#audience perception

Just further confirms what I've known for years--some people get triggered by teenage characters who act like actual teenagers (instead of 20-somethings playing teenagers behaving pretty much like adults).

2/2 I got some pieces of the puzzle because I was sure Rey wasn't Luke's daughter (I thought she'd be some other villain's offspring 😂) and I was sure she was not going to end up with Finn (misdirection like Luke/Leia in ANH). TBF I didn't like the movie so I never bothered to keep up until TLJ trailer dropped. As I said, my only problem is that I didn't trust this kind of medium to tell certain stories and I am still a little wary of that. If Star Wars were an anime I would be 101% sure.

I wrote a post about “why people didn’t see Reylo” a while ago and I still stand by it, but to expand on it:

TFA did a fairly good job hiding things in plain sight. Like, the tropes in themselves are clear as day, but the characters never comment on remark on it and the dialogue does nothing to emphasize Reylo or convey it to the audience, which is quite unusual for a blockbuster movie and for Star Wars specifically, whose dialogue has always been extremely on the nose. Imagine if they had kept the “you have compassion for her” line. Or if Han and Leia discussed Kylo bridal-carrying Rey off and Han said something like “he’s smitten by her, you know he is”, and Leia were like, “I know. I sensed it, like I sensed she’s special”. Or if Finn and Rey had a conversation post interrogation scene where Rey would describe, enraptured, the “electricity” that passed between them? It would have made Reylo instantly 200% clearer. Mainstream fiction normally uses third party characters to “explain” the romance to the audience, but TFA never does that. The characters---including Kylo and Rey themselves---are none the wiser about what’s happening between Rey and Kylo. Their interactions speak for themselves, but the explicit “text” of the movie doesn’t remark them, which makes the whole thing unusually subtle, for something that employs not-so-subtle tropes. It’s show don’t tell at its finest, applied to the first stages of a budding romance.

the audience sees what the audience expects to see. And nobody was expecting a heroine x villain dynamic, going into TFA. Nothing in the marketing and promotion had prepared the audience for it (probably on purpose). And I think people, when it comes to blockbuster fiction, rely a lot on the tl;dr provided by trailers and promotional material to form their ideas on movies. “It wasn’t in the trailer and it isn’t technically a plot twist, so it can’t be that important”. (and I don’t mean it in a condescending way---I didn’t “see” Reylo either upon my first viewing, and it was only a few days of tumblring later that I started processing what I saw and looking deeper into the narrative of a movie that, at first, felt okay and occasionally very entertaining but not terribly different from 90% of current fantasy blockbusters, tbh)

I think, at least on Tumblr and at least initially, TFA attracted a demographic that isn’t particularly primed to recognize & appreciate heroine x villain tropes when it sees them. And it was that demographic that dictated the initial tone of the fannish discourse around TFA, which inevitably shaped most people’s understanding of the movie.

Season 7 is an interesting choice tbh nonny. Lots of people watched season 7 thinking Destiel was dead. 

I think subtextually season 7 is a great look at grief and Dean acts like a widow mourning the loss of his partner. Also Cas’s return in 7x17 definitely reads romantically if you are looking for it. I think at that point it was still embedded deeply enough in subtext that anyone still wearing their heteronormative glasses wouldn’t pick up on it though.

As I have said in other asks, I think the real point of no return when Destiel is basically brought into main text as much as possible without them outright saying that they are in love with each other, is season 12. Everything pre season 12 is still pretty much deep subtext. We can argue that pre season 12 seasons still embed Destiel into the main narrative and there are seasons such as season 11 where the story line itself is extremely confusing in parts if you don’t just assume that Dean and Cas are in love, but Season 12 pushed those boundaries to the point at which the general audience picked up on it, and the antis basically busted a vein screaming to the writers about it because they could see it too. Early season 13 continued that trend right up until the end of 13x05 which was the most romantic bullshit this show has ever pulled.

Because they’re the heroes, they’re a boy and girl, and they cared about each other. That’s how deep it is for the media and most casuals. It is a not-reading, it’s a default assumption- there could be nothing else whatsoever and people would still make that assumption. The path of least resistance tends to be hard to get off, so even when (if) you step back and think ‘hmm, this has pretty much zero dramatic potential and makes no sense as a SW love story’, it’s hard to get away from the idea that it’s somehow too obvious not to be true.

But people going ‘yeah, I guess that’s gonna be a thing, that’s fine’ is not shipping it or being invested in it. Did the film create huge investment in it as a romance? Gonna say no considering all the normal critics and the normal entertainment media felt no qualms whatsoever about jumping ship to Reylo when it became text. Gonna point to the shipping engagement and content creation- did people have a burning need to explore this dynamic and bring it to romantic fruition? Was the focus of the backlash in the mainstream about f/r not happening, or was it almost entirely about Luke, Snoke, the plot, and general whining about new female characters?

The fact that some shippers still can’t let go of their ‘default’ status or have talked themselves into believing an elaborate racist conspiracy against them is the only possible explanation for f/r not being canon with the help of tumblr slacktivism doesn’t mean there’s substance to their arguments. That they can out-and-out completely ignore the Finn/Rose kiss 99% of the time shows how little this is about what’s actually in the films.