#i think in the comics she's made to be somewhat of a ... foil ? for anakin ... like a contrast and comparison type thing

[gffa]

I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH THIS CHARACTER SO MUCH, but I think rereading The Rise of Kylo Ren all at once, as well as the final issue, plus the Age of Resistance - Supreme Leader Snoke and Age of Resistance - Kylo Ren issues (and a bit of the TLJ novelization), have at least somewhat coalesced this character for me. The burning question with Ben Solo has always been:  Why?  Why did he not tell anyone about Snoke talking to him in this comic?  Why didn’t he go to his mother, whom he knew still loved him?  Why did he embrace the dark side? None of this had ever really been addressed in the canon itself, it was all down to speculation, but nothing I felt I could connect to what we were actually being given with any real solidity in the canon.  And issue #4 definitely still feels a little wobbly to me, but I think it at least strung up some connective tissue for me. In rereading the first issue, I was back to:  Why doesn’t Ben go to his mother?  If he didn’t attack the school (which I’m not sure how clear it is what he did/didn’t have to do with it, if it truly was Snoke who did it, how much Ben was aware of it, how much of a hand he played in all of this, certainly it makes the timing of the destruction of the Temple INCREDIBLY coincidental if it was Snoke’s plan AND it was the night Luke and Ben fought), if he knows his parents love him (which Age of Resistance - Supreme Leader Snoke [x][x] shows that he does, he literally goes into the same cave as Luke did to show him his fears, the only thing in there is what he brought with him and he sees Luke saying he doesn’t want to fight, which means Ben knows this is true even if he doesn’t want to admit it[x], as well as the TLJ novelization has him knowing that his mother still loves him and he’s angry about it, as well as TFA itself has him not at all surprised that Han’s there to help him and bring him home, even in TLJ he’s snarling about how, oh, is Luke here to save his soul, say Luke forgives him?, which shows that he knows that Luke regrets it and cared about him)--anyway, I’m getting distracted, there’s a lot to go over! If he didn’t attack the school, if he didn’t want this, why did he run from Leia as much as anyone?  In rereading the issue, there’s an interesting flashback that’s place right in the middle of the droid asking Ben where he wants to go, where he’s thinking about his mother and he hesitates.  I didn’t really pay attention to the timing the first time because it felt like just a cool dramatic moment to show further flashbacks.  But looking for the trends I know Soule is capable of and so often puts in his writing, it struck me that the flashback was specifically set on Luke yelling, “Ben, no!” and Luke in the ruins of the Temple and Ben saying, “I didn’t want this!”  [x][x][x] Thus, I’m left to conclude that he didn’t go to her because he himself couldn’t face her, couldn’t look at all of this storm inside him and find a way out of it.  And I think that’s the thing--in reading this issue all at once, it really jumped out at me that the central theme of this comic was about the path people choose in their lives.  That there’s an undercurrent of a legacy to live up to, but that that’s just window dressing for a deeper issue--in that Ben Solo doesn’t know what his path is. On one side, he has a huge legacy to live up--the man he was named for, this larger than life great Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi, he never even met him, he hates the name he was given, Ben.  He hates the name Solo as well, because it’s a made up name, it’s not real, it’s a lie.  [x][x] This contradiction is fascinating, because he’s named through two different aspects--one, a legacy, and two, a chosen name.  Ben Solo hates the legacy name just as much as he hates the name Han Solo created for himself!  So the idea that he’s creating his real persona for himself, when he stops being a Jedi and goes to Snoke, is directly contradicted by how much he hates the chosen name, that he says it’s a lie.  As if Kylo Ren isn’t a lie he’s hurtling himself towards, too. Neither of these really seem to be the true problem, for all that they’re genuine things that anger Ben.  In the final issue, he does tell Tai, "Even my name isn't a choice.  The dark side and the light side both claimed me for their own the moment I was born.  Do you know how that feels?  Whether it's Luke Skywalker or Snoke, neither one sees me as a person.  I'm just a... legacy.  Just a set of expectations." The thing is, Ben Solo is not a reliable narrator.  He talks one minute about how the light and the dark are warring over him, even Ren comments on how he’s been fighting this every step of the way, you don’t really want to live in the shadow.  “I am the shadow,” Ben replies.[x]  He is trying so hard to shove himself onto some path, any path that he thinks will soothe him. The most emotional part of the issue (or at least one of them) is Tai’s pleading speech to him, the conversation that’s been threaded throughout the entire issue about how you choose your path.  Choice is arguably the most important theme of Star Wars, and we see that very clearly in Tai’s conversations with him.  Even in the previous issue, he tells Ben that he keeps himself locked up too tight, he’s not really being himself.[x]  Ben’s recounting of who Voe is (the other important foil for Ben’s character in this comic) is woven together with how he thinks she never really learned to be herself, rather than measuring herself again him.[x] Ren, in their very first meeting, says, hey, you know there are other paths, right? [x]  On Elphrona, Voe says he must face justice, and Ben shouts back, “You think I’m a murderer, Voe?  Is that what you want me to be!?”[x]  Tai’s big speech to him in the previous episode is all about, be who you are, which is another way of saying, “Find the path you’re supposed to be on.”[x]  Tai’s words to Voe on Elphrona are also, “[Ben] thinks [the Knights of Ren] can help him find his true path.”[x] And of course, all of the above.  Paths and choices and being who you truly are, that Ben Solo couldn’t figure out any of these things for himself.  That he didn’t really want to be a Jedi (and that’s fine, it’s not the path for everyone) and we see, we see that he could have chosen otherwise, that Tai offers him a chance to actually walk away from all of it and just go help people, we see the hesitation there before Ren kills Tai and Ben makes his choice.  Because he may not feel like he had any choices, but Tai showed that he absolutely did. Even when he truly falls into the dark--so completely that a multitude of people feel it, Leia, Snoke, Rey, Palpatine, they all sense it--it’s framed around the idea of, “I’m not anyone special, so I can do what I want.”

All of this coalesced for me into two things, especially once I added in other Ben Solo appearances in canon--this is someone who has no strong sense of self or the path he’s meant to be on, so he just sort of careens wildly from one bad choice to the next, each time hoping that it’ll feel like the right path, rather than doing the really hard work of looking inside himself and not just locking everything up into a little box. And, two, he is further trying to gain that sense of self through others.  Even when he’s not fully aware of it, he keeps walking the same paths they do--like on Dagobah, when he goes into the same cave Luke did, to face his inner fears,  he’s walking the same path his uncle did.[x] When he’s offered a choice, when Tai asks him to come back, if you want, you can absolutely read that glowy red backdrop as being similar to Anakin’s fight with Obi-Wan on Mustafar. And certainly, given that Soule was the one to write Darth Vader bleeding his kyber crystal, we can draw parallels between that and Kylo Ren bleeding his:

And that’s one of the things that the character keeps coming back to--and it’s a huge theme for Ben Solo, that he’s constantly being compared to Vader, by others and by himself.  Sure, part of it is that I assume that’s just how bleeding a kyber crystal goes, but the parallels between Kylo and Vader (and thus between Anakin and Ben) do a lot to highlight the issues between them both, that we see TROKR’s visuals are echoing Dark Lord of the Sith’s scene, as Kylo is very defined by Vader in an out-of-universe meta way. But also within the universe, he keeps comparing himself to Vader and is compared to Vader by others, because that’s kind of the point, that it’s not just too much power in an unstable person (though, that, too) or that they were born evil (no, they weren’t), but that they both couldn’t really look at themselves or the choices set before them, to either actually commit to the path they were on or to find another one.  That they both were still loved even after their fall.  That they both had people pleading with them to make a better choice. "Leave [the mask].  I said leave it!  You cannot hide behind a mask here.  You cannot pretend to be Vader in this place,” Snoke says is Age of Resistance - Supreme Leader Snoke [x] “This is where I will succeed.  ...where Vader failed,” says Kylo Ren in Age of Resistance - Kylo Ren. [x] “There’s too much Vader in him,” Han says in The Force Awakens. “A new Vader. Now I fear... I was mistaken.  Take that ridiculous [mask] off,” Snoke says, not long before Kylo smashes the mask to pieces, in The Last Jedi. It’s contradicted by Kylo’s theme of, “Let the past die.  Kill it, if you have to.” in TLJ, but it’s pretty par for the course with him, where he careens back and forth between one decision one moment and another the next, that he still has no idea what his true path is meant to be. So much of his character was patterned off of Darth Vader, both in universe and out of universe, it seems only fitting that he, like his grandfather before him, has no real sense of self or the willingness to look within himself to find what that path really is, whether it means actually committing to the Jedi path and understanding yourself and working to let go of your fears, or whether it’s finding a path away from the Jedi. And both of them felt like their power must be used for something.  "[We're going to] some planet called Elphrona.  All this way to find some old junk Master Luke will lock away in his temple and never use.  [....]  He's an amazing teacher, very strong.  I've learned so much from him... but he never seems to want to let me use any of it."[x] Ultimately, at the end of it, it seems like Ben Solo was someone who didn’t really know what he wanted out of his life and so he kept looking for the thing that would finally make him feel like it was the right path, except he kept looking to those outside himself to figure that out, whether to reject what he thought they were making him into or to use them as a measuring stick to define himself, and the only sliver of it that he ever seemed to find was when he finally stopped trying to force everything to make sense and focused on someone else for what he could do for them, instead of himself.

#ben solo #comics #meta #reading comics: the rise of kylo ren #wednesday spoilers #long post

[gffa]

This is the anon who asked about books, I want to know EVERYTHING but I have no idea where to start at all

Hi!  Okay, this is going to focus on Canon Novels, since that seems to be what you’re most interested in!  I actually think the comics are a better place to start and usually when I do a list of “where to start with supplementary material” that’s where I begin (here and here and somewhat here are my suggested starting places for EVERYTHING of SW, including the comics and games, if you’re interested)(basically: the 2015 SW comic + 2015 Darth Vader comic concurrently, the 2017 Vader comic, the Obi-Wan & Anakin comic, the Poe Dameron comic, and the Age of comics are great places to start), but sometimes you just want a book to read and I HEAR THAT.This is vaguely in order of where I think good places to start would be, but feel free to skip around based on what catches your interest!- From a Certain Point of View is a collection of short stories based around A New Hope, each one by a different author.  A lot of them are hit-or-miss, so feel free to skip over a story if one’s not holding your attention, but my ABSOLUTE MUST READS of this are the Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, and Yoda stories, as well as the Admiral Motti one (NOTHING IN THE WORLD IS FUNNIER THAN THAT ONE) and I really loved the Breha short story.  It’s a collection that’s nice to get your feet wet with jumping into the supplementary material without being a huge commitment, as well as some of those stories are amazing.- Bloodline by Claudia Gray is her best work for SW, it tells the story of how Leia was alienated from the New Republic government and started the Resistance, as well as being a really solidly good Leia story.- Catalyst by James Luceno is also a great place for getting more connective tissue, between Rogue One and the rest of Star Wars.  I read this before going into the movie and it did a ton to help it feel like it was informed by the events of the Clone Wars and the Republic and the Empire, it felt very much a part of the bigger tapestry to me.  Plus, it has some really cool bits of worldbuilding and made me care a lot more about Galen Erso and Lyra Erso.- Resistance Reborn by Rebecca Roanhorse is one I haven’t quite finished (I’m reasonably close, though) and I love it a lot for connecting all these different elements of the SW tapestry and making me continue to deeply care about Poe Dameron.  It might be better if you’re familiar at least with the Poe Dameron comics, because characters from that appear in the book, but I think it could probably be read on its own, too.- Ahsoka by E.K. Johnston was a really good book for showing what happened with the character after the events of ROTS and how she got to where she was in Rebels and how she coped with a lot of the shit going on in the galaxy.- Thrawn by Timothy Zahn is still one of my favorites, it’s the author’s writing at his best and there are great foils for the main character, new characters who are great, and actually a really good look inside Imperial culture, as well as a fun mystery to solve.- Heir of the Jedi by Kevin Hearne may be a bit of a strange entry on this list, it’s a fairly straightforward adventure of Luke trying to figure himself out as he has adventures across the galaxy, between ANH and ESB, but I’m genuinely enjoying it.- Force Collector by Kevin Shinick surprised me with how much I absolutely loved it, that it’s not a deep dive or anything, but it’s a really solidly wonderful look at a character with psychometry who has to figure out what the Force is trying to tell him and discover the truth about who the Jedi really were, while having adventures across the galaxy.  I loved it for being fond of the main character and for all the ways the Force worked in the book.- While not canon (it’s Legend), the Revenge of the Sith novelization by Matthew Stover is an incredible story, I absolutely L O V E the movie, it’s my favorite SW one, so when I say that the book makes the movie even better, I MEAN IT.  I would recommend it even to people who aren’t usually that into the prequels, because I think it does such a good job of being an engaging story!These aren’t necessarily all my favorite SW books, I have many that I love that just wouldn’t work as good starting points, imo.  These ones are great entry points into the SW books universe and I hope you enjoy them!! ♥

#fic recs #not really but that's my tag! #Anonymous