![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potboyvia https://ift.tt/2Njyf6w
fifilefiend-blog:
benperorsolo:
There’s something I often see that really bothers me when people try to analyze Ben’s motivations and Tragic Backstory, and that is taking Ben’s perception as literal truth, especially as it comes to his relationship with his family and theirs with him.
There’s this thing called the Rashomon Effect. It’s named after a film by Akira Kurosawa, whose films incidentally were one of Lucas’ inspirations for Star Wars. Anyway. The Rashomon Effect is a storytelling technique in which an event is recounted in different, contradictory ways by the different people involved. We’ve seen this explicitly homaged in TLJ here:
Versus here:
And here:
The point is this: a person’s emotions, based on their interpretation of events, may be valid. But this doesn’t mean that their interpretation of events is factually correct, or that their assumption of others’ motivations is accurate. We might not even know whose interpretation is ultimately correct. Just like real life! Cool!
The great complexity of Ben Solo’s character (or one of them), is the fact that he is an earnestly unreliable narrator. Ben believes in his own interpretation of events. He believes (or has forced himself to believe) the things he’s saying. He does believe that his parents abandoned him when he needed them. He does believe that he is now someone other than Ben Solo. He does (or did) believe that his uncle simply wanted to murder him in the dead of night without a second thought.
Ben does believe that, and his feelings that stem from these beliefs make justified sense. From his perspective.
Because the other half of the story is that Ben was a highly vulnerable, highly emotional child preyed upon by a child predator who, according to the TLJ novelization, deliberately set him up against the rest of his family so that he would in the future destroy them for Snoke’s own ends. The other half of the story is that Ben was merely a child when these things started happening to him— a child who would hardly be able to understand the difference between a parent’s ‘fear of’ and ‘fear for.’ The other half of the story is that Han and Leia loved their child— but that they were not there enough for him, because they didn’t know what to do for him; that Han and Leia sent Ben to Luke to try to save him, but that this choice, while motivated by love, was ultimately the wrong one; that Luke did shirk back from his lit lightsaber, but a moment too late.
The other side of the story is a mother who wants nothing more than for her son to come home, of a father who died to save that son, and an uncle who used his final moments to apologize and prevent his nephew from letting another murder stain his soul.
The great complexity and tragedy of Ben’s story is not that his family didn’t love him, or that he didn’t love them, but that they did, and he did, and that this did not stop them from hurting each other or loving each other or doing both at the same time. Part of growing up is being able to understand and to reconcile with this complexity; with allowing yourself to forgive yourself and your family for being human. What Ben needs on his journey to self-actualized adulthood is to realize these things; to synthesize his memories of the past with a more nuanced understanding of how to come to terms with his parents as people, and with himself as both victim and victimizer, both to those who wanted to hurt him and those who wanted to love him.
In my opinion, it only cheapens the story to try to reduce it to lesser terms.
Well put!
fifilefiend-blog:
benperorsolo:
There’s something I often see that really bothers me when people try to analyze Ben’s motivations and Tragic Backstory, and that is taking Ben’s perception as literal truth, especially as it comes to his relationship with his family and theirs with him.
There’s this thing called the Rashomon Effect. It’s named after a film by Akira Kurosawa, whose films incidentally were one of Lucas’ inspirations for Star Wars. Anyway. The Rashomon Effect is a storytelling technique in which an event is recounted in different, contradictory ways by the different people involved. We’ve seen this explicitly homaged in TLJ here:
Versus here:
And here:
The point is this: a person’s emotions, based on their interpretation of events, may be valid. But this doesn’t mean that their interpretation of events is factually correct, or that their assumption of others’ motivations is accurate. We might not even know whose interpretation is ultimately correct. Just like real life! Cool!
The great complexity of Ben Solo’s character (or one of them), is the fact that he is an earnestly unreliable narrator. Ben believes in his own interpretation of events. He believes (or has forced himself to believe) the things he’s saying. He does believe that his parents abandoned him when he needed them. He does believe that he is now someone other than Ben Solo. He does (or did) believe that his uncle simply wanted to murder him in the dead of night without a second thought.
Ben does believe that, and his feelings that stem from these beliefs make justified sense. From his perspective.
Because the other half of the story is that Ben was a highly vulnerable, highly emotional child preyed upon by a child predator who, according to the TLJ novelization, deliberately set him up against the rest of his family so that he would in the future destroy them for Snoke’s own ends. The other half of the story is that Ben was merely a child when these things started happening to him— a child who would hardly be able to understand the difference between a parent’s ‘fear of’ and ‘fear for.’ The other half of the story is that Han and Leia loved their child— but that they were not there enough for him, because they didn’t know what to do for him; that Han and Leia sent Ben to Luke to try to save him, but that this choice, while motivated by love, was ultimately the wrong one; that Luke did shirk back from his lit lightsaber, but a moment too late.
The other side of the story is a mother who wants nothing more than for her son to come home, of a father who died to save that son, and an uncle who used his final moments to apologize and prevent his nephew from letting another murder stain his soul.
The great complexity and tragedy of Ben’s story is not that his family didn’t love him, or that he didn’t love them, but that they did, and he did, and that this did not stop them from hurting each other or loving each other or doing both at the same time. Part of growing up is being able to understand and to reconcile with this complexity; with allowing yourself to forgive yourself and your family for being human. What Ben needs on his journey to self-actualized adulthood is to realize these things; to synthesize his memories of the past with a more nuanced understanding of how to come to terms with his parents as people, and with himself as both victim and victimizer, both to those who wanted to hurt him and those who wanted to love him.
In my opinion, it only cheapens the story to try to reduce it to lesser terms.
Well put!