The Force Finds Balance | a REYLO fan fiction

Author Afterword

MAY 2020

Opposites, poles, dyads, the masculine and feminine. These are some of my favorite archetypes to explore, and so it was that this fan fiction was a delight to write. I hope it was as much of a delight to read. Thank you for reading this to completion--your time and attention mean the world to me. I worked on this over a span of  2.5 years, and I did this all for you.

Although this writerly interlude was definitely an excuse to indulge in some steamy love scenes between star-crossed lovers, it has also been a personal expression of grief for the loss of our beloved "Space Mom," the late Carrie Fisher. She has always inspired me and made me laugh. As a writer and lover of her written work, it pains me that we no longer have her light on the planet. I wrote Leia's death in this fan fiction, and then over a year later, when the final installment of the sequels came out, I was not at all surprised that the official writers also chose to make Leia sacrifice herself for her prodigal son. I think that if Fisher was alive to shoot more scenes, Leia's send-off would have been more glorious in the films. As it stands, I will always imagine Leia went my way--in a grand, glorious blaze of love that no male Jedi could ever eclipse.

I want to offer a special thanks to my friend Heather, whose Reylo obsession inspired me to do this in the first place. She got me deeper into the sequels and eventually, this got me deeply interested in the works of Daisy Ridley and  Adam Driver. Attempting to crawl into Kylo Ren's head forced me to study Driver's acting choices in this series and many other films. I'm convinced that Kylo Ren and all three of the Star Wars sequels were carried by his acting. If a lesser actor would have attempted Kylo Ren--with all the shifts of motivation the studio put him through--it just couldn't have been pulled off. Ridley, too, held her own as his counterpart and she is equally good in other films she has done since Star Wars. I am grateful to have fallen down a hole with these great actors, and I encourage you to check out the movies they've been in; they're both great.

As for the many debates over alternate endings of these films, I decided to honor the official Disney cut of The Rise of Skywalker in this story. However, you may notice I didn't give up without a fight, as I made inferences to the Dyad being aware of alternate timelines and universes where they may have chosen to be if they weren't just characters in a high-budget franchise. And this suspicion of "something isn't right" also applied to what I was writing of them. (Sometimes I wonder if I am a character in a fan fiction...lol.)  As I concluded my research to finish this project, I developed a strong preference for the fabled "JJCut" in which Ben and Rey have a huge duel with Palpatine, Ben is redeemed, Ben survives, and he lives with Rey on Tattooine.  But as the novelist Michael Ende would write, "that is another story to be told another time"...and written by a different writer, because I'm off to work on my own projects now.

I welcome your comments, friends. Thanks again for reading and ranking this story, and may the force be with you.

Love, 

km Carter