More thoughts on Ben Solo’s fall, Bloodline, and That Trailer

anythingtomakeyoustay:

heliotrope-r:

Further to this post, I’ve been thinking.

Just imagine Ben Solo, trying to be a good Jedi apprentice while struggling all the time with this elemental power he can barely control, plus Snoke constantly whispering insidious and seditious ideas in his ear (probably in a way that makes Ben believe it’s HIM thinking it; it’s like having a devil on his shoulder and no angel on the other).

All his life he’s tried to be like his grandfather, the great Jedi hero and martyr Anakin Skywalker, and then all of a sudden he finds out – FROM A PUBLIC HOLONET – that Anakin was actually Darth Vader. And that all this time, not only his mother and his father but Luke, his uncle and master, were hiding this from him. Trying to keep Ben from turning into him.

Can you imagine? KABOOM doesn’t even begin to cover the reaction. The shock, the fury, the sense of utter betrayal, and underneath it all the Force, giving vent to his blind, explosive and uncontrollable rage. And when the storm subsides and the dust settles, Ben Solo realizes with horror that everything around him – the temple, his fellow students – is completely destroyed. Even Luke is buried deep in the rubble, and for all Ben knows he’s probably dead.

Meanwhile, Leia’s still reeling from the shock of having her parentage publicly exposed, and knows Ben must be feeling it too. She tries to reach him and Luke, but she can’t. She records a message and sends it hoping it will reach him, but of course it never does because by then Ben is on his way to Snoke.

All this time I’ve been thinking his turn to the Dark Side was at least partly ideological – it WASN’T. He became Kylo because he’d already destroyed everything and killed a bunch of people (including Luke, as far as he knew) and believed he had nowhere else to go. I think the ideology came mostly after the fact – he had to somehow rationalize the choice he’d made out of horror and guilt and shame and hopelessness, and how better than to use the political jargon he’d learned from his mother?

You can see why he’d be so obsessed with order now, seeing as he is literally the child of chaos. Why he keeps his fists clenched tight and his emotions hidden behind a mask. Why does Kylo slash and punch things when he’s angry? It’s so he won’t give in to the Force and just blow everything and everyone around him to kingdom come. Again.

And it totally explains Luke’s reaction to Rey’s power in the trailer, too. He doesn’t react with awe or even wariness: he looks at the crack in the ground behind her like Indiana Jones looks at a snake. Not only has he seen this kind of raw power only once before, the last time it happened he got buried under a pile of rubble and nearly died, and dug his way out to see everything he’d worked for in flames and everyone around him dead. Luke isn’t crazy, he has PTSD. And Mark Hamill is a genius who deserves more credit, dagnabbit, because that was ALL THERE in his eyes in the trailer. In EVERY scene.

Am I reaching too far here? I don’t think I am. It fits the timeline. It fits what we know from the books and the trailers and the Forceback in TFA. I’ll be very surprised if we don’t end up seeing something very like this backstory in TLJ.

This makes his “you need a teacher” line so much more poignant when you consider that she is like him. And Luke is literally going to be unable to train her as it ended so poorly for Kylo.

And the “don’t be afraid I feel it too” line would have so much more meaning because Kylo is very much afraid and knows what they are capable of.

“She’s strong in the force and more powerful than she knows” he says to Snoke and Kylo knows this because he was the same. He sees that potential – that bomb waiting to blow – and he went to the only person who seemed capable of helping even though it ruined his life.

Rey is running to the only person she knows who might be able to help her but little does she know Luke is probably the farthest thing from helpful now.