favorite thing abt rayllum and why? (i imagine youve answered this before but still curious)

i’ve gone back and forth, debating whether to try and pick something specifically broad to fit as many things under it as possible, or if there’s a defining trait that really stands out, so here have been some of the considerations

but i think a lot of this can be summed up, to the best of my ability, in the way that rayla and callum are exactly, completely, what the other person needed.

not even just “this character is the embodiment of everything this other character needed to learn,” although yes, that too. nor am i saying that they always get it 100% and don’t fail one another sometimes, they very much do! 

but i just think about callum and rayla both growing up as somewhat lonely, awkward children, with important/busy parents and unable to be super emotionally open with their peers. we never see rayla mention friends and soren bullies callum half the time and he has a big fat crush on claudia, and ezran is his little brother by five years.

and then in comes rayla, and suddenly, they have a peer to tease and annoy and push and make decisions with, to be open with. callum has someone who believes in him, who never belittles him; he doubts that he’s a mage, she calls him a mage anyway, he says he’s a bad prince, she calls him a prince anyway. 

he has someone who will look after ezran for him so callum can look after himself in the interim, someone who will wait him out and let him talk as much as he needs to.

and rayla has someone who gives a shit, who can tell when she’s lying (which even runaan can’t), who frees her up from her fears of failure and being afraid, who says she’s worth something anyway, who saves her even she’s saving everyone else. someone rayla can depend on.

in the small stuff and the big stuff. an uneasy boat ride. a sleepless night. making light of a tough situation (rayla teasing him about the food and callum teasing her about being hangry in 1x06). someone who will call you out on their shit and simultaneously offer understanding and compassion, a listening ear, a comforting touch. forgiveness. someone who likes you and admires you for all the reasons you felt lonely or were put down by someone else. someone who says “no, you don’t deserve this shitty treatment.” the person where in a room full of people, you still wanna be talking to them. someone who always has your back, who makes you laugh. a confidant, a best friend. a partner. someone who can push you to be better, yes, and does help make you better, but also someone who already loves you exactly as you are, moment to moment, faults and all.

cause i think that’s exactly what they needed, all along. and i am very, very glad they finally got it.

Many people say they claim Rayllum was run because Callum had just gotten over the crush on Claudia. But the point is that his passion for Claudia was for an idealized version of her, while with Rayla, he knows the flaws and virtues. What do you think?

I personally haven’t seen anything along those lines, but I also follow very few blogs in general and work hard to make sure all the content I see is content I enjoy. As for your question, it’s hard to tell because we know a lot more about the ins and outs of Rayla and Callum’s relationships than we do Callum and Claudia’s. 

I’ve talked about Callum and Claudia’s relationship in comparison to Callum and Rayla’s in more detail here, but there’s definitely more to unpack there. Each relationship is so rich and interesting and says so much about all the characters involved, individually, relationship wise, and in contrast to one another. 

I don’t think it’s possible to grow up with someone and not see any of their faults. I’m sure Callum and Claudia had a few disagreements or hurt one another’s feelings over the years when they were kids. I don’t think they had the same more forceful Rayllum tends to, though, and I don’t necessarily think that means Rayllum is more argumentative, because they’re not.

I think Rayla and Callum’s relationship benefits greatly from Rayla purely being a friend to Callum, at first, as some of his discomfort/nerves around Claudia comes from his crush on her, and she doesn’t really have much control over any of that. 

In many ways, Callum’s crush on Claudia belonged to an old part of his life. A hope amid his decent but also semi miserable life as a step prince who never really felt like he belonged. And they’re still always friends, first and foremost, which I love. Callum was aware of some of Claudia’s flaws - the complete lack of conscience regarding Dark Magic - but lived in a situation where there was no reason for that to bother him, where each of their flaws and weaknesses didn’t matter, because it was peacetime, and they were safe, and there was no reason for anything to change. 

I think that’s the word I keep coming back to with Callum and Claudia. Change. Not only because the splintering of their relationship and where each of them find themselves in s3 - on opposite physical and ideological sides of a war - demonstrate how much each of them have changed but that in a relationship with one another, if say the assassination had never happened and the egg never found, that nothing between Callum and Claudia would ever really change, either. 

Callum likes Claudia and has for years. She’s been playfully aware of his crush for a long time but content to not do anything more than tease him about it sometimes. They grow older, Callum possibly gets interested in dark magic, maybe not. Claudia continues learning and growing. The war never comes. Viren and Harrow arrange for Callum and Claudia - who maybe do fall in love, although I imagine Callum would always be a little bit more in love with her - and it’s advantageous. It’s easy, it’s comfortable. She’s the wife of the step prince and it gets her status and brings their two families closer together. Callum is happy. Even if the feeling of something Right and fresh and well, new, never comes. 

It would have been a very different sort of life. I don’t even necessarily think it would be an unhappy one. But it would be very stagnant, and we’ve seen how easily - how quickly - a sudden rupture like Rayla and all that she represented (war, peace, magic, trust, choices, trials) was able to rip these two apart. 

Rayla, meanwhile, changes everything. She pushes Callum. She never uses him. She questions him, occasionally. Supports him fairly unconditionally. She approaches him first to get to know him. She kisses him first. But at the same time, Rayla also brings a lot more of her own issues to the table: her struggles with opening up, keeping secrets, the circumstances in which they met, how snappish and standoffish she can be when she feels cornered, how cutting she can be when her high morality is tread upon by something or she feels crossed.

But what Rayla does ultimately is she forces Callum into a situation where Claudia’s vices are issues for him. Dark Magic eventually becomes unacceptable to Callum for a few reasons. Claudia, after all, sees elves as parts to be used. Callum very obviously doesn’t (and likely never did, but it wouldn’t have seemed as wrong, either). Claudia’s willingness to ignore other people’s feelings makes her trample all over Callum’s and leads her to betray him and ignore him even when he’s pleading with her. Her inability to choose leads Soren and Viren to make decisions for her and for her to end up on the opposite side of a battlefield to Callum and to let Viren go after an innocent baby dragon a season earlier she was fawning over.

Rayla’s flaws make Callum see his own: her snappish behaviour with him at the end of 1x04 ensures that it’s a mistake he doesn’t make again, and he keeps to it. Her habit of keeping secrets to hide her own pain and to spare him from some makes him work all the harder to both give her space and be there for her in 3x04. He was deterred somewhat and backed off in 1x06 because he didn’t realize she was hiding her own pain, but in 3x04, he knows better and he sticks to it. The nastiness that can come out of him in their fight in 3x08 in the face of her stubbornness is subdued and tempered and leads him to phrase things better when he goes to speak with her again. 

I think with Callum it’s not only that he knows more of Rayla’s good and bad traits, just because of how much more they’ve been through together - the loss of home and family, parents and Ezran, saving each other’s lives, having to trust each other in some pretty crazy and/or high stakes situations, etc. - and how much they’ve had to work through as a result, but also that Rayla’s flaws and virtues make Callum’s flaws and virtues come to light too, and they make each other grow. 

They change each other, and for the better too.

So yeah, this was a really long and rambling way of saying: I think Rayla’s good and bad traits complement Callum’s good and bad traits in a way that’s beneficial for them both and with a compatibility that Callum and Claudia were never able to achieve for a variety of reasons, mostly because their relationship/environment didn’t push them to change, and once it did, they fell apart.

reason #7258382 why i love rayllum: when callum was trying to get claudia's attention, he would always try and change himself so she would like him. but with rayla, he doesn't have to 😭😭😭

as of 3x06 that boy has 100% drooled on her shoulder in his sleep and she’s worn his stank ass scarf. true love, honestly. callum has always been so comfortable around rayla, partially because she’s always worked to make him comfortable in the rare moments he wasn’t, and i love it so much.

boy is a mess sometimes and i love him