#so my obsession with fictional characters comes out in intense literary character analysis

[ihaveonlymydreams]

Some thoughts on Kylo Ren

@itspileofgoodthings​ told me I should write down these thoughts and naturally it turned into a whole essay. So read at your own peril!

I don't think of the dichotomy of the dark and the light side of the Force as being about moral good and evil, but about passion and intellect. The temptation of picking a "side" is that you necessarily become obsessed either with passion over intellect, or with intellect to the suppression of all passion. Kylo is clearly a very passionate person, and Luke is really more of a thinker than a doer. I don't believe Luke knew how to deal with Kylo's passionate nature, and I think Kylo came to believe he was not very powerful because he did so badly at mastering the calm and collected side of the Force. Enter Snoke, who sees Kylo's potential just as Luke does, and turns it to his advantage. He offers Kylo power like that of his grandfather, but abuses him emotionally by constantly telling him he falls short of his potential. Kylo has a HUGE inferiority complex, and I think this is what drives so many of his decisions and his rage. His words to Rey about her parents being nobodies is, I think, a clue as to what he has been told by Snoke his whole life. His father is a random smuggler. His mother clearly has chosen not to develop her Force abilities. In Rey, Kylo sees himself: the child of powerless nobodies who herself has incredible potential for power. I think that in wanting to train her Kylo seeks hope for himself. If she can learn so quickly, gain power over him so fast, can he discover how to unlock his own power?

Kylo doesn't really want to teach Rey. He wants to learn from her. She becomes the symbol of everything he wants to be: not only is she powerful and at ease in her power, she had gained a family, friends, allies, the lightsaber that should have been his. I don't think, in that first battle, that Kylo could have killed Rey any more than he could have killed himself. And to have her turn on him and leave him scarred was, for him, the horrifying realization that he had not gained anything by killing his "powerless" father, had unlocked no potential, had freed himself in no way. So when he sees her again, in the Force bond, he can admit to those facts that make him weak. He can say that he's a monster, and he can say that he never hated his father. He already knows he can't kill his mother. Kylo Ren has admitted his weakness to himself, he has faced it and accepted it, and there is a strange kind of peace in him in those scenes between him and Rey. Yes, he will never be like his grandfather, and he has broken his mask himself. The pretense is over.

But then something unexpected happens: Rey reveals her weakness to him. I like to think that Kylo saw the Force bond open and Rey sitting there in an attitude of defeat that he recognized because it was so much like his own, and that he caught her off guard with the sympathy of his voice or his expression. And so she pours out her suffering and doubt and unhappiness and Kylo realizes all over that this girl is like him. She's not just what he should be, she's suffering like him, and so he says "you are not alone," for the first time in his life, probably, caring more for someone else than for himself. And when their hands meet, he sees a future where both of them are free from that doubt and paralyzing suffering, powerful, and together. Naturally Kylo assumes she will leave everything and turn to him. Because, you see, for Kylo the dark side of the Force means the freedom to express your emotions. It means goodbye to that paralysis of self-doubt and self-hatred which he associates with the light side and its repression of feeling and passion. Now he sees Rey suffering the same way and assumes that she too is caught in that suffocating grip. But that's not all, because in that moment of sympathy and mutual compassion - "neither are you" - he recognizes the falsehood of Snoke's apparent concern for him. Both Luke and Snoke, as he sees it, have stifled his powers and broken his spirit. Only Rey has given him the freedom to be weak, and so, for the first time, he is able to be strong.

I like to imagine Kylo struggling with his emotions in the elevator scene; he's already decided to kill Snoke when the opportunity presents itself, so how hard must it have been to hold back his reaction to Rey's warmth and pleading? In fact this is the first moment that I see Kylo calling on the light side of the Force. He's ruling passion with calm intellect, controlling his thoughts and emotions, manipulating Snoke as he had never been able to before. With Snoke dead, for a glorious space of time it's just Rey and Kylo against the world. And that is what he wants. He wants it with all the force (ha) of his passion and all the cool rationality of his mind. With her he is no longer incomplete, broken, or weak, and so I really believe, at the end of that fight, that Kylo has forgotten entirely about the rest of the world, the fleet, the First Order. He's living in a world where there's just Rey and himself and balance in the Force, and she breaks the moment by turning away from him and talking about the fleet. Thrown off guard, Kylo tries to recapture the moment, but what can he say except that he wants to destroy the rest of this world that's holding them apart? When she doesn't reciprocate, he falls back on the only method of persuasion that he knows: the one that Snoke used on him. But hidden in the insult "you're nobody" is the cry "and I am too." What he wants more than anything is for Rey to say those words back to him, but she doesn't and the moment shatters.

When Kylo wakes up, his world has been destroyed yet again, and his rage against the resistance is now personal. They have taken Rey from him. She is bound, just as he was bound to Snoke and the First Order. He needs to destroy them to free her. And then Luke arrives. Luke, whom Kylo last saw in a Force vision tearing him and Rey apart. Luke who made Kylo feel like a failure (I'm not saying Luke intended this, but it was probably the result of his fear of Kylo's power and potential for the dark side). Luke who tried to kill him in his sleep and drove him to the slave master Snoke. To Kylo, Luke represents everything he hates about the light side of the Force, and he screams to destroy him. Kylo's reaction (turn all the guns on Luke) demonstrates, I think, that in his mind Luke is still the larger-than-life figure of power from his childhood. He knows that somehow this won't be enough to kill him, but he's terrified of facing him directly. Kylo is caught between rage at the light and fear of his own weakness.

Then Luke surprises him. He's there, but not to destroy Kylo with his power and kill him. Nor is he there to exert psychological control over him by “forgiving” him: Luke’s first words are “I failed you, Ben. I’m sorry.” Kylo’s rage meets the untouchable power of the light side: the calm and control of the mind. Quite literally, because Luke is only there in spirit - and just as Kylo and Rey could meet through the Force bond without Rey being able to attack him, Kylo and Luke are now able to communicate for the first time. What Kylo learns is that Luke has never been obsessed with power. He is ready to sacrifice himself in the attempt to hold Kylo back so that the resistance and the Jedi can survive. Kylo learns, too, that Luke understands his pain and the suffering of having killed his father. He learns that Luke loves him, has never given up on him, and never will: “see you around, kid.” Kylo’s desperate cry of “no!” at Luke’s disappearance is, I think, the result of a realization he never wanted to make, a truth that he never faced: that the light side of the Force is not the stifling, power-obsessed, repressive authority that he once believed it was, under the influence of Snoke and Luke’s fear of failure. By admitting to his own failure, by insisting that he will remain with Kylo no matter what, and by literally giving his life to protect the people he loves, Luke demonstrates to his young student what the power of the light side truly is; as Rose says, to save the things we love. With Rey, Kylo learned to admit his own weakness and to fight for someone he loved; these are experiences that he recognized as desirable, and now he sees them embodied in precisely the person he thought was his enemy.

This is Kylo’s horrified realization: he has made himself the enemy of Luke Skywalker, and in doing so, he has cut himself off from compassion, honesty, loyalty, and love. He has killed his father. Kneeling on the ground, with the dice that his mother has left behind for him, Kylo looks up and sees Rey and understands the gulf between them, a gulf he could never have seen or cared about if he had not first seen her as a mirror image of himself and as the person who gave him balance and strength. What Kylo wanted was wholeness and confidence in himself. He thought he needed power to achieve them, but now he knows that he needs, not power, but love, compassion, humility, and self-sacrifice. At the beginning of the movie, Kylo found a kind of peace in admitting he was a monster, but he didn’t really understand what that meant; his identity was twisted up in his need for power and his emotion, his love, was what made him weak and monstrous. Now he understands that only love can make him whole - and now, I think, he can begin to truly mourn for his father. On his knees, in the attitude of a man praying for forgiveness but unable to ask for it, Kylo sees Rey close the door and knows that as he is, he cannot have what he wants. That balance, freedom, and wholeness that he experienced with her requires that he not be the monster who destroys the past. He must not become Snoke; he must become Luke, the man who can admit to his failure.

Will he do so, or will he find the effort too hard? I personally believe, as Luke does, that “no one’s ever really gone.” (A line, by the way, that echoes Faulkner, but I won’t bring my dissertation into this.) Kylo Ren is a powerful, passionate, and determined human being with incredible resilience. He survived the failure of Luke, the psychological abuse of Snoke, the realization of his own weakness, always moving with singlehanded determination towards whatever he thought would save him. I think Ben Solo will get up from his knees with beautiful rage and fighting determination to find himself at last. I think he will have no idea how to do it. I think he’ll make it up as he goes along. Maybe he’ll go hell-for-leather in the wrong direction. But I don’t think he’ll ever give up until he finds that wholeness and balance again.