absolxguardian:

lj-writes:

You know what’s sad? This isn’t even the first time I’ve seen people confused about Kylo Ren’s age due to Rian’s and Adam’s comments. I’ve seen someone ask a similar question on Reddit, too.

To clear things up, yes, Kylo Ren is close to 30, not much younger than the actor who plays him (Adam Driver is 33). Ren was born Ben Solo in 5 ABY (after the Battle of Yavin), and the events of The Force Awakens took place in 34 ABY, making him around 29 during the movie.

I think the following comments by Adam about his character in an interview for the December, 2017 issue of GQ add a bit of clarification (emphasis added):

“It makes complete sense how juvenile he can be. You can see that with our leadership and politics. You have world leaders who you imagine — or hope or pray — are living by kind of a higher code of ethics. But it really all comes down to them feeling wronged or unloved or wanting validation.”

So no, the character isn’t juvenile in physical age, he just acts that way. I hope that clears things up. And no, that’s not because he’s a sweet confused baby or whatever, the actor himself is very clear that it’s about a lack of ethics. In the same interview Adam talks about the absolute conviction of terrorists as another influence on the portrayal of his character.

Kylo Ren, much like the real-life morally bankrupt people Adam refers to, may have real struggles and pain in his life. Who doesn’t? The point is that he chose to deal with those issues, or rather failed to, in an immature and entitled way and that is why he comes across as so adolescent.

Heck, it seems in universe, people are confused about Kylo’s age. He’s literally the age of the New Republic (like he shares his birthday with the signing of the galactic concordance), but in bloodline (6 years before TFA, Kylo is 24) Leia sees him as too young to tell him about Vader. 

Kylo does have the feel of someone whose development stalled off at some point in the past, and I wonder how much of it has to do with personal trauma and how much with the way he was raised. I suspect both.

On personal trauma, Ben’s relationship with his parents already appears to be distant at the time of Bloodline and we’re still in the dark about what sent Han and Leia into separation and prompted Leia to send their son to Luke. LucasFilm officials have stated that the murkiness in Han’s past is due to necessity.

On the parenting side, Leia’s decision also strikes me as someone trying to protect a part of herself, projecting onto her son and trying to protect in him an innocence she never had. She had watched her home planet be destroyed, been tortured mercilessly by a fascist enforcer (who turned out to be her biological father, yay), and learned about the Skywalker part of her heritage before she was Ben’s age at the time of the novel. People who went through a lot at a young age sometimes cope by trying to protect their own children, and it seldom works well. It’s alternately stifling and alienating to be treated as younger than your age, and Ben may have reacted with corresponding petulance and distance.

Leia may also have feared what additional strains the revelation might place on her relationship with her son. In this sense it was the relationship she was trying to protect–again, not an effective  strategy that relied on a lack of communication and avoiding difficult subjects rather than facing them as a family.

I think there is room to talk about Han and Leia as loving but flawed parents who were not always coping well with their own severe traumas, while also squarely placing the responsibility for Kylo Ren’s crimes on himself where it belongs. I have so much sympathy for Leia because I don’t even know how she could have functioned with the magnitude of what she had suffered, and blocking things out was perhaps the only way she could work or even survive. But it certainly had a terrible effect on her family life and, I believe, her child.