The Psychology of Kylo Ren

has no one in your family ever said: cousin so-and-so is just like his uncle bob? or that your little sister takes after her grandmother?


Ben Solo reminds me of his father, who also used to display man child behavior in his late 20s and early 30s. Han and Leia never really knew all of Anakin. They only viewed him as some one-dimensional figure of evil, despite the fact that Luke must have told them what happened aboard Death Star II.

 

again, we don't know what Ben did to provoke their fear. anything he did that they might have been perceived as even nascently evil might cause them to think he was "too much like Vader".

 

Then Abrams and Kasdan should have never included the line in the first place.

 

why not?

 

He might have started using the force to his advantage in negative ways and hen asked alike for some advice and that's when Leia sent him to train at Luke's academy to help him .

 

if they ever said he was like Vader either to his face or within his hearing, they didn't do him any favors either.

children internalize that crap and grow up believing they are hopelessly fated to be the thing their parents detest.

 

He overheard at Christmas:

Leia, "Han, don't give him that LIGHTSABER!"

Han, "He needs to learn to not be like the ruler of the Galaxy...HIS FRANDSTHER!"

 

depends on the client.....

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 28, 2016, Original Post Date: Jan 28, 2016 ---

Are you Hayden Christensen?

 

yeah, sorry it had a lot of stupid in it. hope it wasn't just a waste of time for you.

i mostly posted it because the state of Kylo Ren's mental health seems to have sparked a lot of chatter and that's interesting.

 

oh good!

i don't know about NPD. he seems to have identity issues that makes him behave like a narcissist, but yeah, it seems more like a front. we're given a pretty distinct sense that he's kinda marshmallowy and insecure, which may contradict NPD.

 

My guess is BPD. I believe Ben grew up in a really invalidating environment. I suppose all kids want to be the proud descendants of really cool people. And here you have daddy Han Solo, the now bored ex-smuggler, who talks trash about the Force day in and day out, belittling the achievements of uncle Luke the Jedi. And you have mom Leia, who couldn't be bothered to learn the ways of the Force from Luke (something Yoda asked Luke to teach her in ROTJ).

So I image Ben asks his underachieving mom how she and uncle Luke are related. "Well, we have the same father. Darth Vader." Insert here some dismissive remark from Han about how stupid and evil Vader was.

But Ben is intrigued. He is directly descended from an epic guy strong in the Force, who was just as cool as Luke - from a certain point of view. Which side doesn't really matter. The Force was strong in Vader, and Ben wants to emulate that. So be becomes defensive on his grandfather's behalf and copies his behaviour actively.

Seeing ANH and ESB, I must admit that Vader makes the Dark Side really appealing. The guy has an enormous agency and respectability, and his motivation in ESB is to ditch the emperor and make Luke join him, so he has company on the Dark Side.

I guess Kylo is really going for the same thing kind of career in TFA, but he eventually realizes that the Dark Side as such is rather boring and that he doesn't have the same agency he assumed Vader had. Kylo's new "family" environment isn't any less invalidating than the one he left, with Hux questioning his competence and Snoke questioning his character strength. That's why Kylo admits to be conflicted, I guess. I feels really lonely and he isn't accepted on either side.

 

i hope not either. that would be disappointingly dull and not feel in the spirit of the OT for me.

the possibilities for how all this played out are endless and fascinating. i hope they don't bother to try to fill it in. it's much more fun to just speculate, fill in the blanks based on our own experience, desires, whatever. i agree that his fixation on grandpa plays into his isolation and probably his attachment to Snoke.

it's interesting to think about what's going on in his head right now, in his current state.

i mean, Ben Solo is what he is now. mostly Kylo Ren. so what's to be done with him?

 

I hope episode VIII will give Kylo an explicit purpose. "Grandfather, ...I will finish what you started" is awfully vague. I'm still trying to figure out what Vader (not Anakin) started in the OT that wasn't finished.

 

i love that it's double-edged.

i will finish what you started could refer to ruling the galaxy (that was Vader's original goal). OR
i will finish what you started could refer to bringing balance to the Force (if you believe Vader didn't succeed at this originally). OR
i will finish what you started could refer to putting an end once and for all to Sith (what Vader attempted to do when he turned to the Light).

there are probably other possibilities. and adherents to each of them all make good arguments.

right now based on what we're given in TFA, the first choice is the most obvious. because of that, i have a feeling there will be some kind of reversal or surprise regarding this statement, but we won't know what that is for a while.

 

You know, I really love this last moment in ESB when Luke & Leia are looking out the window into the galaxy, and you know Darth Vader is still out there, and Luke sort of acknowledges his existence without doing anything about that right now. To me that's balance, that's closure. I'd love it if the new trilogy ended on a note like that. Why does everybody has to be on the same side in the end? Isn't that totalitarian? [I hate the Vader resolution in ROTJ]

 

awww i love the Vader resolution. i straight up cried in the theatre at the end. hahaha

maybe it's totalitarian, but these are fairy tales (to my way of thinking). if it ended more vaguely people would riot. it would subvert the formula too much.

i love ambiguity in storytelling, generally. but i love closure in Star Wars ~ hahaha.