Yeah it’s interesting how there’s always a reason to find Finn boring, unsympathetic, and unrealistic. He’s too perfectly good or too violently bloodthirsty, too childishly naïve or too aggressively sexual, too emotionally healthy to be realistic or too emotionally broken to be romantic (not with Rey, that is–because evidently Rose is perfectly safe with a creepy obsessive stalker). If there’s one thing I’ve learned in fandom it’s that a Black character will never be good enough for fandom, often for wildly contradictory reasons.
It still bothers me that Kylo Ren never used the Force against Finn. I mean, we’re talking about the guy who’s been shown doing this
and this
and this
also this
and so much more to his enemies and even people who just kind of annoyed him in the moment. The dude has oodles of Force power and is not at all shy about throwing it around. Other Force users are not immune, as shown with Rey who is even more powerful than he is.
So why, in his fight against Finn at the end of TFA, did Ren never even try to use the Force? Finn went running to an unconscious Rey after Ren knocked her out. Finn had even thrown his blaster aside, not that blasters work against Ren as Poe found out at the start of the movie. Why didn’t Ren throw Finn against a tree, too, or lift him into the air and choke him? That’s more like the guy’s usual MO.
Instead Ren not only dueled Finn but even resorted to punching him after disarming him, which had viewers commenting that his animosity against Finn seemed very raw and personal. It is true that Ren seems to have a personal beef against Finn (link), but again, the new Supreme Leader of the First Order has never been hesitant to use Force power against people regardless of how well he knew them or how strongly he felt about them. He revels in making people, from total strangers to hated rivals, helpless with his power. So why not Finn?
My hypothesis is that there’s another layer to Ren’s animosity against Finn beyond the usually-discussed ones of Finn defecting and making the opposite choices he did, and Ren’s hatred being the manifestation of his regrets. That’s a valid point and I have argued it myself (link), but what if there’s something more immediate and visceral going on?
Let’s go back to that moment in the village near the beginning of TFA, when Ren stared for a long moment at Finn before he turned away. He then unfreezes Poe’s blaster beam to strike a pole Finn was standing near, startling him and showering him with sparks.
Another thought came to me in relation to this theory. Didn’t John say that the massacre of Tuanul wasn’t enough for Finn to break his conditioning and bolt? What if this encounter with Ren was enough to do it? If that staring match happened as I theorize Finn would have had the additional kick of raw terror, both for Ren’s rage and what might be awakening in himself. If Finn felt Ren trying to read his surface emotions and also felt the effort fail, he would have known from Ren’s displeasure afterward that he was a goner if he stayed.
Come to think of it, if Finn is Force-immune (or a wound in the Force, as @themandalorianwolf theorizes) that would also explain how his many doubts flew entirely under the radar in an organization led by Force users. His inner turmoil would have been invisible to Force senses, and it wasn’t until Kylo Ren focused specifically on this particular Trooper that the truth came out.
The exact nature of Stormtrooper conditioning hasn’t been clarified in the movies, but there does seem to be some highly unethical shit going on using psychiatric technology/mindforming. Terex in the Poe Dameron comics was made outright robotic to keep him in line. The “reconditioning” that Finn was threatened with after Tuanul may have looked something like that.
These techniques don’t seem to be the first resort, however, and mostly the FO seems to rely on more mundane propaganda touting itself as the ultimate good. Finn was mostly a model cadet before his defection, which makes it likely that he would have escaped the more invasive procedures before his disobedience in his first battle.
I mean don’t get me wrong, the kind of story you referenced in your prior ask (link) could be a valid storyline for an escaped Stormtrooper. I just don’t think it’s fair to denigrate Finn’s story based on that one specific mold, since different people react in a range of different ways to survive the unbearable.
Yeah even if a shipper seems reasonable or otherwise okay, in the end it never goes well. I was actually mutuals with a shipper for a short time, but she subscribed to all the usual horribleness of her fandom and it stressed me out to see that shit on my dash. Then she quietly blocked me at some point, which was her prerogative and was also a mercy tbh. I was just happy that my dash had become a noticeably better place and then realized why a few weeks later ¯_(ツ)_/¯
That’s an interesting statement, given that the far left has literally never been in power in the United States. The U.S. Democratic Party is center-right by global standards. And if voters supported an openly white supremacist candidate to get the “far left” (snort) Democrats out of power, then they were in support of white supremacy.
The Kasdans are terrible writers, and if there was any kind of serious quality control going on at LF a lot of the developments in Solo and TLJ would never have made it to the final product.
L.J.'s Obsessions 