ST Sequel to the Sequel trilogy coming?

TCW did *a lot* to redeem the PT, made Anakin more fun and focused more on his and Obi-Wan’s friendship for one. Some episodes even showed him and Padme in a supportive and stable relationship.

If a show did the same for the ST by, say, giving Kylo Ren an actual tragedy in his past, it could do a lot for the ST.

 

That’s why I like his portrayal. His fall to the dark side is supposed to be tragic, not anticipated because he was never heroic and always an emo edgelord ***hole.

 

See, I don’t like “complicated,” “vulnerable”, “complex” or “edgy.” If I am going to feel sad about someone making bad choices, I actually need to like the person in the first place. I really dislike “edgy,” and my experience with the word “complicated” when used to describe a character translates to ‘this character is so awful that you would steer clear of them in real life but here you aren’t supposed to think the character is awful because [excuses].’ I did not feel that way about Anakin most of the time, but there were several scenes when I thought he needed to be given a long time out, not an ‘awww you’re so complex’.

I wanted to see Anakin and Obi-Wan being friends, and we only got that during the AOTC speeder chase scene and in the early scenes of ROTS (which I loved, despite hating the movie after the 45 minute mark or so). We got quite a bit of that in TCW though—the show was recommended to me for that reason.

He is supposed to be heroic. He is not supposed to be a villain yet, so I see no point in making him villainous. TCW does a good job in showing how his impatience and short temper led him to make unorthodox decision so it’s not like his turn to the dark side ‘came out of nowhere’.

If he was always supposed to be an ***hole underneath—then who cares if he turned or got redeemed?

 

I tend to think that TCW Anakin leaned mildly more towards the “hero” part of “fallen hero” in his descriptor, while the PT Anakin was, to its credit in terms of clarity and as a character drama, more “going-to-fall anti-hero” with him.

Still, if one my favorite moments of both are when the lines are blurred - ROTS’s Anakin on the very first part is nicely matured and nuanced in his flaws while still being clearly heroic and likable, much like Anakin during the “Obi-Wan Undercover” story in TCW, even though the TCW story was more about positioning Anakin’s flaws front and center as an antagonist.

When it comes to Kylo/Ben in comparison to Anakin, though, I think there’s some tricky things that LFL will end up having to address if they ever want to get more usage out of the character, and that LFL’s track record with him is spotty at best because they tripped over those tricky elements.

The biggest problem is rather simple: you can’t convince people to relate to Ben Solo as he currently is and was because of how self-centered and evil killing Han for power is, arguably especially in comparison to Anakin pre-Vader, and the current formula arguably requires denigrating and dismissing our heroes to some extent. Much of the feud between Kylo/Ben’s most fervent fanbase (and the fanbase for TLJ) with the more recently embittered part of the fanbase comes from giving him a double standard of “expected audience sympathy.” He’s actually kind of a bad analogue to Anakin because of context and substance right now, and they need to change that.

People can get “crimes of passion” more than they can get “coldly sacrificing a loved one for power;” people can get being possessive of a loved one out of fear of losing them more than they can objectifying everyone all the time; people can sympathize with poor decision making emerging from emotional trauma and deprivation, but often have a visceral response to privilege leading too entitlement.

TFA hit a sweet spot for *more* people with regards to Kylo because him being loathsome form many (even most) perspectives was still an intentional part of the formula alongside the other elements, even if other people felt they connected *deeper* with Kylo in TLJ because there was a monomaniacal focus on him being moody and feeling victimized; I think even most critics of the ST get the idea that an angsty young man who feels betrayed can emotionally capture some people’s teenage experience, but I think that seeing that as being the only thing about the character misses how his substance is far nastier and far less relatable.

Anakin, in contrast, has his genesis for evil born in losing loved ones and in being given massive responsibilities that include significant self-denial - we can all get that ugliness.

(Plus… many people don’t have moody melodramatic teenage years rife with rebellion, so some of us were never going to connect with that idea for Kylo.)

What Ben Solo needs is LFL understanding he’s not a naturally likable compelling character even compared to the first run through on PT-era Anakin… yet.

He needs a hell of a lot more than he has, and arguably more than Anakin needed even conceptually before the PT.

 

Why would I be invested in whether a character turns to the Dark Side, or find that turn tragic, if I can’t stand him?

After the PT there were many people who enjoyed seeing Anakin catch on fire on Mustafar, which I am sure was not the way Lucas wanted us to react, Anakin’s fall is supposed to be tragic, but it is the way the audience is going to react when the character is not likable. TCW Anakin remedied some of that.

Kylo had a similar problem but magnified, because there was no real tragedy or trauma in his past like Anakin had, and he was not TCW Anakin at all, he was not even PT Anakin in the scenes where he was likable. He was PT Anakin at his most annoying and melodramatic—and we in the audience were told by the narrative that we are terrible people if we don’t view him as sympathetic and tragic and root for his redemption.

 

I’m not talking about being “compelled.” I’m talking about reacting along the lines of ‘Seeing that whiny creep fry made my day. Now where’s my barbecue sauce?’ That was a real comment on this site at the time.

I am pretty sure that is not how Lucas wanted us to react—pretty sure he wanted us to actually care that Anakin lost everything and feel bad for ‘what could have been.’ TCW gave us that.

 

A nice likeable fellow can absolutely be driven to make bad choices under the circumstances that Anakin found himself in—traumatized by enslavement, the murder of his mother, and war—and in his desperate fear of loss, accelerated by visions of his wife dying in childbirth, finds himself making a deal with the proverbial devil—and not even realizing what he has gotten himself into until it is too late to undo the horror he committed. That is the tragedy. And it makes perfect sense.

If he is annoying as hell “edgy” and “complex” and people just want him to get the hell of the screen—why would anyone care about his trauma? His fear of loss? Why would anyone root for him not to make those terrible choices? Why woudl anyone root for anything other than the credits to roll?

I didn’t care about Kylo being redeemed in the ST because I just wanted him off the screen. I didn’t feel that way about Anakin because I was able to focus on the speeder chase scene, the dinner scene, and the opening scenes of ROTS—the scenes in which he was most like his TCW character. But many people viewed Anakin in the PT the same way I view Kylo. They did not care how or when he turned dark, they just wanted him to go away.

 

It’s a balancing act dependent on your goals for both before and after the fall: sometimes, you mostly just want a more complex but still loathsome villain; sometimes you want a tragic story of a beloved hero failing and falling; sometimes, you want to shock the audience by revealing how base and despicable a character is when deprived of their most cherished possession.

Anakin required a past and a fall that would be worthy of both the heroic best friend Obi-Wan had and the monster that was Vader. Lucas eventually coming around to encapsulating his heroism, his fall, and his eventual redemption all on a sliding scale of transcendent selfless love and paranoid possessiveness of his loved ones clarified things a lot… but still left the details to struggle with.

In comparison, any future material with Ben Solo is likely going to have to generate a way around how self-absorbed he is in the ST; Vader’s “exceptionalism” towards Luke allowed them to extrapolate a more sympathetic love/obsession motivation for him, but Kylo kills Han as though he’s being “liberated” from regarding Han even possessive obsession, and in general, Driver keyed in on how the character was self-obsessed for much of his psychology, even if LFL didn’t… though someone like Charles Soule imitating that self-obsession and inability to regard others as people in his comics both for the character and for the plot, and the films’ version of Reylo in general, provides a worrying sign of LFL having internalized the Kylo-centric viewpoint behind the character’s villainy.

It’s why I still think having Ben Solo get a little “Winter Soldier-ed” is more likely to make him tolerable and engaging to the larger fanbase. While there are several fans who can tolerate and enjoy Han and Leia having a one-direction love for their son that he doesn’t really reciprocate, even conceptually it’s hard for many other to like a character who doesn’t return their parents’ love, let alone when the audience member already likes the parents.

So honestly, not tying his fall into any personality issues or preferences when he’s younger and supposed to be likeable, and instead having some event traumatize him and disconnect him from reality, would work better.

 

If I don’t like someone, I am not going to be invested in their fate at all, past or present.

And I explained earlier how a likable hero could easily make the choices that Anakin made in ROTS, given the circumstances.

One reason I did not care about Kylo’s redemption is…what was he going to be redeemed to? An arrogant ***hole who was less homicidal (what he was in the Soule comics)? Why am I supposed to care about that?

Anakin being annoying “complex” and “edgy” had the same effect on some people in the PT. It detracted from the power of Vader’s redemption for them. And that’s sad—that moment at the end of ROTJ is sacrificed because some viewers and writers think a heroic guy is “boring” and they need a Hot Topic edgelord on steroids for “excitement”. And any investment in Kylo’s redemption is sacrificed for the same reason.