I didn’t intend to stay up until 3am to watch the new Star Wars trailer, but when Twitter was full of ‘only 2 minutes until the trailer’ for an hour, it just happened. And it was good. Ticket sales already beat out everything including Endgame (although they opened at a more reasonable time of day than Endgame’s, so there’s that), and The Last Jedi -prompted boycott of Star Wars seems to be going well…

Rey exudes a goodness that can’t be turned to the Dark side, Kylo Ren still looks like a moody teenager with an unstable lightsaber, and the others are also there. C-3PO’s line is beaten by Carrie Fisher’s single word as the biggest punch to the heart, and Po says some stuff also.

The Last Jedi was bad. Objectively, bad film-makingly bad as well as subjectively, bad writingly bad. Rian Johnson’s need to ‘subvert expectations’ at any cost subverted our expectations of a great Star Wars film and left many hurdles for JJ Abrams to clamber over. There’s no telling if he is up to it. Force Awakens was very good (I thought), but not without its own problems. Not least of all R2D2 waking up at the end just…because. Abrams couldn’t be bothered to think up an actual reason for it, so it just happened out of convenience. That kind of lazy writing will not save this trilogy, so who knows. I look forward to it, anyway.

Aside from the unknowable issues that may arise in the film, there are only two things I know for sure I don’t want to happen. I don’t want Rey to turn to the Dark side, and I don’t want the teen girl ‘Reylo’ obsession to come about. Both would be awful writing, and the former would be insulting to the other characters and to the whole ‘I won’t be the last Jedi’ thing.

But the latter would be real-world problematic. Kylo Ren is a mass murderer. He killed Han Solo, whom I argue became a surrogate father of sorts to Rey in the short time they were together in TFA. He tortured Po. He abducted Rey, invaded her mind, tried to kill her. He emotionally abuses her. And that’s the issue. Kylo Ren is Rey’s abuser. Disney wants this trilogy to appeal to a younger, female audience. ‘Shipping’ ‘Reylo’, as the young, hip people say, and the message of ‘sure, he’s your literal abuser, but he’s troubled and you liked him without his shirt, so it’s fine’ would be extremely problematic and irresponsible far beyond the fictional world.

Also, you heard it here first: Palpatine stole Anakin’s body and fused it to AT-ST legs and now they are a zombified horror. Definitely, no question.

December!