Actually my mom's reaction has made me think. Very few people got Rey/Kylo back then, including some casual viewers that surely didn't dig into interviews. I wonder why it clicked only with a small fraction of people? The only thing I got from TFA was mild sexual tension during the interrogation scene. A fandom acquaintance used to share Reylo theories like the bridal carry and while I thought it made sense, Americans have the worst record when it comes to redemption & villain/hero stories. 1/2
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 đ) 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 âwhy people didnât see Reyloâ 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 âyou have compassion for herâ line. Or if Han and Leia discussed Kylo bridal-carrying Rey off and Han said something like âheâs smitten by her, you know he isâ, and Leia were like, âI know. I sensed it, like I sensed sheâs specialâ. Or if Finn and Rey had a conversation post interrogation scene where Rey would describe, enraptured, the âelectricityâ that passed between them? It would have made Reylo instantly 200% clearer. Mainstream fiction normally uses third party characters to âexplainâ the romance to the audience, but TFA never does that. The characters---including Kylo and Rey themselves---are none the wiser about whatâs happening between Rey and Kylo. Their interactions speak for themselves, but the explicit âtextâ of the movie doesnât remark them, which makes the whole thing unusually subtle, for something that employs not-so-subtle tropes. Itâs show donât 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. âIt wasnât in the trailer and it isnât technically a plot twist, so it canât be that importantâ. (and I donât mean it in a condescending way---I didnât âseeâ 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 isnât 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 peopleâs understanding of the movie.
and yes, what you said: american fiction isnât particularly heroine x villain-friendly. Thereâs a disconnect between the tropes that are employed in Reylo---which are common in the romance genre, but rare in mainstream âmasculineâ fiction---and the kind of narrative that one reasonably expects Star Wars to be (as I said in that post I linked: "neither specifically female-centric nor romantic").Â
