Please write that meta! I’m tired of people trying to prove Kylo and Anakin are alike because they are both “whiny”.
Okay since you asked so nicely, anon. Y’all know I’m super invested in Anakin through the lens of Tatooine, and here’s the thing:
Ben started out with everything Anakin ever wanted.
He was born free.
(I’m gonna give that a line to itself because it’s huge. Like I cannot overstate the importance of this. Ben was born free.)
He had a family who loved him, and a family he was allowed to love in return. Again, that’s huge.
His friends and family were also free, and he could interact with all of them freely.
He grew up in a world that was (as far as we can tell from TFA alone, anyway) largely at peace. The war between the First Order and the Resistance that’s currently tearing the galaxy apart seems to have really only gained headway after Ben turned. And if that’s the case, that also means
He could be reasonably assured of the safety of the people he loved.
And look, that’s it. That’s literally everything Anakin ever wanted.
But it’s more than that. Ultimately, I think their approach to power is fundamentally different, so much so that the similarities between Ben and Anakin are most surface ones, imo.
I know some people are going to disagree with me here, but in my reading, Anakin never actually wanted power. What he wanted was power to.
Power to free the slaves. Power to save people he loved from dying. Power to end the war. Power to have some measure of control over his own life.
Anakin’s tragedy is that he sought that power in the wrong place and in the wrong way, and found himself a slave all over again. But I think it’s important to note that his motivations are not inherently wrong.
Does that excuse what he did? Absolutely not. But I think it does make his redemption more possible. Luke’s struggle was mainly in convincing his father that it was possible to break away from his Master and be free. The Vader we see in ROTJ doesn’t even particularly seem to want to be on the Dark Side – he just doesn’t think there’s any way out.
Ben is very different.
Now, what we know about Ben so far is that he had everything that Anakin ever wanted, and for some reason he gave it up. We don’t know why yet, but we do know that Rey says his greatest fear is that he’ll never be as strong as Darth Vader. And we know that Ben actively wants to be fully of the Dark Side, and is disgusted with himself whenever he fails to be so.
So, going solely off of TFA, it looks like what Ben wanted was not so much power to, but simply power.
Which, among other things, is going to make his redemption a lot more difficult, I think.
(Now, I also strongly suspect that Ben is brainwashed, and if he is, then much if not all of this may very well be moot. But we’ll have to wait for the next movie for that.)
I definitely agree that they’re very different people with completely different backgrounds–on paper, it seems like Ben must have had everything.
I’m not sure that his consuming fear that he’ll never be as strong as Vader necessarily points at a desire for power for power’s sake, however. If anything, his fixation is on the flipside–fear and vulnerability. Vulnerability to outside influence in particular, I’d say. There are his own loved ones, the “weakness” that laid even ostensibly-invulnerable Vader low, and keeps Ben in emotional turmoil that he comes to believe can only be overcome by eradicating the people he cares about (?????). Of course it doesn’t work, as anyone with the vaguest understanding of emotional attachment could have told him, but it appears to be his rationale. And there is the Light Side, which as of ANH requires a certain amount of surrender. Ben’s fear there leads him to that bizarre moment of sympathy with Rey– Don’t be afraid. I feel it, too.
Also, the one time Han seems to get through to him is when he argues that Snoke is using him; after a weak, childlike rebuttal, Ben just says, “it’s too late.” That moment, honestly, seems a much more legit comparison with Anakin than ~whining~.
Also, his little pleading monologue at the helmet seems indicative of the tangled association of family and power in his head as well as some Vader-shaped fuckery:
Show me again the power of the Dark Side, and I’ll let nothing stand in our way. Show me, Grandfather, and I’ll finish what you started.
True!
I admit I haven’t spent much time thinking about Kylo Ren in his own right (while I have spent way too much time thinking about Anakin), but it seems to me that there’s a big difference between what Kylo Ren thinks he wants and what he actually wants.
Does he actually want power for it’s own sake? You make a very good case that he doesn’t. But does he think he wants power for it’s own sake? That power is the ultimate goal and the main thing he should strive for?
Yeah, I think he does. Which is still pretty different from Anakin imo (though Anakin got close to that point on Mustafar; but it definitely didn’t last).
The “it’s too late” moment I honestly can’t decide what I make of at this point. You’re right: it was actually the most Anakin-like of anything that Kylo Ren did. (But of course he wouldn’t see it that way.) Why does he think that? He seems pretty familiar with his grandfather’s story so why does he think he’s different?
This is true but I’m also at the same time genuinely afraid that they’re not going to go that route, and I’m kind of trying not to be horribly angry and disappointed if it turns out they don’t. :(