rex-luscus:

I’ve explained how I think Snoke might have manipulated Ben into falling. But he needed something to work with. A big factor in Ben’s fall could end up being the contrary messages he got from Leia and Luke about the dark side. It seems likely, based on Bloodline, that Ben’s fall will have happened right after the news about Darth Vader being Princess Leia’s father hit the galaxy. So here Ben is, listening to Luke tell him how the dark and light sides of the Force aren’t really good and evil, per se, and then he learns his mother concealed some major dark-side stuff in their family history from him. What’s he supposed to think?

Look at this description in Life Debt: Aftermath of the first time Leia senses baby Ben through the Force:

Her hands fly in front of her mouth as she both laughs and cries at the same time. This, she thinks, is the light side that Luke always goes on about— the promise of light, the promise of a new life…

And then, the black edging of the dark side encircles her bliss like a noose. Because what rides swift on the heels of hope but fear— a fear that stretches out far and wide like a growing shadow. Fear of having a child in an unstable galaxy. Fear of whether or not Han is alive— or Luke, too. Will the child grow up with a father? An uncle? A mentor? What is her legacy and what will her boy’s legacy be?

Her breath catches in her chest. She has to force herself to breathe.

Clear your mind. Clear it all. Focus, Leia. Focus.

Are those her thoughts?

Or are they Luke’s?

One wonders what that felt like to baby Ben. Joy, then fear, then nothing, deliberate emptiness. What if the experience that stuck with Ben wasn’t feeling his mother’s fear, but feeling her suppress it?

We don’t know if Ben was aware of Leia’s attempts to shield him from the dark side, but it doesn’t sound like they ever sat down and had an honest conversation about it. In the novelization, Han gets mad at Leia for never telling him Ben was in danger, so it seems like Leia tried to keep Ben away from the dark side rather than helping him (or the rest of their family) cope with it. Once shielding him was no longer possible, she sent him to Luke.

So maybe Ben puts it together that the fear he’s always sensed from her is related to the dark side—it’s a fear that he might be dark. That’s why she sent him away. Her rejection of the dark side is actually a rejection of him, he now reasons—not fear for him, but fear of him. And all because of this basic misunderstanding about the Force, this refusal to see the dark side for what it is, to see its value. He puts his interpretation of his parents’ behavior together with an amalgam of Luke’s and Snoke’s ideas and comes to the brokenhearted conclusion that his family hates what he is, and so it’s his responsibility, as Vader’s only true heir, to reject his sentimental ties to his parents and embrace his dark-side power.

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate

How will this mess be resolved? Well, here’s another prediction: Finn and Rey will fix it, because they are going to change how we understand the role of emotion in the Force.

Yoda insisted that fear and anger lead to the dark side. But right off the bat in TFA, Rey’s and Finn’s storylines work to redeem these two emotions. Finn’s fear of battle is actually the stirring of a moral consciousness. Rey’s anger allows her to access her power, not in a dark-side-y way so much as a “why yes, I should be angry!” way. Anger, after all, can signal our awareness of injustice, and it needn’t lead to hate the way Yoda seems to think it must. Fear and anger make Finn and Rey aware of evil and give them the strength to oppose it; neither leads to the dark side in TFA. Arguably, the dark side tempts Rey near the end of her duel with Kylo as she strikes him down in anger… but it appears to be fear, fear of turning into someone like Kylo, that stays her hand and prevents her anger from becoming hatred. So, you might say that TFA is about the positive uses of two emotions understood in earlier films to be purely negative.

Finn and Rey also demonstrate the positive value of attachment. The prequel trilogy posits Anakin’s love (for his mother, for Padme) as the weakness Palpatine uses to turn him to the dark side. In ESB, Vader uses Luke’s love for Han and Leia to manipulate him. But in TFA, Finn’s love for Rey motivates him to overcome his fear and join the Resistance. Finn and Rey are both motivated by love for each other to fight Kylo at the end. And most importantly, it appears as if Snoke manipulated Ben Solo not, as Palpatine did with Anakin, by playing on his attachments, but by making him reject those attachments.

If Leia’s big parenting mistake was shielding Ben from bad feelings, this is why that matters. The sequels are going to argue that the Jedi rejection of passionate emotions, particularly negative ones like fear and anger, is itself the whole problem.

Next post: What has Luke been doing all this time? part 2