ST Rey & Kylo Ren in Episode IX

This is what I have been pointing out so very often in this forum: the double standards.

This kind of prejudice towards one character and the will to condone the hero's bleakest deeds as "justified" because heroes are meant to be perfect.
No good storyteller will ever make a hero perfect, unless they want them boring.
What I love in this trilogy is that it questions what we have always taken for granted in Star Wars: that the heroes are infallible. George Lucas once made Yoda say: "Great warrior? War makes no one great!". But he didn't explore that.
The ST goes further and shows that heroes are human and humans make mistakes which sometimes trigger a whole backfire action. And in times of war it may have disastrous consequences.

Before Luke there was the topic whether Leia and Han, were good parents. Being heroes automatically doesn't makes them good parents, IMHO. For some viewers it does.
Kylo Ren is a ruthless murderer who promised to kill Rey, but Rey, who actually tries to kill him thrice while he was unarmed and posing no threat is OK because she's the heroine and justified in her need to kill the villain, so she can.
Poe was responsible for the death of hundreds of his comrades because of his ego and inability to cope with female authority, but that's fine because he's one of the heroes and does not count as mass murder. OTOH, helplessly watching a genocide, having tried to prevent it (without much convinction, granted) it is as good as pulling the trigger.
The person who's actually responsible for the genocide of a whole system, who suggested, orchestrated and pulled the trigger, is portrayed as laughable villain, so he does not even count as villain.

And so on and on and on...

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

...I had the impression I was the only one here who feels compelled to play the devil's advocate more often than I care to
.

 

Rey has been heavily criticized for being too perfect, and as result, boring.

There's a critical term used to describe her that was used so often that it is now banned. I'm sure you know the term I speak of.

He did. It's called the PT, where Yoda leads the Jedi into war, and Yoda is a bouncing badass with a lightsaber, and it all blows up in his face. That's how Yoda learned war doesn't make one great.

Okay right now I can honestly only think of one of the examples, and I find it noteworthy, so I'll deal with that. (someone remind me of the other two examples because my mind is blanking)

The end of TFA when the ground separates and stops Rey from finishing off Kylo.

Well, there hasn't been much fan justification of that. Many fans have called it out as Rey being saved from falling to the dark side by fate. I've even seen theories that Yoda separated them to save her.

By the rules of Star Wars, Rey is wrong there and in danger of falling to the dark side. Not just as wrong as Kylo, but wrong. There's no double standard between Rey and Kylo because the things being compared are very different. If you want a double standard, it's ROTJ making it clear that Luke striking Vader down in anger would lead to the dark side, with no such suggestion for Rey striking down Kylo in anger at the end of TFA.

It's not the fans that are guilty of double standards there, it's TFA/TLJ, which never address it (and I doubt it will be addressed in IX). Fans have called for it to be addressed since TFA. There was much expectation that it would be addressed in TLJ before it came out. It wasn't.

But, really, there's no double standard there at all. There's a big difference between Kylo slaughtering villages, and someone who kills Kylo to stop his atrocities. There's a huge difference between their actions, so no double standard exists.

It's not "mass murder" because it's a war and he didn't kill them. You've allowed your biased search for examples of double standards to inspire you to refer to this as "murder", even though it's nowhere near fitting the definition and you're well aware of it.

But, I have been one of the few who has consistently called out Poe for being a reckless jackass. I don't like him. He's an incompetent, mutinous fool who does indeed deserve some blame for the deaths of his comrades (it's not murder, though). He should have been hanged. In many real world situations, he would have been.

Some fans chalk this up as simply bad writing on the part of Rian. Others indeed see this reckless ego as one of Poe's flaws and accept it as part of his story arc of learning more responsible leadership. Some see it as both. But no one considers it mass murder because it's simply not even close.

When did Kylo try to prevent it?

And, yes, standing by and doing nothing as a powerful, high ranking member of an organization you signed up with, is kinda as good as pulling the trigger. At least I think that's what the Nuremberg Trials concluded.

There's also no double standard here, as Vader is also blamed for Alderaan.

 

It's a very common thought by many fans elsewhere, so it's not like we are the only ones who think this way. It's just the debating and seeing the other person's POV is what gets my blood pumping and sometimes can change my own views if the point made is a very good, convincing one about other things involving Kylo, but redemption will never not be what I believe.

For me, Kylo Ren will always be redeemable and no one can change my mind about that, but I am not blind to his evil ways either or that he needs punishment for his crimes. My love of Han and Leia and their legacy is why I root for redemption, and because of all the sacrifices by his family for him. Killing him or having him remain evil would be a disrespect to the OT heroes. This is also why people fail to understand why Rey wants to bring him back. She's trying to help Leia bring home her son. She probably feels she owes it to Han's memory.

The ST is not black and white, and if continued views of it are in those colors only, people will have a repeat of their disappoint with TLJ. They blurred the lines in it for a reason, and have been blurring the lines since TFA. There is no 100% hero vs villain in this story, and there is no 100% good/bad on either side either. Not to mention during TLJ promotion, the actors said it would be grey, so it's not like anything that happened wasn't told to the fans beforehand.

 

Yes, yes and yes. For personal reasons I believe that even the most horrendous criminal is redeemable, if you find the right leverage point, because we do all have one. It's what makes us human.
I don't feel myself so far beyond good and evil to judge anyone on this earth as irredeemable.
As far as Rey's motivations I believe she wants to bring him back because she is in the position to judge, unlike us. She has full access to him mind, his memories and intentions and she can tell if there's still good in him. She judged him worthy, just like Leia, Han and Luke. And because of that she's been coded as victim of the Stockholm Syndrome.
One may question whether even Han, Luke and Leia are victims of the same syndrome... but some may argue: They have never been kidnapped.

That's the problem with this trilogy, for some. The OT was definitely more black and white. As I said before the OT was very much a child of its time, end of the '70s, the cold war, two poles of powers. Even with an Obi-Wan Kenobi candidly asserting that the "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view", George Lucas still drew a very defined moral line between good and evil, only to surprise us all with Vader's redemption. I honestly didn't see it coming at the time.
The ST is again a child of its time, the time of terrorism where we are forced to ask ourselves if what we call "terrorist" may be considered a freedom fighter to others. So the moral line in our time is much more blurred and much more depending on the point of view. We have villains with backstories (when ever did we have backstories of villains in the OT???), we have motives and political views from one faction to the other, much more context and subtext to discuss, all mixed with a good degree of ambiguity which makes the whole thing very compelling but very complicated, too.

 

If J.J Abrams thinks that he can get trough with Kylo as something better than a traitor of his own family, murderer of his own father, and a leader to the space nazi regime, they are indeed frongfuly counting on [MODified: Nope] , however Reylos are only part of the public, all other , many, will feel repurgent by artifficial forced delivery of Kylo's redemption.
Kylo is in many things worse than even Vader, or eventualy the same, and Vader could not be let to live. Lucas made Vader /Anakin redeemed and emediately he died, because his atrocities can not be erased. Lucas knew that,so Vader was redeemd and emediately he died.
Perhaps J.J. thinks he is better than Lucas, I hope he will not try to challenge Lucas about the matters of redemption.And the matters of morality are here clear and set in stone by Kylo's patricidal act, and by his decision to freely chose dark side path in ep VIII.
So whatever J.J. Abrams makes in ep IX, I hope he remebres that he himself did make Kylo to kill his own father, greatest hero Han Solo, and Rian Johnson further made Kylo to freely chose his dark path by never regretting,even after killing Snoke.
And by this , in my eyes, Kylo/Ben is set it in stone as patricidal murderer, and one who freely chosed his path when he had a chance to chose freely.
I hope young girls of the world will get better message than their idol Rey "redeeming" Kylo by love because this is not real , its travesty, women should not be amalgamate for criminals, and if such thing even happens its not love but a tragedy for a woman which fell in love in a monster. And even if she loves him he stays a monster,especially for the others.

 

@Dragon Jedi Not only do we have villains with backstories, but young villains who are victims like in Hux's case. I never felt any sympathy for Tarkin. With Hux, I see him as redeemable too. Phasma was not young, and well, she's gone now, but we have other young villains and young heroes, all with dark pasts and that's what intrigued me most when I watched TFA. How young everyone is, and how tragic it would be for them to die without the chance of choosing another path. If Hux had been another Tarkin, and similar in age, I would be less sympathetic I confess.

 

Well ... yeah ... no.

 

Well I do. That's just me. Also this proves my earlier point. Hux has a backstory that gives me a reason to feel that way. Again proof the ST is not black/white.

 

He is even a worse mass murderer than Kylo?

 

Same here.

If we could find a leverage point for Hux, he may be able to rethink his fanatic ideas. But this triology isn't interested in giving him one, only a sad backstory and we have no indication so far that he's conflicted in what he does.
He has no one who cares enough to make him doubt his actions.
So, technically speaking, he's the bad guy of the story.
A laughable villain may turn into a nasty piece of work, indeed.

 

Really? Hux is redeemable? Who's next? Josef Mengele? Eugen Kvaternik? Karl Linnas? They were roughly the same age as Hux when they committed their respective atrocities and in the case of men like Linnas, even younger. He's 34, after all. We're not talking about a misunderstood boys here. These are men. Grown men who relish in the idea of mass slaughter. Considering that the past trilogies (and ancillary material) in this franchise had individuals like Anakin or Ulic Qel-Droma who did terrible things consign themselves to death or fates that may be considered worse with altogether different motivations, how is someone like Armitage Hux redeemable?

 

If you read also the posts above the "redeemable Hux" you may find out that the "why" and "where" and "if" and "when" have been thoroughly discussed by @Rebellious Princess and myself.

 

I wasn't considering that one bit. It still goes into self-defence. They were duelling.
Still, he was unarmed and on the ground when she is tempted to kill him. She doesn't. So that would make four.

1) First Force-connection. She shot him. She didn't know she could not harm him, neither did he. She saw him, unarmed in front of her just staring at her. She shot, aimed to kill.
2) In the throne room, after he begged her to join him, she raised her hand and tricked him into believing she was actually going for his hand, she went for the lightsaber. If she had been able to command the saber, as in the forest of Starkiller Base, she would have killed him. The Force had other plans.

3) on the Supremacy when he was unconscious:

My point is: Kylo promised verbally to kill her. She actually raised her weapon on him to kill him.
You do not see the difference?
Try to switch the places.
Switch Kylo in Rey's place, and raise your weapon on an unarmed Rey 3 times.

 

It is an interesting question. If someone like Vader is redeemable, why isn't Hux redeemable? Being not FS he can't fall to the dark side in the way a FS person can, but he is clearly on the dark side, and all life is one with the Force.

 

I would say that there are very few Luke fans who say Luke did nothing wrong here. I know that feel that Luke was portrayed as a near villain here, the catalyst that started kylo’s criminal career. What a lot of us have said is that we are annoyed that the filmmakers destroyed this iconic, beloved hero this way by using this to bolster their new character of Kylo ren and make him look more sympathetic. Well, it didn’t work for me. In my opinion, they shouldn’t have sullied and ruined a character who has been popular for 40 years . They completely twisted and changed Luke ‘s character and personality to prop up Kylo. And because of what was done, I actually sympathize with Kylo LESS, and don’t really want him redeemed. I certainly don’t want him to end up with rey.

And Kylo is still the one who made the choice to kill fellow students, burn down the temple, and join snoke instead of getting off that world as fast as he could and reporting what happened. Killing others because Luke scared him or he was angry with Luke, lets us know that while Luke was wrong, Kylo was by no means an innocent. He had already most likely been corrupted by snoke at this point.

 

Remember, this is the same Rey who perhaps has even more reason than Anakin to view the Force as a tool to be used in one's self-interests rather than a spiritual concept but seems immediately receptive to what Luke tells her in his first and only lesson to her for virtually no reason whatsoever.

 

but then there is Darth Maul who was coming closer to redemption when he died. With Maul I suppose I can see little flickers of light and I don't really see that with Hux. But isn't the backstory that Maul was corrupted from a very early age by Sidious. What is there to redeem then? An innocent child. One could say Hux was corrupted by his father from an early age. Boy Hux in Aftermath seems to already be a psycho, but it also seemed just maybe that it caused Hux pain in Phasma novel when Cardinal mentioned Sloane who I assume was taken out in some way. But this is a pile of assumptions.

--

Regarding Rey's statement about Kylo, I think one can argue that before one actually takes action the choice isn't necessarily made. But I thought Rey probably was getting that from whatever "Force insights" were coming through the mind bridge. And given how much conflict remains in Kylo in TFA, I think there was still a scant possibility that his fall could have been prevented whereas pulling a lightsaber on him in his sleep eliminated any chance because of how far gone he was already.

 

You are talking about her...



...who morphs into this?




Which leads Yoda to say this:


If so I'd ask to change Yoda's words to:
"We [SMURFed: the 900 year old Jedi Master and the myth Luke Skywalker] are what they grow beyond [SMURFed: in less than three days]"

 

Yes, this is my point: The leverage point.
We knew that Anakin Skywalker was a father, a husband a good friend way long before we knew he also was Darth Vader.
We know that Ben Solo was an innocent, troubled child before becoming Kylo Ren.
We know Hux was an abused child, a victim of a loveless childhood...
What's the difference between Vader, Kylo and Hux?

The first two have a leverage point. Which is that point where you can appeal to in order to get a response, a reaction that triggers that will to be redeemed. For Vader it was Luke (a projection of his love for his wife). Vader would have never come back if Padme hadn't managed to give birth to Luke before dying.
For Kylo we may have several, at this stage none is certain. It could be love, it could be his longing for a home, it could be reconciliation with his past.

For Hux????
Apparently he has none.
I say there's simply no one who cares enough to make leverage, to get an emotional response from him.
Because so is his character in the story, we are not meant to know what moves him.

If the writers had found say a love interest for him, or a lost sibling, a lost child, we may have a different story.

 

What is your overall point, here? Simply that Rey isn’t a Paragon of Virtue (which is a given with most characters) or that the films are somehow drawing a moral equivalency between Rey and Kylo? Or something else?

I, for one, think that the movies’ presentation of the characters is more predictive of how their stories will turn out than my own independant judgement of their behavior. It’s a bit like arguing that the Rebels in ANH were really terrorists because they destroyed a space station knowing thousands of innocent people (support staff, etc) were aboard. Such characterization is purely academic and has no bearing on where the story is going because the narrative wasn’t presenting the Rebels as terrorists.

Similarly, one can point out every action by Kylo that one thinks is decent and good, and every action by Rey one thinks is wrong, but that doesn’t change how the narrative is actually presenting the two characters and asking us to view them, and so is not probative of where the story is heading.

ETA:

Born special, that one was.

#muhbbbalance

 

The proof that Snoke had not turned his heart is certainly not only because Rey thinks and says so - we have been told and shown again and again that there is conflict in the former Ben Solo and that Snoke despite his firm grasp over him for many years has not completely corrupted his heart which is much like his father's. There will be no conflict in Ben/Kylo if his heart was turned as Luke mistakenly thought.

The other proof, another force sensitive woman (or are we dismissing all opinions especially if they are female?), Ben Solo's mother who tells Han, in TFA, that there is light in her son.

But even if you dismiss those, Luke himself is the one who knows and thinks he has wronged Ben. He believes he failed his nephew by what he did. He was ashamed and removed himself from everything because he knew he has the burden of pushing a "frightened boy" on a path that he ironically thought (mistakenly) he is preventing. Instead, Luke's mistake pushed Ben towards Snoke. Luke mentions (without naming him) that a jedi master is responsible for the creation of Darth Vader and he is bitter becuase he sees himself as someone who created the new Vader.

Luke believed he has failed his nephew and was deeply depressed and ashamed. He knew he cannot save him because he knew he was part of the (several) reasons why his nephew fell to the Dark Side and thus he couldn't be the one to help.
Despite Leia saying she has almost lost hope, Luke reassures her that not all hope is lost.

Its ironic that for some reason you dismiss Rey's Force ability (insight) as being invalid - I think there is a good example where a strong-willed young aspiring jedi once proved to have better insight than wise Master Yoda and Obi-Wan', and who contrary to them both believed (and was right!) that Vader was NOT beyond saving, in ESB, and that ironically was Luke himself.

Rey is the new protagonist, not Luke and not Yoda. I'm gonna trust that young jedi girl's feelings.