I would like to use this as an opportunity to consider what Kylo and Rey want – not necessarily in relation to each other (though that comes into play – patience!), but more in relation to their general goals, dreams and ambitions.
Rey is easier to pin down, since her goal is clearly stressed – she wants to be reunited with her family, and more specifically than that she wants someone to return for her. This is the dream of an abandoned child who was left to fend for herself in a desert and starved of love as much as nutrition.
Kylo is more difficult. He has many short-term goals that come and go over the course of The Force Awakens, but the real driving force behind him is probably his craving for power. Most importantly, however, is the fact that he appears to crave power because he presently possesses so little of it. For all his extraordinary skill in the Force, Kylo is beholden to his emotions and the systems of power that constrain him. He is straining against his leash, and the only time we see the leash snap – in the forest duel – is when he is at both his most terrifying and his most pathetic.
So, you have two people who are defined by an absence – an absence of love, reassurance and warmth in Rey’s case, and an absence of power and control in Kylo’s. It’s difficult to think of these respective lacks without considering the place that they come from.
Rey was only five years old when she was abandoned, and her daily struggle to survive is motivated purely by the faintly flickering hope that her family will return for her – she has suffered extraordinary trauma, and her actions are motivated by her hunger to overcome her hardship. She has the innocent hope and optimism of a young child, having remained frozen in that state in order to survive.
Kylo’s timeline is less solid, but we know that his parents, to an extent, failed him: his mother was too busy to care for him, his father too consumed by wanderlust to stick around. This, understandably, left him feeling betrayed and resentful. As a child, he will have been acutely aware of his own powerlessness, incapable of keeping his parents with him despite his talent in the Force. And while his parents undoubtedly loved him – Han’s response to seeing him again conveys as much – Kylo almost certainly perceived their lack of attentiveness as an absence of love. This feeling, naturally, will only have been compounded when he was sent away to train with his uncle. That event, however well intentioned, was the culmination of a childhood marked by rejection.
The difference between these goals, then, is their nature – Rey’s goal is very clear and specific. Her desire for someone to come back for her, to be reunited with her imagined family, is solid and becomes her anchor throughout struggle and hardship. Her dream is fulfilled – by proxy – when Finn returns to Starkiller Base to save her. At last, someone returned for her – Rey’s primary emotional struggle is resolved.
Kylo’s goal, by contrast, is abstract – he craves a state of being rather than something external to him, as Rey does. And because of that, he is left unfulfilled. Instead of feeling more powerful after killing his father, he feels weakened. And with that development, all of the tenuous certainties that have formed his framework for existence fall apart. Snoke had filled the role of surrogate father in Han’s absence, but Kylo’s faith in him has disintegrated by the end of the film – Snoke’s guidance was not forthcoming, his tacit command that Han Solo be murdered proven pointless after its hollow fulfilment. By the end of The Force Awakens, everything that had ordered Kylo’s world is gone: his father is dead, his master proven false, his ideology revealed to be hollow.
Rey is afforded something like happiness in The Force Awakens because she is the hero – her struggle and hope are rewarded with kindness, love and affection. Equally, Kylo ends the film broken because he is the villain and is thus deserving of punishment – his path is proven wrong, his cruelty marked by a scar.
But what’s really interesting here is that their journeys are both so clearly only beginning. While Rey is rewarded in The Force Awakens, the fulfilment brought about by Finn’s returning for her is transitory – she has to leave her friend and travel to Luke in pursuit of her destiny. And she doesn’t find a warm embrace waiting for her on Ahch-To – only a long, penetrating stare from a broken man. There is no true resolution for Rey, with her story ending on one of the most literal cliffhangers imaginable.
And while Kylo finds no trace of fulfilment, his ending is more clearly defined than Rey’s. By the end of the film, everything he had clung to is gone – going forward, he will have no choice but to find a new ideology and develop a new system for ordering his world. And I’d wager that his new goal will be securing Rey for his cause. Rey represents what Kylo has always lacked – something solid to aspire towards, a flesh-and-blood person to envisage by his side. She can be achieved in a way that some mythical state of mind cannot.
And while I expect this new goal to give Kylo focus, I expect Rey’s trajectory to go in the opposite direction – I can see her certainties falling away, just as Kylo’s did in VIII. And while Kylo will want Rey, I can see Rey being left adrift by what she will discover about her past – most specifically, her hallowed dream of a loving family will be dashed.
And that vulnerability, I think, is what Kylo will seize on to seduce her to the dark side, as she once threatened to seduce him to the light.
What do you make of this? What goals do you believe the characters had, and what do you imagine their goals will be moving forward?
Spot-on as usual, and I completely with everything as usual. Just wanted to add that both Rey AND Kylo share the need/desire for their family to come back for them – and for just about the same amount of time too. Ben Solo ran away to join the Dark Side when he was still just a teenager. Kids run away from their family usually for one fundamental reason – to be found. It’s a test of their parents’ love. If they run away and their parents come find them, it proves that they care. Ben never got that. He ran away and Han and Leia (well, maybe Han moreso) were like “WELP, he’s gone for good I guess!” Did they even TRY to get him away from Snoke? We don’t know for sure, but judging by Kylo’s statement to Han that he’d “been waiting for this moment for a long time”, my guess is no? My guess is, like Rey, Kylo had been waiting 15 years (literally half his life) for his family to come get him. 15 years before Han finally showed up on Starkiller Base and asked Ben to come home. “Too late” indeed?
Reylo Source 