diversehighfantasy:

lj-writes:

“Star Wars is a story about redemption!”

Then I’m rooting for the redemption of the tens of thousands of Stormtroopers who were abducted, enslaved, brainwashed, indoctrinated, and abused. They knew nothing else, but if shown another way maybe they can make a different choice and bring down their oppressors.

“Star Wars is a story about hope!”

Then I hope Supreme Leader Kyle Ron, a torturer and murderer who had every opportunity to turn away from evil but refused it each time, who willingly took over an enslaving genocidal organization and is continuing its policies, will watch his entire world collapse around him and suffer utter and total defeat.

“But… you don’t get it. It’s a story of redemption and hope for white men who have famous names and a need to get away scott-free with their crimes.”

Maybe, just maybe, the sequel trilogy that refuted the entire idea of the Skywalkers being special and is intent on killing and sidelining every Skywalker it can get its hands on, that made its one surviving Skywalker/Solo an evil war criminal and fascist tyrant, plans to subvert the idea that a powerful bloodline is the end-all be-all in this new universe? Maybe characters like Finn, Rey, and the Stormtroopers–the actual forgotten children of the universe–are meant to be the true heroes who triumph over an elitist mass murderer with a famous name. You know, just maybe.

And like, of all of the characters over the years, all of the suffering they endured, all of the tragic endings, Kylo Ren is the one who should have a happy ending? Nah.

The Sith were destroyed. Kylo proves that you don’t need the lure of the Sith to have evil in you. He makes choices, completely conscious of the fact that what he’s doing is wrong. And yet he’s treated as if he doesn’t have an ounce of free will. Even Anakin had to be carefully manipulated over years. How is puppet Kylo (despite having clear free will when he’s seen by himself asking Anakin to help him fight the light) who turns into the happy good guy complex storytelling? How does that make sense?

The problem is, Kylo being a commander (now Supreme Leader) of the First Order, an organization that destroys more planets and terrorizes more people than The Empire did and doesn’t even pretend to be anything but evil, means that all the battles of Yavin and Hoth and Endor did was destroy some weapons. What does it matter that the Sith were defeated if the Empire came back with bigger weapons? Kylo isn’t where he is because he’s a Sith who fell to the Dark Side, but because he wants to be. Snoke’s fatal error was thinking he could be controlled.

So, where’s the hope? How can it end so that things are better, and the entire Skywalker history isn’t reduced to nothing? I agree that it’s with the thousands of Stormtroopers, a rebellion that guts the FO from the inside, it’s with the billions of people in the galaxy standing up against tyranny, and Luke’s legacy, Rey, bringing the Jedi into a new day. That’s hope for the galaxy, not for one corrupted man.

Puppet Kylo makes story sense in one and one context only: an attempt to derail Finn’s story with “poor Ben had it worse!” Kylo is Finn’s foil in every way. They are from contrasting backgrounds and made the opposite choices. The same people Kylo hurt, Finn befriended and helped. Kylo in TFA was shown to hate Finn obsessively, probably for this very reason. Puppet Kylo takes him out of this foil relationship and gives his pain, his background, precedence over what was done to Finn and what he chose to do in response. Finn, Rey, Poe, and everyone else who was victimized by him are no longer allowed their own pain, they are now forced to empathize with Kylo and being angry about what was done to them makes them the bad guys. TLJ was an overly long exercise in centering Kylo and sidelining Finn, but even it was not stupid enough to go the puppet route and showed, in its muddled way, Finn and Kylo make the opposite choices yet again.

Puppet Kylo is boring and terrible storytelling in every way, but it is very effective at prioritizing whiteness and sidelining the Black lead. It’s in the same vein as arguing Kylo’s war crimes are not too bad, which in addition to making me want to run far away from whoever spouts that shit, also has the convenient effect of denigrating the morality of Finn’s choice and painting him as some kind of helplessly softhearted puppy (one war crimes-apologist Reylow actually called him “my good boy, my best boy”) instead of a psychologically complex man who made difficult moral choices in spite of the physical danger and his own deep-seated trauma.

Star Wars is, fundamentally, a story about choice. Kylo’s choices are what defined him, else the past two movies were just giant wastes of time and the last movie will essentially have to start from scratch. He is far beyond a happy ending. Maybe he’ll have a redemption, but after all the lives he’s destroyed he can’t be both happy and redeemed. He passed that point the moment he chose to respond to Luke’s momentary lapse with mass murder.