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Allusions to spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker though I have not actually seen the movie.

So over the past couple of days I have been having a lot of trouble sleeping at correct hours, which sucks because prior to the past week I had been doing alright given the jetlag. It's almost like I get reverse-jetlag actually. I start work on Monday and it is almost 4:00 A.M. but here I am?

I have been spending a lot of time watching commentary youtube stuff, particularly Jenny Nicholson, whom I had heard of before but hadn't yet watched. Even though there are a few glaring instances where I disagree with her about something, I just so much relate to her approach to commentary and the way she interacts with the whole concept of fandom. A lot of her content is about Star Wars, and while it really hasn't been my "main fandom" since just before I discovered Doctor Who, I was really invested in The Last Jedi (and reylo, but just it as a movie).

I still haven't seen The Rise of Skywalker, and I have pretty much resigned myself to either not seeing it at all in theaters or waiting until all the fuss as slowed to a trickle or it ends up at the second-run theater. And it sucks a lot, because in the week prior to the week of release, it was something I was looking forward to. And then the shit hit the fan.

I'm learning more and more that just staying off twitter is actually better for my mental health, but because it is an access to a lot of material that just doesn't end up on websites like this one, and a lot of my friends refuse to jump ship to something like this, I always end up going back. At least for a time it felt "safer" than tumblr, but it seems like a lot of the infection that overtook tumblr discourse just took a while to make it to the microblogging medium.

I usually don't avoid spoilers very judiciously because, in general, I don't really feel disappointed by being spoiled. It doesn't detract from the experience for me, and if anything being aware of unfortunate things beforehand helps me to rationalize my way through them or at least brace myself before I watch something. They're content warnings of a sort. But on the day of the premiere before the wide release date, just after I had returned from Japan, I remember seeing the reylo folks I follow over on twitter almost immediately start posting unmarked spoilers or alluding to them very heavily at least. And that seems kind of rude, and I don't know if I missed a warning from them, but that's neither here nor there. Even if I had wished to avoid spoilers, I certainly didn't know that I needed to do it before Thursday of that week.

And every reylo person I followed seemed to just drag themselves in, absolutely exhausted.

And it isn't just the way the reylo "arc" basically terminated, became canon, and didn't matter in TROS all at once. It is a lot of other things, too.

And I basically began belatedly to try to just keep myself away from spoiler sources, but everywhere I went there was just no consideration to even warn for them, and so I just gave up. And honestly, it was less the spoilers themselves that bothered me than the fact that every single person I saw who was having an emotional reaction was having a negative one.

There were two notable exceptions. I know that one person on my reading page here was pleased with it, and one of my friends I text with loved it. And the latter said that she could see why some people would have an issue with it but that she felt like that some reylos in particular might have had unrealistic expectations and she would take what she got. But almost everyone seems let down, whether they were into reylo or finnpoe or something else or no ship at all.

And this whole video I am about to share by Jenny Nicholson manages to be funny while succinctly explaining a lot of what is wrong with the movie. There are like 20 things on her list, and yet I had somehow managed to become aware of all of them before deciding to just settle in for the right.

I felt the need to talk about my own emotional malaise that has come from having my expectations and hopes dashed before I was even able to go to see the film myself, even had I gone on opening night which I had elected not to do, and also to bring it back to something Jenny says in her video.

She says something to the effect that any franchise ending can have a lot riding on it but that one of the worst things that can happen is that the culmination of everything causes the audience to feel embarrassed or regretful about the fact that they were even looking forward to it in the first place. And that is a sense that I am getting from everyone's responses. I'm not even getting into the fact that it seems just soul-crushing to watch the cast get upset about the way they were treated both by the fans and by bad or at the very least inconsistent writing decisions. No one is happy or satisfied except those who manage to Pollyanna their way through scraps, though I am obviously making a generalization. Everyone got a lot of answers to questions and a few things they wanted but with no emotional payoff and not enough of anything anyone wanted.

There was talk of hope at the end of the last movie, and I feel like most people's hopes were just kind of burned out. It is a downer ending that seems to invalidate the momentum of the sequel trilogy and to reach its hands into the original trilogy and even the prequel trilogy to sort of snuff out any candle anyone held for those things mattering, too.

From all reports, it does seem like Jenny is right in her assessment that J.J. Abrams had an opinion about what he wanted Episode 8 to look like, but then he didn't do Episode 8. And when he came back to do Episode 9, it was like he decided to barely glance at what had been done in Episode 8 and discard anything that he wouldn't have done himself including the entirety of Rose's character. He just decided he would jam whatever he wanted to do with 8 into the front-end of 9 and then somehow manage to pretend he was writing the culmination to the story that was already there.

Watch on YouTube

Anyway this video amused me and spoke to some of my deep frustrations with what happened before my eyes without my dragging myself to the theater to participate in a "cultural moment" that basically just seemed to be filled with rage and disappointment.

In the past, I always thought identifying as "a reylo" was weird. I don't know when it entered fandom parlance to describe oneself as the ship name of the ship you like. But the Rise of Anti Culture surrounding reylo itself makes me feel like I kind of understand why one would start to identify as a reylo out of a sense of solidarity.

Sometime after TLJ came out, I was dipping my toes into reylo content on tumblr. At the time, I was blissfully unaware of just how deep the rabbit hole went with how dismissive and outright cruel the Anti Reylos could be. I started to write a reylo fic that I actually had an outline for at the time (which is a rarity for me). But then I posted one chapter and never updated it, I think even though I had actually written more, because it failed to get even a single comment on AO3. (Link to the listing because I don't want to ever click on that smug little fic again.)

That in itself would be discouraging, but there is the fact that to this very day the very top result for reylo fic, sorted by kudos, is a twelve word troll fic that is intended to basically Rick Roll reylos into feeling bad about shipping their ship. And it has the top in terms of hits and kudos by such a large margin that it will probably always be there, ironic, cruel smiley face and all. And the fact is that the rise of the Anti movement such as it is was stoked very much from this very specific ship and the negative response to the very idea that people liked it and that, because some people liked it, it might become canon.

Well guess what? It did, but now NONE of us are actually satisfied.

A part of me is tempted, despite being spoiled to the point of absolutely no return, to hold off even more deliberately on seeing TROS and to just go back and try to dig that little fic I was trying to do more than a year ago now and see what I come up with. But it's just so disheartening to look at that freaking twelve-word juggernaut and to have it feel like my efforts are for nothing. I have been having a hard time writing anything at all lately. I haven't written a word since coming home from Japan, even though one of the main reasons I was looking forward to coming home was the notion of having time and enough sleep to write again. I'm just sad, and I really don't know how to help myself make it better.