THEY ARE HEARING US. This right here is why we must stay strong and fight for Ben Solo.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker had raised the hopes of Reylos, fans who longed for Rey and Kylo Ren to end up together in the end, healing the wound inflicted on the galaxy two generations earlier by Emperor Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker. The marketing certainly hinted at such and, at least for less-invested viewers, the film delivered on its promise of romance: Reylo (and Bendemption) did occur, and Rey and the redeemed Ben Solo shared a passionate kiss, which is why it may be so perplexing for the general audience that Reylos hated the ending. Two weeks after the release, they're still mourning on social media, and demanding for Disney to #RealeaseTheJJCut, a reference to an edit that would have delivered the conclusion they wanted, and purportedly what director J.J. Abrams intended. So, what happened, exactly?
While romance is certainly not a new concept to Star Wars, it was never depicted from the perspective of a woman. However, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi made moves to remedy that: The camera stays with Rey when she interacts with Kylo; the lighting, music and the chemistry between the actors drew in many women. The trope being trapped was "enemies to lovers," a classic of romance literature. In The Force Awakens, Kylo is infatuated with a "lowly scavenger," despite himself and his training. In The Last Jedi, the two characters establish a connection that goes deeper than their pasts, ripe with wedding imagery from around the world, before separating again.
The comparisons with the doomed romance of Anakin and Padmé popped up. If the tragic lovers of the prequel trilogy married in the second movie and died in the third, surely the sequel would turn it around, allowing the last descendant of Anakin Skywalker to fix what he had broken and to triumph where he had failed.
It's easy for a certain segment of the audience to dismiss the power of romance, but it remains most lucrative literary genre in the world. Romance writers master the art of the promise and the delivery, which is a happy ending for the main couple. There are tragic romantic novels in which one or both of the lovers die, but that's not what Disney was promising with Episode IX. From that perspective, The Rise of Skywalker punishes the male lead by killing him the moment he chooses to save the love of his life. Abrams and his co-writer Chris Terrio were going for a parallel with Return of the Jedi, but that movie was never promoted as having romance at its core, and Darth Vader didn't have his entire life in front of him.
The Rise of Skywalker then goes out of its way to show how little Rey really cared for Ben, to the point where, after watching the final scenes, it's difficult to assess what impact he had in the plot. The film also does that to Hux and Rose, but in the case of Ben Solo it's particularly egregious because he's the last of the Skywalker bloodline. If they were going for Return of the Jedi parallels, they could have included either a funeral or a Force ghost, but the audience is denied that, which is a strange and cruel narrative choice.
Even worse, the ending broke the promise made in the promotional material. Yes, there was a kiss, but it's swiftly punished: The heroine ends up alone in a barren planet; the Byronic hero is never mentioned again. The other side of fandom might argue that Star Wars should have never catered to romance, but they would be the first to complain if a film advertised like Fast & Furious turned out to be a family comedy; false advertising elicits the same kinds of reactions in everyone.
Ben Solo's death, isolated from the romance, is also problematic because he was coded as a conflicted, groomed, abused, abandoned and brainwashed child soldier fighting to break from his programming. The ancillary material supports this, and in Marvel's The Rise of Kylo Ren, it's shown he never attempted to kill Luke Skywalker, he didn't burn the Jedi temple, and he didn't attack his fellow students. It was a set-up designed to turn his family against him and place him within the First Order. Han, Leia and Rey work for two entire movies to try and bring him back. By killing every single character that even attempts to turn around, the film confirms their worst fear -- that the only way out is death.
There'ss another horrifying message lurking in The Rise of Skywalker, however, if you are coming to the film from this perspective: that your family will disown you and forget you the moment you misbehave, replacing you with a "good child." That's exactly what happens to Kylo Ren; despite his efforts to come back as Ben Solo, neither Luke nor Leia nor Anakin help him. Ben has to imagine a conversation with his father to move forward, and in the end, his mother and his uncle replace him with Rey, who becomes their "found child" and assumes the Skywalker name.
But Kylo was filling a different role too -- the monster boyfriend, whose most famous example is Beauty and the Beast. While the original purpose of tales like Beauty and the Beast was to prepare girls for marriages in which they would be under the authority of their (potentially monstrous) husband, the tale evolved, and the monster became a focus for those that society had misunderstood or repressed. It's the grown-up version of little children, who feel powerless most of the time, preferring the Hulk over any other superhero, only with romance, darkness and danger thrown in; it's a way to explore a problematic aspect of reality through fiction. Unfortunately, instead of allowing fiction to play its role for women, the monster boyfriend trope is incredibly policed ("it's toxic!"), a criticism that doesn't extend to monster girlfriends (see Mara Jade's murderous origins and her eventual marriage to Luke Skywalker in Legends).
Many women in Star Wars fandom identified with Kylo Ren for those reasons, and the more the character was attacked on social media ("he killed his father!" "he's ugly, unworthy of being a hero!"), and the more stories about what really happened to him were published, the more affection he drew.
And while we are talking about ancillary material, The Rise of Skywalker contradicts almost every single narrative thread about Kylo published to date, which were hinting at redemption as far back as 2017. Most Reylos engaged with that material wholeheartedly. Despite the amazing talent involved in its creation, those fans view the ending of Episode IX as a slap in the face, and many women feel like they have wasted their time buying into a franchise that ultimately never cared about fulfilling its own promises about happy endings, telling a complete story, or even offering hope and compassion to the characters that needed it the most.
However, all of that might have been better received had the film been generous with the heroine, the first woman to be the primary protagonist in the Skywalker Saga. For two and a half movies, it even looked to be a story in the fairy-tale tradition, with a poor orphan discovering her inner power, defeating an unspeakable evil, forging friendships and, ultimately, finding the love of her life and becoming the leader of her people.
Instead, The Rise of Skywalker leaves Rey effectively where she started, on desert planet, taking with her someone else's droid and someone else's name. She doesn't grow, and she doesn't even confront or integrate her inner darkness. Rey, who had been wonderfully feral up to that point, becomes a creepy Stepford smiler.
That, in a nutshell, is why Reylos are angry, despite getting their space kiss. For many, The Rise of Skywalker felt like a bad punchline after a long con from Disney, and Star Wars has the bitter taste of a franchise that accidentally tapped into women's interests but had little interest in them as intelligent viewers engaging with the material.
