Yup, agreed with all this. There's nothing wrong with headcanoning Rey as ace or aro or gay or what have you. But I wish people would look at why they're fixating on those headcanons. Some of their reasons are a little troubling.
The whole "she's too awesome to be with anyone" thing is uncomfortable for me as a reason to headcanon her as ace, because it's kind of saying "strong women can't be independent and sexual at the same time".
And headcanoning her as a lesbian is fine, but like you say it usually just involves a throwaway line to explain why there's no way she'd ever get with either of the male characters in a slash pairing. It can come across as part 'pair the spare', and part 'it needs to explained that she's not sexually attracted to male characters because men and women can't simply be friends'. For all the 'Rey is a lesbian' headcanon stuff I see on Tumblr, the ratio of people creating femslash fic and art with her is tiny. Sure, Star Wars does have some femslash, which is awesome, and the quality of it is top-notch. But a lot of the Rey/lady fics in the AO3 tags are just a barely-there background pairing to Stormpilot.
It is progress from the bashing female characters used to get. But in some ways it's also really insiduous and disturbing that now people desexualise and erase women from fandom but have found a way to do it that makes it seem like they're 'protecting' the female characters and should be applauded.
Re: goddamit
The whole "she's too awesome to be with anyone" thing is uncomfortable for me as a reason to headcanon her as ace, because it's kind of saying "strong women can't be independent and sexual at the same time".
And headcanoning her as a lesbian is fine, but like you say it usually just involves a throwaway line to explain why there's no way she'd ever get with either of the male characters in a slash pairing. It can come across as part 'pair the spare', and part 'it needs to explained that she's not sexually attracted to male characters because men and women can't simply be friends'. For all the 'Rey is a lesbian' headcanon stuff I see on Tumblr, the ratio of people creating femslash fic and art with her is tiny. Sure, Star Wars does have some femslash, which is awesome, and the quality of it is top-notch. But a lot of the Rey/lady fics in the AO3 tags are just a barely-there background pairing to Stormpilot.
It is progress from the bashing female characters used to get. But in some ways it's also really insiduous and disturbing that now people desexualise and erase women from fandom but have found a way to do it that makes it seem like they're 'protecting' the female characters and should be applauded.