rex-luscus:

Kylo/Ben’s storyline puzzles me in one major way. Long before he ever destroys Luke’s new Jedi Order, everyone was worried that there was “darkness in him.” But we never hear exactly why.

In TFA, Han and Leia have a (necessarily) vague conversation about the causes of Ben’s fall. Leia tells Han, “it was Snoke. He seduced our son to the dark side.” So whatever Leia detected in Ben that made her worry, she at least explains it to herself later as the result of Snoke’s influence. Han just says “there was too much Vader in him.” So Han thinks it’s genetics and Leia thinks he got it from the creep down the street, but neither of them talk about any cause within Ben himself.

Luke in TLJ gives us more specifics. Apologies for not remembering the exact quote, but he says something like, “I had sensed the darkness growing within him and seen glimpses of it in moments during his training, but when I looked inside his mind, it was worse than I had ever imagined.“ Still, though, that’s super vague. Like, did Ben do fucked-up things? Or was Luke sensing a darkness that he got a better look at when Ben was asleep? And by the way, what does Luke see when he looks into Ben’s sleeping mind? We hear chaos and screaming – is that what’s going on in there in the present moment? Are these Ben’s fantasies of destruction? Or, as Luke’s actual dialogue suggests when he fears that Ben is going to destroy everything he loves, is he just seeing a vision of what Ben is going to do, all the destruction he’s going to cause?

In Aftermath: Empire’s End, Leia senses Ben’s spirit when he’s in her womb: “He is less a human-shaped thing and more a pulsing, living band of light. Light that sometimes dims, that sometimes is thrust through with a vein of darkness.“ Luke tells her that this darkness is normal, that we all have it, but Leia worries anyway. She worries about what will happen to this child she’s bringing into an unstable galaxy.

My point is: whenever Ben’s family worries about the darkness in him, they either express it in metaphorical light/dark terms, or purely as anxiety about the future, a fear of what Ben could or might do. We hear almost nothing about what he’s like as a person at that moment.

In the TFA novelization, Leia says a bit more to Han: that Ben was “born with an equal potential for good or evil.” But isn’t everybody? It’s only critical for Ben because he’s so powerful and his good or bad choices could majorly affect the galaxy. But still, nobody describes his character traits before he falls, they only talk about his futurity.

This must be on purpose, because the sequel trilogy (picking up from the prequels) makes a big deal about the dangers of predicting or even just anticipating the future. Kylo and Rey see each other’s futures and get everything about each other wrong. Luke, after getting a glimpse of Ben’s future, does the exact thing that will make that future happen. The tie-in novels imply that Leia’s worry about Ben’s darkness might actually make it worse. So we’re urged to conclude that everyone’s fears that Ben might turn dark in fact helped turn him dark. If you don’t accept the dark side, you give it more power. And you alienate your kid.

But it’s frustrating, because Ben before his fall is just this black box. It’s like he doesn’t really exist, except as pure potential, until he takes that definitive step and becomes Kylo Ren. We’re told that from the beginning, he was equally “light” and “dark,” but the Force is just a metaphor for a person’s character. In the prequel trilogy, we saw the flaws in Anakin’s character that led him to the dark side. We saw in fact how his good qualities exacerbated his bad ones. We saw the struggle of “light” and “dark” play out in the dynamics of an individual personality. But with Ben, that’s all hidden from us. It’s all buried in a past we’re never shown.

Now, you could say he was just a good kid influenced by an evil external power. But that’s…not very satisfying. So what, if we took Snoke out of the equation, Ben would have turned out just fine? The conflict of light with dark isn’t nearly as interesting if it doesn’t emerge from Ben’s own character. Anakin is critically influenced by Palpatine, but Palpatine needed something to work with that was already there, and the story tells us what that was. Snoke is an evil predator, certainly, but because Star Wars is an allegorical fairy tale, he must also represent something internal to Ben. What in Ben himself was dark, and how did it manifest itself? We can speculate, but it’s almost as if the story deliberately hides the sorts of specifics that would let us understand him as a real person.

I guess what I’m asking is: where does the sequel trilogy think evil comes from?

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Regarding Ben’s character, the tie-in novels do give us a few hints to work with, something in the nature of a strength that can also be a flaw, as we saw with Anakin:

In Bloodline, Leia remembers him as a child: ”[Another kid’s] expression reminded her a little bit of Ben’s when he was little, running in after an afternoon of roughhousing with his friends, hair mussed, absolutely filthy, and proud of himself.” He’s a normal, happy, rambunctious, confident child. Even more critically, in Aftermath: Life Debt, we hear how Leia sensed Ben’s budding little personality in her womb, and the person he’s going to become: “…she is suddenly aware of her child’s mind and spirit: she senses pluck and wit and steel blood and a keen mind and by the blood of Alderaan is this one going to be a fighter!”

So that’s the tiny bit we get about Ben’s character, as little as we’re shown of what he used to be like: he has an incredibly strong will. He’s a fighter. That is the grain of information that suggests who he was, who he is and who he’ll eventually be. He got into this mess by fighting, and he might get out by fighting as well. It all depends on what he’s fighting for.

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(Thanks to @hausofodin for helping me remember that Luke quote.)