#sw worry

[kylos]

taylor! im worried- have you seen the gifset going around of daisy ridley being interviewed at swc where she said she doesnt support reylo bc it's abusive ?? i've tried reading her lips and i cannot tell if it's subbed correctly or accurate. but its got thousands of notes which is lowkey freaking me out. did she really say that?

(2/2) ok sis its the same anon: i found the original interview ( youtube. com/ watch?v=TNoQS_wkzf4 ) and daisy literally didn’t say any of that which makes me even more upset because antis spread a fake gifset with tens of thousands of notes :( but she p much implied there’s gonna be a lot of it in the movie so who’s the real winner lmao

i wouldn’t worry at all anon! but ugh not surprising that antis are spreading around misinformation. the key part is that daisy said she “can’t get behind it now” (because kylo’s not redeemed yet). and then she said something about kylo’s possible redemption unprompted. so like, no big deal. these are all things we’ve heard from her before.

from now until december there’s gonna be a lot of back and forth, interviews seeming to support reylo and vice versa, and i say this as an OG reylo—take it all with a grain of salt. the actors are told to be cryptic on purpose and BESIDES, actor opinions literally don’t matter. even if daisy comes out tomorrow saying she doesn’t like reylo at all, whatever. like what you like. and her opinion hasn’t and isn’t going to change anything in the story either. actors are not in charge of storytelling. i mean, mark freaking hamill was notoriously vocal about how he hated the direction his character was going in tlj, and STILL, LF/Disney went along that story for luke anyway.

take a deep breath anon. we’re good. rewatch tfa/tlj, like the proof is all there. the odds are (and have always been) heavily in our favor. no contest. antis are scared and they’re grasping at straws like they always have. and no matter how many thousands of notes anti posts get on here, these sad, toxic people make up like .0005% of star wars fans. it’s just very in our face because they’re loud, disgruntled, and things aren’t going their way.

[benperorsolo]

I feel like a lot of the "good" redemption arcs people set up as examples for all others happen in TV shows (ATLA, GOT, etc) or in longer movie series, where the audience gets to see every step of the journey. There isn't time for that in SW, and not that it makes Bendemption any less valid (it's valid af) but i worry people won't accept it because it will happen relatively quick compared to what audiences have gotten used to. Does that make sense?

The answer is: who cares. You’re worrying about the wrong people, and it’s a fruitless endeavor. Vader was redeemed in basically one movie, in functionally five minutes of collective screentime, and his redemption arc has been canon for 40 years. That’s How Star Wars Is and how it works as advertised. And Ben’s redemption, which has been going on for two films and will culminate in three, has been given infinitely more complexity and development than Anakin’s-- Ben’s filmic redemption is an arc, whereas Anakin’s was a moment. 

The general audience is not the monster you think they are– most GA people will accept anything as long as they feel it’s written well. Ben and Rey’s relationship happened in a handful of scenes in TLJ, and that didn’t make it any less canonical or valid or noticed by the GA or reviewers who promptly wrote about how they looked like they wanted to bang in the elevator scene. The nature of a movie’s limited screentime applies to all aspects of its plot. That’s how movies work and how they are different than TV shows. That’s not Ben’s redemption’s problem. It’s not a problem at all; it’s a fact of the medium. One that has not been an issue in the past and won’t be in the future. 

The people who hate Ben will hate him regardless of what happens on screen. That was never actually their issue.

[benperorsolo]

I saw this anti take the other day (blog is mon/arda/mmm if you want to block), and that's how I realized that some people actually have no grasp on SW' themes but still feel like authorities on it: "But then I remember how much of the Star Wars audience thinks Kylo Ren can and should be fully redeemed in Episode 9, a fucking, unrepentant space Nazi who doesn’t even have a discernable sense of humor or a marked degree of physical attractiveness to recommend him. And then I kind of despair."

Star Wars is not for this person and they should quit as soon as possible.

[benperorsolo]

I’ve done mandatory military service in my country and I still feel more anxious when a new Whatever-gate explodes in the SW fandom than I did at any point during my service. I have a blacklist 50+ words deep and I follow very specific blogs who I know won’t emptily buy into negative or positive hype, but sometimes it still hits me and I have to log off for a while to avoid the Discourse

Ughhhh, it’s so fucked up. Fandom is supposed to be fun, what happened!

And although I’ve never done anything as serious as the military, I feel the same. There is nothing that has given me as much stress as the sw fandom. Those times when I’d been unable to access the internet and therefore had a break from tumblr were ones were I could really notice exactly the sort of stress the fandom sort of imbued into my daily life. I wasn’t joking when I said I’ve literally had to take a break and read In Cold Blood to calm down from fandom, like reading Truman Capote is less stressful than a space fairytale about hope and redemption. I was less stressed living abroad, without access to tumblr, than living in my home with access. And yet like a big dumbass I always come back. (But as a jaded fandom grandma.)

Please take care of yourself!!

[benperorsolo]

I hope you can take some time to relax and take a break from this fandom when you need to. This space shouldn’t be exhausting or stress-inducing, and it’s awful that the SW fandom has made you feel this way. Please know you’re appreciated, your meta, your humor and just your presence in and of itself, but your well-being always, always comes first.

Awww, thank you guys <3 

[benperorsolo]

“I’m so tired of people in fandom calling everyone downers” in an optimist’s inbox unsolicited just screams “I’m so tired that you aren’t being pessimistic about this ending the way I am”

Also, it's Star Wars. This optimism versus pessimism thing is not about how you are as a person, it's about genre awareness. I'm not reading No Country For Old Men expecting an Ewok party. And I'm not watching Star Wars expecting a soliloquy on the ultimately uncaring nature of existence. This is a basic feature of interpreting a text.

What I'm tired of is people acting like pessimism is somehow more intellectual than optimism. Not only is it not, but you are actually wilfully misinterpreting Star Wars and its core themes if you insist it's cynical. You are actually failing to read this story in a manner that remotely holds up to the text. And that sounds like a personal problem. And certainly not one it is my or Rachel's or anyone's problem to hear in our inbox unsolicited every day, especially under the guise of us somehow shaming people for their pessimism when it's the pessimists who flood our inboxes and then make us talk them down or just plain drain us with the emotional labor of unasked for negativity.

[benperorsolo]

I don’t think there are many things about the “pure” parts of SW fandom that are admirable, they’re pretty bad spaces from the harassment to the gatekeeping and gaslighting, but one pointer Reylos could pick up from the F/R, D/R and R/Sky fandoms is self-confidence. So far, every SW source has bluntly characterized F/P/R as friends, LF has been rolling its eyes at Rey-parentage questions since 2016, yet the fandoms’ assurance that TROS will be their perfect HC movie hasn’t decreased one bit.

If there’s one thing three years being in the sw fandom has taught me, it’s that there is nothing as dumb as the SW fandom. 

[artistichopes]

Daisy even spoke about Kylo killing Snoke as a gray morality thing though because it was killing another person, like she talked about how Kylo’s intentions of saving Rey were good but the action of murder was bad, so I just think she’s got a lot of strong morality opinions even in the context of Star Wars. Like even Rey kills people in the ST, no ones hands are technically clean, and she’s allowed to not like Kylo or Reylo if those kinds of characters and dynamics aren’t her thing

yeah you’re right. maybe she should read some metas lmao. 

anyway this whole thing got me very pensive and wary but i’ll be fine. 

we’ll have bendemption so.