Why Do They Find Reylo So Threatening?
Reylo is an immensely popular ship but as they say in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So we’ve had to deal with ant*s, bad takes, condescension, and even harassment over our desire to see the two most powerful people in the Force hook up.
I’ve had to deal with this to some degree as an Anidala fan but what I’ve seen and experienced as a Reylo is a whole new level. It’s visceral. When something makes people angry enough to act out in very irrational ways, even to the point of going after total strangers, it’s because it is threatening to them.
What is it about the potential for love that’s so threatening? I’d been thinking about this question for the past few months. There’s nothing about Reylo itself that is particularly transgressive. It’s a male/female relationship that so far has been chaste onscreen (though with a heavy serving of UST). It’s sufficiently modern so that the woman equals the man in power and if anything, you’ve got to hand it to Kylo/Ben for treating her as someone worthy of respect, whether as a potential ally/bond mate/lover or as an enemy. He might come off as a bit classist occasionally (“you, a scavenger” and “you come from nothing”) but he never diminishes her because she is a woman. So what’s the big deal?
My conclusion is, the anti-Reylo crowd finds Reylo as a romantic pairing threatening because they find Kylo Ren threatening. Oh sure, there are some fans who were hoping to hang their hat on Rey coming out as the world’s first major ace/aro fictional character or hoping she somehow defeats the forces of romance for no other reason than to prove her independence. But nobody has attacked pairing Rey with anyone else to the degree they have with pairing Rey and Kylo.
So why is Kylo so threatening? By that I don’t mean they find him a terrifying movie villain who gives them nightmares. I mean threatening in a way that challenges their very world view. Having grown up during the OT era, nobody ever found Darth Vader threatening in this way. There was no moral judgment made on kids or adults who loved him, and believe you me, lots did. Lots still do. It’s not that Kylo Ren is somehow worse than Darth Vader. In fact the movies emphasize that he’s not. If anything, the usual villain stans don’t think he’s evil enough and hope he becomes more evil in TROS. No, the difference between Darth Vader in 1977 and Kylo Ren in our time is that the way some people look at pop culture has changed.
When I was growing up, movies were just movies. They weren’t real life. Today, there’s a tendency to view movies as a literal depiction of reality. On the one hand, real things certainly inform art and today’s fantastical tales are informed by modern understandings about human nature. On the other hand, I think this tendency can sometimes get out of hand, where the analysis forgets this is fantastical and not real life.
There are obvious and identifiable reasons why there are those who don’t like Kylo for his own acts (he kills his own father, he harms the good guys). To hear them talk sometimes however, they sound like they’re talking about some punk they watched on Investigation Discovery, not a fictional character. They’re thinking he’s guilty of homicide, worse yet patricide, so he needs not to redeem himself in the manner we normally see in high fantasy but by literally going to prison or by getting killed off.
For others who dislike Kylo, he can become a tabula rasa for whatever real world “evil” the individual wants to hang on him. They see Kylo Ren as the series’ main bad guy so he must symbolize whomever they believe are bad guys in real life, whether he actually displays those traits in the movie or not. For some of these people, being a Caucasian man is enough to judge him as evil. (That he’s seen as thwarting a biracial ship galls them even more.) If you don’t like MRAs, then you see Kylo Ren as a MRA regardless of how he actually treats women in the films. Kylo never discusses ideology beyond the dark side but because he’s a bad guy, he is tagged a Nazi and a fascist by those who routinely call other people Nazis and fascists. If you’ve been at the hands of a manipulator, then he’s a manipulator. If you think the world’s biggest problem is “toxic masculinity,” then he’s the poster boy for “toxic masculinity.” If you loathe “soy boys,” then he’s a “soy boy.” They make him into a secular sin eater there to absorb whatever one finds wrong with the real world.
Since Kylo Ren carries the sins of not only his world but ours and he can never find absolution, the idea of him having a romantic relationship with the “good girl” is abhorrent. The idea of Kylo/Ben being happy and in love is horrible to them. How dare he, that (fill in the blank), find true love and connection with the heroine when the haters themselves often don’t have those things? Some guys cannot get over the fact the cheerleader turned them down for the jock, the rich guy, the douchebag, the bad boy, or whatever. It’s very telling these people often overlook or are utterly dismissive of the character’s positive attributes.
People need to look at this in the abstract (as kids do) rather than in a literal way. Kylo Ren/Ben Solo isn’t a school shooter. He’s not a Nazi. He’s not a rapist. He’s not an incel. He’s not Max Landis or your jerk ex-boyfriend or any real person. People who like him aren’t racists, fascists, or tolerant of abuse and people who don’t aren’t morally superior.
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