Actually my mom's reaction has made me think. Very few people got Rey/Kylo back then, including some casual viewers that surely didn't dig into interviews. I wonder why it clicked only with a small fraction of people? The only thing I got from TFA was mild sexual tension during the interrogation scene. A fandom acquaintance used to share Reylo theories like the bridal carry and while I thought it made sense, Americans have the worst record when it comes to redemption & villain/hero stories. 1/2
2/2 I got some pieces of the puzzle because I was sure Rey wasn't Luke's daughter (I thought she'd be some other villain's offspring 😂) and I was sure she was not going to end up with Finn (misdirection like Luke/Leia in ANH). TBF I didn't like the movie so I never bothered to keep up until TLJ trailer dropped. As I said, my only problem is that I didn't trust this kind of medium to tell certain stories and I am still a little wary of that. If Star Wars were an anime I would be 101% sure.
I wrote a post about “why people didn’t see Reylo” a while ago and I still stand by it, but to expand on it:
TFA did a fairly good job hiding things in plain sight. Like, the tropes in themselves are clear as day, but the characters never comment on remark on it and the dialogue does nothing to emphasize Reylo or convey it to the audience, which is quite unusual for a blockbuster movie and for Star Wars specifically, whose dialogue has always been extremely on the nose. Imagine if they had kept the “you have compassion for her” line. Or if Han and Leia discussed Kylo bridal-carrying Rey off and Han said something like “he’s smitten by her, you know he is”, and Leia were like, “I know. I sensed it, like I sensed she’s special”. Or if Finn and Rey had a conversation post interrogation scene where Rey would describe, enraptured, the “electricity” that passed between them? It would have made Reylo instantly 200% clearer. Mainstream fiction normally uses third party characters to “explain” the romance to the audience, but TFA never does that. The characters---including Kylo and Rey themselves---are none the wiser about what’s happening between Rey and Kylo. Their interactions speak for themselves, but the explicit “text” of the movie doesn’t remark them, which makes the whole thing unusually subtle, for something that employs not-so-subtle tropes. It’s show don’t tell at its finest, applied to the first stages of a budding romance.
the audience sees what the audience expects to see. And nobody was expecting a heroine x villain dynamic, going into TFA. Nothing in the marketing and promotion had prepared the audience for it (probably on purpose). And I think people, when it comes to blockbuster fiction, rely a lot on the tl;dr provided by trailers and promotional material to form their ideas on movies. “It wasn’t in the trailer and it isn’t technically a plot twist, so it can’t be that important”. (and I don’t mean it in a condescending way---I didn’t “see” Reylo either upon my first viewing, and it was only a few days of tumblring later that I started processing what I saw and looking deeper into the narrative of a movie that, at first, felt okay and occasionally very entertaining but not terribly different from 90% of current fantasy blockbusters, tbh)
I think, at least on Tumblr and at least initially, TFA attracted a demographic that isn’t particularly primed to recognize & appreciate heroine x villain tropes when it sees them. And it was that demographic that dictated the initial tone of the fannish discourse around TFA, which inevitably shaped most people’s understanding of the movie.
and yes, what you said: american fiction isn’t particularly heroine x villain-friendly. There’s a disconnect between the tropes that are employed in Reylo---which are common in the romance genre, but rare in mainstream “masculine” fiction---and the kind of narrative that one reasonably expects Star Wars to be (as I said in that post I linked: "neither specifically female-centric nor romantic").
