silvermoonlight wrote:That not though why I hate the idea of Rey showing compassion to Kylo I hate it because its a forced love interest perspective like women in movies can not go with out a love interest its like they can't just be friends with guys and I'm not saying I hate romance I do enjoy it but in Hollywood its in almost all movies and its annoying as hell.
The Last Jedi also feeds in to abusive love trope that abusive assholes like Kylo just need love to fix them which I hate and its a very dangerous message to send. Its the 90's beauty and the beast cartoon all over again and young men and women need to stop being fed this toxic message period as it causes real issues in the outside world and male and female characters who act this way should be given zero reward and held accountable for there actions.
On the one hand: It's a movie written and directed by a man, so it's a man's presentation (possibly) of the Beauty and the Beast trope (Gendo'sPapa doesn't see any romantic connotation to those scenes, and that interpretation is perfectly valid) which can very easily slide into problematic territory.
On the other: Why do women need to be told this trope is toxic if it plays out in real life, or sheltered from it by excluding it from film?
Let's look at some male-centric tropes. My favorite example is James Bond: Dude lives the life, right? Adrenaline rushes, fast cars, wealth from nowhere, master gambler, the hottest women on earth constantly fall on his dick and disappear with no strings attached before their shit becomes tiresome, right? Yet it's also assumed that most men are aware that Bond is a broken man (especially the Craig version) who had and lost a reason to live and just absorbs all these compensatory pleasures (yeah I'm going to be a pretentious asshole and slip a Hemingway reference in there) without truly engaging in them, either. I'm sure everyone is confident that if asked, they would be confident that most guys would say yes, they want the fast cars, unearned luxury, and easy sex with beautiful women- but since being James Bond also entails getting whipped in the balls to the point of hospitalization, torture, nearly dying from poison, and all the other shit that's happened to him up to and including voodoo curses, no (sane, well adjusted) guy would actually want to be James Bond with all that entails given the opportunity.
In other words, guys are assumed to know the difference between reality and fantasy. A male viewer is assumed to know that it's fun to temporarily identify with Bond or John McClane or Batman or whoever but actually being that person would suck.
Even the parallel trope to Beauty and the Beast -the Manic Pixie Dream Girl- is assumed to be a pure fantasy that never works in the real world. Guys are taught early to "never stick your dick in crazy" i.e. don't even have a fling with a woman who'd be a comedic love interest in a movie. In the real world those types of partners steal your credit cards or stab you in your sleep or decide it would be great to let homeless people pee in your sink as a performance art installation or something.
Where am I going with this?
Feminist film is not made by men deciding women can't handle fantasy. I have the same issue with people criticizing, say, Fifty Shades of Grey for the same reason. It always seems to turn into a debate between men of what men think women can handle in their entertainment.
Also Rey pretty solidly rejected him in the movie so it's not like she went full Disney Princess and changed his heart or whatever. It's pretty clear that they're not going to get together unless it's purely in an emotional sense five minutes before he expires.
As janky as TLJ is, I'm about 90% certain that Johnson would not under any circumstances just play the beauty and the beast trope straight to the end and mush the characters together. Kylo Ren killed Han Solo. He's dead, sooner or later.
Which is what is going to happen, because that is what happened sort of in Return of the Jedi, and the next movie is being made by Abrams, who is constitutionally and spiritually incapable of making an original movie in a franchise series if there's a way he can take on that already exists and make it louder, dumber, bigger, and tentpoled by faux-nostalgic HEY REMEMBER THIS FROM THAT OTHER MOVIE? beats.
(KHAAAAAAAN! This callback totally makes up for us casting Bumblewhite Caucasianbund to play a character Rodenberry envisioned as Sikh-descended superman)
I think the intent behind their interactions in TLJ is that Rey and Ben Solo (had he never turned evil) and/or the part of Ben Solo that still exists could have an attraction to each other but don't because he's an evil self centered asshole. It's bush league greek tragedy plotting but it's still greek tragedy plotting; his hubris denies him true fulfillment yadda yadda.
Which, again, brings me back to an important point in this discussion:
If Rey was a dude and the vibe between Guy Rey (Ray?) and Kylo Ren was "in another life, we could have been as brothers" between two guys, no one would bat an eye. If it's "in another life, we could have been lovers" between a man and a woman -potentially, anyway- we have to get all up in arms about whether this is *appropriate* for girls to see. The men who make up the majority of critical discussion of these movies just flatly accept male-male character dynamics but feel a need to discuss a woman's attraction to a man like they have some stake in it. Curious, really.
Also, for the record, I was fangirling pretty hard when I saw the movie in theaters and felt legit disappointment when Kylo stayed evil, even when the basic structure of narrative storytelling dictates it doesn't happen at that juncture or at all.