remember you vague-posting roseh/ux sometimes. i don't get it; tell me the vision. at least what yours is
she bites his finger and then bites his dick off <3
okay no but more seriously: "the otomok system, that brings back memories" is such a chilling little line, when you take it along with her canonverse lore, both in the TLJ film where she says:
The First Order stripped our ore to finance their military, then shelled us to test their weapons.
and from the novel the last jedi: bomber command -
The people of one village, Sebris Gamma, refused to go along with the new orders. The Gammans told the First Order that they’d been an independent mining collective since the Republic days and meant to stay that way. We cheered them on – until the First Order bombers came to Sebris Gamma. They dropped ground-penetrating bombs loaded with incendiaries that burned the Gammans alive.
A week after Sebris Gamma, our parents put us on a supply ship to Botajef.
there is something very compelling to me, personally, about her being forced to look at the man who probably had a hand in colonising, then destroying her homeworld and orphaning her and then figure out what next. there is also something very compelling in her realising that the man who is a monster was made a monster by some very specific processes - in canon, hux is the son of brendol hux who pioneered a system of essentially raising up child soldiers and its implied hux was raised the same way. what can she do with such knowledge? why must she be responsible for holding that knowledge? will killing him bring back her family? will beating the living shit out of him change anything? will solving him solve the mystery of why her world was destroyed the way it was? will solving him allow her to undo the past? how can she make sense of such monstrosity, of her world and of the cruel disposability with which her family and her people were treated?
lots of metaphors occur to me here. its both the metaphor of the ways in which power and cruelty intersect and inflict world-destroying harm on a person and one person trying to make sense of it by trying to fuck the thing that destroyed her world into making sense again. its also the metaphor of colonialism and the descendants of colonial violence constantly scouring their colonial overlords and the past to try and make sense of the ways in which they've been warped as people, all because of this violence.
its about trying to gain mastery over this, somehow, and impose some logic and control and ordering over it. its about recognising that there's no way to do so & that the violence never disappears; that something is unforgivable and yet despite the deeply unforgivable wounds, that rose tico might be able to move past that and find some understanding. its about the nasty and ugly feeling that maybe hux understands exactly what was done to rose and her people better than anyone else could possibly imagine, because hux was on the frontlines giving the orders to drop bombs on them. its about imagining that by fucking him, she could tame him and therefore tame the monstrous system that destroyed her world. its about imagining that by fucking him, she could be fucking the first order over. she could be more powerful than the system that destroyed her life. its the vague hope that the past could be undone by salvaging one monster and turning him into something else.
also its just hot to think of her domming him.
idk, the appeal to me sits in the same emotional place that is drawn over and over to various shades of incest and noncon fic, you know? enemies to lovers of this scale and scope lies on the relatively "politically acceptable" end of that scale of affective pleasure for me. but its all ultimately trying to make sense of the same thing, unveil the same thing, undo and re-bottle the same thing. they're both bound together by an act of great evil and now they have to work out how to balance the scales of cosmic justice when that rebalancing is impossible. as my friend @caracalliope put it: in fic you can take a sliver of that injustice and try to reverse it or intensify it, and that's what eroticism is - it's reversal or exaggeration. but also the eroticism comes from the friction of whatever is happening between them in bed, and the big ugly thing that can never be changed.
which is also part of the appeal from hux's pov - how does he walk back from having committed such world-destroying evil, consciously, over and over again? can he walk back? can he be a better man? why be a better man for this girl specifically? what would it take for that to be genuine? i mean, what does actual and genuine redemption and deradicalisation look like? what would it take to push him to do that work? how can i push the canon to the point where hux looks at this girl whose life he's destroyed and experiences guilt for the first time? what comes next? there is a wish-fulfillment fantasy buried in there; a political one. there is something appealing in imagining utopia, in which some of the thorny violence of colonialism can begin to be deconstructed or defeated in a meaningful way, instead of lingering and festering in the side. or at least, a moment of control over it. its a great way to ask political questions and answer them without having to wade through theory and practice, but entirely surrendering to a childish id.
tl;dr: striking them together like little flints makes my favourite fictional sparks & it makes for hot and fun porn writing!