Thinking about the Kylo Ren/Rey ship again

[koalathebear]

This morning, I read a thought-provoking post that had been reblogged over at The Mary Sue.

Someone named thejgatsbykid wrote:

Okay so like, seeing the way that reylo is shipped made me realize something.

A vast, vast majority of the reylo blogs I see are 15/16/17 year old girls, and I can’t actually say I’ve seen any that aren’t that specific demographic. What that says to me is that the issue with Reylo isn’t teenage girls romanticising abuse, it’s with the way that romance is sold to young girls.

I consumed a lot of “girl” media when I was younger, I read so many YA romance novels. And I know that a lot of people are aware of this because of all the jokes about “brooding YA love interests” but it’s really obvious the way it bleeds over in the fact that young girls, when presented with this angry, abusive character, automatically interpret him as a love interest. They hear the “I can take whatever I want line” and there are so many similar lines that have been painted to them as swoon-worthy. Young girls are taught to see the anger and aggressiveness characters like Kylo display as attractive qualities- especially when combined with his conflicted nature, which shows them he’s in some way “redeemable.” The “save the angry misunderstood loner from himself” narrative is sold to teenage girls so frequently that it’s almost impossible not to look at the way Kylo talks to Rey and see dozens of books I read when I was a kid.

Everyone remembers Twilight, how young girls were crazy over it and thought Edward was the boy of their dreams despite him stalking and manipulating and abusing Bella, because he was painted as such a romantic, misunderstood character. It was obvious with Twilight, because it became so endemic and everyone read it, but how many adults can say they’ve read a romance novel targeted at teenage girls in the past five, ten years? Because, let me tell you, Twilight is not alone in painting abuse as love, it’s just a very famous (and, admittedly, somewhat extreme) example.

Even ignoring the whole possibly-incest part of reylo, which is an equally nasty aspect in and of itself but not something I feel I can or should talk about, the biggest problem I see with Reylo is that the writers wrote him in a way that was most likely meant to be scary and abusive and threatening, and young girls are interpreting that as romantic, and the issue I see with that isn’t the shippers themselves, for the most part, but the kinds of things that society paints as romantic to young girls. So, yes, absolutely call out reylo for its myriad problems, but remember also that a lot of shippers are going to excuse those problems cause they’re young and this kind of cruelty is what’s been sold to them as romance for a long time.

There was an anonymous response from someone that said:

I'm really bothered that you reblogged that long post shaming teenage girls about Reylo, especially when it was written by a man. Teenage girls get enough grief from people. They don't need help from a website that is supposed to be feminist. He's concern-trolling people and you're giving him publicity, and reblogging him without a response. That's really hurtful and I'm surprised you're taking part in that. I'm just disappointed.

The Mary Sue responded as follows:

The message of the post was not about shaming teenage Reylo shippers, but about exploring how that type of relationship has been sold to young girls as the apex of romance. From the first paragraph of the post: “[T]he issue with Reylo isn’t teenage girls romanticising abuse, it’s with the way that romance is sold to young girls.”

Shipping Reylo isn’t in itself a bad thing, and we absolutely wouldn’t shame teenagers for their fanfic. But the reasons why that ship and others like it-such as Jessica Jones and Kilgrave-are popular is a topic which we feel is worth calling attention to.

I wrote about how I feel about ships like Kylo/Ren and Kilgrave before over here.  I'm now reading more and more about the issue and I am still grappling with the topic.  I know it's just fandom and fiction but it does raise issues that matter to me.

Despite the anonymous comment above, I can't help agreeing a lot with what the writer said.  In the Marysue article  Yes, There Is A Kilgrave Fandom - And Here’s Why I’m Not Condemning It, the writer says: “ "I think the romanticization of characters like Edward and Christian is a hell of a lot more disturbing than that of characters like the Joker, Hannibal, and even Kilgrave." and on further reflection that’s absolutely right.

As a younger koala, I loved my fair share of Alpha males but as I got older, it became clear to me that an Alpha male from romance would be a pretty crappy person to have a relationship with/to live with and really is very little that’s romantic about someone who is selfish in all ways - whether emotional, sexual and mundane.  When getting prompts for writing fan fic in both the Homeland and the Star Wars fandom, I notice that ‘jealousy’ is a hugely popular prompt.  People find it really romantic ... I kind of don’t unless it’s written with a degree of humour because jealous combined with violence or insecurity is really dangerous - not romantic.  That’s a different issue.

For a while, because of the rise of feminism, there was something of a backlash against the old alpha male that you read about in old Mills & Boone, Harlequin and old time bodice rippers.  I used to read romance novels quite heavily in my primary school, highschool and uni days and I saw the shift from alpha male to more sensitive, nurturing heroes.  I kind of cringe when I re-read my old Jayne Ann Krentz and other ‘older’ romance novels where the hero is possessive, jealous, selfish, misunderstood, horribly troubled and sometimes just plain intimidating.  I remember one novel I read where the heroine becomes pregnant, hides it from the 'hero', runs away from him and he chases after her and basically blackmails/bullies her into coming back to him and of course she does because she loves him but doesn't want to trap him and he's great in bed and can arouse her even when she's saying no no no.

Ugh ugh ugh ... Yeah I know, I am embarrassed for myself because I read so many of those novels for a while there as a young and impressionable teen.  'Trade Winds' by MM Kaye and Easy Connections by Liz Berry had a pretty common scenario which was the victim of non-consensual sex ends up falling in love with and ending up with the guy who assaulted her.  *winces a little*  Shirley Busbee (Gypsy Lady comes to mind) and Johanna Lindsey (Secret Fire comes to mind) - both popular romance novelists - also had a lot of books featuring non-consensual sex where the 'hero' ends up getting the girl - usually because he ends up impregnating her and she has no other choice.  Double urgh.  Thinking back on it ... I even wonder sometimes if the swoonworthy staircase scene in Gone with the Wind is a rape scene ... although in novels it's never rape, it's called seduction or ravishment

By the time I got to uni, the romance novels were far more enlightened.  Nora Roberts' heroes would never dream of taking what wasn't theirs and what wasn't willingly given.  Women were the equal of men in and out of bed and there was no more orgasming women into submission and consent ... All of this probably still existed in porn and sub-genres and the like of course but I'm talking about 'mainstream' romance novels...

Then Twilight came along and effected something of a renaissance of the alpha male first in the young adult category.  Then it moved its way into new adult, chick lit and then back into a lot of the mainstream romances. Characters like Edward, Christian Grey, brooding/selfish/obnxious alpha males are held out as the hero in many novels.  If you look on amazon at some of the top selling Kindle books, they are all about alpha males, BDSM themes that would probabaly make real BDSM practitioners roll their eyes ... One genre I particularly hate is the billionaire alpha male trope i.e. it's ok for a guy to be a jerk and have his way with you and take things without consent as long as he's a billionaire.  Uh huh.  I actually hate this genre a lot.  I get that submission/non-consent/forced pleasure is a common fantasy - but why is it more ok when the guy's a billionaire?  Also, the rich guys in these novels are always hot - they don't look like Donald Trump.

So the novels follow the theme of alpha male, dominant, jealous, possessive, it's ok to do things without consent as long as you are rich and you are good-looking.  The "good guy" is usually presented as the safe and boring option.  Either he gets discredited along the way as e.g. secretly being unfaithful/seeing hookers/being a bad person, or he is actually that nice but he is boring and the heroine is seen as 'settling' if she stays with someone who cares about her, loves her and treats her right ...

So then when you look at Kylo Ren, particularly through the prism of recent fiction ... you can see he resembles a lot of the characteristics of the ‘heroes’ in those novels.

• he is broody and misunderstood i.e. just needs the love of a good woman/man to redeem him - set him on his path to redemption
• he dresses in black
• he stares at the heroine in an anguished way a lot
• he resembles a pale, narrow-faced young male
• there is debate about Adam Driver’s attractiveness I know and I won’t go into it because hot or not is a very personal matter, but I will say that they have picked a tall young, white male with dramatic features to play the character.  If they had made him deformed/extremely old/alien - then there would still be shippers, but they would be niche and the ship would be less normalised/appeal to younger people
• he makes her swoon (literally)
• he says he can take from her what he wants - implicit in this is that he could probably make her enjoy/take pleasure in something against her will - which is a pretty common kink.  I’m not going to take away from people who enjoy role-playing/fantasies about non-consensual sex blah blah.  I’m just going to going to name it and note that it’s probably something you only want to have done by people who call a spade a spade and don’t try to sugarcoat it/normalise it
• after Rey swoons, Kylo Ren picks her up and carries her out of the clearing.  Just that very visual act of sweeping her up in his arms is theatrically dramatic/romantic - think Rhett Butler picking up Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, think the Phantom picking up Christine Daaé  in Phantom of the Opera (not very romantic for me though some ship it).  There was a hilarious post where someone thought it was romantic that Kylo picked her up and didn’t leave it to one of the stormtroopers to do.
• the novelisation shows him as angsty - he doesn’t really want to hurt Rey.  He is gentler with her than he is with Poe etc.

If you like the dominant and submissive relationship then that’s all well and good but my understanding is that BDSM practitioners do it with the full consent of both parties.  Where a lot of the ‘romance’ novels and the Kylo Ren/Rey shippers fall down - is that this power imbalance is one-sided and is extremely non-consensual and all the power is with the dominant character - although the alpha male/reformed rake trope will have it that the submissive will turn the tables on the dominant and bring him to his knees emotionally once the submissive has made the dominant fall in love with her... In reality, it doesn’t usually end up that way ...

I think our definitions of romance and what is romantic definitely change as we get older and they definitely get influenced by what we read.  There’s a line in Faye Weldon’s novel Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen where she tells her fictional niece Alice that Alice’s mum married Alice’s dad after overdosing on too many Georgette Heyer novels.

I am very thankful that I never married someone after reading the romance novels of my teen years as I know for a fact that the person I ended up with is not the person I would have wanted to spend my life with.  Mini Koala fresh out of law school might have thought merchant bankers and corporate lawyers were cool but the koala of today definitely does not.

I am not sure what I am saying here.  I guess I think it’s ok to have fantasies (no matter how out there or kinky they may be) so long as you are self-aware enough to know what the boundaries are and what is appropriate in ‘real’ life and not in ‘real life’.  There’s no point condemning people for their fantasies - they are what they are.  By way of example, the law is not about sanctioning people for their fantasies.  You can fantasise about whatever you want - it’s how you act upon those fantasies that could get you into trouble - whether with the law, emotionally, physically ... The problem with these ships is not that people have these fantasies - it's the fact that the way people ship them and describe them can make them seem 'normal' when they're not.  Someone joked a while back that incest was the new trendy fandom kink and it really did seem to be after seeing the Supernatural fandom ... and then with Game of Thrones it's canon with lots of people shipping Jaime and Cersei Lannister...

ETA: Despite being on the 'romantic', vanilla ship of Finn/Rey and Rey/Poe, I'm not suggesting for a minute that people should always go with someone because they are kind and nice and gentle and treat them well and respect consent.  There's a really interesting interview with Domhnall Gleeson where he's discussing the movie Brooklyn:

Click to view

He talks about Saoirse Ronan's character and everyone's asking should her character end up with his character Jim the Irish guy or with Tony the Italian American guy and Domhnall says: "I found myself wondering right at the end whether either was right for her, not which - but if either was right and I wonder if maybe she's just too young.  Maybe what she should be doing is meeting more people." and then he says: "And just because you have a choice to make does not mean that either is the right choice."

ETA: raincitygirl has some really interesting commentary on the issue over at her blog.