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Star Wars actor John Boyega had to get something out of his system. And that something was an impressive video editing footage to show him literally fighting back against — or sometimes just dancing off — responses to his controversial comments on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
You can’t say the criticism didn’t get to him, since he or someone close to him spent a lot of time carefully crafting the video to perfectly time each push or kick for the music. But still, if you’re going to respond to things, this is probably the best way, instead of engaging through replies, the way he did with some Rey and Kylo fans.
This all started when John Boyega made a raunchy joke about Rey that many fans found disrespectful. They pointed it out to him and he defended himself. He went further, taking shots at the Rey and Kylo romance and fighting with “Reylo” fans. That’s pretty much how he spent the end of 2019, fighting with fans on two fronts while others — with no horses in the Rey romance race — just laughed from the sidelines. (He also shot down a theory about what Finn wanted to tell Rey in Rise of Skywalker; this is supposedly the real answer.)
I thought maybe John Boyega had pulled a Taylor Swift to shake off the hate, but instead he was waiting to drop this little video on us. While the video is pretty awesome, I do hope this particular Star Wars war will end now, since there are no clear heroes or villains in the story.
Reylo fans aren’t doing anything wrong for liking Rey and Kylo together — and many of those fans are quite young and/or don’t have John Boyega’s influence or huge fan base as backup. Mocking “Reylos,” as so many Star Wars fans have done, certainly not just Boyega, is cheap and cruel. You’re better than that.
However, John Boyega also didn’t do anything wrong to point out the past violence between Rey and Kylo, and any fans who didn’t agree should’ve just ignored his posts or at least refrained from replying with their own insults and mockery. His “lays the pipe” joke about Rey wasn’t his most mature moment, but it was indeed just a joke, and being part of the Star Wars galaxy doesn’t mean he has to tone down his sense of humor on his own social media.
The infamously passionate Star Wars fandom is filled with big personalities and diverging opinions about every movie, and even every response to every movie. No one opinion is right — not even the opinion that of course Rise of Skywalker should’ve revealed more about how Palpatine survived, because WTF — and I know some fans are not going to think John Boyega’s video was awesome or impressive at all. That’s fine.