Originally Posted by
godisawesome
“Swing and a miss” is a charitable description for what wound up on screen, in my opinion. “Cancerous” or “corrosive” feels more accurate to me.
Not to the idea as a concept, mind you.
I firmly believe that competent writing could take a Rey and Kylo love story, or even just tight connection, through all three films if that was the plan, or maybe just TLJ and TROS if it worked really hard.
But what wound up screen was a giant piece of crap that ate away at Rey’s character, was for all intents and purposes an abusive relationship, and ultimately the one thing which I don’t think I’ll ever let anyone proclaim as enjoyable in the ST without objecting and mocking the concept in a way meant to remove their enjoyment of it.
Yeah. I can try not to be that guy on Luke’s story, Palpatine's return, the absolute waste of Finn, and everything else... except for this pile of hypocritical garbage at the rotten heart of this trilogy.
It didn’t have to be that bad... But let’s break it down:
TFA plants absolutely nothing goo between Rey and Kylo - absolutely everything in their interactions is antagonistic, vile, and cruel on Kylo’s part, and justifiably enraged and fearful on Rey’s part. Kylo is very clearly the monster stalking Rey, kidnapping her, torturing her, and violating her mind in a scene that very clearly is going for disturbing sexual assault tones. And that’s before Kylo kills Han, Rey’s friend, potential father figure, and a personification fo his vastly different Kylo’s mind is compared to her - he’s basically an alien she can’t understand for killing the one thing she wants most in the world - and then maiming her best friend and found family member Finn for daring to protect her.
There ain’t any Rey and Kylo love story or friendship story in TFA, full stop... which might be informative when you remember it was by far the most successful ST movie.
TLJ is kind of weird. I’m fairly certain that Rian Johnson intended for his film to end in a way deconstructing or ending the chance of Reylo for good... but only because he saw it as a genuine possibility after TFA, somehow, and he casually treated it as a near thing when, after TFA, it couldn’t possibly be a likelihood for as lazily as he wrote it. Rey’s spine, mind, emotional investment in people not named Kylo, and her general characterization in TFA was all thrown out, either because Johnson just didn’t connect to it in TFA (which remember, he first experienced as a script and dailies, not as a finished film), or he struggled writing female characters who were of the more assertive action-girl variety.
There’s no attempt made to really tackle the totality of all the horrible things Kylo did to Rey in TFA to help explain Rey suddenly getting sympathetic towards him - the *inky* thing referenced is Han’s death, where Rey is portrayed as for some reason accepting Kylo’s blatant and sociopathic-sounding dodge as acceptable. We never address wha5 he did to her, Finn, Luke’s students or the Galaxy... and it seems likely this is because Johnson had trouble seeing Kylo for the blatant scum he was after TFA. Johnson’s the guy who told John Williams to replace the initially dark and threatening music he out in their hand touch seem with a more sweet and romantic one - because somehow Johnson didn’t see why Rey could hold a grudge, be afraid of her assaulted, or simply be as wary as a survivor from a horrible planet would be towards a clearly deranged fascist murder. So even though Johnson ended the film in a way meant to probably end the relationship, by both making it clear he submitted Tey to Snoke’s torture for his own benefit than had her close the door on him... the way he treated it as a strong possibility against all logic and emotional sincerity for Rey planted the seeds for TROS to basically finish her character off with it.
TROS is an absolute mess here, and shows how the relationship ultimately damaged Rey as a hero and Kylo as a villain... and I’m inclined to think that TROS is largely the result of Kathleen Kennedy and LFL wanting to build on what they thought the most positively received TLJ elements were, even though Johnson seemed to be intending the opposite reaction - they wanted Ben redeemed (thus they were down with Palpatine coming back after other attempts didn’t seems torn enough to them with Supreme Leader Kylo), and they wanted Rey to give a damn about Ben (even though she didn’t know him in any way, and Kylo was, y’know, her twice abusive captor and friend-killer).
So what do you get? A film where Kylo can continue to be an utterly terrible person in every way, but can’t seem to get Rey to really treat him with anything more than disappointed frustration until he tries killing her again... at which point she hits him while defending herself but freaks out over hurting him and insta-heals him to keep him from dying... when he’s still Kylo Ren. And still near her friends and allies. And all because Ben Solo is a character LFL over-invested in at Rey, Finn, the ST’s conflict, and the OT3’s expense. We than have Rey’s climactic confrontation with Palpatine, a villain almost certainly brought back so that Kylo wouldn’t be the main villain (as per Chris Terio), get interrupted and knee-capped by vacillating and inconsistent motivations and exposition, just so Ben can show up and act as Palaptine’s battery with Rey, then have Rey get Sleeping Beauty-ed for no good reason just so she’ll kiss this character she’d shared no dialogue with that wasn’t as his abusive and evil persona.
I’ll be blunt, this “Reylo” story stinks of being written by people either ignorant of or apathetic towards how a real human being would react towards Kylo, or people showing some benign racism and sexism in their favoritism towards a character because he’s a white male, and thus more appealing than a female hero or a black male lead.