>I see Kylo Ren (or Ben Solo, if you prefer) as having more of a chance
>of redemption.I have to admit, the more bits and pieces about the film I hear, the more my instinctive reaction to that proposition is, "Nah. Fuck that guy."
>(Of course, he's
>taking life advice from what looks like a hologram of Gollum's badly
>burned grandfather and hanging out with Bill Weasley the Space Nazi,
>so it's no wonder he made a hash of it.)
Speaking of "it's no wonder he made a hash of it," I realized something the other day that made certain things about the whole Star Wars canon suddenly make a bunch of sense.
So, Darth RevanKylo Ren there, the Big Shock Reveal is that he's Han and Leia's son, am I parsing that right? If so, it fits neatly into my thesis, which is basically that the Skywalker men are all congenital incompetents. Anakin couldn't even get being the Chosen One right, and how hard can that be; the original trilogy is sort of one long sequence of Luke screwing things up, making really bad decisions, and getting away with it often through no direct fault of his own. Padmé was pretty clever apart from her fatally catastrophic taste in men, and Leia seems to have inherited the better parts of that package, but it would be perfectly in keeping with the Skywalker clade's tradition for her son, if she has one, to be simultaneously a powerful Force-sensitive and a complete bungling goon who can't even do Doing It Wrong right.
But beyond that, the real revelation that came to me is what that must mean. It skips the women in the family; it's just the Skywalker men who are hopeless clods. That must mean it traces back to a common paternal ancestor. Except that, if Anakin's mother is to be considered a reliable informant, they don't have a paternal ancestor.
Except that they do, because assuming Shmi isn't bullshitting us, Anakin's father is the Force.
Which means the Force is incompetent.
Suddenly the arc of the Jedi Order in the entire prequel trilogy—snap!— makes sense. :)
>Darth Vader was an old man,
The funny thing here is that everyone thinks that? But if you do the math he totally wasn't. How old was Anakin supposed to be in Attack of the Clones? 18? 19? How long were the Clone Wars? No more than three or four years, I should think. Similarly, Luke is 18 or 19 in A New Hope and the Battle of Endor is maybe four years later. So when he dies in Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader is in his mid-forties, 50 at the outside.
I probably would have thought that was ancient when I was 20, admittedly, but now that I'm 42½ it doesn't seem so very old. :)
(Similarly, Obi-Wan's 18ish in Phantom Menace, meaning he somehow manages to age from his mid-thirties to his late seventies in 18 years between Revenge and New Hope. I guess it's hard out there in the Jundland Wastes. Maybe the Japanese captured him and made him build a bridge at some point in the intervening years; that'll age a man.)
>resolved to the fact that he was beyond redemption long before Luke
>showed up (he did think his children were dead after all).
I don't think he believed he had more than one until that last duel scene in Jedi, but that's a fair assumption otherwise. Y'know, come to think about it, I don't remember there ever being a scene in the original trilogy where Vader learns that he has a living son. He obviously doesn't know who the Rebel fighter pilot in whom the Force is strong actually is during the Death Star fight in the first movie, and in Empire he and the Emperor chat about "the son of Skywalker" in a way that shows it's clearly not the first time they've discussed the matter, but I don't remember any scene wherein Luke's identity is actually shown coming to Vader's attention. That's interesting. (Presumably Imperial Intelligence determined who the Rebel pilot was who blew up the Death Star sometime between the first two movies.)
--G.
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