Random question but I've been thinking about this & wanted to ask someyhing from one rayllum fan to another. Do you think rayllum will stay Canon to the end? Because with rayllum happening early in the series along with 4 potential seasons left on the way, anything is possible & honestly I'm worried the ship will not last because anything could change. Any thoughts?

i wrote this post after s2 and a lil over a year plus ago but it still holds up and with s3 making rayllum canon, we have new info and stuff to go over. so i guess here are the five main reasons why i’m not worried about rayllum breaking up?

1) like the post said, it is narratively harder for rayla and callum to want to be a couple / spend their lives together and forces them to confront obstacles they just wouldn’t in friendship. if they went back to being friends, it would presumably mean that rayla lives in xadia and callum lives in katolis, and take away from that representation of elf-humanity in the new/younger generation that’s distinct from say, ezran’s relationship with rayla that is rooted in friendship, or janai and amaya’s romance that handles that theme in the ‘older’ generation.

2) established rayllum in s3 of getting to see them actually be a couple seems very purposeful to me, particularly in light of there being a timeskip between s3 and s4. what i, and many fans, were expecting was for rayllum to become canon sometime within the last two episodes of the season, or even in their last scene together of the season, not halfway through. the fact that we saw so many milestones besides their first kiss - making important decisions together, casual affection, their first “i love you” - the latter of which could have been a milestone after a timeskip of one year makes me think their relationship will continue to deepen. to like, an engagement plotline, if the timeskip is three years.

3) on that note, the international dubs for TDP, for Japanese and Latin / Spanish has Callum using the form of “I love you” that you say to your soulmate and the type of “I love you” (“te amo”) that you use as like, a promise of forever, respectively. [sourced here]

4) the cast/crew has gone on record saying that rayllum wasn’t planned from the start and it was conceptualized as more of a romantic bond during the storyboarding process of 2x04 with the lightning strike. whether amendments were made to help with this new route in s1, or whether the relationship was conceived before or after they realized ezran would turn back to go rule at the end of s2 is unknown. however, i do think that ezran going home to xadia opened the floor simultaneously for a strong rayllum romance in s3, as both were technically unplanned. these were all changes the story made early on, though - not semi mid production.

there is also how the cast and crew talk about rayllum now. tdp’s composer has called rayla “the love of [callum’s] life.” two writers for the show, including tdp’s head writer, devon giehl, have stated that callum would try to emulate how he saw his stepfather treat his mother in his relationship with rayla, and a possible date they would have in the “years post-dragon prince season three.” [sourced here]

i’m not saying, of course, that the story couldn’t change the original plans of s4 onwards to accommodate a rayllum breakup; the (far more likely) alternative is that plans s4 onwards have made room for their relationship, as a romance and a bond, to continue to grow (like a possible engagement plotline, for example). but everything thus far from official videos to interviews has indicated these two kids are going to be together for a long, long time, if not for life.

5) he jumped off a mountain for her.

so yeah, i am not worried, at all.