The Jedi as bad guys

Dunno about Dooku but George Lucas himself said Anakin/Vader was a victim.
Interesting fact...so was Kylo Ren, more so than Anakin, yet his character has had very little sympathy and even outright hate from Anakin fans.
One in particular, who another member on this forum knows as well as I do, has repeatedly criticised him as being a 'toxic abuser of women' while defending Anakin Force choking Padme because she dared to criticise him.
In fact, if you go through all of the ST trilogy I never once saw Kylo Ren abuse a woman.

 

Yep, Kylo was primarily an old man abuser.

To be fair, he tried to abuse a woman once but Rey kicked his butt.

 

Rey kicked everyone's butt....apart from Snoke. And Kylo kicked his butt for her!

 

Well, there is another forum where he's very popular...Kylo Ren however, is loathed and detested on it in a way that is so venomous you'd think he was a real person who had done his haters actual harm.
Comparing the two...
Kylo Ren was psychologically groomed, and later psychologically and physically abused by Snoke. His parents neglected him by spending much of his childhood busy with 'other things.'
Anakin was a slave, true....but he grew up with a loving mother who sent him away to free him (bit ironic)
Anakin as Darth Vader murdered children
Ben Solo as Kylo Ren murdered his own father....who immediately forgave him
Vader was complicit in the destruction of Alderaan
Kylo was not complicit in the destruction of Hosnia...Hux asked for and got, permission from Snoke to carry out the destruction of the New Republic. Kylo was actually against it.
Kylo did not once abuse' the woman he loved. In fact, Rey was far more violent towards him than he was towards her! When they first met - she shot first. He knocked her out by throwing her against a tree because she was trying to kill him. The interrogation scene is seen by his haters as a kind of 'assault' because he said: 'you know I can take whatever I want.' He was referring to information, his haters chose to see it as 'something other'....
In TLJ he actually showed her far more compassion than she showed him...'you're not alone' - remember that?
I'm not really interested in TROS Kylo as everyone was out of character in that garbage - but it was Rey who stabbed her unarmed adversary, not Kylo.

In ROTS, Anakin meanwhile, did this:

To his own wife - who was heavily pregnant with his children

Compare it to this

Kylo wasn't a saint - far from it - but he was nowhere near Anakin's level when it came to doing evil things - and I actually have some sympathy for Anakin.

Regarding the Sand People however, torturing an unarmed prisoner to death sort of removed any compassion I might have had for them!

 

Good grief! I can't believe I had just read this.

I have a lot more sympathy for Anakin, because I found him to be a better written character, whose redemption arc I believe was handled 20 times better than Kylo Ren. I have more sympathy for Sheev Papatine simply because I found him to be a better written character than Kylo Ren.

 

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Why?

 

Because I feel that both characters were better written. I thought Kylo Ren was badly written and got tired of people telling me how profound he was. In my eyes, Kylo Ren was good for one thing - parody.

 

Fair enough. You are of course, entitled to your opinion.
But can I just say why I get very tired of him being accused of 'partner abuse'?

Rey was NOT Kylo's girlfriend. We reylos wanted her to be of course, but she wasn't. In fact, they were for the most part of the films, enemies. When they first met, they were on opposite sides in a war. This continued throughout TFA and much of TLJ until Kylo and Rey 'touched hands' on Acht To. Rey also was the more aggressive of the two post TFA; in TROS she repeatedly attacked him first; twice when he was unarmed. Yes, I know he 'tried to run her down' (which baffles me as he could have just shot her), but he was supposedly a 'dark sider' aka 'the bad guy'. Rey was the Last Jedi. And as Obi Wan told Luke in the OT, Jedi use the Force for knowledge and defense - never attack.

Padme was Anakin's wife, the love of his life. She was pregnant, unarmed and didn't even have the Force to defend herself. The sight of Anakin Force choking her in ROTS was actually horrific. Yet his fans always find excuses for him....while accusing Kylo Ren of being 'abusive' towards Rey. It just doesn't add up for me.

 

I'm sorry, but I'm not a Reylo fan. I found the idea of the two being part of a relationship repellent. Did Anakin abuse Padme? Yes - in that one moment when he thought she had been seeing Obi-Wan behind his back in "Revenge of the Sith", he reacted with a jealous rage. As for Kylo Ren, he did the following in TFA:

*kidnapped Rey
*attempted to telepathically torture her, the way he did Poe
*murdered Han before Rey, Finn and Chewbacca's eyes
*nearly killed Finn during a duel
*tried to kill Rey

The fact that TLJ occurred a day or two after "The Force Awakens" struck me as incredibly contrived.

Anakin has no excuse for nearly strangling Padme in "Revenge of the Sith" in a fit of misplaced jealousy. But if you think I'll use this as an excuse to be some kind of Reylo fan, you're sadly mistaken. Anakin had attacked Padme that one time and ended up regretting his actions when he learned of her death. But I found the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren repulsive from beginning to end. Sorry, I just feel that way. The idea that Rey would be remotely attracted to Kylo Ren in JUST A FEW DAYS after being kidnapped, nearly mind raped and nearly killed by him is repellent to my very core. What I find equally repellent is that many have viewed this aspect of the relationship as "sexy" or "romantic". In fact, a critic for "TIME" magazine had regarded Kylo Ren’s attempted torture of Rey in "THE FORCE AWAKENS" as "sexual energy". And I found the whole "dyad" thing worthy of a massive eyeroll.

But if you feel differently, fine. You're entitled to your opinion. I'm entitled to mine. Just don't try to convince me to change my views . . . . please? I can't go through that again.

 

I stopped being a 'reylo' fan after TROS, actually. And I did my best to be factual and not sentimental when I wrote that post.
I have no interest in changing anyone's opinion, but the fact remains...how can Kylo be an 'abusive boyfriend' when he was never Rey's boyfriend?

And as I said....they were enemies. She tried to kill him as much as he tried to kill her. I'm not saying this as a 'reylo', but as someone who watched all the films.

 

She's better than him though.

 

Better person, or better written character?

 

I might consider Rey to be a better person. However, like Kylo Ren and the other major characters, I don't think she is well written.

 

I don't think either were poorly written. I do think that Kylo/Ben's arc was a bit derivative and unsatisfying and that Rey's arc is just weird. That doesn't necessarily mean they were poorly written just because we the consumers don't like their stories.

As far as who is the better person, I don't think this is even debatable. Kylo is an arrogant, self-serving mass murderer. He idolized another arrogant self-serving mass murderer. He was a trash human who used childhood trauma to excuse away his despicable actions. Every single time there is a glimmer of hope of goodness in him, he consciously squashed it.

Rey, an abandoned orphan slave, overcame her childhood trauma to fight against evil for the common good. Just about every decision she makes is selfless and for those she cares about or for something she believes to be good. She resists the draw of the Dark Side even when Kylo tries to manipulate her emotionally.

Bottom line-
Rey strives to do Good and be a Good person
Kylo strives to do Evil and be a Bad person

 

There was a story series in the SWOTOR era by Dark Horse Comics where a bunch of Jedi elites decided to kill their padawans because they learned of a prophecy that one of them would turn to the Dark Side and kill them all. It was an excellent series. It turned out that there was actually a failed padawan from that group named Haazen who had become a dark sider and wanted to try to run an organization that was both Sith and Jedi, forever competing. He was actually a really interesting character and in a sense, I think he had a good idea, but not exactly the way it came to him. Of course he goes into the great circular file of the Force when the protagonist of that storyline, Zayne Carrick, manages to outmaneuver him.

Something about Zayne Carrick reminds me strongly of Cal Custis...

 

The theoretical premise, i.e. theoretical relating to the outside the detail/circumstance premise of reality, of the Jedi being bad can be construed along the lines of the happy invasive implementation of language constructs, the ones that are happy denotations of government control.

Worker/deserter/foreigner, etc, are the examples for the description

 

The KOTOR series! I remember being so annoyed that it wasn't about Revan, to really enjoying the first half of that run.

Anyways, to the core of the post, the Jedi were flawed and brought down by their hubris, but they were not evil or the bad guys. And that's all I'll say because this whole topic makes me feel like I'm having deja vu.