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Re: Sleemo’s excellent tweet about Rey’s trauma, The Trail Bride was like my big, sloppy, complicated tribute to scrappy Jakku survivalist Rey. In earlier chapters, this was treated as set-dressing to a romance. Which TTB was. But when I didn’t drop that from Rey’s character—
—there was a weird tension with some readers because I had set up the “marriage of convenience” and then not forced it. Rey being too stubborn and proud to accept the handout. The word that always kills me is “nicer” when applied to Rey, or more specifically, why isn’t she.
Especially in TTB where she’s already considered odd in her time because of how trauma shaped her, which isn’t my invention for Rey. Men in the story are telling her she’d do better to smile more and be more grateful and then...uh...women in comments did the same thing.
Ben doesn’t succeed because he’s nice to her (he’s also not nice because he’s a liar who wants a horse and this goes unremarked upon) but because he recognizes her trauma from his empathy towards the most kindred being in her life, who experienced violence from the same person.
The convenience of the marriage is her hand is forced to a situation that will last the rest of her life in the perilous situation she currently is in. Everything has to be taken from her until she accepted help from someone she actually started to like.
Blah blah blah and then love but let’s talk about AFTER that:
Sending Rey to Phasma’s was an important decision for me because it was essentially sending Rey to college. She had no time to live with herself after all this grief, and now she’s stuck with her own perception.
Sending Rey to Phasma’s was an important decision for me because it was essentially sending Rey to college. She had no time to live with herself after all this grief, and now she’s stuck with her own perception.
Ben wasn’t her first experience of stability: Phasma was. It was routine and community and access to new ideas. And perception, sometimes unforgiving perception, from others of herself and she is finally open to reckon with how people other than Ben see her.
And the medium of fanfiction is one where I got to explore that in a romance, and a character that wasn't healed by love but by her own will to live, which is why I was not knocking down Harlequin's door with my super accessible traumatized heroine with an Eastwood Glare romance.
