#tdps4

Okay, so maybe I’ve been thinking about this far too much—probably because I’m seeing it so much on TikTok—but there are so many people saying that S4 Rayllum wasn’t good/it was terrible, and all sorts of other stuff. And honestly? I strongly disagree, even with the provided reasonings they give (disclaimer, I’ve reworded these but they’re literally the same comments I’ve seen):

“They didn’t even kiss!”

“They lost their spark and I’m so annoyed!/S4 Rayllum was disappointing”

“They should’ve got back together.”

“Callum was so annoying towards her” (this one really makes me mad sooo yeah)

Now. We waited three seasons for them to get together. Is it understandable that some fans would be disappointed that their favorite/one of their favorite ships fell apart? Yes, of course. That had been built up since the beginning, and then having them not have that “spark” is very sad. BUT, if we’re looking at this from a realistic perspective, their dynamic this season makes perfect sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Rayla, she’s one of my favorite characters. And yes, she left him because she was afraid of losing him and she wanted to keep him safe. But it’s been two years since he’s seen her. It was his fifteenth birthday. His birthday, when she disappeared. “I don’t even know if she’s alive” (Episode 1). He’s spent the better part of two years without knowing where she is, and somewhere along the way, whatever hope he had probably went away at some point, because clinging to something that painful is definitely not healthy. He’s got his new duties as the High Mage, and he’s worried about her, and he wonders if Viren really is alive, and there’s so much more stuff going on. Like rebuilding an entire kingdom and giving his brother whatever support he can.

And then suddenly, she comes back. After two years. Not days. Not weeks. Not months, but years. He’s been hurting all this time, and then she just waltzes into his room like nothing happened. “I was so happy, but so mad” (sry I don’t remember the episode number). That comment about how annoying he was towards her? He was angry, and he had every right to be. If someone had done that to me, I wouldn’t have swept it all under the rug. Remember how he got upset with her at the Storm Spire because she basically told him she wanted to sacrifice herself while the others escaped? Yeah. But this is worse. She promised him that they would go together, and that promise was broken. She lied to him. She broke his heart. But she also had her reasons for doing it, and in her mind, it was her only chance to keep him alive and safe. To her, it was the best solution. Rayla would much rather him be mad at her than losing him.

But remember the third episode? She admits that she was so obsessed with revenge that she had risked losing him. So she, too, acknowledges that she was partly in the wrong, but she also knows that she would have made the same choice again. Given their two differing views, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter who’s right and who’s wrong if they can’t agree on that. They’re currently in the middle of another fight that could turn out to be something so much worse, and they’re being forced to work together again. If they had more time, maybe things could have wrapped up a bit quicker, but the thing is, they don’t. They barely had a chance to fully talk. If my memory’s right, they actually had a “real” talk twice. Once when she first appeared, and they were both too high-strung and keyed up for an actual conversation. The second time was at the Storm Spire when he started crying. They almost had a full-on conversation when Soren interrupted them (Soren, you’re a great person now, but please never do that again). And that’s where I want to add in the fact that the lack of any “kiss” makes so much more sense, because it’s kind of hard to be intimate with each other when one’s stubbornly angry and the other is stubbornly justifying her actions.

This whole season, they’ve been rebuilding what they had. I was lowkey worried that the writers would rush their reunion and sweep it under the rug, and if they’d done that, I probably wouldn’t have liked it all that much. But you can see their growth throughout the season. They argue, and they bicker, but they also are much more cordial towards each other. In the third episode, Callum doesn’t even want to talk to her, and in the episode where they’re confronting Igneous Rex, he reaches out first and comforts her when she gives up her swords—swords that he knows are important to her. And when they escape Umber Toh, he knows she can’t let Viren go, and he doesn’t fight her on it because he trusts her a little bit more. And that hug at the last scene of them was pure perfection. It wasn’t a kiss, but it was a step forward, a very important step forward that lets Rayla know that Callum can forgive her, that they need more time to talk, to be around each other, to trust each other. Two years is a long time for that sort of trust to fade.