let everyone, everyone die just to take out a First Order Dreadnought. Even though successful, Poe seems more focused on the success of his mission than the countless deaths of his fellow Resistance fighters.

And that is not who Poe Dameron is. To say so makes a complete mockery of a fantastic character whose character has already been set and esteemed by fans. Changing his character to comply with stereotypes in order to try to advance the plot isn’t “moral ambiguity” or “challenging the character” – it’s just bad writing.

In short, Poe becomes aggressive, dangerous and hotheaded, all to fulfill the stereotypical role that the narrative wants him to play. His character attitudes are changed in order to fulfill a plot device, and that’s the conflict set up between himself and Vice Admiral Holdo.

This conflict is disappointing. It focuses on a female leader putting an aggressive, chauvinistic male in his place. It’s supposed to be empowering, but it’s not, especially when you have to have one character act so differently in order to get to that point. The problem is that the kind of feminism this movie is preaching is white feminism, which is dangerous in and of itself.

But what does white feminism mean in this case? Vice Admiral Holdo, and even Rose, both undermine and belittle Finn and Poe, treating them like children. This concept of infantalization upholds racist stereotypes of black and Latino men being both incompetent and irrational. In Poe’s case, it works to also uplift the alleged moral superiority of white women over people of color. And it’s not feminism.

It’s just disgusting.

Holdo is held up as someone that people in the Resistance are supposed to respect as a leader, and yet she refuses to tell the very people she’s leading what their plan is, citing Poe’s earlier reckless actions as an excuse. Even according to the Navy’s Leadership Principles, keeping your people informed is the second principle on the list. In other words? It’s pretty important. Vice Admiral Holdo’s refusal to do so is driven by petty motives, and while Poe is painted as ridiculous and childish the entire movie, he’s actually proven right when the First Order does the very thing he was afraid they would do.

One of the “lessons” from Poe’s story line is you should always blindly trust authority figures even when they provide no valid reason for doing so, and this is an extremely dangerous and topic example to set, especially in today’s society when people of color are so often made targets of police brutality, which again feeds back into the movie’s underlying theme of systematic racism.

Holdo herself seeks redemption from her mistakes by turning around and ramming her ship through theirs – an admittedly cool move, although it would be cooler had we not seen Admiral Raddus suggest the idea of plowing through a ship no more than a year earlier – and dies so that Leia can explain to Poe that Holdo was a good leader (without really stating how) because she was more concerned with fulfilling the mission without getting credit for it.

The problem with this? It means that Holdo had to die in order for Poe to “understand” what it meant to be a leader. This doesn’t work for two reasons. For one, Poe is a decorated Commander who had already served as a leader in the Republic Navy before joining the Resistance. Painting him as a cocky flyboy with a chip on his shoulder just doesn’t work when it goes against everything we’ve been told about his character. The “lesson” Poe was supposed to learn was one he already knew.

The second problem is that it meant that Holdo had to die in order for Poe to learn this lesson. In other words, we’re back to that age-old trope: a woman had to die in order to advance the plot/characterization of a male character.

And that’s where we get to our final topic: sexism. For a movie that preaches itself as so overtly feminist, it is rich with sexist undertones that are immediately apparent on the surface. Most of these are notably in the interactions between Rey and Kylo Ren, but there’s another character that I wanted to touch upon first. Rose Tico.

Despite Kelly Marie Tran’s boundless enthusiasm for her role, Rose Tico is ultimately underwhelming as a character. Despite mourning the death of her sister, her ultimate presence in the film seemed to be reduced to a girl with a bad crush on Finn.

I’ve already touched upon how poorly Rose treats Finn, but Rose herself seems to have gotten the short end of the stick in terms of the plot. Her character exists only to serve Rian’s image that your heroes aren’t what they seem, tazing Finn when she sees him trying to escape. From then on, Rose’s status seems to be downgraded to “Finn’s crush” as seen in the description of this deleted scene:

Originally, the film spent some more time clarifying the dynamic between Rey and Finn, and further setting up Rose’s crush on the Resistance “hero.” Rose chastises Finn for “pining for Rey,” which Finn quickly denies, claiming that he was “raised to fight” and that he finally found something to fight for in his friend, Rey. “Whatever,” responds Rose with a hint of jealousy.

Rose’s constant nagging of Finn and being catty about Rey enforces a negative female stereotype that has no business in a Hollywood blockbuster that claims to be catered to young girls, especially when it seems that Rose’s role has been reduced to working the love triangle dynamic between Finn and Rey. This seems like it could only lead to a destructive end for the character, especially considering how she attempts to save Finn’s life by almost sacrificing her own at the end of the film. Rose presents us once again with the trope that a female character must sacrifice herself in order to advance the plot of the male character, in this case, to prove her love for him. It’s a frustrating trope, made all the more exhausting when you consider what her role might be in the next film.

If you focus on the look Rey gives Finn putting a blanket over the unconscious Rose, it sets up tension for the next film: assuming Rey and Rose engage in competition for Finn’s attention, putting the two girls at odds with one another.

Because if the sexism in this movie wasn’t blatant enough, that’s just what Star Wars needs: two girls fighting over a guy. While frustrating to watch, it’s also extremely degrading to both characters and reduces both of their arcs into nothing more than instruments to direct the story of a male character.

Hopefully JJ will take the next episode in a different direction, but the damage that has already occurred in this film cannot be understated. There is, unfortunately, a lot of ground to cover regarding Rey’s story, so I’m going to start with the most visually striking one: Rey’s costume.

In The Last Jedi, Rey adopts what has been dubbed her “Jedi Training” outfit, trading out her three signature buns for a simpler hairstyle and trading out her light Jedi garb for a bit of a darker color. It’s a way for Rey to separate herself from the girl we saw crying desperately over her parent’s retreating ship on Jakku, keeping the same appearance a decade later in the hopes that they would come back to recognize her.

Many who speculated that Rey would undergo this physical transition after she discovered the true origin of her parents and worked to free herself of that disappointment found themselves disappointed. Rey didn’t change her clothes and her hair after she learned about her parentage from Kylo Ren, she learned about it after.

Despite being wet from the rain, another reason for this change is that she was shipping herself off in a box to see Kylo Ren, prompting those who want them to be romantically involved to start citing the Snow White parallels. It’s not hard to believe that the reason for this change was to make Rey appear more feminine. With her hair down, she looks more like a girl and less like the hardened warrior who had to fend for herself back on Jakku.

But wait, wouldn’t that mean that Rey’s entire role in the movie basically focused on developing Kylo Ren as a character? It does, and you wouldn’t be wrong to think that way. Even during Rey’s training sessions with Luke, the conversation is always geared back to Kylo Ren in some way, whether it’s Luke talking about his past or Rey assuring Luke that she won’t end up like Kylo. Either way, we hear Kylo’s name spoken more times between them than we actually hear anything about the Jedi or the things that Luke learned about the Force on his travels (say, Pillio, perhaps?)

It becomes clear early on that despite Rian Johnson saying that the film isn’t about what the fans want, that certain scenes were added in to appeal to a certain demographic. For example, Adam Driver’s uncomfortable shirtless scene?

Rian himself says that the scene had a “specific purpose” of creating an increasing feeling of “uncomfortable intimacy.” In other words, Kylo Ren’s shirtless scene is basically synonymous with a dick pic: no one asked for it, but there it is, one of the most subtle forms of sexual harassment. Think about this another way: if Rey’s character was really a boy, would the shirtless scene still be present? Or necessary?

Hint: it’s not.

The fact that Rey’s character only seems to exist to play a role in Kylo’s story is concerning, considering that she is touted as the protagonist of the sequel trilogy. Even though she witnessed him murder Han Solo no more than a few days prior, she becomes emotionally intimate with him pretty quickly, opening up to him about the strange experiences she had in the “dark place” beneath the island.

And therein lies the problem. When they touched hands, Snoke gave her a vision of Kylo Ren turning back to the light side to compel her to rush off to the Supremacy in the hopes that she could turn Kylo Ren back to the light and turn the tide of the war.

There’s only one problem with that.

It’s not her problem.

Rey was a civilian. As Kylo Ren himself told her, “You have no place in this story.” She has no part in the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance, and yet she was swept up in it all the same. It shouldn’t be necessary for her to rush off and turn the tide of the war, and while it fits with the Star Wars theme of how one person can make a difference, the trope that a woman must rush off and sacrifice herself in order to progress a man’s character and offer him redemption has been a long-running frustrating trope. If Rey wants to help the Resistance, that’s her choice, but it shouldn’t be necessary to rush off and try to save the person who kidnapped and abused her.

It’s one of the things that makes any sort of Kylo Ren and Rey team-up so off-putting. In The Force Awakens, he kidnaps her and invades her mind in order to try to find the location of the map. After she escapes, he confronts her in the forest, throwing her into a tree several feet up in the air in a move that could have potentially killed her. Then she wakes up just in time to watch him slice through Finn in a move that could have killed him.

Oh, and did I forget to mention how she watched him murder a defenseless Han Solo right before her eyes only moments before? The man who, as Kylo himself taunted, presented a father figure that she never had?

In other words, Rey has absolutely no reason to trust Kylo Ren. She has no reason to even want him to get redemption. For all of Rian’s talk about how he wanted to keep this film “morally grey,” trying to make a genocidal murderer relateable, or even redeemable, was not a step in the right direction. Wouldn’t it have been more compelling to watch Rey wrestle with the ramifications of eliminating Kylo Ren once and for all? Instead of trying to find redemption for the dark side, wouldn’t it have been far more interesting to explore a situation in which Rey realizes that good people must sometimes do bad things for an overall good to result?

Perhaps, but that’s not the film we got. Instead we got a team-up between Kylo Ren and Rey where, moments after they work together, their alliance is quickly severed. Rey asks Kylo to call off the attack that is sure to eliminate the Resistance, including Finn. Kylo, however, refuses and tells her to move on and join him in ruling. He tells her, “You come from nothing. You’re nothing. But not to me.”

Fortunately Rey grabs the lightsaber and rejects his offer, and the final scene of her closing the Millennium Falcon doors on him seems to confirm that she has severed her connection for good. The problem? The damage has already been done.

Rian Johnson has already set up the Kylo Ren and Rey dynamic to be potentially romantic, between the shirtless scene, the hand touching scene, to be filled with an uncomfortable kind of sexual tension between the girl that declared to Maz, “I don’t want a part of any of this” and the man that murdered his father.

As troubling as that notion is, it does get worse. Kylo Ren tells Rey, “You come from nothing. You are nothing. But not to me.”

The problem is that Kylo Ren’s frequent gaslighting and emotional manipulation throughout the two films reaches its climax: he has discarded Snoke and wants to use the powerful, yet naive Rey, to further his own power. Still, the sexual if not romantic implications are there, pushed along by a group of shippers that call themselves “Reylos,” who desperately seek for Rey to redeem Kylo through, well, you get the idea.

There are several problems with this. One of the first ones is the fact that Kylo Ren is 32 years old, whereas Rey is only 19. While many are quick to claim that age is just a number, Rey is emotionally immature, having been isolated on Jakku for most of her life. There is absolutely no good reason to try to push her into any sort of relationship with someone who is so destructive, especially when the sole reason for doing so is to help Kylo Ren find redemption.

The line, “You’re nothing…but not to me” is a quote that unfortunately most women have heard far too often. It’s an emotional manipulation tactic in order to try to isolate a woman from her friends and family until she only relies on her abuser for support, and this is exactly what Kylo Ren is trying to do here. With Luke unwilling to teach her, Kylo wants Rey to rely on him, and solely him, so that he can use her power and manipulate her to further his own goals (which is to lead the First Order to…conquer the galaxy? It’s not quite clear.)

It’s a frightening message, especially when you think about who this movie is supposedly marketed to. Think about how many children dressed up as Rey for Halloween. How do we explain to girls that the man who killed Han Solo, the man who emotionally manipulated her and tried to use her just to validate himself, is the person that she should ultimately fall in love with? It paints a dangerous picture that girls internalize before they have enough experience to make their own decisions regarding their own relationships.

Remember Edward Cullen’s creepy manipulation in Twilight? Apparently that’s crept into Star Wars as well.

And this gets to the heart of the overall problem. The Last Jedi is ultimately soaked in sexism, misogyny and racism, and yet Kathleen Kennedy and Bob Iger widely praised the film before its release. How can Kathleen Kennedy, who said that she was proud to have a feminist icon in Rey, be willing to reduce Rey’s entire story to “the love interest?” If the executives and storygroup approved such blatant racism and actively worked to rewrite characters in order to fit their stereotypical narrative, what hope do we have that the next trilogy will be better, especially when they gave Rian Johnson full control over its content?

Rian himself believes that Darth Vader was worse than Kylo Ren, and while that is probably a conversation as controversial as the movie itself, Rian still wholeheartedly believes that despite what happened in The Last Jedi, that Kylo Ren can be redeemed. It shows that the storyline that JJ Abrams set up has been reduced to simply furthering the narrative of the white villain, and the rest of the characters are simply players in his story, which is why they exist as nothing more than stereotypes in Rian Johnson’s version of Star Wars.

And that’s the disappointment. While The Force Awakens received criticism for being too similar to its predecessor, A New Hope, JJ did set up some interesting and mysterious characters. While Captain Phasma’s role was ultimately underwhelming, fans were assured that she would have a much bigger role to play in Rian Johnson’s world.

Unfortunately, we all know how that turned out.

Phasma’s quick dismissal wasn’t the only disappointment. Snoke was killed off without any satisfying explanation to who he was or even what he wanted the First Order to do. The Knights of Ren, which were mentioned in The Force Awakens and played a role in Rey’s vision, disappeared from the narrative entirely, instead being replaced by Rian’s Praetorian Guards.

For many, Luke Skywalker’s return was the biggest disappointment. Mark has made no secret in recent weeks citing how he didn’t agree with Rian Johnson’s vision of Luke and how he wished George Lucas had directed the sequel trilogy instead, a mere three days before The Last Jedi hit theatres. It fits into Rian Johnson’s grim version of reality: our heroes can be defeated, and idolizing legends is ultimately unsettling and disappointing when faced with reality.

But by disappearing into the Force, did Luke not himself become a legend, the very thing that Rian seems to chide against? The film’s “message” seems to give audiences such mixed signals, it’s not surprising that audiences claim that the film seemed better after a second viewing: basic elements of the plot just doesn’t make sense, like how the First Order has suddenly developed hyperspace tracking despite the film only taking place a few days after the events of The Force Awakens.

There are other plot holes that point out the flaws in logic in the story: where did Rey learn to swim on Jakku? How can bombers drop bombs in space when there’s no gravity for the bombs to fall? Since space exists in three dimensions, why didn’t the First Order just have a ship drop out into hyperspace in front of the Resistance Star Cruiser and blow it to bits? And why was General Hux, a serious, straight-faced villain in The Force Awakens, who ordered the destruction of the Hosnian System, delegated to a comedic side role who’s only function was to serve as a cheap laugh and be the butt of an awkward your mom joke? Instead of using the antagonism between Kylo Ren and General Hux to show the crumbling of the First Order and how the small band of Resistance heroes we’re left with at the end of the movie might stand a chance against them, it seems that the First Order’s army, which was flowing with Nazi imagery in The Force Awakens has just been reduced to campy slapstick humor.

Despite these obvious problems, the most glaring ones still remain in the fact that Star Wars is a film that claims to market itself to the people it exploits and ultimately rejects. It’s no wonder that merchandise and ticket sales have dropped when the movie is back to focusing on a white male lead, like so many other before it. Kylo Ren tells Rey that you have no part in this story, that she doesn’t belong – something that minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community have been hearing their whole lives.

But if this movie isn’t made for these people, then why does Disney keep trying to insist that it is? Most people who have been critical of the film have been met with the chorus of, “You’re just upset that you didn’t get what you wanted” as if it’s somehow wrong to expect more from what you receive. The story was set up so that we would get answers. How someone as powerful as Snoke managed to manipulate Kylo Ren from the womb and grow the First Order from the seeds of the Empire, Phasma’s increased involvement, and especially the question of Rey’s parentage, has been dangled in front of us like a carrot on a stick for the past two years, and it’s ultimately unsatisfying to see all those threads being clipped off and brushed aside with a, “Oh! It didn’t even matter!”

If it didn’t matter, then why feel the need to keep up the secrecy and suspense for two years, when the final product is ultimately disappointing? (Point not withstanding, Kylo Ren tells Rey that Snoke showed him that her parents were buried in a pauper’s grave on Jakku. Why her parents would actually return to Jakku, or whether Snoke was actually telling the truth, is a matter that JJ has yet to resolve.)

It’s not wrong to be a critical consumer of the media that we consume. It’s not wrong to say that we deserve something better. Minorities and women can and should demand to be treated with more respect than they were shown in this film, and the overwhelming amount of racism and misogyny in this film is something that most avid fans of the film have not provided an answer for.

People who claim that The Last Jedi is a good movie, while at the same time acknowledging how deeply misogynistic and racist it is, are contributing to the larger problem we have as a society. It’s saying, “I know it’s racist and misogynistic, but it entertained me, so I’m okay with it.”

It might just be fiction. It might just be a story. But all media we consume influences us, subconsciously or not, in ways that we may not even be aware of. Star Wars may not be real. These characters may not be real.

But it still affects how you feel, and that seems pretty real to me.

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