More thoughts about Kylo Ren
Mar. 12th, 2025 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterYes, in the year of our lord 2025. There's a chance I'll still be going in another decade from now. He's just A LOT TO UNPACK, okay.
A while ago now, Adam Driver caused a bit of a stir in Reylo fandom by revealing in an interview that Good Boy Ben Solo was a surprise late addition to his character’s trajectory. JJ Abrams originally conceived of Kylo Ren as being Vader in reverse: where Vader began his trilogy fully committed to the dark side and gradually had his convictions dismantled, Kylo was to start out conflicted and grow secure in his villainy by the end. So until quite late in the sequel game, through the whole first two movies, that’s how Driver understood his character: as someone who was basically on a path towards completely snuffing out his own spark and committing himself wholly to the dark side.
I didn’t pay much attention to this at the time, because I've always been on Team Kylo Ren Redemption and I generally don’t care about Word of God type stuff unless it happens to coincide with my own opinions. But I hit a bad slump the other day and decided to cheer myself up by rewatching The Last Jedi for the first time in ages, and I was surprised by how many feelings I had about the story viewed through that lens. It’s such a strong, dark, honestly much more realistic take on the nature of evil.
Because it’s still confrontingly easy to relate to Kylo’s motives, if not his choices: he’s angry and in pain and wants desperately to control the narrative, to vindicate himself, to punish the people who’ve hurt him so that no one will ever dare do it again. What makes him seem so redeemable to (at least a decent portion of) the audience is that he so clearly is acting from a place of pain, that he doesn’t enjoy the terrible things he does, that they’re not even getting him any closer to where he actually wants to be. But honestly, setting aside whatever you believe about redemption, that’s pretty much just how human evil works, right? Gleeful sadists exist but they’re not by any means the majority. Most of the shit things we do to each other boil down to “I feel vulnerable in some way and believe I can make myself safer by hurting someone else”. Kylo's evil is the kind of evil that everyone alive is capable of sharing under the right (wrong) circumstances - dialed up to eleven by the lightsabers and magic powers, but at its core, utterly human and far more relatable than most of us would like to admit.
And I think that's probably a big part of why I care so deeply about his redemption - because I need to believe that we're all capable of overcoming that part of ourselves, of learning to soothe our own hurts in less destructive ways, of making better choices even in the face of overwhelming emotions. But I also have to admit it would have been a hell of a story if they'd carried it through to the end. We're seeing it play out all over the world right now: the evil that does the most damage isn't the evil that cackles. It's the evil that truly believes it's the victim, that throws temper tantrums and lashes out when threatened, that has to twist reality in knots around itself to justify its actions because it can't otherwise live with the cognitive dissonance of what it's doing. I think we'd be far better equipped to recognise and combat evil if we all got more comfortable with the idea that a person can have reasons other than malice for hurting others - nuanced, sympathetic, relatable reasons - and still be utterly in the wrong beyond all possibility of compromise.
I will always and forever be glad we got a redemption arc instead of the bleak outcome that was originally planned, but it does make me wish more than ever that TROS had done more to earn it. Demoting Kylo to secondary threat in the face of Palpatine's return was such a moral cop-out. I'd have loved more than anything to get to see him play out his villain arc all the way, to make those terrible choices on his own with no more "the Real bad guy manipulated me into it" to hide behind, and still find redemption at the end, because him being truly in charge of those choices is precisely what means he has the power to make better ones. And this is why no one is ever prying the Ben Solo Lives tag out of my hands. The redemption we got on screen felt like a start, a first taste. It's not enough. I need to see him do the actual hard work of changing his habits and overcoming his kneejerk reactions to any negative emotion.
Thank fuck for fanfic.
A while ago now, Adam Driver caused a bit of a stir in Reylo fandom by revealing in an interview that Good Boy Ben Solo was a surprise late addition to his character’s trajectory. JJ Abrams originally conceived of Kylo Ren as being Vader in reverse: where Vader began his trilogy fully committed to the dark side and gradually had his convictions dismantled, Kylo was to start out conflicted and grow secure in his villainy by the end. So until quite late in the sequel game, through the whole first two movies, that’s how Driver understood his character: as someone who was basically on a path towards completely snuffing out his own spark and committing himself wholly to the dark side.
I didn’t pay much attention to this at the time, because I've always been on Team Kylo Ren Redemption and I generally don’t care about Word of God type stuff unless it happens to coincide with my own opinions. But I hit a bad slump the other day and decided to cheer myself up by rewatching The Last Jedi for the first time in ages, and I was surprised by how many feelings I had about the story viewed through that lens. It’s such a strong, dark, honestly much more realistic take on the nature of evil.
Because it’s still confrontingly easy to relate to Kylo’s motives, if not his choices: he’s angry and in pain and wants desperately to control the narrative, to vindicate himself, to punish the people who’ve hurt him so that no one will ever dare do it again. What makes him seem so redeemable to (at least a decent portion of) the audience is that he so clearly is acting from a place of pain, that he doesn’t enjoy the terrible things he does, that they’re not even getting him any closer to where he actually wants to be. But honestly, setting aside whatever you believe about redemption, that’s pretty much just how human evil works, right? Gleeful sadists exist but they’re not by any means the majority. Most of the shit things we do to each other boil down to “I feel vulnerable in some way and believe I can make myself safer by hurting someone else”. Kylo's evil is the kind of evil that everyone alive is capable of sharing under the right (wrong) circumstances - dialed up to eleven by the lightsabers and magic powers, but at its core, utterly human and far more relatable than most of us would like to admit.
And I think that's probably a big part of why I care so deeply about his redemption - because I need to believe that we're all capable of overcoming that part of ourselves, of learning to soothe our own hurts in less destructive ways, of making better choices even in the face of overwhelming emotions. But I also have to admit it would have been a hell of a story if they'd carried it through to the end. We're seeing it play out all over the world right now: the evil that does the most damage isn't the evil that cackles. It's the evil that truly believes it's the victim, that throws temper tantrums and lashes out when threatened, that has to twist reality in knots around itself to justify its actions because it can't otherwise live with the cognitive dissonance of what it's doing. I think we'd be far better equipped to recognise and combat evil if we all got more comfortable with the idea that a person can have reasons other than malice for hurting others - nuanced, sympathetic, relatable reasons - and still be utterly in the wrong beyond all possibility of compromise.
I will always and forever be glad we got a redemption arc instead of the bleak outcome that was originally planned, but it does make me wish more than ever that TROS had done more to earn it. Demoting Kylo to secondary threat in the face of Palpatine's return was such a moral cop-out. I'd have loved more than anything to get to see him play out his villain arc all the way, to make those terrible choices on his own with no more "the Real bad guy manipulated me into it" to hide behind, and still find redemption at the end, because him being truly in charge of those choices is precisely what means he has the power to make better ones. And this is why no one is ever prying the Ben Solo Lives tag out of my hands. The redemption we got on screen felt like a start, a first taste. It's not enough. I need to see him do the actual hard work of changing his habits and overcoming his kneejerk reactions to any negative emotion.
Thank fuck for fanfic.
