Legacy of Vader #4-5: It's All Just a Game (and Everyone Else is an NPC)

[lucymonster]

You think I need an enemy, Vaneé? Someone who will actually put up a fight? Someone whose defeat will actually give me something instead of just taking and taking and taking? Someone I might actually remember killing? Then find me one.

Unlike the first few issues, this second arc has taken me some time to fall in love with. Kylo spends most of it behaving in really erratic, nonsensical ways for reasons that present as extremely flimsy - and it turns out, we're supposed to find them flimsy. Kylo's adventures on Naboo end in a blistering callout from Vaneé that cuts to the heart of the true motivations he's concealing from himself. And that's not even the part that hits me hardest. This has ended up being an intensely psychological arc that shouts about an aspect of Kylo's character we've only seen in murmurs on screen.

So, brief plot summary: Vaneé takes Kylo to Naboo, to visit the ruins of Padmé's mansion and learn about Vader's past with her. Kylo shies away from the love story like he's allergic, and instead becomes fixated on the political disposition of Naboo - specifically, on its willingness to submit to whichever power holds the biggest stick at any given point. Despite having devoted his life to enforcing exactly this kind of submission, their meekness disgusts him. He orders Hux to launch a full invasion, and when that predictably fails to provoke any resistance, he returns to the planet in disguise and initiates a rebellion himself, teaching the populace to fight the First Order and leading them in a guerrilla war against his own forces.

At about the last possible moment before the puppeteered conflict turns nuclear, Vaneé bails Kylo up and laughs at his insistence that he's helping the sheeple evolve into wolves. What he's actually doing, Vaneé says, is acting out his own self-hatred; unable to attack himself, he's instead cosplaying as a rebel hero and attacking everything that represents him.

It's not exactly a revelation that Kylo Ren hates himself, and venting his self-loathing in ridiculous, counterproductive ways that he feebly convinces himself are in service of some grand galactic vision is very on brand for him. But what stands out most to me about this whole episode is the intensity of Kylo's narcissism. He shows no awareness at all of the interiority of anyone outside himself; he's so utterly consumed by the contents of his own head, by his obsession with his own warped vision of self-actualisation, that nothing e;se seems to even register as properly real.

He's very capable of putting on different, likeable personas to get what he wants out of people - a curious traveller receiving history lessons from the locals, a mysterious Rebel Alliance-trained revolutionary standing up fearlessly for a whole people's freedoms - only to casually and remorselessly kill off every friend he's made the instant they cease to be useful. (Side note: fandom tends to have strong opinions about what Kylo was trying to achieve with his "you're nothing" speech to Rey in TLJ, and the view I tend to take - that he was being a cunt on purpose for reasons he knew full well were selfish - is unpopular among my fellow Reylo shippers. So it's very fun and validating to see his manipulative streak on such unambiguous display here.) But because he's in such deep, deep denial about his need for human connection and the kind of deeper meaning that can only actually be achieved in relation to others, the result of his total rejection of everyone else's personhood is that he walks around in a haze of nihilism, staying compulsively active (even if he has to pick the world's most avoidable fights to keep his sword arm busy) while feeling the whole time that his efforts are pointless. He's wasting his life trying to control NPCs that will ultimately just respawn somewhere else and keep doing their mindless pixellated thing, so his victories over them are hollow and satisfaction remains forever out of reach.

Next issue, Vaneé will be sending him off in search of an Order 66 survivor to lock horns with. I truly can't wait. This series just keeps getting better and better.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

Invading a country and then puppeteering the rebellion against that invasion is SUCH a choice, OMG. Such a series of choices! Each choice weirder than the last! But all ultimately running on the same fuel of self-hatred. (Does he also see something of himself in the meekness of Naboo? Something that he hates more than he hates everything else?)