Official Episode VIII - Kylo Ren Discussion Thread

i'm not disagreeing with you. i'm saying from the FIrst Order's perspective they are within their moral right; these are enemies of their people.

just as our OT heroes killed their way through to unseating the Empire, this junta is killing their way through unseating what they believe is an illegitimate governance.
the First Order are the scrappy rebels in TFA.

the winners decide who the criminals are. it'll be very interesting to see how this galactic conflict will resolve itself in an ST that has set itself up thematically to emphasize balance.

 

Lor San Tekka knew Ben and his family before he became the EVIL kylo ren yet instead of taking LST prisoner, he outright kills him with his own hands. Extinguishing any memory of who Ben Solo was, and later thanked his father for helping him do the same. Anyone who views Leia, Luke, and Han as criminals are Empire or FO zealots who are led by a disillusioned cause.... The First Order rose from the Dark Side. You did not...Something far worse has happened to you...

 

i'd challenge you to look closely at Lor Tekka's words: "something far worse has happened to you".
something has happened to Ben. something Lor Tekka doesn't even appear to blame him for. it happened rather than was chosen.

like you said, Lor Tekka knows Ben and he knows that this isn't Ben--it's not how he was raised or who he should be.
he calls the First Order evil (they "rose from the Dark side"), but appeals to Kylo Ren as someone who did not rise from those origins.

don't forget too, that killing Lor Tekka was an act of passion.
the stupidity of not taking him prisoner is our first indication that Ren is disordered in the head.
rather than fulfill his objective, he just wants the man to shut up because what Lor Tekka is telling him is too painful to hear.

we see the culmination of all this confusion and pain on the bridge when Ren kills Han.
i expect Ren Ben's going to be finding some much-needed clarity in TLJ--hopefully sooner rather than later.

 

You're so right... disordered in the head... for sure

The Empire, and now the FO are led by someone who is disordered in the head... you're so right... EMO KYLO REN...hehe

 

absolutely. you get no argument from me there ~ hahahaha
he's not okay. i think that's kind of the point.

 

The truth is indeed too painful to hear when someone is led by a disillusioned cause and a misguided leader... we'll see how a stupidly manipulated Kylo Ren redeems himself for his crimes against the scrappy Rebels.

 

well, he has a lot to answer for, but if the galaxy is truly just, it will listen.

 

I agree with this analysis, excellent observations. The only rub is that I think RJ has already primed the pump for the Redemption Arc. The 2nd movie in the trilogy is probably one of the most influential because it answers the questions from the first, and sets the general trajectory for the trilogy (which is why it bothered me so much that Finn's FS/non-FS isn't going to be addressed in 8, it basically determines the rest of the trilogy, by "punting" on the issue). If RJ sets this arc into motion it'll be hard to stop going into the next episode.

--- Double Post Merged, Nov 12, 2017, Original Post Date: Nov 12, 2017 ---

???

The FO having military strength does not make them a legitimate anything, any more than we'd say dictators or war lords with similar power profiles compared to those around whom they live are legitimate. Was there something else you were saying makes them legitimate? Also, I'm still waiting to understand (from anyone) what Lor San Tekkas crime was or what the military justification was for slaughtering the captured unarmed villagers; I don't think there is one that exists "out-universe".

 

the villagers were disarmed, not unarmed. and i already said you could argue that the treatment of prisoners was barbaric, but justified in their mind.
the reason i say they are legitimate is because the New Republic has allowed them to operate without sanction--they are not recognized as "criminals" or even "terrorists" at this point. likely because there is sufficient Centrist support in the New Republic that they can get away with all of this.

Leia would not be leading a "Resistance" if the galaxy recognized the First Order as a threat.
in fact, it's Leia's Resistance that is working outside of galactic "law".
yes, they are technically a "peace-keeper" organization, though obviously we do not agree with their methods.

look, i am not justifying the First Order. i'm trying to clarify the political landscape at the opening of TFA (which is all changed now since the Hosnian holocaust).
we recognize them as bad guys because we also disagree with their goals and their methods. but we also know (from the EU and from Rogue One) that the Rebellion was not above killing people for the "greater good"--though we continue to define true heroism as being above such moral greyness.

wars are morally grey sometimes. oftentimes. maybe even most of the time. it's all about your point of view.

 

This disarmed/unarmed argument feels like a hair split, but I'll walk it through with you. They were armed. Then they were disarmed. As a result they were unarmed. I think the difference here is that armed/unarmed are adjectives (describing a state of being) whereas disarmed is a verb (describing an action).

I don't think the method by which they become unarmed is material to the focal point here that they were shot and killed while "unarmed" and presenting no threat. That happened at Kylo's command. He could have taken them prisoner, he could have let them go, he chose to order their slaughter. It's not a zero sum game where we say it was barbaric but not ethically criminal; it was both. It served no military purpose, it just illustrated Kylo's wanton disregard for other life.

Theoretical question though, why would you refer to it as a Hosnian Holocaust? The strike served a strategic purpose for the FO and by your own version of events, they're at war, so this is a grey matter right? Wouldn't you also say, this is barbaric, but technically not the act of criminals since the FO views themselves at war and they were a legitimate enforcement cell?

I guess what I'm getting at here is that there are some acts that elude justification, regardless of political climate.

 

the people they killed on Jakku were combatants. they attacked and fought and were defeated and executed. this is the cost of war.
wiping out a whole system of innocent people just to destroy a seat of government (which could have easily been more specifically targeted), is, to me, obviously a whole different scale of barbarity.

so yes, it does matter that they were armed and then disarmed in one instance as opposed to just obliterated without warning in another.
and again, that's not say there isn't a degree of barbarity to both. but circumstances do matter as to how one justifies it in their mind.

this is why Ren walks away from Jakku feeling pretty okay with himself, but does start to unravel after they destroy the Hosnian system and actually fights against firing on the Ileenium system. he's begun having this moral crisis from the moment Hux suggests destroying the New Republic. Snoke even twigs to it and that's why he sets his mind to killing Han.

 

Herding people into the village center and slaughtering them is not war. That is a war crime.

 

Real-world morality can't be applied, point for point, to the SW universe. Just as it can't for any of the comic book movies. I mean, by all rights, Loki should have been put to death or whatever for his actions in the Avengers, but he wasn't.

Kylo will have to atone for his actions- but in a positive way, by helping the Resistance overcome the FO, by helping to kill Snoke. I doubt they'll put him in galactic prison at the end of the trilogy. Might banish him, though. To the Unknown Regions. He might die in the last episode, but I don't know if they should do that. It would be too much of a rehash of Episode 6.

 

I would argue both are barbaric precisely because they're both unjustified and political climate or even a perceived state of war (there was no declared war at the time between any of the factions was there?) doesn't change the void of justification. There is a reason why we have Geneva Conventions "Out Universe". It is not prosecution of war to kill unarmed in a state or surrender, it's murder. And again, I will point to the slaughter of Lor San Tekka who was not armed at ANY point during the conflict. I suspect there were others among the villagers who simply ran and took cover and weren't armed and didn't fire. They were all killed while presenting no threat. It is more than a bit precarious (to me) to say because those we attack were armed that we may dispatch them in any way see fit under the guise of "war". If there were children among the dead, was this also just the cost of an undeclared war?

Ren walks away from Jakku unbothered because he is ethically compromised, that doesn't mean he doesn't have feelings for some people (like Leia) and would act to protect them. We don't truly see Kylo recognize a moral dilemma until he is required to bring the death he has brought so easily to others, to someone he cares about. He is clearly in a quandry about killing Han. There is no quandry or even a second thought for the villagers.

 

Isn't that the case always, though?

I mean even now, drone strikes kill so many innocents beyond the actual target. The people who carry them out do it because they've been ordered to do it and because they feel they have a justified reason to do it. Hell, so many wars that we've fought has resulted in the deaths of millions of innocents- Hiroshima and Nagasaki are just two most violent examples. But do we really hold the Allied forces accountable for the deaths of all those civilians- unarmed and absolutely unready?

War is a very gray area and it's my personal belief that even a single death is one too many.

But luckily, this is a fictional world, where death only means something where we already KNOW the character. Or if it's a dog.
Like, the deaths of all those people on Jakku and the New Republic would have been easily forgiven if Ren hadn't killed his father- Han Solo. They don't really exist and the audience knows it. There's no weight attached to their deaths. Not really.
His lack of empathy for the villagers isn't going to even register in the minds of the GA because his conflict showed when it was necessary- before and after he killed his dad.

If Rian Johnson has to convince the audience that Kylo Ren is worth forgiving, all he has to do is have him atone for the murder of his father.

 

I mentioned it in another thread, but I think Kylo will turn light side, and offer to train or help Rey. But like the audience, Rey won't forgive him, and gives into the dark side by killing him.

 

but were there? i don't disagree that probably not all of the villagers fired on the First Order. i didn't see any children. but like you said, Lor Tekka certainly never had a weapon. might as well ask Andrew Jackson how many families he wiped out by expelling the Cherokee and driving them to their deaths. but we still gotta stare at his face on a twenty dollar bill a "great president" to this day despite signing into a law an act that was tantamount to mass murder, don't we? just as an amusement, i looked up other presidents who could be considered murderers and found this story at Straight Dope:

As an inexperienced militia officer in 1754 Washington led an ambush on a small French military detachment in the Ohio Territory in which the French commanding officer and nine others were killed. Indians in Washington's party then scalped the dead. France and England weren't at war at the time; the French were on a diplomatic mission to deliver a message telling the English to clear out of French territory.

One French survivor claimed that his CO had been shot down as he attempted to read the message while surrounded by English troops. (Nobody says Washington killed the man himself, but he was there and nominally in charge.) Five weeks later the French captured Washington and made him sign a document describing the French officer's death as an "assassination." Washington later claimed he didn't understand what he was signing because of a poor translation; in any case, the incident caused an uproar and precipitated the French and Indian War.

French historians have long regarded the incident as murder. Even if you don't buy the story that Washington's men blew away the defenseless emissary, a plausible argument can be made that our first president rashly concluded the French were up to no good and supervised the killing of ten people by mistake.
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my point is, it's easy for us to judge from the outside based on what we know of the world of Star Wars. the characters are not blessed with our perspective (more below).

yeah, i said that. because he can justify it as an act of war. he can't so easily justify the Hosnian system, Ileenium, or his father.

this isn't the first time the First Order has gone somewhere and used brute force to push their agenda or exert their will.
again, the New Republic has (for political reasons) turned a blind eye to it. the way governments often do when they allow insurgent countries handle their own affairs without picking sides or getting in to the mire of "who's right and who's wrong". again, it's obvious to us that the First Order is wrong, but it's not obvious to people like Ren or Casterfo or Carise in Bloodline.

and these aren't necessarily bad people (except Carise, she's awful ~ hahaha). they just have a very skewed perspective. and don't forget too, that Casterfo's family were victims of the Empire, but he still has grown up to tout the ideology in spite of recognizing the evil of its former leadership. Ren Ben is in that same boat.

 

I genuinely don't see that happening. They're not going to have Rey go to the dark-side. She might be tempted, might even lean towards it now and then but I doubt she'll ever really give in. And they'll most likely keep the kylo killing to the last movie. For maximum toy sales.

 

Rey will forgive him by the (indirect) help of Luke. I can promise you that.

 

I disagree. For the scene where Kylo orders the execution of the villagers to work, it has to register with the audience, otherwise Finn's refusal to follow that order doesn't mean anything. Kylo and Finn have just been introduced (Finn doesn't even have a face at this point in the story). The execution order informs the audience about both characters precisely because it registers in the minds of the audience without further explanation.

However, I do agree that the murder of his father is Kylo's worst offense to general audiences - that's just human nature. But that doesn't mean Kylo can be absolved of all of his crimes by gaining forgiveness for the one. Vader only had to save his own son to redeem his soul, but he also had to pay for his crimes with the sacrifice of his own life.

I might agree if we were discussing actual events, but the morality of Star Wars is not independent of our own. The story is specifically designed to be a morality play with modern sensibilities - so by it's very nature, it requires a direct correlation. The audience is intended to judge to what they see through their own moral lens, not one assigned a fictional context. There is no ambiguity in Kylo's actions.