John Boyega was attacked by the unfortunate (though small and in no way representative of the overall shipping community) racist section of the Reylo fandom after one off-color joke, and he gave the racists the treatment and belittling they deserved and deconstructed the abusive relationship that they hold above all else in the fandom.
Boyega was hired to be the male lead of the Sequel Trilogy. I’d be willing to bet that his contract probably included some kind of emphasis that prevented Johnson and LFL from filling removing his screentime, since LFL’s apathy towards him is unlikely to have still allowed him to have such a screentime lead of Kylo/Ben in TROS.
But in spite of doing his job well, he was shuffled to the side, had his character lectured, and was put into scene that suspiciously belittle and make fun of his character while LFL themselves seemed to deliberately undermine the drama of his character in TFA, forsaking stuff like a Greg Rucka’s Before The Awakening story and it’s serious edge for him as a stormtrooper in training, and going for more janitor jokes. Frankly, it feels like there’s some benign racism probably at work against the character; please note I’m saying this as a white guy, but if his story isn’t suffering from all the ill-effects of benign racism that I’ve been told identify it, it certainly looks that way.
And regardless, it definitely seems like all those racists who attacked him when he was announced and featured in TFA got what they wanted; TROS showed LFL was more comfortable with having Rey kiss an ex-Space Neo-Nazi and mass murderer who’s d tortured her than in having her confide her feelings in a black man.
Driver got to be front and center of all the publicity for all three films and had his character get magically redeemed at the cost of Carrie Fisher’s last on-screen material, and enjoyed the privilege of sharing the screen with the expensive Harrison Ford to try and undo his character’s worst crime, and then his character got kissed by the victim of Kylo’s most heinous and selfish acts with little to no justification for it. Was Ben underdeveloped? Oh yeah, but that’s because he wasn’t built to be the male lead LFL wanted him to end up being, and Abrams was likely worried about a fully realized Ben stealing Rey’s spotlight since she wasn’t a Skywalker and the script was already making her pull a Sleeping a Beauty at an awkward time so Ben could get a kiss from her. What Driver had to deal with on an unpleasant level was harassment of his real life family by the kind of nutjobs who I wont even associate with Reylo fans, since “Daivers” are just morons who make Reyloers look like saints even to Kylo haters.
Gleason got screwed over by Johnson first. Abrams just perforated his character to get replaced by Pryde because a comedic idiot, like the one Johnson wrote in TLJ, couldn’t serve as the competent villain that Abrams had built in TFA.
Tran got screwed. There I have no argument. Even if someone didn’t find her character good in TLJ (like myself), the answer was not to banish her to a tertiary role. It would have been to rehabilitate her and integrate her with the heroic crew; Rey could have used a wrench wench friend to break the Bechdel Test with. I don’t think Johnson did Tran anymore favors than casting her in TLJ, and I think he gave her a limited and ultimately bad script to work with... but Abrams and Terio botched handling her in every way that could be worse.
Driver’s charisma and unconventional good lucks definitely played a part in the pro-Kylo slant that slowly came to ignore the character’s crimes, shallow nature, and clear placement as a bad guy with few to no redeeming qualities before TROS tried to magically wave that away.
Though to be fair, Kylo’s biggest advantage wound up just being the part where his character was a Solo/Skywalker, while Rey wound up being first a Random than a Palpatine.
Johnson was on the one hand arguing that the Skywalkers shouldn’t get special treatment and shouldn’t absorb too much audience attention going forward, but he also made a movie where the Skywalkers got special treatment and Rey’s attention was absorbed by them, and created the situation that led to Kylo experiencing the most egregious “Skywalker privilege” in the Saga.
Frankly, if his goal was to move beyond the Skywalkers, than pretending like the mass murderer, patricide and at-the-time-supposed-school-shooter was still a viable candidate for Rey’s attraction was a massively stupid move. If Rey Random was meant to say anything, than Kylo should have acted as the foil to fully deconstruct the idea of a Skywalker hero, and just stayed a turd or grown even worse.
And if we’re posting fandom articles not officially published by LFL, here’s one tied to my point:
https://the-swsc.com/2019/10/07/wher...s-protagonist/