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lucymonsterHere’s what you do when your *cough* well-laid plans inexplicably go wrong, okay? There are four easy steps:
This month, we see him get tortured. He gets so, so tortured, you guys!!! Gardulla goes so hard on him that the weird little anti-Force user dude (who, yeah, is still pretty obviously working for Palpatine to facilitate the next phase of Kylo’s unwitting Sith apprenticeship) has to step in before the torture actually kills him. Once Kylo is done screaming and threatening and pleading and flashing back miserably to Rey’s rejection (because it turns out they actually wrote this comic as a personal gift for me specifically), they put him into a drugged sleep for a while and he hallucinates Vader telling him to man the fuck up. He wakes full of new resolve, blows the dungeon to rubble with the power of the Force, and does an almost too cool escape montage through the desert that involves fighting a giant monster bare-handed, skinning it and taking its tusks for weapons, then using those weapons to kill some bandits and take their comms equipment. He calls his flagship, orders an apocalyptic strike on Gardulla’s fortress, then nips in just before the bombardment starts to take back his lightsaber and presumably kill Gardulla in person.
Back on his ship, he pronounces himself satisfied with the experience, which taught him that the path to self-fulfilment is to reject community and interdependence even harder than he’s already done - and yes, he would like more such learning opportunities, please. So he lets Vaneé steer him off to Naboo next, to learn about Vader’s romance with Padmé and (dear God please let it be so) have some more angst about Rey, maybe?
I’m in heaven. I still almost hardly believe that this is a real thing that’s happening in canon, that I’m not about to wake up and realise I dreamed the whole story. They didn’t have to cater to me like this. I would have bought the damn comics no matter what, just because they’ve got Kylo Ren in them, but I’m getting served a lavish fucking banquet of all the things I like best, and the only complaint I have is that waiting a month between instalments is LITERALLY TORTURE. Really, who has it worse here - Kylo in the dungeon, or me?
Actually though that’s not quite right. I do have one other, very minor quibble, which is that they ignored an opportunity for some really powerful (Reylo-themed, not that I’m biased) resonance with the events of TLJ. There was already a moment early in this instalment where a piece of dialogue echoed something he said to Rey and provoked a flashback. There should have been another one at the end, when Kylo sums up the lesson he learnt by saying, verbatim, ‘I am alone.’ The hand-touch scene was RIGHT THERE waiting to be flashed back to and they just…didn’t.
But that’s the only trick Soule has missed so far. Kylo remains a magnificently erratic protagonist: exhilaratingly badass one moment, so genuinely pathetic the next that I almost have to read through my fingers. And of course the movies already showed this to an extent, but the comic is going even deeper on just how badly Kylo has misunderstood the character of Vader: he sees Vader’s loneliness as strength and self-sufficiency, not seeing (or refusing to see) that Vader was only alone because he lost the family he ransomed his own soul to protect, and that in the end he willingly threw away all his power in exchange for just a few moments of knowing he had even one of them back.
It’s all just so good. So, so, so, so good. I’m a puddle.
- Throw an absolute fucking tantrum. You’re an important man! They can’t do this to you!
- When the tantrum fails, dissolve into angst. Bonus points if you can shoehorn in your feelings about Rey and/or your family.
- Pull it together and do something spectacularly badass to get out of the situation.
- Learn entirely the wrong lesson from your ordeal and go charging merrily off with renewed purpose and conviction in the most self-defeating direction possible.
This month, we see him get tortured. He gets so, so tortured, you guys!!! Gardulla goes so hard on him that the weird little anti-Force user dude (who, yeah, is still pretty obviously working for Palpatine to facilitate the next phase of Kylo’s unwitting Sith apprenticeship) has to step in before the torture actually kills him. Once Kylo is done screaming and threatening and pleading and flashing back miserably to Rey’s rejection (because it turns out they actually wrote this comic as a personal gift for me specifically), they put him into a drugged sleep for a while and he hallucinates Vader telling him to man the fuck up. He wakes full of new resolve, blows the dungeon to rubble with the power of the Force, and does an almost too cool escape montage through the desert that involves fighting a giant monster bare-handed, skinning it and taking its tusks for weapons, then using those weapons to kill some bandits and take their comms equipment. He calls his flagship, orders an apocalyptic strike on Gardulla’s fortress, then nips in just before the bombardment starts to take back his lightsaber and presumably kill Gardulla in person.
Back on his ship, he pronounces himself satisfied with the experience, which taught him that the path to self-fulfilment is to reject community and interdependence even harder than he’s already done - and yes, he would like more such learning opportunities, please. So he lets Vaneé steer him off to Naboo next, to learn about Vader’s romance with Padmé and (dear God please let it be so) have some more angst about Rey, maybe?
I’m in heaven. I still almost hardly believe that this is a real thing that’s happening in canon, that I’m not about to wake up and realise I dreamed the whole story. They didn’t have to cater to me like this. I would have bought the damn comics no matter what, just because they’ve got Kylo Ren in them, but I’m getting served a lavish fucking banquet of all the things I like best, and the only complaint I have is that waiting a month between instalments is LITERALLY TORTURE. Really, who has it worse here - Kylo in the dungeon, or me?
Actually though that’s not quite right. I do have one other, very minor quibble, which is that they ignored an opportunity for some really powerful (Reylo-themed, not that I’m biased) resonance with the events of TLJ. There was already a moment early in this instalment where a piece of dialogue echoed something he said to Rey and provoked a flashback. There should have been another one at the end, when Kylo sums up the lesson he learnt by saying, verbatim, ‘I am alone.’ The hand-touch scene was RIGHT THERE waiting to be flashed back to and they just…didn’t.
But that’s the only trick Soule has missed so far. Kylo remains a magnificently erratic protagonist: exhilaratingly badass one moment, so genuinely pathetic the next that I almost have to read through my fingers. And of course the movies already showed this to an extent, but the comic is going even deeper on just how badly Kylo has misunderstood the character of Vader: he sees Vader’s loneliness as strength and self-sufficiency, not seeing (or refusing to see) that Vader was only alone because he lost the family he ransomed his own soul to protect, and that in the end he willingly threw away all his power in exchange for just a few moments of knowing he had even one of them back.
It’s all just so good. So, so, so, so good. I’m a puddle.
Yes ...
Date: 2025-04-16 04:37 am (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2025-05-17 11:08 am (UTC)Re: Yes ...
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Date: 2025-05-18 02:40 pm (UTC)He was SO fun! The MCR fandom cracked him once by posting the lyrics of "Welcome To the Black Parade" at him until he joined in.