Raving mad and somewhat slightly dazed

Nothing grows on Jakku. Nothing is produced here, there’s no industry, hardly any native species. Everything here is something that was thrown away.

I mean. Don’t get me wrong. I feel for Ren.

full of rage and confusion and furious pride, trying to be dark because he thinks that makes him powerful, that makes him /important/.  I have been friends with literally a /dozen/ teenage boys just like him. I think most girls/femme reading people in nerd circles have.

(Girls that take his path are rarer. I flirted with it, tried being powerful and dangereous, but it never worked out as well for me. It’s not a path open to us, our anger even more a joke than theirs. The boys will take each other seriously, but they won’t take /us/ seriously.

our anger is much more likely to be directed at ourselves rather than the world. )

You know the ones.  These are the Tyler Durden fanboys, the ones who idolize the Joker.  If you haven’t meet one, you’ve seen one from the distance.  They talk about how powerful they are and how much they’d slaughter you if you fought them. (I once refused to be intimidated, and played his game back at him only better. He wasn’t sure what to do with my refusal to believe that I’d lose.) A lot of them are teenagers, but a lot of them aren’t.

There are a lot of those guys in the star wars fandom, I think. The ones who dragged Bobba Fett out of the sarlaac and back into the continuum, because he was cool - the ones who idolized over how /awesome/ Darth Vader was, and never acknowledged that he was mostly powerless  in that form. The ones who complained that Anakin wasn’t badass enough in the prequels, that he was too whiny, when he was  - the same age as Kylo Ren, really.

And this raises a very important point. This movie is not for their world view, I think - it is not for what they think the dark side is. Kylo Ren is a /dork/ trying to be cool, and the universe treats him with absolutely none of the dignity those boys think the darkness should afford them. He is a /child/ and he is acting like a /child/ and /that is what draws him to the dark/.

(let’s get rid  of the idea that the light is the realm of children, that innocence means goodness. innocence just means you don’t know any better. let’s make growing up mean a walk into the light.)

(in fact, that’s likely precisely what kylo ren’s plotline is going to be.)

And everyone in the world acknowledges it. That poor general! He’s probably struggled for /years/ to get that position, and he’s put on equal ranking with a whiny child who keeps breaking things when he gets mad.

And that makes Kylo Ren /much more sympathetic/ than he would have  been otherwise. Maybe it’s a factor of my own age - now that I’m not a teenager myself, and out of the age of needing to be intimidating to be secure. So I’m parental to him, mourning the fact that he’s fallen into bad influence - that he’s fallen into the hands of someone saying “yes, your anger is legitimate, your rage is fair, everything is exactly as serious as you feel it is, there is no need to analyze.” and then using that rage to control him. he has no self-control. his master acts like he doesn’t need any. (let me control you instead.)

Poor dear. I don’t take him as seriously as he’d like, but I do want him to learn and grow and come home.