imagine being a published author and not getting it so much
I’m putting my face in my goddamn hands Kylo Ren is a TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE of a character who will get a redemption arc why is this hard for people to understand
“Kylo did Bad Things and had a shitty attitude so he can’t be redeemed”
News flash: you have to do bad shit and be a bad person to warrant having a redemption arc????? It’s?????? Required??????
Didn’t you know guys you only deserve redemption for being just a little rude. I mean just look at darth vader :)
I just read an article that claims Kylo Ren having any humanity at all would be a shock?? Like the possibility that he might show some depth of character or – God forbid, the potential for *gasp* REDEMPTION?!? – is the most ridiculous idea they’ve ever heard???
The complete lack of basic story-telling structure is appalling…
It’s not even whether he deserves it or not (and the whole point of redemption is that you have to earn it and atone) – it’s that the author seems to think redemption is not interesting.
Come on, somebody who does terrible things realising they might be wrong and trying to do better. Fuck that shit, it’s just boring and completely undesirable, moreover it’s unrealistic because nobody ever realised they were on a horribly wrong path and needed to change.
Going out on a limb here but I’d not be surprised if people saying this were at least overlapping with people who demand to see only wholesome things in fandom. The black/white thinking of “villains are monsters and you’re a monster if you like them” is nicely complemented by “nope, redemption arcs are bad (bec. monsters can’t be redeemed and don’t deserve it and the acoompanying sympathy anyway)”. And the general ridiculous cognitive dissonance these people experience makes simultaneously held opposing views such as “I only want wholesome things to be portrayed” and “it’s wrong to portray somebody who does evil as realising they’re evil and trying to better themselves” extremely likely.
Not saying everyone who’s against a Kylo redemption arc is an anti, but surely there’s a not insignificant percentage; it fits the pattern too well.
Normally I agree with a lot of things N. K. Jemisin says, but absolutely not here. Particularly since this gets to the heart of a very unpleasant sort of attitude that’s starting to be visible in fandoms these days. I’ve talked about it in the context of TFA and of people who will bend themselves out of shape and stuff their fingers in their ears and pretend like they suddenly can’t read any longer, if you point out the in-canon evidence, stated by Leia herself, that her son was watched and groomed since infancy by Snoke.
I’ve seen that little bit of detail getting swept aside so consistently, both by fans and by some Lucasfilm people themselves (looking at you, Pablog Hidalgo and your misogynistic ‘of course Leia would say that, she’s his mother!’, as if being a mother precludes a woman from rational analysis!) because it gets in the way of… honestly, what ends up coming across as some very frothing, completely out-of-control hatred via projection. That’s how Kylo Ren as a character ended up reduced from a nuanced, complex, damaged individual to an ‘allegory’ for ‘fuckboys’ and ‘school shooters’. I’ve said it before, but a friend who works with former child-soldiers from various warzones, when it comes to social reintegration, went to watch TFA convinced by the fandom that she was going to see Kylo Ren as sort of ‘MRA stand-in.’ She came out completely fucking bewildered and told me ‘what on earth are these people smoking? If anything, he has more in common with former child-soldiers of the LRA and is a narrative foil for Finn, both of them being two sides of the same coin – people groomed for violence from an early age, in a totalitarian framework, who end up reacting very differently to their conditioning!’
So what you essentially end up is a fannish culture that blatantly ignores or denies in-canon shit like CHILD-GROOMING, if the character in question is one that people have projected all of their negativity on. That’s how you end up with the bewildering situation of:
CANON:Something went down when he was young, but Ben Organa was clearly targeted by Snoke from an early age, with nefarious purpose.
FANON: He was just a spoilt, whiny, angsty fuckboy who had everything and who threw it away for nothing!
And here’s the irony – redemption and atonement don’t preclude suffering. They don’t preclude punishment, if that’s what people are specifically looking for. They’re something a person earns, through making the choice to lift up their soul from moral decay and the act of good works. The road could well be long and hard and redemption doesn’t obligate anyone to forgive. The character could well go through a conga-line of pain and hardship on their atonement road. All that redemption and atonement preclude is the character dying/exiting canon with their soul still in a state of moral degeneracy. That’s it.
“I’d started thinking about it and I said to George, ‘Why? This guy—he’s like Hitler. He’s killed. He’s done all of these terrible things and now we’re saying he’s equal with Yoda and Obi-Wan, as if he’s gone to heaven or whatever.’
And George pointed at me, he was real close, and he says, ‘Isn’t that what your religion is all about?’ And, boy, that was like being slapped on the side of the face, because, yes, it is what my religion is all about.”
