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terriblepersongreatseamonster · 6 months

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I’ll be honest, when Kylo first meets Rey the whole thing from him knocking her out to her waking up restrained and having their first face-to-face interaction has always felt a bit rapey to me. I think it’s one of the big reasons I’ve been staunchly anti-Reylo for so long. However, having now fallen to the Reylo side and rewatched the movies from that perspective, I have a different take on that first meeting and their subsequent interactions.

First, before I dive into everything, I want to address the age gap. I wish Rey hadn’t been 19 when they met. It just makes the whole ten-year age gap a little hard to stomach (even though it is a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, and Ben has the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old). I wish she’d been a little older, or that the gap hadn’t been so huge if they were going to insist she be 19. Plus, how does that whole sharing-a-soul thing work? Did Ben have a complete soul for the first decade of his life, and then as soon as Rey popped into existence his soul ripped in half and yeeted itself across the galaxy to find her? (There’s probably an actual official answer to this particular question, but I haven’t really looked into it yet.)

Okay, let’s go back to Ben. This was the son of Han and Leia, and they are two of the biggest deals in the New Republic. They love Ben, but they don’t have a lot of time to be parents. Anyone who’s had parents who were in leadership positions knows how much time is sacrificed to be available to others. Ben spent the beginning of his life sharing his parents with the entire galaxy. Plus, roughly around the time he came to be, Leia was off training to be a Jedi. I’m not sure if she was still training after he was born, but from everything I’ve found, she quit her training sometime around then. The woman might be a badass, but there are only so many hours in a day and so many places she can be at once.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ben was raised to have manners. He’s the kid of leaders, he was probably in etiquette lessons before he could fully form sentences.

I have no doubt that Ben witnessed his parents showing each other physical affection, but who knows how often that happened. I wouldn’t be surprised if Han and Leia spent more time apart than together because of their roles in the New Republic. On top of that, I’ve always felt that there was a layer of slight aggressiveness to their relationship. It’s not bad, but it could be very confusing to a little kid. This is what Ben spends the first decade of his life observing.

Then, right as he reaches the age of ten, he gets sent off to hang out with his bachelor uncle to learn to be a Jedi. I know that in the now non-canon material, Luke was married, but in the current canon, it seems that his marriage exists only in his dreams. Given the Jedi issues with love and attachments, I sincerely doubt that Ben and his fellow padawans were given any kind of sex ed or instruction on how to treat someone they might be attracted to.

So, Ben becomes Kylo, and while there are women who work with him, none of them are his soulmate. He has zero dating experience and he only has his memories of his parents’ relationship to give him any idea of how to treat his soulmate. I think he knew from very early on that the other half of his soul was out there, somewhere in the galaxy.

By the time we reach The Force Awakens, Kylo is 29, and barely holding it together. Ben is still in there, fighting hard to break free. When he reaches Takodana in the search for the map, I would not be surprised if he sensed the missing piece of his soul and that’s how he found Rey so easily. He was literally drawn to her like a magnet.

When she starts shooting at him, he flicks away the blaster bolts. He could easily have bounced them right back at her causing wound or death, or even stopped the blasts as soon as they started (much like how he did with Poe at the beginning of the movie). He takes a surprisingly long time to actually put a stop to it. And you get this sense that he’s trying to figure out what to do with her. He observes her and even paces around her frozen form. The guy is huge and intimidating, it would be enough to terrify anyone. And Rey is already on edge from what happened at Maz’s castle.

When Kylo knocks her out, he doesn’t just let her collapse onto the ground. He’s right there catching her as she falls and then he sweeps her up in his arms, rather than having his underlings take over. If he’d thought she was just some random girl, this action wouldn’t make sense. I think, at that moment, he wanted to be as physically close to his missing piece as possible.

She comes to, restrained in this terrifyingly unfamiliar place, and the big bad of the galaxy is watching her. He’s not touching her, he’s not even that close, but he is there and he’s still observing. Still trying to figure her out. As soon as she makes the comment about the mask, he pulls it off and they’re finally face-to-face. When you watch, there is almost a subtle Gollum/Smeagol type fight going on inside him. Ben is there, fighting against Kylo, and you end up with a very tense scene.

Kylo doesn’t make a great choice using the words, “I can take whatever I want” and then immediately probing her mind. Yes, this is non-consensual and scary. But as soon as she tells him to get out of her mind, I think Ben takes over briefly because he doesn’t even question, just obeys. He’s trying so hard to get a read on her. And then the Kylo part of him takes over and tries so hard to pull the information from her.

There’s an episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor is reading Madame de Pompadour’s mind, and she starts reading his. He’s shocked by this and she tells him, “A door once opened may be stepped through in either direction.” This is exactly what happens between Rey & Ben/Kylo.

Also, I just want to point out that there is a big difference between Poe and Rey’s interrogations. Kylo is aggressive and angry with Poe, but he’s much more restrained with Rey. In fact, by the time their interaction ends, he’s absolutely shaken by how Rey has responded, and you can see the fear in his eyes as he realizes he’s experiencing something completely new. Rey can read him almost easier than he can read her.

Throughout the rest of the movie, their interactions are intense. Kylo throws her against a tree. And then he fights with Finn. He screams and rages against the other man, He beats Finn, and tries to take the lightsaber, but the saber flies past him and into Rey’s hands. Ben almost manages to surface. The rage is gone, and you can see how intrigued he is by this new development. The way he looks at her is a complete shift from the way he looked at Finn. Their lightsaber duel is not nearly as brutal as it should be considering the fact that he’s far more experienced with the blade. He could use his powers to disarm her, could break her, and he doesn’t. He fights with her, and it’s like he’s trying to get a read on just how skilled she really is. He even tries to convince her to let him teach her. That’s not something you say to someone you hate or want to kill. When she wounds him, he just keeps getting back up until the earth splits and physically separates them from each other.

He lets her go. As wounded as he is, he’s still a very strong force user, and I think it’s very possible he could’ve pulled her back, could’ve dropped her in the chasm. He could’ve ended things right there and then, but he doesn’t.

From the first time he and Rey lock eyes on each other, he never looks at her like he looks at anyone else. The anger, the hatred, all of it isn’t there when he looks at her. There’s fascination, annoyance, frustration, and by the time we get into Last Jedi there are the beginnings of love in his gaze. She’s his missing piece. His soul is complete when he’s interacting with her.

Kylo is barely there at all when he interacts with her. Their first soul bond, he tries to order her to bring him Skywalker, but you can tell the order is half-hearted at best, and he immediately drops his hand and you see the shame in his face. I suspect he’s been beating himself up about how he interrogated her, and realizes he was just about to pull the same shit again.

Ben can’t fully break free, but he’s still there. When he slips the glove off and they touch, that’s all Ben. Kylo isn’t there at all. (And then Luke had to break in and ruin a perfect moment.) He never denies her accusations that he’s a monster, and even sits quietly and listens when she pours out the whole story about what happened in the cavern. His actions and behaviors with her are the closest we get to see Ben Solo for the majority of the trilogy.

At his heart, Ben wants to be the kind of man he knows Rey deserves and I really do think you see him making a genuine effort to become that, even if the road to get there is rocky. They share a soul, and I think it’s tearing both of them apart for the majority of the trilogy because they can’t seem to figure out how to get on the same page.

I think Kylo/Ben was wrong for how he behaved at the beginning, and I'm not trying to make excuses for him. However, I do think he genuinely regretted his behavior and tried to be better.

#Reylo #Kylo Ren #Ben Solo #Rey #Star Wars #The Force Awakens #Last Jedi

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