[ SECRET POST #4746 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4746 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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04.
[Devil May Cry]


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05. [SPOILERS for Rise of the Skywalker]



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06. [SPOILERS for Rise of the Skywalker]

[Star Wars, Berserk]


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07. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia]

















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #679.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Really? Because I thought TLJ buried the leade with him, while TROS revived it. The first movie seemed to have some "could be a Jedi someday" themes, and the last definitely made it seem like he was force sensitive. The middle one really made him feel pointless (though also not force sensitive, which I want really badly)

[(Anonymous)]

DA

TFA never hinted that he was force sensitive. Rian Johnson just followed up on that.

[(Anonymous)]

It's true about the force sensitive stuff, yes, but being force sensitive doesn't intrinsically make a character interesting, you know? Especially when TROS still doesn't really do a lot with the force sensitivity.

On the other hand, I thought that TLJ gave him a lot of meaty character development stuff about, like, learning how to exist in the universe and good and evil and moral complexity and sacrifice and living for others and all kinds of stuff like that. And he had his own whole subplot which I thought was strong on its own terms, even if it was rather awkward in relation to the rest of the movie. In contrast, in TROS, he doesn't really develop emotionally as a character at all - he's really poorly served in that regard by the movie. I don't know what his plot even really was.

Also the "I need to tell you something" was bad and I refuse to believe that he was going to tell Rey about being force-sensitive, that explanation makes no sense in the context of the movie.

[(Anonymous)]

I never so that many hints of "he could be a jedi someday in the first movie, tbh". Picking up a lightsaber from a ground and trying to use it is not really something which a non-Jedi can't do. Anyway, I might be biased, because I really don't like the TRoS suggestion that the reason why he escaped FO was because he was force-sensitive rather than just not interested in killing people for them (or being there), and that any others who have fled were force-sensitive as well...it just makes any moral choices almost irrelevant.

(But that's the entire new trilogy for you - I'm still waiting to find out why Ben turned and why his mom calling him by his name was enough to get him back, because it's so fucking hand-wavyily ***force did it*** that it's beyond ridiculous).

Still, I thought that TLJ's arc for Finn didn't really work that well, but had a potential - there was some attempt to tie him and Rose to "everyday people" on the ground, suffering under the FO, and to get him fully understand what he's signing up for here, make him make that choice more deliberatly than in the first film where he just followed Rey and was very quickly swept into the larger thing. You could continue with that - make him and Rose be the voices of the ordinary people, be the inspiration for them, tie it back to Finn as a motivator for Stormtrooper rebellion, or something. But there was no screen time for that, in the end.

Frankly speaking, you could make a trilogy out of Finn's story and a trilogy out of Rey's story anda trilogy out of properly fleshed-out Kylo/Ben's story. There was no need to cram it all into three films whene there apparently wasn't even a proper plan as to what exactly did they want the story to be about.

(the whole no-plan-beyond-vague-ideas thing is madness considering the price tag on all these flicks)

[(Anonymous)]

da

it just makes any moral choices almost irrelevant

TROS implicitly blames brainwashed kidnap victims for their situation, which is just fucking horrible.

why Ben turned

Ben thought his Uncle Luke had tried to kill him and that he had killed Luke in self defense. Ben didn't believe he could go to his parents; Luke was Leia's twin, Han's friend, the man they had sent Ben to in order to cure him of his darkness. The voice in his head (Snoke/Palpatine), the darkness Luke had seen, was Ben’s only hope.

If you're interested, the comic miniseries The Rise of Kylo Ren is detailing what happened the night Luke invaded his nephew's mind and its aftermath. (Ben didn't burn the Temple or kill the students, for instance.)

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds like the comic is trying to give Kylo Ren some redeeming qualities well after the fact. Unfortunately, that’s too little too late for normal people.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Look, I'm sorry to say this because you've probably heard it many times, but I would have liked to have seen the things you're writing about in the actual films. They are important details for the character and the storyline and they were simply not there. Additional material should never be the place where the entire point of the character's motivations is revealed, because as long as what I'm seeing on screen doesn't make sense to me (and does not interest me), I am unlikely to go and seek the a comic series or a tie-in novel that makes it more reasonable. //Not to mention that I find it hard to treat all auxillary stuff as canon, when there are other comics (e.g. Poe Dameron's whole series) which the last film kinda contradicts.//

As far as I'm concerned, the films gave me nothing except vauge mentions of the darkness within Ben (somehow maybe connected with Snoke), Luke's betrayal, and a suggestion that Ben/Kylo might have killed his fellow students. There's nothing more there. In particular, there's nothing there about how he decided to go from being betrayed by his uncle to becoming a space Nazi and participate in genocides and destructions of planets (it does feel to me like something that should involve one or two more steps in between; you can be betrayed and still not become a killer). Or, I don't know, what did the Palpatine/Snoke tempt him with? Or what fears did he pray upon? He supposedly had fairly normal childhood, what the fuck happend? In the films he still acts and sounds like an independent person being tempted by darkness and making his own awful choices.

I appreciate the work somebody put in the comics to make it all more plausible and interesting, if I had to write about Ben/Kylo I would have added similar things to the story to make it into some kind of choerent narrative, but as far as the films go - this was not the story we were told. The story we were told resembled a crossover between the first draft of a promising outline and a piece of Swiss cheese - that I find hard to get fascinated by.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that supporting material should not prop up the films. I thought you were interested in more info, which is why I mentioned the comics.

I feel that Ben's motivation for turning to the dark side was in the films. Leia "sent him away" and says that Snoke was there from the beginning (not a normal childhood), we see a fucked up relationship between Snoke and Kylo, and the Luke/Ben stuff was thoroughly examined. We'll have to agree to disagree there.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I appreciated the response, but yes, I'm aware that there's some supplementary material for this, I was mostly venting my frustration with the core material :)

I guess we just have a different idea for what's sufficient, because we seem to more or less agree on what was shown in the films. It's just not enough for me if I'm supposed to treat the characters as humans not sketches of characters/pure archetypes. I mean, I know they said that the evil influence was there from the very beginning, but that could mean a /lot/ of things (from total brainwashing to an equivalent of a space text message once a year), and again doesn't solve my "how did he go from personal betrayal to justifying killing peoples in hundreds". I like to know why people do things and I would prefer the reason not to be a short summary edition in which the Luke's betrayal is the /only/ chain of clear action-reaction that makes some sense? The rest is the origin story along the lines of "this whole dark side thing, it's like a space virus, you contract it by standing close to Snoke, and once it's there, you can't walk away, unless your mum does some magic trick, cause choices don't matter" /sorry, venting again; it's just such a waste of character and actor./

TLDR - Indeed, we have to agree to disagree on this :)