ST Rey & Kylo Ren in Episode IX

From that article:

WTF is that?!?

Poor Baby Bennie Boo Boo felt abandoned when his father did a thing while dealing with the trauma of Baby Bennie Boo Boo mass murdering his classmates.

Now I really want to know who that author is lol.

 

The article is an absolute embarrassment. I'm normally not this way, but I'm pretty sure my blood pressure went up while reading it. I had to take a walk to cool down.

 

I know this will bring on a ton of disagreement from many of you and that’s fine but I’m still going to share my perspective.

The section is poorly worded but I read that sentence more as a long-winded way of saying that if they’d reached him sooner and talked through a path back sooner the same way he tried to on Star Killer base then the younger Ben Solo that JJ said was close to changing his mind even at SKB may have actually done so.

However, when Ben checked in after his cry for help (yeah, you read it but this only applies if what I think happened at the temple night ends up being true) and saw his old man just boozing and smuggling and not coming for him after he believed his uncle had come to kill him and many of his classmates failed to believe what happened (my opinion on what will eventually be shown based on where the people died and how some friends joined him) and things escalated to from a war of words to a slaughter... he just assumed his parents had given up on him for good and continued on his path to the Dark Side.

People ask me why I think it’s relevant that a temple night show what I’ve laid out above and it’s because this was the biggest turning point in his life and if it ends up being that he thought his uncle was coming to kill him and then a bunch of students surround him in rubble and say that he killed him and has always been weird and he rages on one and then that starts into more of an escalating conflict it’s a clear step above for me what Vader did when he consciously and methodically walked into a room of unarmed kids and killed them one by one without a family member coming to kill him moments prior and without a situation escalating.

If they want Bendemption truly then revisiting this night in this way and reframing his turning point would help for me and others. Considering the shocker that Lucasfilm approved of in Luke’s role for his turn it’s not hard for me to imagine this setup playing out at all. It would be super easy and feel relatively logical. Luke was KO’d. Only the Knights of Ren and Ben know what happened there and we may see it in a Knights of Ren flashback.

It would be best if the other students surround him and accuse him of killing Luke unprovoked and him telling them what happened and them bullying him and calling him a freak who thinks he’s better than everyone just because his mommy happens to be famous. Show him raging on one and then getting hit by force use from some one else and the whole thing escalating to his friends versus them. Then, have Snoke be the one shortly after that tells him who his grandfather was and why they sent him away.


If they want to show his turn that will help.

 

Not really. @godisawesome inferred over at the Finn thread that when Finn came back to tell Han what Starkiller is and when he turned off the shields on Starkiller, that Finn was aligned with the Resistance now.

I argued since Finn’s goal was only there to get Rey, like he said, lied to the resistance, and got the shields turned off because Han yelled at him, that Finn was still not aligned with the Resistance by the time Kylo injures him.

Two different interpretations. But the next film, TLJ, only used one as a basis.

Until the next film proves it, there are a lot of interpretations up for grabs in the sequel trilogy. Not just when it comes to Reylo.

 

I mean, I didn't say that nobody else ever infers anything from a film or from these films. I said specifically that's pretty universally the theme for arguments that in any way support reylo and/or exist only because reylo is a thing. If you want to contradict that point, come up with a great reylo argument that doesn't require an inference. I'm sure that they exist. My hyperbole wasn't meant to be totally universal lol. It's just a common thread.

@godisawesome and I have disagreed on that point actually, but there is in that case, unlike in yours, textual reason to make that inference. He is always good to point them out. It's called supporting the inference with evidence from the film. Kind of important.

Your summary is false though. Finn didn't only turn off the shields because Han yelled at him. He turned off the shields because he'd been thinking about it and came up with a plan on his own. If you're going to argue inferences, at least accurately cite the film in support of your point.

 

My favorite example of Han retreating from difficult situations is that time on Hoth when he was searching for Luke and just gave up after an hour because it was too cold. Or half-way through the battle on Endor when he just left the group because it was just too darn hard dealing with Ewoks.

Gotta love how 2/3 of the examples of him 'habitually retreating' are done in the ST/Disney Era, almost as if they're changing his character instead of proving some long established character trait or adding to it. His defining moment - his arc - in ANH, was realizing he actually did care about friends and the cause more than just money and himself. That's a major thing to learn about yourself. That didn't go out the window the next day. Or willy nilly, as if Han is just a scum bag through and through and ANH is a lone aberration from his true character.

I just see a lot of arm-twisting to make this new trilogy fit. And again, instead of making Kylo's perspective that his parents abandoned him is way out of reality, the movie is actually trying to tell us that that they sure did. It's not poor Ben Solo's fault...his father was a selfish quitter. It's not his fault... his mom had a job outside the home.

And no. Han Solo's 'unapproachability to others' (whatever that even means) doesn't explain why Ben Solo feels detached and resents his parents. And Han's so called temper, is in no way like his son's chaotic, emotional, tantrums where he proceeds to kill innocent people and inanimate objects around him.

Yuck.

 

This is incredibly depressing but also too potentially accurate. Dang.

 

My favorite Han quitting moment is when he was totally ready to move on from Leia for the next woman who came along here and just treat it like a fling:



But then she hooked him with that kiss and ruined his poor life by giving birth to a dark side child. Poor Han.

 

Oh, I’m sure this person is a Tumblr Kylo fan because there was a post that went around showing Han saying “I’ll see you in hell” and saying that’s where “Ben” got his anger from.

Right, because of course Han would come listen to the hurt feelings of his son who murdered his fellow students. C’mon now.

Yes, indeed. This is exactly the way they want it. Han’s trash so of course he failed Kylo, Luke was never going to make it as a Jedi so of course he failed Kylo, Leia worked too much so of course he failed Kylo - so the new young fans will identify with him. The whole theme is fixing your parents’ mistakes.

 

I wrote that she wanted to fix the messed up Skywalker family (she grew up hearing stories about).

Part of it, IMO, was that it was about the family she now knows and how a returning Ben Solo would have helped a lot of their issues. For someone without a family the Skywalkers were a fairy tale family. Seeing them broken she probably wanted to help fix their family unit since she couldn’t fix her own.

But this was only part of her motivation. She saw a vision likely of him killing Snoke and not her and them working together. That’s a big development and I do think she thought it’s how they could turn the tide of the war and that ALL OF THIS was her destiny and why the force connected her to him and why she was here.

 

This is actually a really mature thing to do though. He think she's in love with someone else, his best friend no less, who's now a Jedi, and he's immediately ready to not get in her way, so she can pursue that and still be friends with her. He's calm, instead of flying off the handle in a rage of entitlement like his son would. He's open about his own feelings, and insecurities, instead of trying to keep her in a relationship with him using guilt or some other form of manipulation, like his son is so good at.

Gosh....what a horrible coward. Look at him, just retreating like that.

And no. Not poor Han. No cares about Han. It's Ben who's had a poor upbringing because he was raised by such parents.

 

https://defendinnocence.org/get-consent-not-like-han-solo/



I wonder if an academic somewhere may try to get into generational consent issues for a paper someday and cite the slippery slope and importance of fathers ensuring messaging on this is very clear.

 

Weird to post that article in the Rey/Kylo thread knowing you’re a Reylo fan. I mean, if you think Han treats women bad, wait till you meet his son

 

They should do a Dark Side ending for Kylo and Rey like in Jedi Knight II, with Emperor Katarn and his romantic partner and minion Sariss. Then they can do a trilogy that takes place 150 years later,lol.

 

You forget... Rey fought back when Kylo mind r-metaphors her, so somehow that means she actually attacked him. Consent is not needed when someone fights back, or something like that.

 

You didn’t wait for the edit. That was my whole point actually.

 

Nope doesn’t work. Nothing Kylo did there was learned from Han even at Han’s very worst. Kylo isn’t Han’s fault, much as LF would love the audience to buy that.

 

This is the Han at the end of the end of ROTJ, not the one who didn't get consent in ESB. Han throughout the OT grew into the man you see in this image right here. This is the father that Ben Solo saw in his home.

IDK, I guess it's possible Ben flew to Jakku at some point and borrowed Rey's copy of ESB. That would explain it.

 

I think the 7 biggest reasons for Kylo Ren’s fall in the end will be:

1) The Dark Side is powerful in his family. Particularly for the men it seems.

2) He had issues with the dark side but got sent away and then Luke sensed the darkness and read his mind and saw his evil thoughts and acted and pushed him further. So, nobody really worked on the darkness issues.

3) Prior to that Leia and Han were fighting more and Han’s worst issues came out. Possibly more consent issues. More drinking. More illegal activity. Han might have hit rock bottom and Ben might have seen it. Meanwhile both were so into other things that it’s possible neither excelled as parents as well as they did other things. As J.J. & Kasdan wrote. They went back to what they did best.

4) Luke, from his perspective, coming to kill him was huge.

5) My guess is that the other classmates then saw what happened and only thought the worst of him and he pushed back against one and got pushed back from another and a fight broke out between cliques that became a slaughter.

6) Sidious or Snoke pounced on his low point and told him he was the grandson of Vader and that his parents knew he was like him and didn’t want him around and sent him to Luke who wanted him dead eventually. He leaned of his past from the villains, not from family.

7) From there I think he just made bad choice after bad choice after bad choice. Sometimes mixing aspects of what he’d learned from his father and uncle and mom but in more evil ways.

 

I don’t so think he still didn’t make horrible choices on his own along the way as I am just wondering more what the biggest factors may have been in moving him from presumably innocent kid, earlier in life, to who he becomes just after the temple night.

 

I've criticized Han before, and I will again, for how he approached Leia in TESB. However, his intentions there were entirely different from Kylo's.

However wrong he was to push himself on her (yes, she did eventually reciprocate), Han was not intending to use deadly force on Leia. Kylo was using a form of torture on Rey in TFA, whether he would have used that torture all his life or not, and regardless of where he learned it.

"You like me because I'm a scoundrel" is a far cry from "I can take whatever I want"