kafrenes:
how long do you think it’s been since cassian last held someone, or was held? few months? years? over a decade maybe? this man’s family was killed when he was six and his only friend was a droid, i think it’s pretty safe to say it’s been awhile. there is so much bullshit here: like the way his eyes close slowly, savoring the feel of her, the weight and warmth. he breathes out, grips her tighter. the way she pulls him closer in response, the way they just ease together, like holding this person is the most natural thing they’ve ever done. GOD!!! what the fuck!!!!!!! this is bullshit. fuck diego luna and fuck lucasfilm
Okay, I have a lot of emotions about this.
I know all the rebelcaptain shippers like me love to tell our stories of Jyn and Cassian falling in love, making out in corners, etc, and in particular we love all our AUs where they survive Scarif and have a relationship, and make their way towards some kind of happiness together - & clearly we are a bunch of the most hopeless soppy ha’porths imaginable - but in allowing ourselves to wallow in all that we are half-forgetting how immensely subtle the canonical relationship is, how well scripted and how brilliantly acted.
Don’t get me wrong, I want as much as anyone to believe this could/should/would have been a love to sway the sun and the other stars! And I’m one of those who went into the film the first time really hoping that the script was not going to push another slightly-forced “we-only-just-met-but” romance on me. The love story crept up on me unawares, and tore my heart out; because incredibly, and largely by resolutely focussing on not telling it as a love story, they made it a completely believeable one.
Yet what we actually get to see is almost entirely platonic; two people who discover a kindredness of spirit, and who help one another to recover a sense of belonging; who become comrades, and are edging towards being friends, and who may be just beginning to wonder if they could be more; and then in the end they don’t have time. And yet, they manage to say everything that has gone unsaid, including all the might-have-beens, without a single word, in those two last scenes; the elevator, just looking at one another without speaking, and finaly on the beach by this simple act of holding one another in the face of death, being there
for one another
right through to the very last - which is an ultimate act of love.
Words, confessions of love, kisses, would snarl up the clear and unabashed emotion of this moment and burden it with too much thought, too much consciousness. It all stays interior, instead, and is shown only through their body language; through the things the OP here remarks on, they way they hold one another, so close and yet so gently, they way they fit together so tightly and find so much comfort in that closeness. All their awareness of the future they’ve laid down in order to complete their mission, all their awareness that they have come to like one another, that they would have been glad of the time to know one another better; their awareness that their chances have finally run out, but they won, is all carried just in the way they embrace. It’s that simplicity, that acceptance of the fact everything else must be left unsaid, as these two really quite ordinary, and very damaged, people - who in the end have found it in themselves to be consumately brave and honourable - accept their fate and roll with it, and pack all the years of comradeship, friendship, love, hope, that they could have known, into giving one another the last blessing of not dying alone.
And because we have two very good actors here, they don’t need any lines to do it. They just show it.
The result is almost a Sci-Fi equivalent to Hamlet’s “If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be
not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all… Let be.”
And - the rest is silence.
