Author: Sarah Dempster

Last February, Claudia Gray, author of Lost Stars and the imminent (and hotly anticipated) Bloodline, dropped a bomb into the Star Wars shipping community when she declared her affection for Reylo—in other words, the notion of a romance between Rey and Kylo Ren. While Reylo is a divisive prospect for a number of reasons, in particular the characters’ potential family ties and the overtones of sexual assault in Kylo’s mental torture of Rey in The Force Awakens, the reactions of many of her fans on social media was, well, staggering to me.

While likely a small number in the grand scheme of things, numerous people were appalled, declaring they no longer planned to purchase Bloodline, and even attacking Gray’s character. She spent the next day or so tweeting at length on the subject, responding generally and to several specific individuals, and to my mind, made a lot of great points both on Reylo and on shipping in general.

To be clear, I can’t get my head around Reylo myself. Nor am I particularly into Kylux ^[1]Kylo and Hux or Stormpilot ^[2]Finn and Poe (though Poe is one hundred percent not straight). But I have latched onto certain Star Wars couples over the years, both actual (Tycho and Winter) and prospective (Jacen and Danni Quee), and one thing I do know from experience is that you can’t always explain what appeals to you and why. Like Grey said, it’s complex stuff full of emotional baggage from real life—that’s why people can feel so strongly about it. But you certainly can’t draw a straight line from somebody’s ship to their real character or values; what’s therapeutic for one person can be triggering for someone else. Two people with similar backgrounds can have completely opposite reactions to, well, any story beat or overtone, romantic or otherwise. What I love the most about Star Wars is how one thing can attract such a huge amount of fans for so many varied reasons, and a ship is a microcosm of that—saying “Reylo fans condone abuse” is like saying Han Solo fans condone drug running. Read More

Mike: I’ll say this much: the Academy Awards are exciting. Much like the Super Bowl, undoubtedly the dominant yearly cultural event in modern American life, unless you make a conscious effort to tune them out entirely, it’s hard to simply have them on in the background and not get sucked in. They may not always be a good show, but they’re an exhaustively elaborate show, and like the live TV musicals that have recently become a holiday tradition, it’s fascinating to watch so many shiny and well-known moving pieces swirl around in an environment where pretty much anything can happen.

They’re so fascinating, and so elaborate, that it can be easy to lose sight of how little it really means. Popular art and culture are extremely important—we wouldn’t have written hundreds of thousands of words on this very site if we didn’t think so—and winning an Oscar certainly means a lot to any individual lucky enough to do so, but as this year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy highlighted, to win an Oscar is at best a narrowly-defined victory. And it’s certainly not an absolute guarantee of something’s value, any more than to lose one guarantees a lack thereof.

So amidst my own feverish live-tweeting Sunday night, it was disheartening to see a number of Star Wars fans—though, I speculate, a comfortable minority—express shock and even rage as The Force Awakens lost one, then another, and eventually all five of its nominated categories. Whatever you think of Mad Max: Fury Road or Ex Machina or The Hateful Eight, they’re each singular films with nothing near the weight of the Star Wars franchise behind them, and personally I can’t help but root for spunky underdogs. Read More