LogFAQs > #932139857

There have been equally as problematic ships in the past, and there will be equally as problematic ships in the future. What matters is what the fans make of it.

I absolutely agree that Kylo Ren spent all his time playing mind games, and he intentionally and repeatedly tried to instill fear and hate in her while actively gaslighting her about her parents. It's a bad relationship, and it's messed up that people find that dynamic romantic.

But keep in mind that people shipped Zutara in Avatar: The Last Airbender well before Zuko started his redemption. That scene in Book One where Zuko is holding Katara hostage with the pirates, and dangling her family necklace in front of her to get her to betray the Avatar? I've heard people unironically call that scene romantic, because Zuko says "I'll save you from the pirates". It's not an out of the frying pan into the fire situation, it's romantic because Zuko said he'd save her.

I think the reason people ship characters like pre-redemption Zuko and Kylo Ren is because people like a bad boy. He's dark, he's brooding, he treats you like shit but there's something soft there that people want to coax out of them. That dynamic alone sums up Reylo, but it's the rough draft of a hundred different problematic ships. It's the pretense of thousands of fanfiction stories where angsty characters hit their SOs for cheap drama. This has existed for longer than Reylo, and it will exist long after.

The worst part about Reylo shippers is that since 2015, they've been emboldened by the flack they get. They've heard time and time again that they're evil and abusive for partaking in Reylo shipping, they've been called disgusting and incestuous because the common thought for years was that Rey is a Skywalker. They've been painted as abusers in the same way pre-redemption Zutara shippers were labelled abusers, and in the same way Kataang shippers from that same show were accused of normalising pedophilia because Aang was 12 and Katara was 14. Mind you, this discourse was happening when I myself was 12 years old, shipping those two characters. It's batshit insane, the degree that people subscribe to functional pairings and actively attack other people based on their ships.

Here's my take on Reylo, as someone who's engaged in similar disparaging rhetoric against a similar ship in the past. The people who are invested in it are most likely not neo-nazis, white supremacists or abusers - all labels that have been ascribed to Kylo Ren, and two of them ascribed to the First Order as a whole. They are likely indulging in misplaced fantasies of angsty boys treating someone like shit, because pain and suffering is deep and it's meaningful to inflict pain on others, and other stupid dogshit like that. These people are most likely teenagers who will snap out of it as they continue to grow up and regret being a part of the Reylo ship.

But they will not stop enjoying this ship because self-righteous people call for the death of it, because people cry out that it's warping the minds of its shippers. This is something they will grow out of 9/10 times, but you can't force that because they'll feel victimised, double down on it to "fuck the haters" and become more reactionary to defend themselves and their personal interests. Seriously - I've been there, I've seen it happen in other people. This is not new.

People didn't stop shipping Zutara because they were painted as abusers, they doubled down on the aspects they feel were justified and began attacking the self-righteous "haters" who tried to paint them as bad people for shipping it. The Twilight fanbase didn't stop liking Twilight because people characterised the central relationship as abusive, and characterised the young, teen girl demographic as vapid idiots who would grow up to let men slap them in the face because they committed the cardinal sin of enjoying Twilight over "better" or "healthier" literature - and I say this as one of the self-righteous shitheads who engaged in the Twilight hate mob. It's still dumb and gross in parts, but the people who enjoyed it growing up haven't been so crippled by one media franchise that they're actively seeking out men to batter them because that's what they think true love is. Frankly it's just an entertaining footnote now, and there's nothing wrong with liking something like Twilight for the sum of its parts.

Reylo is merely the next iteration of this fandom moral panic. It harkens back to 2015 where Reylo was slagged for romanticising a Nazi, romanticising abuse and engaging in incest - because Rey was clearly a Skywalker, it's so obvious that she's a Skywalker, that would make her and Ben cousins, how could you etc. It also harkens back to when people asserted that their headcanon about Rey being gay was clearly the case, and argued that Reylo was homophobic. Reylo copped a metric fuckton of flack for a bunch of bigger-picture stuff that ended up amounting to nothing, and now only one pillar of its backlash remains - that it's abusive.

Zutara was abusive. Bella and Edward was an abusive relationship. No-one gave a fuck, people built on the foundation of its better points and used it as a force for good. I thought it was stupid, and I also thought it would only embolden potential abusers and such, but people who stuck with Zutara and people who lived and breathed Twilight have come out the other side still breathing, and surprisingly they're not irrevocably warped to believe that emotional and physical pain are what true love is all about. Some people might be like this, statistically, but just as many people who stayed out of any "problematic" ships at probably affected by that problem.

Anti-SJW fanboys ruin fucking everything. Captain Marvel, Titans, Star Wars, Life Is Strange. Anti-SJW fanboys tried to define what was and wasn't a game during Gamergate, which excluded stuff like visual novels and choose-your-own-adventure style experiences. And they're adaptable - whatever the herd sniffs out this week will be the subject of widespread mocking and hate for "pandering to the ess-jay-double-yous", across anything deemed to be "nerd" media.

I'll agree any day of the week that shippers are some of the most overzealous, combative and unpleaseable people within a fanbase. But it's the backlash against ships like Reylo, the insistence that its practitioners are mentally ill and will only grow to hurt others or be hurt themselves that further embolden the people who like it. They'll work twice as hard to justify their love for it, and they won't get better until they grow out of it themselves - and since 2015, when Reylo shippers were hit the hardest by other Star Wars fans, that has happened. If they're overzealous now, you can probably blame the