Rey & Poe: The Sequel Trilogy's Hidden Love Story
Now, normally going through Twitter is a very poor decision anyone could make, and looking up your self-indulgent favorite noncanon otp of your two favorite characters is an even worse decision someone could make. I have no self-preservation, so I did so anyway, and found a tweet where someone mentioned it was funny people acted like damerey had no chance of being canon when it was confirmed they were originally together in the art books.
Cue me going "wait, what the hell?" and frantically downloading The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens to confirm if this random tweet was correct. It was! Then it snow-balled into me becoming Charlie Day and trying to track the development of Damerey throughout the process of making the Sequel Trilogy.
The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is full of goodies (I wrote down like, five pages of notes while reading), and it does in fact confirm that...Poe and Rey in their original iterations were meant to be partners.
The Art of the Force Awakens
Granted, it doesn't say romantic partners, but given that they toyed with giving John Doe, as a bounty hunter, a Wookiee sidekick, I do genuinely think they meant romantic.
The art book is pretty forthcoming, in regards to dates/where in production these ideas percolated in. The above comes from March 2013, when Michael Arndt began work on his basic outline for The Force Awakens, which pretty much had the biggest and most basic story beats down, that remained consistent for the rest of production. Unfortunately, this is the only reference I've found for Kira/John Doe being together (I haven't looked at the other two art books, though).
In May 2013, more of the eventual plot got hammered out: Sam (Finn) became a stormtrooper who defected after witnessing the Neo-Empire kill a group of rebels, and escapes with John Doe (Poe) in a fighter that crashes. In that version, John Doe escapes the crash and abandons Sam (Poe would never!).
In October 2013, Michael Arndt departed production, leaving SImon Kinberg, Lawrence Kasdan and JJ Abrams at the helm. His outline, obviously, got used for the Force Awakens, and he still has a writing credit on the movie. In December 2013, the first script was turned in, and by January, John Doe had been renamed "Poe".
Thanks to the Force Awakens commentary, we know the original plan was for the Jakku crash to be a fake-out where Poe actually survives even though Finn thinks he's dead:
"Originally when I thought of Poe, I thought he would seem to die here and come back later, but then when Larry and I wrote the script, we just killed him. And when I showed the script to Oscar Isaac, who I really wanted to be in the movie, he said he really wanted to do it, but he'd died in, like, four other movies in the first act. And is there any way he could live.
And it was Michelle Rejwan, co-produced of the movie, who said “You know, Poe used to live, you could have Poe live again.” And I was like, "No, no, no. I think you see it coming."
She's like, “Yeah, yeah, but it's really happy and the movie needs something happy at that point."
So I called Oscar and said, "All right, you live.” And he agreed to be in the movie.”.
The Meet-Cute, an Abridged History
At some point during all of this, Alan Dean Foster is approached to write the novelization and given the screenplay of the film. In the novelization, Poe and Rey officially meet on D'Qar:
The romantic context in particular is especially interesting (Rey likes his face?), because Alan Dean Foster is a hardcore finnrey shipper, and really pushed for them in the novel. Interestingly, according to the interview I read with him, some scenes were added/expanded upon at the behest of Lucasfilm.
In 2017, Pablo Hidalgo confirmed on Twitter that the scene from the novel was actually shot for the Force Awakens. Thankfully, this post archived it as I don't think the tweet is available anymore.
I've found a lot of "he said this, he said that, I've heard this-" about why the scene was cut from the Force Awakens, but with no citations to back them. Word on the street is that Rian Johnson asked J.J Abrams if they could hold on the meeting so it could be featured in TLJ. I do know that in the commentary for the Last Jedi, where he says he wanted them to have a nice moment together after the events of the movie.
Obviously, it has the basic bones of what was in the original screenplay for TFA, but Rian Johnson was reported in this Bustle article to have said that it was an unconscious callback to Empire to have Poe say "I know", and the parallel was pointed out to him by Oscar Isaac.
Setting Up Episode IX
Now, interestingly (and kind of confusingly), Colin Trevorrow - who was tapped to write Episode Nine back in 2015 - has gone on record to confirm he requested Rian Johnson include the meeting between Poe and Rey, to set some history between them for the next movie, which we know from the (alleged) leaked script of Duel of Fates, would've included a romance between Rey and Poe.
“I just asked Rian if he could include a little moment where Rey and Poe meet for the first time,” Trevorrow told Empire. “They’re such beloved characters, it felt right for them to have some history in the next movie. I thought the way he did it was perfect.”
Trevorrow and his co-writer, Derek Connolly, left production in 2017. Due to Lucasfilm refusing to budge on the 2019 release date, and being dissatisfied with multiple script/outlines, J.J Abrams and Chris Terrio basically had to scrape together a bunch of previous drafts/scripts + their own ideas, into a reasonably coherent script, so a lot of "Trevorrow's DNA remained in the film" and he and Derek Connolly, get writing credit on The Rise of Skywalker:
“I’m grateful to J.J. for embracing some of our ideas,” Trevorrow said. “It’s exciting that fans will get to see the moments that felt essential to all of us.”
So far, this is all I've been able to find regarding the development of Rey and Poe's relationship throughout the making of the films, or at least the stuff I have real citations for. Even if an on-screen romantic relationship never made it past the concept stage, I think the fact that Damerey was baked into the original bones of The Force Awakens, and what would go onto become the Rise of Skywalker, is really interesting given how many parallels/motifs they share throughout the trilogy as it currently exists.
With all of this in mind, I'm really looking at the expanded material surrounding the movies with new eyes, because I've thought for a couple years now that it's interesting that after TLJ, Poe and Rey's friendship has been the most explored in canon material, often with a lot of romantic undertones, which...implies something, I think.)