#rewrite the whole thing to have a monster romance redemption arc

[frumfrumfroo]

What’s one AU that you’ve never seen for Reylo that you want to? What’s one trope that you wish was more common in fic?

I had a really good one a while back that I can’t think of now. Maybe I’ll remember later lol.

I wish there were more modern royalty AUs with ridiculous romcom tropes, you know Prince Ben and CinderReya (yes, I am proud of that pun). I know of only one. I will also take more royalty stuff at all, period. There is not enough Prince Ben in any form and this is an egregious crime because he is an actual canon prince and I feel like there’s so much potential there for amusing double-fish-out-of-water scenarios with Rey’s socialisation exclusively in seedy underbelly culture vs his Raised by Books and Droids. People tend to make him way more rough and tumble than he actually is and Rey way less so and it’s a waste lmao. They are both impulsive under pressure, but he is a social thinker, he’s curious about people, she’s the one who problem-solves by pretending there are no problems and hitting anyone who looks at her funny.

People do a lot of jokes about her teaching him manners post-redemption like he’s this half-tame bear she brought home, but it’d be the exact opposite. He’s stiltedly formal in canon, he’s solicitous. Meanwhile Rey has zero manners and is blunt to a fault, she is ready to throw down over her sense of justice at any time with no apologies. I feel like she’d be super overprotective of Ben/their relationship and I’d love to see more fics with that kind of Rey the secretive hoarder vs the outside world clash. It feels like such a natural extension of her canon conflicts.

Also set ups which acknowledge how Not Fine, sealed off, isolated and judgey she is. Like she’s a ranger who works with animals, loves animals with such soft compassion, but barely speaks to people, and he’s either a scientist or a developer, someone she can easily think is up to no good and a threat to nature. She thinks he’s an unfeeling brute, but obviously it’s complicated and he has some kind of tree-hugging past he had to abandon etc. etc.

(Back on manners and how they have a complex double-defrosting dynamic everyone tends to simplify into her being his opposite and her defrosting him, sunny well-adjusted social butterfly Rey to a broody Byronic man- which is NOT correct at all. He is emotionally available and immediately compassionate for her, he defrosts her inner self; she seems available to the ‘good guys’ but isn’t. Anyway, subversive swerve: My Fair Lady/Anastasia fusion AU where Ben is Eliza/Anastasia a secret foreign prince lost since he was 10, Rey is Higgins teaching him elocution while he teaches her how to people, F/nn is Pickering an aristocrat who picked Rey up as a foundling in India to be his companion shortly before he was orphaned himself, Han shows up as Mr Doolittle the con artist- he’s actually been in hiding with Ben because of a military coup in their country, Rose is Mrs Higgins, Leia’s the Queen of Transylvania- she doesn’t know where Han and Ben are, Luke is the Hungarian, R2 and 3P0 are both Mrs Pearce, and Poe is Freddy- he’s obsessed with the mystery of Rey’s origins and has always annoyed her deeply because of this but he’s 100% fooled by her Ben project and never questions his origins, annoying her even more.)

Arranged marriage is always great and I will always take more.

My BIGGEST WISH and constant frustration is still the one I’ve mentioned a few times, which is that there’s hardly any fics that actually play their forbidden secret relationship and have them get caught red-handed somehow. The entire set up is BEGGING for this kind of drama and no one does it. Basically, I just want Rey getting caught being in love with Ben by the Resistance and needing to deal with their reactions. I can’t believe how rare this is and I extra can’t believe that even when people do it they almost to a fault completely gloss over the fallout. Aka: the point of doing it.

I’m so big on that huge psychological shockwave of everyone !!finding out!! a person/situation isn’t at all what they thought. I’m super, super big on the melodramatic romance potential of her needing to defend how much she loves him in public. I have a thing about emotional vindication and given one of Rey’s biggest problems is her repression and refusal to face things, where one of Ben’s biggest problems is that he doesn’t believe he can be loved for himself or that anyone will fight for him…………………..

Guys,

the drama

the romance. The humour potential. The perfect character through-lines! WHY.

[bluntblade]

Because apparently my Kylo Ren thoughts just don’t stop coming...

I really think nowadays that the point of Kylo as Johnson wrote him was that he was a predator pretending to be prey. And yes, I’m defending TLJ again. Here we go.

Looking at his scenes with Rey in Episode VIII, Kylo's not opening up to her half as much as she inadvertently is to him - heck, when she actually gets into her grief and anger over Han (the Swolo scene), he goes straight in for the attack and the framing of the shots emphasises that.

When Rey brings up the subject of him murdering Han, Kylo advances to dominate the frame in his shots and pulls her off balance, forcing her to say the words “why did you kill him?” Rey begins to crack at that moment, and from there, Ren drives the entire conversation towards weakening her faith in Luke further. There’s genuine, calculated cruelty in this, and that’s of a piece with him torturing Poe and inflicting pain on Finn in their fight.

The hand-touch scene comes at Rey’s lowest ebb, having lost almost all hope in getting Luke back to who he was and having just found that in the dark... she’s got no one waiting for her to find them. Johnson’s admittedly talked about asking Williams to change the original, sinister music he composed for the scene, wanting the audience to feel that a friendship or romance is “possible”, but my read on that is that he’s having us empathise with Rey’s desperate, perhaps delusive mindset.

And that’s a mindset which she is forced to shake. Because it’s a delusion, and a dangerous one, to think she can fix the person who’s mistreating her.

Because then, in the throne room, he treats her desire to save hundreds of lives as an inconvenience. He screams at her for wanting to save the Resistance because it’s not what he wants to do. Sure he talks about building a new order, but the whole point of that is that it’s his order and no one else’s. There’s no desire to do good underneath it all, unless it gets him what he wants. And in all of this, the urge to control, the inability to step outside of himself and his own desires, he's fallen into what you might call the "incel trap". He's seeking external validation from control over his surroundings, but it will never solve his internal problems. So all his terrible deeds will ultimately be futile unless somehow he makes the choice to right himself... ...but sixpack, I guess, so lots of people didn't and don't register it. And Luke’s one mistake isn’t interpreted as the tipping point when “Snoke had already turned his heart”, but the one thing that turned a totally good but conflicted boy into a monster. 

You might say that Johnson accidentally gaslit a portion of his audience in the process of depicting the act of gaslighting. And then with Abrams... well, Vader was redeemed in old Star Wars and we've got to be like old Star Wars. Because old Star Wars... man, old Star Wars is great. Whereas I think if you followed the trajectory of the character, you’d be fixing for Ren go down as the villain - heck, for all the many faults in Colin Trevorrow’s version of Episode IX, he recognised this. And yes, before you ask me if I’m self-plugging here, I'm most of the way into posting an Episode IX rewrite and I've gone all-cylinders on the tragic antagonist angle.

And to get meta, Joe in Looper is on a redemption arc, so it’s not like Johnson doesn’t know how to do one. Given all the evidence I say “Yer Honour, Mr Johnson clearly acted with the intent to see Kylo Ren dead with a lightsaber through the heart.”