Lit How old is Ben in "Bloodelines"

I got the impression reading the book that he was a teen, but Life Debt has Leia as pregnant. Did she have an older child we've yet to hear about, or is Ben actually 30 years old in TFA?

 

There's no catch: Ben/Kylo is actually 29 in TFA, although he behaves like he's younger.

 

FWIW Adam Driver is actually 32.

 

He would be 23 in Bloodline.

 

and by 23 years old no one thought he should know about Grampa Vader??

 

Leia and Han: not perfect parents. Go figure.

 

Worked for Luke.

 

It doesn't seem he is very strong in the force for being 30 years old as compared to Luke being around 23 years old when he fought vader the final time.

 

Maybe Ben WAS exceptionally strong with the force at the time of his seduction to the dark side (hence the reason snoke showed interest in him) yet after killing Luke's new order (which probably included close friends of Ben) it left him emotionally conflicted as we see in TFA which led to his force powers regressing slightly?

An example of this happens in Darth Bane Path of destruction (legends) in it Bane is quickly becoming the most advanced sith student at the korriban academy until he murders another student in a duel, after which he starts to fear his own power, and in next to no time Bane is the weakest student in the academy and is considered a laughing stock when he is almost beaten to death by an average student.

Maybe now that Kylo has murdered his father and has lost his doubt, he'll become as powerful as Darth Vader

OR

Disney was like "Let's make Kylo a Skywalker for shock value then have Rey defeat him at the end cos...........whatever let's go with it....."

 

OR

The Force is in balance now, meaning the dark side isn't as powerful as we're used to seeing it.

 

24 as Hidalgo said he's 30 in TFA. Also, you really misspelled blood?

 

or maybe Kylo is really strong with the Force but hasn't received any lightsaber training? He does some things in TFA that we haven't seen before, so I don't think we should question his Force abilities. It's only when he's half-dead and in a lightsaber duel that we see him less competent.

 

Ben was 23, the same age Grandpa and Uncle Luke were at the end of their trilogies.

 

Ben stops a blaster bolt midair while choking someone and holds it there casually while conducting an interrogation and an execution. Like.

He's hurt in the final duel, guys. He's shot by a gun the movie takes great pains to show us is incredibly powerful. A gun that Han is still impressed by after decades of watching it go pew pew.

 

Part of the problem with giving a straight answer is that the jury's still out on how many years apart Bloodlines and TFA are set. Most people are running like lemmings with the assumption that the book and film are set six years apart, which is entirely based on pre-release materials and is never stated in the book itself. In fact, the internal evidence strongly suggests that they are only set four years apart.

By that reckoning, we conclude the following: Ben/Kylo was 29 in TFA (appropriately, the exact age Han himself was in ANH), and was therefore approximately 25 in Bloodlines.

 

I believe it was stated by either Del Rey or Lucasfilm themselves that said it took place twenty four years after ROTJ. Even the news sites caught onto it and posted the timeframe of when it happened. If there is any question. Go with what the people who made the book said.

 

You believe, or you KNOW? There's a world of difference between the two.

Before one would advise me to go with what the people who made the book said, one first might want to actually consult the book that they made.

The character of Ransolm Casterfo is described in the book as having just turned six years old at the time the Battle of Endor took place (p. 75). He is also described as being thirty-two years old during the events of the book (p. 10). From there, the math does itself: thirty-two minus six equals twenty-six. So twenty-six years have elapsed since Endor at the time of Bloodlines, making it circa 30 ABY; the film The Force Awakens is set thirty years after Endor, or circa 34 ABY. That's a four-year interval.

I'm not particularly interested in what the publicity people at Lucasfilm or Del Rey, or the news sites, have to say about it if it goes against what the actual content of the book is telling me.

 

I remember that part of the book and it did confuse a lot of people because it had been widely publicized that it took place in 28ABY. There were also some inconsistencies in the characters ages in Lost Stars as well though. I think characters ages might be something that Gray doesn't put much emphasis in on nailing down. I would still go with what has been publicized though if that is the only thing you found. If Gray was big on nailing down accurate ages then I might agree with you. But from reading her books the best I have found is that she tends to just give an age that would be in the ballpark instead of putting much effort into finding out exactly how old they would be. Besides I believe Leia was only guessing how old he was currently.

 

I never found any inconsistencies in Lost Stars; can you cite examples?

In any case, that does nothing whatsoever to undermine the basic credo that what the actual source says goes, unless there's a VERY good mitigating circumstance that says it shouldn't go. Vague assertions about the author's lack of focus on character's ages just doesn't - and can't - meet that standard.

Also, there's nothing else I'm aware of within Bloodlines to indicate any other date for the story. In the absence of contradicting information within the source material in question, I'm constrained to go with what IS there.

 

Back about the time of the Battle of Hoth when Thane should have been about twenty-two he makes a reference to one of the guys he is flying with is a year older than him and that guy was only twenty one or twenty two.

 

If the guy is 9 months older he can be considered a year older but they can both be 22

 

There are times when people don't want to be talked out of their opinions, even when confronted by hard facts.

What more has to be done? I cited the exact chapter and verse to prove my point; all anyone can provide in return are half-statements like "I believe it was stated by either Del Rey or Lucasfilm" (without even knowing for certain which company, by the way), or "I remember..." (without actually referring to the material they're remembering, take note - or even considering that memory itself is flawed), and then when faced with actual hard evidence, they resort to "Pfft, oh, that doesn't count because I think (not 'I can prove,' mind you, but merely 'I think') that the author never cared about exact ages anyway (in a thread where we're trying to calculate a character's exact age, no less!) - here, here's a single, vague unimportant data point from a separate book (which is not quoted directly and not given a page number for referral) to prove it." (except that it doesn't prove their point or disprove mine - at all).

How do we account for this? I attribute it to two things that I see on these boards entirely too often: ego, and laziness. Ego because when people become set in a certain mode of thinking, it becomes part of them as individuals - it therefore constitutes a piece of their identity, no matter how small, and so it is their personal sense of identity they're ultimately defending, not the point in question, and to think in terms of the personal is the exact wrong thing to do in a debate about facts. Laziness, because it's simply easier to just accept what the publicity people (who may themselves be wrong) said about something than it is to actually do the hard work of going through the book and finding what the book actually provides us with in terms of data (even though it took me, at best, ten minutes to find what I was looking for - it's amazing what a Google search of the book's contents can do to help you locate what you're after!).

Now, I'll be the first to grant that we ultimately shouldn't HAVE to be put in a position where we don't trust what the publicity people say regarding something as simple as when a book is set in the timeline. The LSG is supposed to be there to prevent such mistakes, is it not? But the members of the Story Group, and those who work with them, are, as Nietzsche so perfectly put it, "human, all too human." People are fallible, and mistakes happen, even if it's rare (and for the most part, they've made very few mistakes), and our job as individual human beings with minds is to be able to make determinations regarding the facts at hand WITHOUT leaning on the herd-mind, BECAUSE it is fallible when fed with fallible material. The person in marketing makes the mistake, and the trusting herd amplifies it and gives it a life of its own - and as long as there's a new someone entering the herd, there's always a new someone to accept the flawed assumption given and run with it as their own. Unless the flawed assumption itself is challenged. Unless the herd that repeats it is corrected.

In determining things like timeline placement, or anything else that comes with our enthusiasm for this franchise and our need to properly categorize what's in it, we need to decide what's more important: what the actual source material says, or what people SAY about what the source material says? Is it what's there on the page, in black and white, or is it what someone said about it, half-remembered by someone who heard it from someone else? No self-respecting researcher would be in any doubt as to which answer they would pick, and neither should we - not if we take what we do seriously.

 

I love that this turned into an argument in less than one page. "What year does Bloodline take place?" is the new "how long is an SSD?"

 

It's amazing where the knots reveal themselves, isn't it? But like all the rest, this one too will untangle eventually.

But the thing is, even the SSD people had hard data points that they could point to, established at one time or another during the long life of EU exploration of those starships. However many thousand kilometers one side or another picked for how big that thing was, they could at least point to hard evidence from this or that sourcebook, novel, or other official then-canon publication; the only thing in question then was whether one accepted that said hard evidence could be subsequently overwritten by evidence equally firm but contradictory to the previous hard evidence.

But this? There's no comparison. One either chooses to accept what the novel itself, which is supposed to be canon, says, or what publicity, which can never realistically be held to canon, says. And when that fails, one either chooses to accept what the text says in black and white on the page, or what someone thinks/feels/rememembers-but-can't-cite. One is honest research; the other is head canon. Both can be considered valid for a given individual; only one can be considered valid for the canon record.

 

Pfluegermeister sorry but you never stated any hard evidence. You cited one instance where the ages didn't match up and no one can say for sure if that was just a mistake on the authors part or not. Add to that the scene where his age was given was told from Leia's perspective. It wasn't Casterfo that said he was that age it was Leia going into the room and describing the situation with her thoughts. It could have just been meant to be taken from Leia's point of view.

None of that is good enough evidence to overide the general consensus that the book did take place in 28ABY.