Found in my drafts - on how evil it's possible for a 5 year old to be

[potboy]

Swan2Swan  says

"Empire’s End confirms that Armitage Hux is not some poor child who was raised to be cruel, but instead chose to be so on his own.

This becomes plain when he is given his first command of fellow children. He sits alone in a room with his peers and decides to test his authority. His first order is this: “I want you to hit the boy to the right of you. Hard.”

The boy obeys immediately, and Armitage “feels a strange and sinister buzz of excitement” as he watches the boy bleed.

He could have issued any command: “take off your shoes and give them to me”, “quack like a duck”, or even “shut your eyes”. He chooses none of these, and instead moves immediately to violence. His goal is to cause harm to others–and it is a goal that is not influenced by anyone else. It is his choice. The decision rewards him with excitement and a thrill, and thus the foundation for his character is born: a cruel, sadistic monster who revels in genocide and hurting the innocent."
 

This is what really annoys me about the whole “Rey was raised by sand, didn’t become a murderer” school of thought. It divides people up into those who are born evil and those who are born good, and then it goes on to draw the conclusion that there’s something immoral in having sympathy for a scared five year old child, because that child is (presumably, by this school of thought) already irredeemable.

I saw this in the prequels fandom too - people arguing that nine-year-old Anakin should have been put out of an airlock because he was obviously always doomed to become Vader from the start.

It’s funny how the people who think they’re the most moral are the ones who firmly believe that certain children are just born as monsters.

I think it proceeds from a very shallow understanding of human nature. A belief that people are either good or evil and that’s immutable from birth. Therefore you can mistreat a ‘good’ child as much as you like and they will still turn out okay.

But Luke is right - everyone has darkness in them. Anyone who’s had children knows that kids are inherently selfish. They haven’t yet processed the idea that other people have their own inner lives which are just as important as their own. (This is a difficult concept and some people never get there, even as adults.) Half of a parent’s job is going “no, we don’t bite people. That’s bad. How would you like it if someone did that to you? Apologise,” or “No, that belongs to her, give it back.” And the other half is making sure they know you love them and you’ll be there for them no matter what - that just because you’re disappointed and sad that they did this one bad thing doesn’t mean you now hate them and think they’re a bad person.

But that’s assuming you want your child to grow up into a well adjusted adult who has respect for other people’s boundaries and welfare.

Even the good side in the Aftermath books is flush with violence - everyone in these books is violent. And the Imperial culture from which little Hux comes completely valorizes the ability to do harm. You can bet he hasn’t spent his first five years hearing things like “No, we don’t hit people, that’s bad.” Imperial culture isn’t like that. Imperial values are more like “Get them under your heel as soon as possible. If they let you hit them it means they’re weak and they deserve it.”

There are enough posts going round Tumblr pointing out how pernicious the whole “Boys will be boys” attitude is, and how that leads to men growing up with a huge sense of entitlement and an inability to see anyone else as really human. So we know, really, that very often children do grow into the roles they’ve been assigned.

 

Comments

[acidwitch]

You are so right about a lot of this post. Arguments about Hux being evil because of decisions at age, like, nine, are made by people in pretty sure have never spoken to a child since they were children themselves. They also seem to forget that Anakin spent literally ten, eleven, twelve years of his life being groomed by Palpatine, to one degree or another, and that Obi Wan, well intentioned though he was, was MASSIVELY unequipped to raise a child, much less a child who likely has massive amounts of PTSD.

[potboy]

Oh God, yes, poor Anakin. Not only being groomed by Palpatine but also being feared and distrusted by the people who were raising him who were just expecting him to go bad. And with Obi-Wan being impossibly repressive over every one of his character flaws and human emotions. It scares me, tbh, that anyone could look at young Ani in TPM and see a monster that ought to be destroyed.

As for young Hux, people forget that he's been raised by Brendol to this point too and even Rae Sloane - who isn't the most empathetic of people - can tell that he's already damaged in some way. Star Wars's monsters were made, sometimes by mistake, but more often deliberately.

Who made Palpatine or Brendol evil is a different question!

[lavender_sage]

Whoa, I love how level-headed your response is. My first thought reading the OP was that I would have lost my mind. Which maybe you did, but replied when you were calmer. I mean, hating grown up Hux makes sense, but don't be ridiculous about it!

[potboy]

*G* I did lose my mind :) And then I typed out at least three responses of de-escalating intensity and deleted them. Then when I got to this one my natural "do not engage," response had kicked in and I left it in my drafts. But yes, I'm not one for judging people on their responses to fiction in general, but the "this infant child already deserves to die," people genuinely worry me.

[lavender_sage]

I just read the OP again, and the thing that struck me is that Rax's conversation with little Armitage is completely erased. Like it's only important that Armitage, somehow, got put in charge of these kids, not that the most powerful person he's ever met at this point, put him in that position, stirred the pot violently, and abandoned him.

I mean, yeah. Armitage is really unsympathetic in that scene if you cut out most of the scene.

[potboy]

I do think that the black and white, good and evil crowd genuinely don't think that context matters. They think that a good child would have found a way out of that terrifying situation that did not involve violence.

They're ignoring the fact that Ray's first reaction on seeing Finn is to run at him swinging a staff, and she's an adult and (by their lights) a holy and pure hero.

They're also ignoring the fact that children in general are not little saints. Perfectly ordinary children hit each other all the time.

They're also ignoring the fact that little Armitage has just gone from a situation in which all he could do was be silent and obedient and terrified to one in which he suddenly has some options and some control. Anyone would be excited by that.

Of course, the scene is also setting him up to become an evil villain. Wendig using the words 'sinister thrill' is deliberately there to indicate that maybe giving an abused child a squad of killers and telling him he can do what he likes with them is not a decision likely to improve his moral fibre.

And Rax almost certainly does it because of that. Rax wants Armitage to turn out as bad as he can possibly be. So do all the other adults in the boy's life, and to leave out all the adult influences pushing the kid along to be the worst form of himself really is to leave out three quarters of the story.