#Reylofanfic

[starblightbindery]

Forty books later, I've made another set of this fanfic by @theaguanzon, which does the best job of capturing how it felt to be 13 and reading Star Wars books in the 2000s. This set is a collaboration between myself and @selunchen, who did an amazing job illustrating the covers!

(The covers are inspired by an iconic Star Wars teaser poster. Do you know which one?)

This bind incorporates all the new techniques I've picked up over 2.5 years in this hobby. I foiled the line art on veg tan goat leather from Siegel, and there are Crepaldi endpapers and bookmark charms from @afterblossom.

The maps are based on Legends maps designed by Dan Wallace, Jason Fry, Chris Barbieri, and James Luceno. I revamped the typeset and painted the edges with a galaxy splatter pattern, and this bind is also rounded and backed.

[starblightbindery]

A dos-à-dos binding of Lawn Boy and Dick in a Can by beebee_kate. These are two Reylo modern AU textfics full of irreverent joy. Two legal quarto sized books sharing the same back cover.

This was my first ever dos-à-dos and I figured I might as well go as weird as possible with these two fics. This was also my first competition entry ever, to the reddit r/bookbinding contest!

[starblightbindery]

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.

[nessalovesbooks]

“Everyone is connected, even if, sometimes, it’s just by the skin of our teeth.”

My first Reylo fanfiction bind! 🌌

Ever since I’ve started bookbinding I’ve dived in to Dramione and Hunger Games set fics but now I’m also going full speed for Star Wars and specialy Reylo set fics! 😍

I’ve read this year The Love Hypothesis, but somehow I feel that this fic will be much more my cup of tea! Whose wouldn’t it be - Rey found in an early age by Luke and Ben and trained as a Jedi?! Awesome! I can’t wait to read it! ♥

Have you read it? 📖

Story by diasterisms (@theagwrites) 🖋️

Candle by @theabyssix 🕯️

Typeset by @twinsunsbooks 🌷

[ceciliasheplin]

Try As I May… (E)

A #reylo rugby fic 🏉

Rey is the proud captain of the women’s Resistance Rugby team. She hates their greatest rival, the First Order. Especially the men’s captain, Kylo Ren.

Read it here

[typesomesensetome]

Amazing art by @ratsandlove

Commissioned by Z

for my fic Compulsion

[tmwillson3]

Seven Sentences Thursday

Thank you @myfavouritelunatic and @pursuitseternal for tagging me!!

This snippet comes from my Reylo fic The Lost and the Lonely...a chapter is coming soon!

Shaken to his core, Armitage stumbled to the nearest rose bush, drawing strength from the fragrant, beautiful blooms that now dotted the entire Labyrinth.

No matter how young or old Armitage was, he always came back to his roses. They had been the flower his mother loved, the one scent that comforted him when she died. After every beating, he'd smell a rose, needing some reminder that he was not as awful as he seemed, that beautiful, new life could sprout from this pitiful, insignificant seed.

As much as he hated himself and his puny plant magic, he loved his roses. They were the only beauty to blossom out of his miserable existence, except for maybe his friends. Each deep inhale of the red rose restored a little more of his calm so that he could think reasonably again, even if he was still fuming about Rey.

There you go! A Hux-centric chapter is on the way! Tagging @burnt-kloverfield @my-jedi-life @biekewieke @beatrixacs and anyone else who wants to participate!

[tmwillson3]

New update! Rey meets Babu and Zorii, and there's Magic Dance for all.

Title: The Lost and the Lonely

Rating: E

Triggers: violence, past referenced abuse, smut, and kink

Summary: On Rey's ninth birthday, she made a wish, and an old woman gave her a special book, titled The Labyrinth. It would shape her life until one stormy night, she made a wish...

Then her whole world was turned upside down.

Overly Honest Summary: it's a Labyrinth AU

Link

Thanks to @winglessone for the moodboard!

[typesomesensetome]

NOW COMPLETE!

Reylo Older Woman/Younger Man • 30k • Soft Ben Solo

Read it here on AO3: At Best, Tenuous (E) by TypeSomeSenseToMe

[tmwillson3]

New update!

Title: The Lost and the Lonely

Rating: E

Triggers: violence, smut, and kink

Summary: On Rey's ninth birthday, she made a wish, and an old woman gave her a special book, titled The Labyrinth. It would shape her life until one stormy night, she made a wish...

Then her whole world was turned upside down.

Overly Honest Summary: it's a Labyrinth AU

Thanks to @winglessone for the moodboard!

Link

[koderenn]

"This isn’t what I had in mind when I was planning on introducing the two of you, but something positive can still come out of this meeting," Luke sighs. "Rey, I would like you to meet Ben Solo, formerly known as Kylo Ren within the figure skating circles. He will be preparing you and Poe for the World Championship this coming year. Ben this is Rey Kenobi.”

When Rey turns, holding her breath, he is already looking down his nose at her - his gaze as cold and inscrutable as black ice.

“The girl I’ve heard so much about.”

.

.

b l a c k i c e 🌬

.

.

A reylo modern au about figure skating, old wounds and the healing power of love

❄ read the first chapter here:

[my-jedi-life]

Chapter 3 - "Learn To Do It"

@cosmo-gonika @tazwren @savingwhatilove @semperfidani @reylosource @chibireylo @greyforceuser @koderenn @newer-fear @reyloreaders

[koderenn]

"Kylo Ren is dead," she snarls, every syllable of her arch enemy’s name an open wound that refuses to heal. "I killed him myself."

The smuggler smiles, a crooked smile that reminds her less the man meant to be forgotten--and more his father. "So, you're the Last Jedi..." he says.

His eyes, she notices, hold no recognition.

.

.

💫 "Carry a stone for the Forgotten"

A short scene set 15 years post TROS, inspired by discussions of a new SW movie.

Canon compliant

[cdknelson]

CW : Underage; talk of death of younglings Be With Me Chapter 11 Canon divergent AU Rated E https://archiveofourown.org/works/39413376/chapters/109519528 Read from the beginning: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39413376/chapters/98639163 Moodboard by blessedreylo

[reylotrash711]

Frostbite - A Reylo One-Shot

Rating: M

Ben Solo finds himself trapped and Rey feels cold, it must just be a coincidence... right? OR Another Solo man gets frozen in carbonite and it takes a feisty brunette to save their ass.

----

I am in love with this fic, I have wanted to write a fic like this for sooooo long and I am so excited to share it. This fic is a gift for the lovely Ceallaigh, I hope you enjoy it!

Huge thank you to @ceciliasheplin for the beta, you are a star!

[typesomesensetome]

Marked

a Reylo AU by TypeSomeSenseToMe

Excerpt:

There was knocking at the door and Rey snapped to attentive stillness. Kylo was still in the bathing room.

Her heart pounded with a tinge of fear because she didn’t know what to do.

She stood and slowly went to the door. The person on the other side did not continue to knock, but they did slip something underneath.

A white square envelope slid quickly across the carpet toward her feet.

“REN” was scrawled on the front of it in thick red ink. It looked entirely forbidding, because all she could think was that the letters could have been written with blood, and she didn’t believe that was at all outside the realm of possibilities.

Rey stared at it, then at the closed door where Kylo was, heart thudding desperately in her chest.

She picked up the envelope and ran her thumb over the letters. Not blood, but a thick-lined quill had been used to write his second name.

The man at the lobby desk had greeted Kylo as Mr. Ren. Did that mean his full name was Kylo Ren? Rey shrugged. She thought her own last name was pretty weird.

At that moment, the door to the bathing room whipped open and steam poofed out, along with a very wet and a very much unclothed Kylo Ren. His glistening chest was built out of two wide, pale slabs of muscle. His flesh was mottled with bruises and scars.

Wide eyed and burning up with embarrassment, Rey was thankful there was a white towel covering the rest of him. She waved the envelope toward his face, averting her eyes over her shoulder and away from him.

“Someone just shoved this under the door,” she squeaked at a pitch not at all like her regular tone of voice.

When the letter left her hand, she scrambled back to the dining table and promptly swallowed half a glass of water. She willed her mind to banish the titillating image of Kylo’s chest from her memory. She had enough to deal with and… that… was just one more thing too many.

She did her best to ignore Kylo for the next several minutes. But curiosity soon dug its claws into her.

He was making several trips back and forth between the closet and the bathroom. Fully dressed now in sleek black dress pants and black button-down shirt, he buttoned up a vest that matched. He brought out a small black cloth pack from the closet and unrolled it on the bed. From it he pulled a knife and strapped it to his lower leg under his sock. He had holsters built into the back of the vest and he stowed two guns, one on the right and the other on the left side. He went back into the closet and spent a few more minutes inside.

What was happening now? Was she supposed to do something? Rey stood and hesitantly shuffled closer to the closet. She peeked inside and saw Kylo methodically counting out bullets and sliding them into several metal sheaths. The letter he’d received was opened and lying on the floor next to his gun case. He finally slipped his arms into a black suit jacket and pocketed the bullets.

Kylo turned and stopped short when he found Rey watching him.

His face had changed. Gone was the man who had been laughing earlier. In his place was the scary assassin whom she’d seen shoot two men at once the day they met. The all black suit lent a quality of mystery and menace to his appearance.

He picked up the letter and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt.

Dark, dark eyes met hers and she held her breath.

“I left the pills for you on the counter. I don’t know how long I’ll be out. Keep the door locked.”

Rey blinked several times, recalling how he’d geared up with all those weapons.

Why was it so hard to breathe all of a sudden?

“But,” she began. “You will come back?”

Kylo’s mouth and his eyes softened for the briefest of moments before his features went hard again. He tipped his black-stubbled chin downward.

And then he was gone.

Read the completed fic here: Marked