zenbrainjam:

oldadastra:

bensolotrashh:

jraepeters:

beautiful-thensad-thensadder:

kylo-ren-trashcan:

bensolotrashh:

It still gets me yknow, thinking bout Ren removing his helmet for Rey, without hesitating.

Because he obviously wants her to believe he isn’t a monster or a creature he’s a human like her

I think there’s a lot of subtext, here.

Ren feels Rey in the Force, he can read her and perceive her in way she can hardly imagine. It’s like she’s naked and he’s in an armour.

Here I can hear someone screaming “Raaape!”, which is not entirely accurate. Though I can concede Ren’s attitude may look abusive, there’s much more to this scene than most people want to see.

For example, he waits for her to be awake to approach her. He wants her to be awake, wants to be able to talk to her, and not just break through her mind and take whatever he needs.

Also, when she makes that comment about the “creature in a mask”, he doesn’t even hesitate: he bares his face at once, as if it didn’t even matter, when we all know how much it does matter to him because:

– when Poe made the same remark as Rey, Ren didn’t bother to listen to him

– when Ren is talking to Snoke and Hux walks in, Ren is extremely uncomfortable to be seen unmasked by the General

For some reason, however, when Rey complains about Ren’s mask, the mask is gone in a matter of seconds.

By taking his mask off in front of Rey, Ren is implicitly removing the psycholgical distance between the two of them and even the symbolic advantage he has on her with his face hidden. He is trying to make her feel more at ease, and at the same time he’s willingly making himself more vulnerable. Virtually, given how vitally important that mask is to him, Ren is getting naked in from of her.

We’ve all seen Rey’s blatant dismay as she takes in Ren’s real looks: he’s young and charming and nothing like she probably imagined. This is when things begin to level for these two characters:

– she is physically exposed, he is physically exposed

– he’s probing her in the Force, she’s being read thought

But then, as Rey starts to realise she can invade his mind as much as he’s invading hers, they are even: they’re both physically and emotionally exposed to one another.

From the very moment Ren took off his mask in front of Rey, he opened a door that’s meant to be yanked away piece by piece, slowly but definitely.

When he drops his disgiuse for her, the subtextual message is: see who I am, look at me, I’m not afraid to show myself to you and you shouldn’t fear me.

Ren knows Rey could use the Force, if she only tried, and knows she’s strong in it. So when he revelas his face, it’s more than proving there’s a human being under that black armour: it’s offering his most vulnerable side to her so that it’s a fair game.

And, yes, there is a sexual undertone to this scene,but it’s not all about the rape symbolism most people think it is: Rey fights back and then she’s the one pushing through Ren’s mind, violating his thoughts.

Rather than rape, it looks more like a fierce makeout session between two people bursting with UST who are unable to process it properly and end up vent it with mutual spite.

If only we tumblr people worked this hard on class work.

SW Meta A+
English class work C-

In taking off his helmet, he is also sharing his natural voice with her, not the distortion.

We will go on dissecting this scene into bits until 2017, without even tiring…

a-shipper-despite-herself:

raven-star7:

oldadastra:

starwarsnonsense:

The heroes are the ones that are still changing and the villains are locked and petrified into what they are.

Akira Kurosawa via Lawrence Kasdan

I get a lot of asks, and can only answer a fraction of them due to that irritant commonly known as real life (sorry folks, I do appreciate all the questions – truly). One of the topics that comes up over and over is redemption. And to the question of whether Kylo will be redeemed, I can only say “possibly” – we simply know too little to say either way. 

But I appreciate that that’s no fun, as far as answers go. So let’s change tack.

Personally, I find it far more productive to discuss the question of petrification. The quote heading this post is Lawrence Kasdan’s paraphrase of the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, and I find it one of the most pertinent comments on the matter of villains. The worst villains are the ones who are immobile, their worldview completely fixed and unyielding. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to the one villain of The Force Awakens who truly fits this model: a certain General Hux.

Hux is utterly convinced of his absolute righteousness, never demonstrating the slightest flicker of self-doubt or questioning. He is utterly convinced that he is correct and justified in committing planetary genocide, and his fixed mode of being is emulated by his manner of dress – his uniform is immaculately tailored down to the last stitch, and it evokes a sense of a man with absolute self-possession and a dictatorial need for control. 

So, in Hux you seemingly have a villain who is “petrified”. In this sense, he’s much like Darth Vader in the original Star Wars – there is no shade to Vader in the first film, his persona as fixed and rigid as his armour. Only in The Empire Strikes Back do we glimpse layers and vulnerability, with that depth best exemplified by the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where you see the back of Vader’s bald, paper-white head in the moment before his mask goes back on. 

But to move on from past examples, let’s talk about Kylo. While Kylo certainly isn’t heroic, he’s absolutely not petrified into a particular state – over the course of The Force Awakens he goes on a journey, and while it’s absolutely not the hero’s journey (as I’ve seen some people claim) it does change him and alter his perspective. And if anything promises that redemption is lying in wait for him, that does.

At the beginning of The Force Awakens, Kylo is seemingly assured and confident. He is introduced striding into the midst of battle, and proceeds to sweep away the resistance he encounters from Tekka and Dameron with quips and comebacks. He is an imposing figure projecting a powerful persona. You only truly get an idea of his vulnerability when Snoke reveals that Han Solo is involved – even through the modulation of his mask, you can sense that his assurance is slipping, fear and doubt creeping in despite his claims of strength and resolve. 

What follows is a progressive unravelling, as you witness Kylo’s life come apart (very literally, in fact). He captures Rey and is fascinated, provoked into revealing his human face and attempting to forge a connection with another person. He faces his father and is mortified after killing him, struck by the weight of the evil he has committed. He watches as Rey claims the Skywalker lightsaber in the woods and is awed and amazed, characterised by respect and wonderment more than anger. His whole arc sees the certainties, hopes and framework Kylo had clung to when serving Snoke and the First Order slipping away, his master’s authority and benevolence thrown into question and his base of operations literally crumbling apart beneath his feet. 

By the end of The Force Awakens, Kylo bears a scar, a wound to remind him of what he has experienced and what he has learned. His costume, which has always been frayed, layered and unfinished, bears smouldering marks, ruined beyond repair. There is no closure for Kylo at the end of The Force Awakens, just as there is no closure for Rey or the audience. Every key character in the film is left with question marks, and that’s just as important for their development as it is for hype-building for Episode VIII.

It’s worth saying here that this could not be more different from Star Wars, which is effectively wrapped in a bow by its end point, its heroes content, safe and happy and all but one of its villains dead. The development for Luke, Han and Leia was only bolted on to the original trilogy after the fact, when George Lucas realised that he had a money-making behemoth on his hands and all the creative freedom he needed to take the series further.

And that – the knowledge that The Force Awakens was designed to be continued, designed to be the start of a longer, grander journey – is what makes considering the characters and their positions in the film so productive. While the filmmakers could perform a 180 with Hux, I’m 99.9% certain that they will not – he is frozen as a character, envisaged as an evil person and designed to stay that way. Kylo, meanwhile, is his opposite in that he is ever shifting, untethered and characterised first and foremost by how unfinished he is. 

In short, Kylo’s mercurial and unbalanced nature does two things – it makes him interesting, and it leaves open the possibility of redemption. J.J. has described Kylo as a “work in a progress” and that comes across very clearly in the film itself – the only real question is where that progress is going to take him.

@starwarsnonsense, lovely meta, as usual. I agree with what you are saying, especially the differences in manner of construction of this new trilogy compared to the first – character development being “bolted on” after the fact in the original trilogy, in contrast to the luxury of carefully constructed, nuanced development in the present story, in which the most fluid character of all may be Kylo Ren. 

I am biased and it surely colors my attitude about this, but I am fairly confident that the redemption path of Kylo Ren will be the emotional heart of the new trilogy, and that years from now when we can look back on the new films with hindsight, we will see that his will also have been a hero’s journey.  At least I hope so.  My conviction has less to do with my knowledge of Star Wars canon (which is limited), and is more informed by what seems to motivate the real-world Adam Driver as an actor and activist, and why he would be interested in telling this particular story.

I don’t even think we need to read this deeply into things. I’ve only seen TFA once and my initial impression was that J.J. Abrams is being really sneaky and there’s a lot about Kylo’s character that is purposefully being kept ambiguous and why would that be if he was just a straight up villain? The language used during Han’s death scene is so elaborately misleading that my head kinda twisted around trying to figure it out. I am still unsure of what actually happened. Adam’s acting alone was a huge wtf for me. What are we supposed to be gleaning from that scene? Was Kylo tricking his father to his death, or is he truly that tormented? If he is then we have to assume he finds no pleasure in his actions and if so then he’s not truly a villain, he’s a walking, talking tragedy! I left the movie feeling like TFA was not only about Rey’s heroes journey, but about Ben Solo, the Skywalker heir’s journey as well. He may not be a hero, but he’s a lot more than just a bad guy that’s for sure.

I think it all hinges on Kylo’s real goals. We have no idea why he’s doing whatever he’s doing, what his endgame is. It seems likely that Snoke only agreed to ‘complete his training’ after Kylo had made the sacrifice expected of him. But the question remains, what does Kylo need his ‘completed training’ for? Is he just an ambitious Vader wannabe (if so, why is he so damned unhappy about it?) or is there something else? We don’t know yet. I tend to think that everything being left so ambiguous can’t be an accident.

We just have no idea yet how big a threat there is to the galaxy, though I have my own crackpot theories. I don’t see Kylo as a traditional ‘double agent’ – that implies some kind of co-operation, and even if my crackpot theories are right I think he’s working very much alone. But I can easily imagine a scenario where the real question isn’t ‘How evil is this patricidal freak?’ but ‘How much is can you sacrifice for a goal that may be justified?’ or even ‘Are his means misguided though the end may be justified? Was his motive good but has he lost his way over the years in the darkness? Is there still a way back to the right track?’ Especially in light of this interview with Kathleen Kennedy, I’m convinced that there’s a lot more to Kylo than we can guess. A lot more.