Wondering if you might share your interpretation of the line "welcome home". I hope you're well!
Certainly, and thanks for asking! I know other people have already articulated this more eloquently than I could, but to put a bit more of a personal spin on it, all the things implicit in “welcome home” basically summarize the main reason I ship this pairing so hard.
I’m a total sucker for pairings that pull one or both characters out of their comfort zone, so to speak. In other words, a character has an established pattern/belief/behavior/etc, but then they meet someone who completely turns that on its head, who makes them act differently or see the world differently than they did before. “I thought things were this way, but then you came along and you’re the exception.”
That’s essentially what happens with Jyn and especially with Cassian. Cassian is introduced as a hard-edged spy who will make the hard decisions and do whatever it takes to get the job done. He’s been in the Rebellion since childhood, so fighting and shutting out emotions is essentially all he’s ever known. Literally our first introduction to his character shows him murdering another member of the Alliance—one of his own men!—in order to make sure the information about the Death Star isn’t compromised.
And yet, he’s not heartless or dead inside, which would have been a really easy path to take with his character. Immediately after he shoots the other Alliance spy, you can see on his face that he hated having to do it. But he did it anyway, because he believed it was necessary. This is clearly a guy who will leave people behind when he needs to, even if he doesn’t want to.
But then Jyn comes along, and Cassian WILL NOT leave her. Even when he knows he should, even when he would have left anyone else. Jyn essentially exhausted her usefulness to the Alliance on Jedha once they were captured by Saw and his rebels. Her only purpose there was to get them in Saw’s front door; after that, it would have been much more efficient to just leave her there, even if the whole place hadn’t been in the process of being blown to smithereens by the Death Star.
Yet Cassian, entirely contrary to his established pattern of behavior, risks everything including his own life to go back for her. Then on Eadu, he does it again. The Alliance airstrike on the base had the potential to eliminate not only an Imperial weapons engineering facility itself, but also Galen Erso (prominent weapons designer,) and Krennic (weapons director). You’d think that would be a significant win for the Alliance, but Cassian freaks out and tries to call off the strike. And his reason isn’t “Galen Erso might actually be on our side” or “this will draw unwanted Imperial attention to the Alliance” or anything like that. It’s “Jyn’s on that platform.”
Then even after the Alliance hits the base anyway, and for all Cassian knows Jyn is already dead or about to be, he still runs headlong onto the platform to go get her anyway. And it’s not as though he’s abandoning logic and reasoning this entire time, either. In the novelization, even as he rushes toward the platform, he’s thinking, “even if we make it out of here, we’ll probably still be stuck on this planet because our ship is scrap.” But it doesn’t matter. Everything in him has to get to Jyn, regardless.
And then let’s not even get into the third time Cassian fights past everything to get to Jyn, after he’s been shot at least once and fallen like thirty feet and been knocked unconscious. He can’t even walk unsupported, but he somehow climbs up a huge vertical shaft with swinging trap-door things and gets there just in time to keep Jyn from being shot. Like at this point you’re expecting soaring, swelling violin music every time he so much as looks at her. What the heck won’t this guy do in order to get to Jyn?
So, all of that by itself would be enough to make my shippy heart melt, but that’s not even all. Because Cassian is Jyn’s exception, too. Her whole life has been marked by loss and by others not being there for her. People always leave her, one way or another—either through death or through being pressed into Imperial service or through flat-out abandonment. It’s no wonder she’s a little on the bitter, jaded side. She’s learned she has only herself to rely on, because other people aren’t going to come through for her. They’re going to leave her.
But then she meets Cassian, and he doesn’t leave her. Time after time, even when it would be in his better interests to leave her (and in the Rebellion’s better interests to leave her), he refuses to. They’re like two halves of the same coin, or like two pieces of a puzzle snapping together. She was the one who never had anyone to get close to because they all kept leaving her, and he was the one who kept himself locked up for the sake of the cause and wouldn’t let himself get close to anyone besides a reprogrammed Imperial droid. But then they crossed each other’s paths, and that all went out the window.
To me, that’s what “welcome home” means. For them, home isn’t a place, it’s each other. It’s them finally finding their exception.
Going into Rogue One, I thought, “this is going to be a gritty war movie showing the harder darker side of Star Wars, no romance or silly rolling around in the fields of Naboo or anything like that.” Well, it may have been a gritty war movie, but it was also basically the sappiest most wonderful romance I’ve ever seen.
