Part i
Been on a serious Adam Driver kick lately and I don’t think anyone can blame me.
It started after watching Rise of Skywalker, which canonized Reylo. Up until that point I’d been unsure of the ship, open to the concept of Kylo Ren as an asexual ambition monster. (Disclosure: I’m asexual so my perception skews that way.) If he showed any attraction to Rey, it was too subtle for me to catch.
I mean, yeah, there’s the interrogation scene in The Force Awakens where these tumblr users see what I couldn’t. I guess they’re right. There’s sexual tension in the room but once he looks her over and says, “You know I can take whatever I want,” it’s not the good kind of sexual tension…? Personal preference, I guess. Your mileage may vary.
The observation about how Ben/Kylo grew up under Snoke’s restrictive tutelage, deprived of any real human connection, intrigues me more than anything else from that post. I don’t know where the info comes from, but I trust thirsty nerds to have pored over every last bit of developmental ephemera they could find. It supports the idea that Reylo is a Victorian romance in space: like Kylo, Jane Eyre had a strict, deprived childhood and fell for the first and only match available to her.
In The Last Jedi, Kylo asked Rey to join him and it was very seductive in spite of him telling her she came from nothing and is nothing. Huge red flag aside, those lines resemble Mr. Darcy’s failed proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. I don’t know if this was also true of Darcy, but the ending of Rise of Skywalker affirms a read of this scene wherein Kylo is only projecting his worst fears about himself onto Rey. Our brooding boy knows that almost no one will mourn him when he goes. What’s worse than nothing? Kylo Ren. And he knows it.
sadistic aside:
Ben really, completely disappears when he dies. Like, he actually became one with Rey, joining her in an impossibly intimate way. If this is the case, I wouldn’t expect to ever see Force ghost Ben Solo. My interpretation of that laugh he gave at the end is that he realized his loneliness was about to resolve forever in an ironic way, and he was so down for it. That’s hot. Bittersweet stories where the hero bravely disappears forever make me swoon. (It’s the only way romance stays evergreen.)
Kylo was aware of his ever-expanding loneliness and was sick to death of it, but I think his thirst for power was what drew him to Rey. If there was anything else that attracted him to her, it seemed to come at a distant second. Did he think she was beautiful or special in some way apart from her incredible Jedi talent? If so, I never noticed it. Did he really see her for who she is?
Do any of us? Who is she?
The last time I watched The Last Jedi I found myself still wondering who Rey was, despite agreeing with a random Twitter user’s observation that Rian Johnson was the only director who “got” her.
Did he? I had just taken for granted that he did because I trust him as a storyteller. So in order to look closer, I had to ask, “What is Rey’s dramatic need?”
In TLJ at least, she wants to know her place in all this, just like she tells the elder Jedi who grills her about her motivations. She needs to know why her and what to do now. I think that’s a relatable and urgent need. This opera of war and destiny and family identity is unfolding all around her. It’s kind of imperative that she figures out what her next move should be and from where.
Hey, is there matching criticism of her counterpart? That’s the whole reason I’m writing this damn entry. Well, not to criticize him (while I’m sure there are already think-pieces about how abusive Kylo Ren is, I wonder if they’re as numerous as the angry YouTube videos about how over-qualified Rey is) but to heap on apologia that we love him because we’ve always loved Byronic Heroes for some fucking reason.
From the minute he takes off his mask, Adam Driver presents like a Victorian cad. He’s the space opera version of Edward Rochester, Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Heathcliff Earnshaw, who himself was haunted by the sins he was driven to commit through a poorly explained connection to the dark side. Driver’s hair and wardrobe insist on comparison to these brooding 19th century jerks. And apropos of nothing, we get to see him without a shirt once – the inverse of Carrie Fisher’s iconic metal bikini jaw-dropper.
I’m always fascinated by these characters. They’re so rotten yet there’s always an audience who finds them appealing – myself included. Why? I think it’s unconsciously more about identifying with the heroine who loves him. One of her driving needs is to feel loved and special because childhood trauma left her feeling insignificant and unlovable, and when the bad-boy target of her attention has a moment through which the light of his highest self shines upon her? Well, shit. Can anything else make her feel more like a Jedi master?
All of this has been to justify the fact that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, for all its flaws and my being way too stuck-up about fan-fiction, has moved me to write a shitty fan fic of my own. Or something. I don’t really know what it is. It started as a narrative, then demanded more space and looked like a poem, then demanded even more space – like, literal space – and suddenly it became some kind of art project I guess.
I’m not that ashamed of it. Hell, even manly-man Michael Shannon is down for some filthy Kylo smut. We’re all in this together.
Part II
BLOG OF RHIANNIMATOR 