ST Were you disappointed that Rey and Finn's relationship never became anything romantic?

No, they did not become popular among “female fans.” Female fans here have told you multiple times that we did not like the ‘ship.

There were a couple of them. And the genders of people who posted there were as varying as the genders of people who post all over this site.

Again...stop mansplaining to us what became popular with us. You absolutely are stereotyping women. “Not all women but...” is still telling us what we like.

Systemic racism and how it played into Finn’s writing and promotion can definitely be pointed out, as well as his his portrayal which calls back bad stereotypes of Black characters.

Adam Driver is a good actor, but that does not mean his character was owed a romance with Rey, especially after all the marketing about the “first female Jedi protagonist” and “the Force is female” and then they turned her into another bad stereotype, this time of female characters. “Women are good, men are bad and need a good woman to fix them.” That stereotype.

 

Hey!

Just because you claim to not steretype doesn't mean it's not what you're doing. Knock it off.

 

Comic relief sidekick, works in sanitation.

There were many, many other directions they could go other than that one.

 

I think we are mostly on the same page as well.

 

TFA is a good overall treatment for Finn, all things considered, and I'd say that Boyega's positive feelings there reflect the actual substance of his role in that film.

It's the "what they didn't do with him in later films and material" part, and a few cases of stuff they *did* do in later material, that makes me think of "soft," unintentional racism - aka, white privilege. It's not a prejudice of malice or conscious thought, but it *is* still a product of damaging biases and ignorance. TLJ especially seems astoundingly disconnected from the character's experiences and story, and does seem to deliberately try and undercut him as a dramatic figure and make him more of a ceomdic supporting character (not sidekick, though... as Rey's more the sidekick of this film). That later comic that decided his flashback story needed to be about him as a janitor saving some animals, though? And the high probability that LFL ordered his TROs story cut down? And the way they seemed so nonchalant about marketing Kylo as the male lead instead?

It's not a racism of hate. It's a racism of apathy and forgetfulness. It's not the type of the lynch mob, or the deliberate sabotage of a superior officer to enforce a desired social strata. It's the type of racism that comes with token representation that never gets ambitious and seems designed for a limited mindset, or that thinks that things are fine just the way they are when an informed opinion would reveal that no, they aren't. It's the thing behind decades of almost exclusively white quarterbacks in the NFL long after the color barrier broke, not the color barrier itself.

It's not the idiot screaming about miscegenation, its the person who just forgot to think that maybe their daughter could date a guy who's black and just keeps thinking she's dating one of her white peers automatically, and has to be told to see what's happening in front of their eyes.

Like, Finn definitely got disregarded and disrespected in the other films and material in comparison to TFA, even though Boyega worked harder than many of his peers and it paid off astoundingly well. And even the decision to promote Kylo/Ben as the lead didn't require the degree of apathy and unambitiously banal wastes of time with Finn - and it feels like the kind of thing that wouldn't happen to Finn if, say, it was Adam Driver playing him instead of John Boyega.

And I do mean that; I feel like if Abrams had cast Kennedy's preferred actor in the male lead role he created of Finn from the original male lead rough draft, and cast someone else as the Jedi Killer half of the character (even with the tie to the Solos), we'd be talking about Rey and Finn as the story's romance, and not Rey and Kylo. A lot of that has to do with Driver being Kennedy's preferred leading man... but some of it would likely comes from certain people just having their mind automatically label a white guy as a romantic partner for Rey when their minds didn't for Boyega.

 

I don’t think she gave an order to screw over Finn’s character nor do I think Johnson or Abrams intentionally did so. I think they just did not pay attention or notice that that’s what was happening. Kennedy and Johnson were more concerned with Adam Driver and Kylo to notice that both Finn and Rey got saddled with bad stereotypes so that his character could be promoted.

 

The idea that TLJ is feminist is indeed absurd. If I did not know better I would think it intentionally mocked feminism.

 

Two of the ST mods already addressed this so I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up again.

That said—

Claiming something is “popular with female fans” is claiming to speak for female fans about what we like, making assumptions about—yes—all of us (or “maybe you don’t fit within my assumption therefore you don’t count as a female fan”), and—again, yes—stereotyping. Because that is what making assumptions about “what female fans like” is.

There is no reason why, in making the point the poster was trying to make, he could not have used “Reylo was brought in for people who like a specific type of romance.” There is no need whatsoever to bring gender of any fans into it—other than to make stereotypical comments about gender, which is what happened.

 

If I can try addressing the demographic arguments here for a bit...

...I’d say what data we do have would suggest that, at minimum, the attempt to use Reylo to draw in a larger and more profitable slice of the female population was a failure; that regardless of the exact nature of its draw to some fans (those already in the fanbase and those outside), it’s overall impact was, at best, negligible enough to fail to counteract the diminishing returns fo the rest of the ST, and at worst, that it actually depressed the female demographic’s creation of the films’ profits as the series went on.

And that some of that can be seen by comparing it in terms of style and tone to what people who thought Finn and Rey were being setup in TFA were looking at.

Star Wars is an Action-Adventure series; the sci-fi trappings, space opera tropes, and the varying degrees of fantasy it contains are all, ultimately, mere funnels through which the action and adventure is delivered. And Action-Adventure is one of the most successful genres of fiction: just about everyone likes it, and demographically, it actually doesn’t have much defined bias outside of that introduced by other elements (like the distinctly more male power fantasy elements that show up in some works vs others, like the James Bond franchise vs something like The Goonies.)

TFA’s possible suggestion of Finn and Rey is the type of romance that’s right at home in an Action-Adventure story; it’s two adventurers with a great rapport and complementary character arcs where the adventure is always the attraction - even in the romance department. The “fun” aspect is the main appeal of successful romances in the Indiana Jones films, Han and Leia in Star Wars, or stuff like Steve Trevor and Wonder Woman or Aang and Katara in The Last Airbender. Those kind of romances attract repeat customers... and merchandise hunters as well.

The reason Reylo didn’t attract the same degree of profitable customers is because the way it was presented - as a more soap-opera style angsty forbidden romance. Now, you can have an angsty forbidden romance and still have it fit an action and adventure story... provided the fun and adventure is still there as the main attraction, even in the angst (think Ciena and Thane from Star Wars: Lost Stars, where the very mortal peril of their conflict and the way it clashes with their feelings leads to action scenes and tense confrontations... even when they’re being peaceful with each other!)

What undermined Reylo, at its core, was the action and adventure element was almost just tacked on - the appeal was supposed to just be about the emotional drama in TLJ. And since TLJ sacrificed everything - including taste and imagination - to set-up it’s version of Proto-Reylo... it became a question of whether or not just the angsty emotional story (and mostly just for Kylo) was enough to keep people coming.

And evidently... It didn’t. At least, not enough to offset those it drove away or (arguably worse) bored.

 

Studios should not stereotype either.

On topic I think Rey and Finn had the potential for a dynamic like Kanan and Hera had, or a space fantasy version of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband (there was a recent article in Vogue about them), and that was wasted in favor of Rey losing IQ points.