An Analysis of Reylo

 Introduction: 

As someone who is heavily invested in Star Wars and its fandom, as well as online fandom in general, the roller coaster surrounding Reylo has got to be one of my most memorable fandom experiences ever. 

For those that don’t know, “shipping” in fandom terminology refers to creating content and discussions surrounding the romantic relationship between two or more characters. Shipping can be applied to a couple in a story who are already in a relationship, but more often than not it refers to hypothetical “what-ifs” that fans would like to happen. Ships are given different names, a portamenu of the people involved. Reylo, thus, is the ship name of Kylo Ren and Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy. 

To put it simply, Reylo completely rocked the Internet. It became one of the biggest ships not just in 2015-2019 (when the Sequel Trilogy was being released), but one of the biggest ships in the history of Tumblr and Twitter, as well as one of the biggest ships in all of Star Wars. That’s no small feat considering the abundance of Star Wars material out there, much of which is devoted to beloved relationships like Anakin and Padme, Han and Leia, Obi-Wan and Satine, and Hera and Kanan. 

It also became one of the most hated ships I’ve ever seen. Moreso than anything else remotely resembling Reylo, Rey and Kylo (and the people shipping them) were accused of being abusers, gaslighters, racists, Nazis, emotional manipulators and everything in-between. So what gives? How did this ship become so popular, and why did some love it while others hated it? In this essay, I aim to explain why. 

When Did the Ship Start vs When Did it Get Popular:

Reylo was mildly popular after The Force Awakens, which introduced both characters for the first time. However, it wasn’t really on too many people’s radar, and the notion of Rey and Kylo Ren being romantically involved wasn’t on the table for a few main reasons:

1. First, far far more people shipped Rey and Finn. A bizarre facet of shipping is the presence (and lack thereof) of multishippers: people who ship more than one couple. Shipping is often viewed as a competition, where one character has several possible love interests and only the “best” one “deserves” to be canon. Giiven the fact that Star Wars had a massive fandom presence on LGBTQ+ friendlier websites like Tumblr, Finn and Poe were unambiguously the SW ship of 2015-16. Many fans saw natural chemistry between Finn and Poe as well as Finn and Rey, so they just rolled with the punches and had them all in an OT3. (An OT3 that received more support in Episode IX and is still going strong to this day.) 

2. But second, and more importantly, many people believed that Rey was going to be the child of Luke Skywalker, and they were not down with shipping cousins. Incest of any form is highly taboo in Western shipping circles, even between cousins—just ask Game of Thrones fans who shipped Jonsa in Season 6. 

Those were two pretty damning reasons, and the only reason why Reylo existed at all in 2015 was because shippers will ship anybody together (especially if they’re hot). In the early days, Reylo was even commonly known as a crack ship: a (sometimes derogatory) fan nickname for ships that have no basis whatsoever in canon. Reylo had slightly more weight than most other crack ships because Abrams seemed to be a fan of the ship, and TFA had some imagery that many shippers enjoy, such as Kylo carrying Rey bridal-style, a trope commonly seen in romance stories. 

Reylo really took off with The Last Jedi, a movie heavily devoted to building a relationship between them but leaving it ambiguous what their feelings are for each other or how deep they go. This film almost completely sunk the notion of a Rey-Finn relationship or even a Rey-Finn-Poe relationship by having them all go in separate directions, introducing Rose as a new love interest for Finn, and having Kylo Ren explicitly tell Rey that her parents were nobodies, thus opening the door for them to be a couple without incest. This was also when discourse popped up about whether the ship was considered “problematic” and whether it condoned certain toxic behaviors or not, but I’ll get into that later. 

Resolution of the Ship: 

Reylo reached its unfortunate conclusion in the 2019 film The Rise of Skywalker. In the film, Rey and Kylo Ren are enemies, going back to the dynamic they had in The Force Awakens, a change that has probably more than a little do with the fact that both movies were directed by JJ Abrams. With that being said, the film does give Kylo Ren a (rushed) redemption arc towards the end of the second act, and he rejoins the fight on Rey’s side as Ben Solo, not Kylo. 

The film concludes with Rey mortally wounded after killing Palpatine, but Ben heals her and brings her back to life using a technique he taught her. The technique uses all of his own life force, and in his final moments before he perishes, they kiss. However, the novelization for the film said that—and I’m not shitting you here—the kiss was platonic. Really?

The notion of these two teaming up is one that had been foreshadowed since The Force Awakens, and the confirmation of romantic feelings was great to see for Reylos everywhere, but no one likes a ship that’s only confirmed in the seconds before one party dies, and it’s pretty obvious that Disney retconned the kiss as platonic in response to the moral panic, which I’ll detail in a second. 

Why Do People Like It? 

Okay, but why did people like Reylo even in The Last Jedi? Sure, people will ship anything like I said, but that doesn’t explain how this could become one of the biggest ships of the decade. 

Well, it really comes down to the context surrounding how Rey and Kylo Ren interact in these films. See, Rey and Ben have what fans call an “enemies-to-lovers” dynamic. That is to say, the intrigue of their romance comes from the fact that they are moral enemies who are (supposedly) attracted to one-another. 

I cannot overstate how powerful of a trope this is. Enemies-to-lovers is a multifaceted relationship dynamic because it allows for action, drama, comedy and romance. The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker explored each of those possibilities with the “Force Bond,” a plot device where Rey and Kylo were mentally linked across the galaxy. 

• In terms of action, Rey and Kylo use the Force Bond to switch weapons and battle in multiple locations 

• In terms of drama, the Force Bond forces Rey and Kylo to confront their personal grudges with one-another

• In terms of comedy, Force Bond elicits a laugh from audiences when Ben is changing, among other things

• And in terms of romance, the Force Bond allows Rey and Kylo to be intimate even when they’re on different planets 

Those diverse emotions are why we love Reylo and other enemies-to-lovers. It’s why Jamie and Brianne are one of Game of Thrones’ most popular couples, why Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice are so fondly remembered, and why so many people stuck with Once Upon a Time just for Hook and Emma. 

The enemies-to-lovers ship is one with a long history. In classical literature, we often had Byronic heroes seducing fair, innocent maidens. Byronic heroes are tortured, angsty, tragic souls who were fully aware of their shortcomings as people but nonetheless view most (or all) of humanity with contempt. Classical examples include Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Rochester from Jane Eyre. 

In fiction of the 20th and early 21st centuries, we often called these relationships “good girl meets bad boy,” with examples like Grease, Goodfellas and several of the James Bond movies. 

The thing about “Byronic heroes meeting fair maidens” and “good girls meeting bad boys” is that they create very specific gender archetypes. The men have to be angsty and tortured, and writers who don’t know how to handle the trope often go too far and make them criminal, abusive and cruel. The women have to be naive, innocent and dainty, and unskilled writers often make them outright oblivious to the danger posed by their partners.  Fandoms like Star Wars have latched onto the “enemies-to-lovers” label because it’s a broader label without any attached gender norms, and it embraces the conflict between partners as the whole point instead of an unfortunate implication. Hell, one of the most popular couples associated with the “enemies-to-lowers” label is Batman and Catwoman from DC Comics, where Catwoman is obviously the criminal and the poor influence on Bruce rather than the other way around; to the extent that the TV Tropes article for this is called “Dating Catwoman.” 

An interesting facet of shipping culture that we don’t often talk about is how people can become interested in one ship due to similarities with other ships. Part of why Reylo became such a huge phenomenon is because they had a lot of fans come in from Lotura and Zutara. The former is the ship of Allura and Prince Lotor from Voltron: Legendary Defender, while the latter is the ship of Katara and Prince Zuko from Avatar, which faced a resurgence in the mid-to-late 2010s after being put on Netflix. 

I’m not going to let this become a discussion about Avatar and Voltron as well, so I’ll be brief: Katara and Allura don’t really resemble Rey all that much. Rey is far angrier and more uncertain of her heritage or her place in the world. The shared appeal of Reylo, Lotura and Zutara comes from the fact that the males (Kylo, Lotor and Zuko) are all royalty with complicated paternal relationships and uncertain moral compasses, and websites like Tumblr definitely picked up on that shared theme. It was common in the weeks after each new Season of Voltron and each new Star Wars film to see collages on Twitter and Tumblr comparing Lotor to Kylo, or Zuko to Kylo. 

The final thing to address here is that many people who loved the ship were also diehard fans of the Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars specifically. It was long-speculated that Kylo Ren would turn to the light at the end of the trilogy, and the writers had been developing him as a foil and opposite to Anakin Skywalker for years. Many fans of the Prequels and The Clone Wars who loved Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala (or “Anidala”) enjoyed Reylo, and considered Kylo to be a heroic counterpart to Anakin. Whereas Anakin turned to the dark for the woman he loved, Ben turned to the light for the woman he loved. 

In effect, this earned Reylo the nickname “reverse Anidala.” It’s…not the most accurate label. Again, the fandom is overfocusing on the Ben Solo half of the ship, not the Rey half. Rey has no similarities and no connections to Padme Amidala, so even though Ben is obviously meant to be a twist on the Anakin Skywalker character, calling the overall pairing “reverse Anidala” doesn’t seem right. 

Why Do Others Hate It? 

Now, this is where the real meat of the analysis is gonna be. Reylo isn’t just one of the most popular ships of the last decade, but also one of the most hated. So called “Anti-Reylos” are often seen arguing with or in some cases even harassing fans of the ship online, to the point that many Anti-Reylos believe the ship is a litmus test of morality: if you ship it, you’re a bad person. But why such an extreme reaction?

Reason 1: Many people interpret the battles between them in TFA and TRoS as abuse. This wasn’t a complaint that surfaced much in the months after TLJ released, because Rian Johnson went to great lengths to depict the two as realistic companions trying to persuade one-another, whereas Episodes VII and IX have a dynamic where they’re at each other’s throats. Notably, Rey even stabs Kylo in the gut in Rise of Skywalker after he tries to kill her. In general, these detractors are more so just uncomfortable with the enemies-to-lovers ships on the whole, which is understandable. 

But for people who actually do ship other enemies-to-lovers, this is much weirder. Why are some of us not okay with Rey and Kylo Ren being a couple, but we are okay with Batman and Talia al Ghul being a couple? Or Batman and Catwoman? Or Vegeta and Bulma? 

We often saw people saying that a relationship between the two couldn’t exist in the real world because such hated enemies would likely never reconcile their differences in a more realistic story. This is fair, but luckily, fiction isn’t the real world, and we’re allowed to explore all sorts of dynamics and characters that can’t exist in reality. Furthermore, why should we use this standard to evaluate some couples but not others? 

Reason 2: However, there is a very vocal subset of fans who believe that the ship isn’t physically abusive so much as verbally and emotionally abusive. (These fans tend to be Tumblr users, a site well known for its “morality police.”) In essence, these fans believe that the worst of the ship actually manifests in Episode VIII, not VII or IX, when Ben tries to convince Rey that her parents were nobodies. In this scene, Ben is angrily telling Rey that her parents were nobodies. I won’t sugarcoat it: his behavior is alarming, and many have interpreted it as manipulative or even threatening. 

To clarify, in this scene, Ben is not threatening Rey. Obviously this is extremely alarming behavior, but his anger is not directed at her and his statement that she needs to “Let go” of her preconceptions are not leveraged as an attack against her. Is Ben being manipulative? Well, that depends on your interpretation. But I will say: if you consider manipulation to be a signal of morality, and if you consider Ben’s behavior to be manipulative, then you have to accept that Rey’s behavior has been applying similar tactics while achieving the same results (none). In the same film, Luke was acting manipulative as well, outright lying to Rey about why Ben turned. 

The Star Wars fandom has an odd double standard here. I’ll admit, the SW fandom is more like six smaller fandoms wearing a trenchcoat (Sequels, Prequels, Original Trilogy, Legends, Mandalorian and Clone Wars) but there’s a lot of overlap between fans of the Prequels, the Sequels and the Clone Wars show. 

To reiterate what will be obvious to many readers: Anakin Skywalker is probably the most popular character of the Prequel era, and maybe in the series as a whole. Also, Anakin Skywalker literally choked his wife into unconsciousness after accusing her of murder. Amidst all of the adoring fan art and posts, finding social media users and critics who actually refer to Anakin as an abuser is rare, yet Ben is for this one scene alone. What gives? 

Reason 3: Many people tire of redemption arcs triggered by a heteronormative romance. Specifically, many fans hate the trope where women are expected to “fix” men in fiction, often in the aforementioned Byronic hero or Bad boy romances. However, I don’t agree with this take at all, and I think this argument falls apart under scrutiny because Rey actually does leave Ben in TLJ. The film that has the most Reylo subtext also ends by asserting that, chemistry or not, Rey is her own woman with agency in the narrative. It’s not her job to fix him, so she leaves. 

Ben’s redemption in TRoS happens because of his own free will. It’s the culmination of a three movie arc, and while we can debate all we want about the quality of those films, it’s undeniable that when he changes it’s because he wants to change. 

Reason 4: Many argue that as the son of Han and Leia, Ben should have no reason to be evil in the first place because he “came from a place of light.” This…is a completely nonsensical argument, yet one I always saw written as if it was a rebuttal against Reylo itself. Followers of this argument are not putting the relationship on trial, but rather, the existence of Ben Solo. 

The fact of the matter is that Ben Solo is evil. Or, at least, he struggles with it. Every Skywalker has struggled with the Dark Side, even in the Legends continuity; Ben’s character arc forces the audience to ask which of his actions are a result of his nature or his nurturing. The Last Jedi—again, the film that transformed him into a sympathetic character—seems to indicate much of his choices were due to his own nature, while The Rise of Skywalker’s opening seems to indicate his choices are a product of Palpatine influencing him from a young age. But Ben’s morality is not the issue at hand, and we are once again holding a popular ship to a different standard than any other ship in this fandom. 

You’ll notice that we’re starting to get into complaints that are less about the ship between Rey and Ben, and more just people who have objections to Ben Solo as a character. Which is bizarre, because Ben is also shipped with other characters besides Rey, yet these complaints are only ever leveraged at them as a couple. Side note: one of the most popular SW ships on AO3 is between Ben and Hux, a literal Nazi who hates him, yet I have never seen someone refer to this ship as “unproblematic” or “toxic.” 

Reason 5: Remember how I mentioned before that Reylo gathered many fans from Zutara? Well, the overlap between Star Wars and Avatar fans is quite large overall, and we got a lot of fans of Zutara who believed that Reylo had potential but squandered it for one simple reason. 

Unlike all ships involving Zuko, Reylo—in the eyes of these fans—fails because Ben Solo kills people, thus making him too irredeemable. 

I acknowledge that subjectively we all have our own opinions about the fiction and characters we enjoy, but I can’t get over how weird this take is. Fandom loves to romanticize murderers, even in the SW fandom itself. Anakin Skywalker, Loki and James Moriarty are some of the most popular characters on websites like Tumblr and Twitter, yet they’re mass murderers. 

The point of fiction is that it’s a safe place. We can explore ideas that we might never see in the real world, and we can explore new ideas that reshape how we view the real world. When Captain America goes around killing people in a Marvel movie, I have no problem because I know he’s the good guy. When Nathan Drake kills 30 people in an Uncharted game, I don’t mind it because I know they’re just NPCs. The simple fact of the matter is that morality—especially when it comes to taking another’s life—is treated differently in fiction. 

In nearly every fandom, one character taking or not taking a life is never used as a metric for whether they deserve happiness. Dina and Ellie are a huge ship in The Last of Us despite Ellie being revenge-obsessed throughout Part II. Guts and Casca are the #1 ship of Berserk despite Guts killing who-knows-how-many people. 

So why is Ben Solo different? 

Reason 6: Finally—and this is the reason I relate to the most—some people just don’t like the pacing of it. Understandable. 

Personally, I love the ship. It helps that TLJ is my favorite movie, but I enjoy the enemies-to-lovers dynamic in any form of media, and I love when stories take a nuanced, hard look at how that relationship would actually unfold. TLJ does a great job capturing the complicated feelings that come with falling for someone so opposed to everything you stand for, but TRoS just failed to keep that momentum going. Even as a fan of the ship, I completely understand why some people don’t like it, simply because it wasn’t executed all that well in the final movie of its trilogy. 

Overall Reason: I want to circle back to what I said earlier: Why is Ben Solo different? Why is he treated different, and why is this one relationship treated differently than anything else? 

To answer that question, we need to look at both the tendencies of fandom, Adam Driver’s performance, and the social climate these movies were coming out in. I think there’s a deeper layer of reasoning going on with all of these. 

Many people enjoy the thought of a Skywalker turning evil (it had already been explored in the Legends canon). They also enjoy the thought of enemies-to-lovers ships, and they enjoy the thought of morally ambiguous characters. Why do people get so up-in-arms over whether or not *gasp* the villain of a movie kills people? 

These movies were coming out at a time where racial tensions, gender dynamics and sexuality were on everyone’s mind, and it showed in the adolescents of the time period. Teenagers and 20-somethings were getting sick of entitled white men getting everything they wanted, they were sick of women being treated as objects, and they were sick of people of color being treated as side characters and nothing more. 

It’s no surprise then that Star Wars—a series that always had many different political undertones throughout its incarnations—embraced this cultural change. The heroes consisted of a Caucasian woman, an Asian woman, a black man, and a Latino man. The villains were (with the exception of Phasma) all white men with lots of Nazi iconography. These casting choices and visual imagery worked a little too well, and even as it became obvious that Kylo Ren was always intended for redemption and that we were meant to sympathize with him, those first impressions led people to label him as a “Nazi” and then use that label to justify hating the people who shipped him with Rey. 

Remember, like I said above, most hardcore fans on Twitter, Tumblr and Deviantart aren’t multishippers. Shipping was a competition, one intertwined with the social politics of the era and the preferences of the masses. And when shipping Rey with a kind, loveable, sweet and heroic black man like Finn; a charismatic, funny, charming Latino man like Poe; or a morally-ambiguous, angry, white man like Ben…well, Ben was just the “bad” option. 

Unlike someone like Loki, who does everything with humor and grace; or Vader who’s calm, sturdy and precise; Kylo Ren is angry and erratic, shouting and screaming during all of his most intense moments. Adam Driver didn’t play Ben Solo as if he were a cheesy villain, but as a tortured, volatile, impulsive, power-hungry young man unsure of his place in the world. It was real, raw and—for many people who related to Rey—triggering. 

Given that this was an era where people were holding white men in positions of power accountable for their actions (whether they were writers, actors, directors, CEOs, etc.), people also started holding Kylo Ren accountable for his actions, but they used a standard of morality that rarely came up in fiction. People stopped reacting to Kylo Ren as a fictional character, and they started reacting to Kylo Ren as a real person. 

That was essentially the power of Adam Driver’s performance. He did such a convincing job with the character that people just stopped treating him as fictional entirely. If you liked Kylo Ren, you supported patricide and murder, and if you shipped him with Rey, you were a bad person. 

My Thoughts on the Ship:

Obviously, I dig Reylo. 

I’ve long since believed that Star Wars has fallen into the trap of being too morally cut-and-dry. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad. Good guys sometimes become bad, but then they deserve to die. Bad guys become good, but they have to die for them to be redeemed. 

Reylo presented something else. It presented a murky gray area, where heroes pushed villains and villains pushed heroes. But I never thought of the ship as just pairing off Kylo Ren with the nearest random person (I fear many people fell into this trap). No, I liked Reylo because it only worked with their specific personalities and characteristics. 

Kylo Ren has always had a sort of nobility, tragedy and determination to his character. He’s very much the individual who believes he should walk the straight and narrow path, even as he’s being tempted away from it. However, in a twist, the “straight and narrow path” for him is darkness, and the light is what’s tempting him away—very much the opposite of his grandfather and of most other Fallen Heroes in general. 

Rey, meanwhile, handles every problem with brutality. She’s a shoot-first, ask-questions-later sort of person. She’s not just strong, she’s borderline savage, particularly in the first two films. The shot of her cornering the Praetorian Guard and just fucking screaming before charging him is one of my favorite shots in any Star wars film. In essence, he’s a villain who acts exactly like a hero, and she’s a hero who acts exactly like a villain. 

Many people are still under the impression that Reylo is a ship where the girl has to “fix” the boy, and that’s understandable, given our final impression of the ship was The Rise of Skywalker. But I believe Rian Johnson really nailed the two characters in The Last Jedi, a film where Ben is trying to get Rey to join him just as much as the other way around. 

I feel like I have a good grasp on the moral panic surrounding Reylo, including the other ships that influenced its fandom and the social climate it became popular in; but I’m still saddened that the moral panic happened at all. This is one of the most unique ship dynamics I’ve ever seen. It’s not one where the hero is trying to convince the villain to be good, or the villain is trying to convince the hero to be bad. It’s both, and yet neither. Rey and Ben Solo are connected by fate itself, and after a while, they stop caring about any sort of morality. Instead of asking “Will you join my side / my army / my faction?” Rey and Kylo ask one-another “Will you join me?”

It’s a completely selfish dynamic in both directions, and I love it. 

My name is Jonathan, and thanks for reading.