I don’t understand how it’s not some sort of flag to antis that a Lot of alt right internet trolls hate Kylo, which seems perplexing since according to antis he is supposedly a caricature of them and the narrative is asking us to sympathise with him like the total fools we are 🤔🤔🤔🤔
Antis hating Kylo/Reylo (and TLJ) exactly as much as MRA fans do is a perfect example of the horseshoe theory. I mean, of course, if you talked to antis, they’d tell you alt-rights are mad at Kylo because they don’t like their flaws to be reflected and magnified in a mocking way by a villain character who is also arguably a loser in the context of the narrative, but it’s much deeper than that. Fascist-leaning viewers are the least likely demographic to be fans of Kylo. Those groups tend to worship “pure” masculinity, which is NOT the type of masculinity embodied by Kylo (who is vulnerable, volatile, emotional, “whiny”, all features that, incidentally, tend to be associated with femininity). Being a sympathetic villain, Kylo will likely send them in a rage, because his whole existence blurs the line between good and evil, and makes the whole “us against them” rhetoric much harder to sell.
Kylo is also heavily, explicitly targeted towards female viewers and alt-right fans HATE it. He’s the polar opposite of a character who is supposed to make them feel good about themselves, and not merely because he’s depicted as “pathetic” (while Kylo is a tragic figure, the narrative never ridicules him, and his pain is treated very seriously): whenever he resorts to violence he ends up being miserable and is punished by the narrative; his efforts to imitate his *badass* grandfather so far are failing tragically, while he’s at his best and most successful when he allows his tenderness for a girl ten years his junior to quell his frothing rage towards his family and everything it represents.
