galadhir replied to your post “All the freaking out in Kylux fandom about whether the ship is still...”
What changed was that Snoke is no longer around keeping Kylo on a leash. Now the power dynamic has shifted strongly towards Kylo, who now not only can, but also clearly *will* use violence to shut Hux up. A relationship where Hux was in it entirely because his only other choice was death would be a coercive and abusive relationship. I'm not saying you can't write non-abusive Kylux with this dynamic, but I am saying that it's become more difficult.
(As a disclaimer, before I respond, I completely respect that sometimes people just don’t want to ship stuff anymore or that even a slight shift in dynamic can turn them off it, and that’s fine and their business. Have fun wherever you guys end up next! But this is all assuming arguendo, that there is significant population of Kylux shippers who still want to ship it but are trying to process the shifts caused by TLJ in the characters’ dynamic.)
Ok, that’s fair, to the extent that the dynamic may need more careful and thoughtful handling then before and that no pre-TLJ romantic development is really possible anymore. However, I think it’s a pretty large jump from “Kylo has power which he will use in inappropriate ways to shut up his rivals/enemies” and “Hux will enter into a relationship with Kylo only because he fears for his life”/”Kylo would necessarily treat a partner the same way he does an enemy.” The latter do not necessarily follow the former and, at least until the next move, we can imagine whatever development we want. The entire point of enemies-to-lovers anyway is that the relationship changes. People who would love to kill each other at the start of the arch end up protecting each other and taking care of each other by the end of it, which allows for the romance to develop. This was a huge, mainstream component of Kylux after TFA as well.
Hux doesn’t have Snoke to “protect” him, but I’m not even sure hoe much protecting Snoke did. Hux best protections are still with him: 1) Kylo knows he needs Hux and 2) Hux has the loyalty of the military far more than Kylo. (Canon or not, rn both are easily justifiable for headcanon/fic purposes.) Hux certainly had no qualms about overruling Kylo’s firing-at-Luke tantrum when he saw it was getting to far, nor did he have any qualms about sassing Kylo (“Do you think you got him?”) They can still have that competitive edge that they did in TFA.
Also – and this is the great thing about what we did and didn’t get – the two incidents we saw aren’t necessarily super typical. The first was a power grab. Just a flat out fight, basically. The second…we know Kylo is volatile but here he is ESPECIALLY so. He’s facing Luke, Luke is evading him, Luke is mocking him. If Kylo had really ascertained that Luke had tried/wanted to kill him then facing him may have been a triggering experience. Not that that makes throwing people at wall ok, but just that this is a sort of pushed-to-the-edge state that he’s not likely in on an everyday basis.
Kylo would certainly try to lord his power over Hux but Hux has ways to fight back and it doesn’t look like Hux is actually THAT intimidated by him. And at least until the next movie comes out, we can imagine the further development of their relationship however they want: including that they come to respect each other and Kylo refrains from physical violence once their relationship starts to ship away from the “enemies” end of the development arch, etc.
