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https://ift.tt/2AWAGmXIDK, I’ve always thought that there had to be an element of emotional abuse in Hux’s upbringing simply because he was brought up by rabid fascists in an echo-chamber of their own making. The kind of people who were singled out by the likes of Gallius Rax and Emperor Palpatine to perpetuate the legacy of the Empire (an abusive system) were never going to be the kind of people who could thoughtfully raise a child, or who even cared about trying.
So yeah, it gets complicated because even if Brendol genuinely loved Hux (which he very well might), pretty much everyone in the FO grows up in a culture of abuse.
And then, of course, once The Secret Academy dropped, we knew that Brendol was the kind of man who encouraged the children in his care to kill one another in a quest for his favour (and for survival.) Even if a man like that loved his son, the son’s going to grow up with conditional affection and unspoken death threats as part of his environment.
I know we liked the idea that maybe the FO was an actually legitimate alternative to a New Republic that didn’t seem to have done a thing about slavery and poverty in the Outer Rim. We hoped that they might be a kind of socialist, not exactly utopia, but at least a working alternative form of government that actually lived up to the implications of Hux’s speech.
But we knew we were reading against the intentions of the text all along. And the more canon that’s come along, the more impossible it’s become to sustain that reading. So now, I think the entire existence and internal structure and world-view of the First Order is abusive, and that even if Brendol did love his son, he would have abused him as a matter of course, because that’s who he was and that’s what his society would have demanded.
I think everyone’s agreed, for example, that Sloane is among the best of the Imperials, and it’s canon that she liked Armitage. But her reaction to a bunch of brutalized children who had been turned into murder machines was (a) this five year old can be responsible for them as long as he keeps them away from me, and (b) and he should learn how to make more of them.
It never occurs to her to take Armitage out of that situation and raise him like an actual child with books and lessons and encouragement. And it never occurs to her to go ‘omg, what did you do to those poor kids? Get them a therapist immediately!’ She is quite content with turning kids into weapons as long as they’re not aimed at her.
In a society like that, it doesn’t matter whether Brendol loved his son or not. In fact it probably makes things worse if he did, because it would have kept that painful bond tight between them - it would have kept Brendol playing games to get his son to stay desperate for his attention, it would have kept Hux trying to move the world to get a kind word. If there was genuine love there, it would just have been the thing stopping them from walking away from each other and putting an end to the misery.
I agree with you that it’s not what we wanted, and I find it very painful to contemplate (it’s way too close to home.) But it’s more or less what we should have expected all along.
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