#?does this even count as negative space I'm not an art scholar

[thefishdeath]

Ohhhh negative space I love negative space (I got side tracked while doing the line art)

[luminousfinn]

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious. Can you expand on what effect you think the fact that the ST is made by two jewish men will have on the storyline? I do NOT ship rey/l0 (FinnRey FTW!!) but I've always assume that redemption is the way things are going for Kylo because that's what we got with Vader. If I'm perfectly honest it never dawned on me before that the type of redemption the rey/l0s want for Kylo is a distinctly christian view of things.

Before I go anywhere with this let me state that I am no rabbi nor any kind of scholar on this, just a Jewish person with a lot of opinions, who talks a lot.

Also, beneath cut because hoo boy did this get long.

But to start with Vader, new canon doesn’t portray him as redeemed at all. 

Not in the eyes of his fellow mortal beings - everyone but Luke hates him, even Leia - nor even in the eyes of the Force (the Star Wars version of G-d) if the concept art of Anakin’s Force ghost - who was to appear in TFA at one point - is anything to go by.

Abrams specifically wanted someone who was still marked by the Dark Side, by the sins he had committed and never atoned for.

In Judaism there are sins so deep and vile that only in sacrificing your life can you atone for them, but going by this it appears that the Force still didn’t judge Anakin’s sacrifice as being enough.

So Vader in our new canon is not redeemed at all.

Suddenly it doesn’t look good at all for Kylo, does it? If not even Vader could achieve redemption, Kylo’s self-evident redemption narrative suddenly isn’t so self-evident at all.

One thing that is markedly different between Judaism and Christianity and pertains to this point is our (Jews) belief in free will, that humans have the knowledge of right and wrong. And that because we have free will can choose freely between doing right or doing wrong, but will face the consequences of doing wrong (sinning) because we know that it is wrong. 

Things also hinges on personal accountability and that no one can redeem you for you, or make you redeem yourself.

In regards to the latter, if Kylo is going to redeem himself it’ll be him and him alone who does it. 

Final concept that important here is yetzer hara, the evil inclination. That is, the thing in humans that tempts us do to evil things. Operative word here is tempt, because we have free will we can resist the temptation and do what we know is right. Or course us having free will also means we can give into yetzer hara and sin, though we know it is wrong.

Now Kylo is shown to have free will - he constantly goes against Snoke’s direct orders to suit his own agenda - and he knows right from wrong even in a divine perspective - “I feel it again, the pull to the Light”. So he knows right from wrong and he can act as he chooses to, he might be tempted into something for one reason or another, but his choice is his own.

And he constantly chooses the path of evil, to do what he knows is wrong. His own conflictedness and the pangs of his consciences counts for nothing in Jewish perspective when it doesn’t mean that it alters how he acts. It only shows us that he knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he does it anyway.

The clincher comes with the killing of Han. Not because he’s a beloved Star Wars character, though that certainly helps drive home the point to the audience, but because he is his father.

Killing a family member in cold blood might not be the worst thing you can do, but it’s on the top three. And it is in this context worth noting that in killing him Kylo becomes weaker, not stronger as he had expected. It’s almost as if the Force - part of it anyway - has turned away from him.

In fact, if we’re going to continue with the religious analogies, then if Anakin/Vader was a rather heavy handed space Jesus, Kylo to my view is a somewhat better crafted space Cain. With Han as a stand-in for Abel - a father rather than a brother.

Now there are two version of what happened to Cain after he killed Abel and G-d found out, but in both he is cursed by G-d to roam the earth for the rest of his life, never to be able to farm again - a rather severe thing as Cain’s whole identity is in fact tied into him being a farmer, so G-d cuts him off from what is crucial to him - and exiles him from his home, family and people. Given that family and community is absolutely central in Judaism this is even harsher as it also by extension means that Cain is cut off from even hearing or speaking to G-d again.

What happens next depends on interpretation.

In one version Cain truly repents what he has done and pleads with G-d for leniency, though he accepts G-d’s judgement as just. G-d relents - a bit - and marks Cain so he may come to no harm from other people, but still sends him off into exile and lets him make a living, though not as a farmer. (He’s still cut off from the core of his identity.)

The other version has Cain being a truly vile person who not only kills Able out of jealousy and greed, but who’s subsequent repentance is also false. I.e. he tries to hoodwink G-d into forgiving him. Well, G-d is omniscient so guess how far that goes. He’s banished into exile and founds a new dynasty of evil who’s descendants constantly tries to tempt the children of Seth - Adam’s and Eve’s third son and the ancestor of the Jewish people - away from the path of G-d.

Frankly I can see Kylo getting one of those two endings, depending on whether or not he makes a true about turn and truly repents what he’s done. But that will also mean accepting full responsibility and culpability for his actions and accepting all punishment meted out - given that Star Wars have always spanned the space between real world and mythical there’s bound to be both legal ramifications and Force related ones.

I call this the Ulic Qel-Droma ending, where he’s likely to end up severed from the Force and alone either in exile (like Ulic did in the old EU) or in prison. (There are a lot of parallels between Kylo and Ulic, but then Ulic has a shit ton of Cain parallels too.)

Alternately Kylo will turn falsely repentant and then we’re looking at ending number two where he’ll likely bugger off at the end to found a new evil dynasty and the Knights of Ren will supplant the Sith as the new baddie.

So is it possible that Kylo will get a redemption? Sure, but not very likely and if he does it’ll be one akin to ending number one with some very severe repercussions for him.

You asked about Kylo’s redemption specifically so that’s the one I’ve focused on answering, but there’s a lot more where it shines through that this is a story made by Jewish people and not Christians. And by extension that the new EU is heavily influenced by that.

Somewhat at random: 

That structured religion is now viewed as a positive rather than a negative. 

Heck, I’d even add that it exists at all in universe as a prominent thing. 

The immanence of the Force and that fact that everyone who reaches out can touch and to some extend wield it. (Now the difference is not so much Force sensitive/non-Force sensitive as it is trained/untrained or even just believer/non-believer.)

The prominence of choice as the what defines a character (Kylo and Finn especially).

The prominence of family. (Yes it’s always been important but now that’s been underscored even further. Try counting the number of times family and familial relationships came up in TFA, it’s really impressive. A concept that is also key in the Vader comic.)

Finn. Yes just that, Finn. He on his own was what opened my eyes to how Jewish TFA is and likely how much the ST is going to be. (And who is surprised by that? Absolutely no one.) He embodies key concepts of how a virtuous person according to Judaism is supposed to act. Emphasis in Judaism is on acts, not on beliefs or states. Being good isn’t a passive state, it’s a constant act. But he really deserves his own post so I’ll get into that one later.

Well, this got a whole lot longer than I planned, but I believe in being thorough and that anything worth doing is worth trying to do right. Am I right in this? Is this the story they’ll tell?

I don’t know, but it’s a damn sight more likely than anything I’ve read so far.