Ppl send topics and instead of salt or hot takes, you MUST talk abt smth you like about it. Good excuse to gush abt smth you already love, OR think and find smth positive to say.
Hard mode, “missed potential” is NOT allowed as an answer.
Star Wars gets a lot of rightly earned praise for its villains really fitting the moment they show up in, and I think Kyle is def a part of that. While it’s kind of a Thing all over media these days, right as TFA came out, the idea of a villain in a major studio genre film being a privileged, radicalized white guy who was obsessed with but also hated a girl was kind of fascinating? like i think they laid a lot really good groundwork for making Kyle as awful and as real-world relevant as he is: his hair trigger violence; his resentment toward his parents despite, by all canon accounts, him being a well-loved and cared for child; his victim complex; the weird sexual dynamic to most of his abuses; the fact that his main, most personal targets were brown and Black men and a woman who was more powerful than him; and how completely he fell in with an obvious Nazi allegory, right when white nationalism really started pushing into the political spotlight in a much more visible way. like all of this is good stuff!
it’s one of those things that even shows up in Reylo fics -- a lot of them ARE weirdly in character for Kyle being like, The Worst, and then are totally off on a) how Rey reacts to that and b) how In The Real World that kind of awfulness isn’t something you fix by ~falling in love/having lots of sex w/ a 19 y/o girl. but i think that’s in some ways a sign of how solid Kyle’s characterization is, that even in otherwise terribly OOC reylo fic, his baseline but of-the-moment awfulness (ugh, white men) while come through. i respect it (but respect his redemption arc/treatment after TFA less lmfao)