Why I hate Kylo Ren: A Rant

So at this point it should be clear that I think that Disney's Weekend at Yoda's trilogy is worse than garbage. It is an abomination. It is like that one comic story where the villain brought a bunch of dead heroes back, except as evil, defiled zombies. (BTW, Blackest Night is excellent, READ IT.) Disney has murdered Star Wars and paraded its mutilated corpse around and demanded we pay them for the privilege of witnessing it all, or at least give them a thorough tongue-bath and pretend it's at least better than the prequels. Which it is not.

And there is nothing that infuriates me more than praise for The Actor Adam Driver (the words "The Actor" appearing by contractual obligation to remind us all what it is he's actually trying to do, although he was surprisingly good in Lincoln which only goes to show that he can, in fact, act when given proper writing and direction) and his character, Kylo Ren fuck that Kyle Ben fuck that Lord Hiltsaber fuck that Darth Wannabe no fuck that, we'll call him by his stupid made-up name. What the fuck is that? "Kylo" sounds like either a Space Lego or a bastardization of "caelo," the Latin for, I shit you not, "heaven." Okay, "caelo ren" would then conjure up imagery of splitting the heavens in two, which is badass as fuck, not that Kylo does anything of the sort, but only super-nerds would get that, and there's probably already a 40k character or weapon or ship or concept named Caelo Ren, because of course there is.


No, I don't fucking care that he somehow comes across as sympathetic rather than plain old pathetic to some of you. Actually fuck that, yes I do. I care. And it's wrong. He's the fucking villain. We're supposed to be able to hate him. We're not supposed to be wondering whether The Actor Adam Driver is doing a piss-poor job portraying Darth Vader, or if The Actor Adam Driver is doing a fantastic job portraying a Darth Vader wannabe. The marketing for The Farce Awakens suggested that it was the former, but after two films of this garbage, I'm forced to assume that my suspicions upon walking out of the The Farce Awakens were indeed correct, and that Kylo Ren is indeed a massive middle finger to every Star Wars fan who ever dressed up as Darth Vader for Halloween (hi). I'm not actually sure that was what they meant him to be, because Rey's determination to save the guy in The Next Cash-in seems to come out of bumfuck nowhere. It's like Rian forgot that he killed the closest thing she ever had to a father or something. And I realize that Rian couldn't be bothered to watch the first six movies and spot ten fucking plot holes created by the invention of Force Mary Poppins, but I assumed he watched the film that his film is allegedly a sequel to. Fuck him. Fuck everybody involved in this abortion but fuck him especially.

So assuming it's the case that Kylo was always meant to be this fucking pathetic, which I think is the route they have to go, Tommy Wiseau-like, even if they didn't actually intend to go that route in the first place... There are still two major problems. One, The Actor Adam Driver decided it would be a good idea to have the character act like he can't move his jaw properly and wants to talk like Javier Bardem in Skyfall, for some appalling reason. It's incredibly distracting and raises the question of why this Vader wannabe is impersonating a villain who is a) not Vader and b) won't be invented until a long time from now in a galaxy far, far away.

Two, Kylo is supposed to be the fucking villain. He's supposed to be scary. Now, you can have emotionally unstable rage-monsters be scary. Ask Atrocitus. Or Angron. Or, fuck it, Anakin Skywalker; Hayden Christensen, on the rare occasion where he was allowed to act, was fucking terrifying as pre-lava-bath Darth Vader. Kylo always seems - and this I do have to chalk up to the general failure of The Actor Adam Driver - like a little emo twerp who badly wants to be in the Dark Side Club, and wants his Mary Sue crush to join too. There is no scene - save very briefly, when he blocks Poe's blaster bolt, which he then ruins by squatting down like a monkey - where he comes across as effectively terrifying. There was a scene in The Farce Awakens that treated one of his temper tantrums as a fucking comedy moment, for fuck's sake.

And I keep harping on this because this is Star Wars. There's supposed to be a clear-cut line between heroes and villains. I'm not saying that characters can't cross over that line - the prequel trilogy being, essentially, The Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker the Unwise. But the audience isn't supposed to be confused about whether or not they're meant to sympathize with a character. We don't sympathize with Vader, and we don't care about whether he turns to the Light per se; we sympathize with Luke and with Luke's efforts to turn Vader. And the family connection is what justifies Luke's efforts to save Vader. (Why else would you try to save the man who killed your father figure, Rey?)

Thanks to unforgivable decisions by J.J. and Rian, and the untimely death of Carrie Fisher, Kylo has no family members left to try to save him in Episode IX: The Search for Plot. This is why making Rey Palpatine's granddaughter would have made fucking sense; Palpatine turned Vader to darkness; Palpatine's grandchild turning Vader's grandchild to the light is, to borrow a phrase, poetic. Even though they don't have a family connection, it still works, because they have family history; Rey could need to prove that her blood isn't irrevocably tainted with the stain of the Sith by saving Kylo from the dark side. (And she wouldn't need to be his kin to turn him, because she is pure pureness, of course.) But no, fuck that, Rey is "nobody," the Skywalker bloodline - which this entire fucking series has been about - is about to be completely extinguished, and FUCK YOU EVERYONE INVOLVED IN THIS.

Okay, where was I? Right, comparing Kylo to Anakin.

It's not until the prequels - where Anakin is the protagonist - that we see just how tragic his life has been. It's not just that Palpatine manipulated and seduced him, it's that the Jedi Council - particularly Mace Windu and Obi-Wan Kenobi - utterly failed him. At different points in Sith, over his protestations that killing unarmed prisoners is not the Jedi way, both Palpatine and Windu insist that someone is too dangerous to be kept alive; the Jedi Code has been defiled by Jedi and Sith alike. Seeing the two as morally equivalent, he makes a terrible, irrevocable decision to throw in with the faction that can save his wife. We see the consequences of his decision weigh on his soul even as he grimly follows through on it. And we see the great tragedy on Mordor Mustafar is not him forgetting that Force Mary Poppins is a thing getting crispified, but rather him snapping and murdering Padme, the woman he did all of this for, because his lust for power got the better of him. "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will!" Also, remember how Luke turned Vader? It wasn't with a rational argument or by besting him in combat. It was by getting himself nearly electrocuted. Vader turned because Palpatine - the guy who told him he could save Padme, but got him drunk on the Dark Side so he killed Padme instead - is now zapping pretty much the last vestige of Padme left in the universe. (Yes, there's Leia, but there's no indication in the film that Vader knows who the "sister" is.) Indeed, Vader's turn to the Dark Side was cemented by the murder of a family member (his wife) to whom he had offered the opportunity to rule the galaxy at his side; he turned back to the Light to save a family member (his son) to whom he had offered the opportunity to rule the galaxy at his side. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that he was remembering what happened to Padme as he was watching Luke get zapped.

The prequels paint Vader's actions in the OT in a new light, and make him a more sympathetic character, without diminishing his threat as a villain (Lucas tries to claim that the Vader of A New Hope is actually "pathetic" in a commentary, and, okay, he is Tarkin's attack dog, but he's a fucking terrifying attack dog). Weekend at Yoda's tries to do that with Kylo, but it hasn't earned an iota of it: Luke had a wildly out-of-character moment and so Kylo decided to join the Dark Side Club, apparently. That's all the explanation we get because fuck you Rian Johnson.

Then he killed his dad so he could join the Dark Side Club. What the fuck. What the FUCK. Anakin killed Padme because he had already fallen to the Dark Side. He was given the opportunity run away with her, to save her life at the expense of the rest of the galaxy - a choice he had already made when he cut off Mace Windu's arm - but he slipped into full-on Dark Side mode and accidentally murdered her. (Don't give me this "lost the will to live" bullshit, please. I fully buy into the theory that Crispy!Vader, lying on that operating table, unconsciously stole Padme's life force to keep himself alive long enough to get into the suit.) Snoke treats the murder of Han Solo as a rite of passage or some bullshit - that's why I call it the Dark Side Club. Kylo doesn't kill Han - well, first of all, he doesn't kill Han at all because this fucking horse cacky is not canon la la la I can't hear you. Kylo doesn't kill Han because he's consumed by the Dark Side and not in control of his actions; Kylo kills Han because some fucking douchebag Gollum hologram told him to. Fucking hell, the Emperor told Luke to kill his father, and Luke didn't do it. Hell, the Emperor's gloating basically snapped Luke out of his murder rage. I get that unlike Kylo, Luke didn't want to join the Dark Side Club. Which again raises the question of why Kylo wanted to join the Dark Side Club, a question we don't know the answer to because Rian. Moving on.

What you needed to do, if you wanted Kylo to be sympathetic/redeemable, was have another, better villain. A Palpatine or a Tarkin. But we have Supreme Leader Gollum and General Fux. See, we didn't really have the notion of redeeming Vader until Return of the Jedi, which promptly stuck Emperor Palpatine front and center as a much more powerful threat than Vader himself. This is important, because without a physical threat, you're left with this metaphysical notion of saving someone from evil that doesn't play out nicely in a visual medium meant for children. Watching Kylo futz around, try to be evil but realizing his heart really wasn't in it, while being terrified of failing Darth Plagueis - that could have actually worked, but you didn't make the movie about him, you made it about MaRey Sue. Then you had Kylo murder Gollum without breaking a sweat. So now this emo dipshit is in charge of the Empire. What the fuck. What the fuck is keeping him on the Dark Side now? Luke is dead. Snoke is dead. Are we really supposed to pretend that Luke would have had so much trouble turning Vader if Palpatine had fucking died in the middle of the OT? "Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has forseen this." "Done, dad. Now what?" "Umm... podracing?"

Finally, let's just be clear about this: this fucking c*nt murdered Han Solo. Actual Star Wars fans don't want to see him redeemed, we want to see him fucking dead.

Fuck Weekend at Yoda's, fuck J.J. and Rian, and fuck Kylo Ren. I'm out.