defyaugury reblogged your post and added:
Going to preface this by saying that I’m not...
Firstly, sorry I’m doing this in answer format where it’s harder to follow what I’m actually answering - I’ve got your actual post open in another tag - but OP asked me to keep my comments off her post, so I’m doing that.
The truth is that I’ve seen many posts which cast the relationship between Rey and Kylo as both an essentially sexual thing and a metaphor for the central theme of light and dark and balance and how they need each other. I do get, therefore, that that is hitting something that a lot of people are finding affirming and positive.
I’m not trying to stop anyone from finding that affirming and positive. I appreciate you telling me why you find it so, and that’s great. I’m glad that you have got something that is valuable to you.
However, that very same thing makes me feel alienated and uncomfortable and invisible. It’s an intersectional thing, isn’t it? Depending on where you come from, the same things may not be affirming for everyone.
On my own dash, it’s mostly Reylo posts which are coming up with all of this meta about female sexuality and Rey and Kylo’s intertwined centrality to the plot - and that’s the reason why I now have Reylo blacklisted. I’m not trying to stop people from enjoying and relishing a thing that I don’t like. I’m just hoping that ideally - given that it makes me unhappy - they won’t do it around me.
But this means that when a post crosses my dash which is not blacklisted, I don’t automatically assume that it’s a Reylo post. I follow mostly Kylux and Hux orientated blogs. So when a post on my dash says “All of us,” I assume it means either “all kylux fans,” or “all fans.”
The way this post is organized, it contrasts “All of us,” with “Straight men.” So I read that as “Every fan of every orientation except for straight men reads the Rey & Kylo interactions of TLJ as Rey’s sexual awakening.” And that’s just not true.
I hate being generalized about wrongly, and I hate my existence being made invisible. So I ranted for a paragraph and hit a nerve with other ace people who also find stories about sexual awakening alienating and false to our own experience of life.
It wasn’t meant to be a manifesto - it was meant to be a casual throwaway comment about a thing on my dash about which I disagreed. I’m not interested enough in the relationship between Rey and Kylo to make some kind of meta statement about it, other than “I personally don’t like it when ace people’s existence is forgotten.” Even then I’m aware I’m having a “not all men” reaction to a generalization that was probably originally meant as “All of us Reylo fans” (though doubtlessly there are ace Reylo fans too who don’t appreciate the assumption that their femininity is tied to their sexuality.)
So yeah, tl/dr - I’m glad that you have a nice thing, and I’m not trying to take that nice thing away from you. I’m glad to understand why it’s nice for you. If I had the power to stop this kind of story from ever being told, I wouldn’t do that, because different strokes for different folks. BUT the fact that something is affirming for you doesn’t necessarily make it affirming for me. I can understand why you find it affirming. I hope you can understand why I find it alienating and upsetting instead.
