via
https://ift.tt/2ONW59Wnevernerdenoughblog:
rosamundhodge:
magpie-trove:
allgirlsareprincesses:
catefrankie:
allgirlsareprincesses:
catefrankie:
I am at peace with Ben sacrificing himself, because I am positive that sacrificing oneself is good. In fact, it is a greater act the more innocent you are and the more you are giving up.
Ben could have come home again - which is precisely what makes his sacrifice so noble.
Ok but him living and being able to make sacrifices for the people he loved every day would have been better. A noble life is better than a noble death. I don’t care for this story encouraging people (men especially) to have a death wish rather than order their lives in service of love.
“Head full of fantasies of dying like a martyr?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, dying is easy, young man, living is harder.”
I’m sorry, but I must disagree.
All of our sacrifices are modeled on the Cross. Marriage is a way of being conformed to the Cross, a way of giving the whole self forever; so too consecrated virginity. But so is martyrdom - “martyr” is not a dirty word in Christianity. It’s not that the early Christians somehow didn’t value life as much as we do now, it’s that there are goods greater than earthly life, for which earthly life can be legitimately sacrificed. It’s not a death wish - it’s a wish for that greater good, for the sake of which dying can be foreseen and consented to.
Living is not the better or higher sacrifice, though it may be harder in some cases. No greater love than this, Christ says: to give one’s life for one’s friends.
Does Ben’s death fit these requirements? I think so. I think Ben foresaw his death as a possible effect of healing Rey; he wasn’t surprised by it. But he didn’t directly intend it, he didn’t throw his life away - his intent was to save her, and he accepted his death. There’s a difference.
I am perfectly fine with the story encouraging men to love their beloved like Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her.
Ben wasn’t wrong to give his life for Rey. But Ben is not a real person making real choices. He’s a fictional person in a fairy tale whose fictional death makes a point, and in context of our modern world, I don’t think that point is as pure as you do.
I’m planning to write a longer essay on this so I’m going to let it lie for now.
I really shouldn’t because I’m terrified of Discourse TM, but I kind of want to chime in here because I think this back and forth highlights a divide in the message of Ben’s death depending on how it was viewed. And that divide stems from a distinction about the nature of sacrifice/death that I think is important to articulate. I mentioned it in another post, but here it is more fully. (Sorry guys, hope that’s ok?)
Sacrifice, the act of pouring oneself out for someone else, is undoubtedly a good and beautiful thing. It’s what Jesus did for us. It’s what he encouraged us to do for others. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” BUT the clincher here is that last bit—he must lay it down for someone. It is the act of giving up one’s life because you see no other way for someone else to live. Ben’s death, from an in universe perspective, fits this definition. I want to quote the lovely
bensaidbutido here because they said it beautifully here (
https://bensaidbutido.tumblr.com/post/190395630378/i-just-keep-thinking-about-how-ben-literally#_=_) and I have never stopped thinking of it since:
“Ben reached a level of happiness that I don’t think any other character in this saga could’ve felt, and that happiness was out of pure love for the life he brought back.
Rey brought light in Ben’s life, and he would never want that light to be taken from the galaxy.
He loves her so much he couldn’t imagine a world without her, even if it meant he couldn’t live in that world himself.”
He saw value in her, loved her, saw no other way for her to live, and gave his life for her so she could. That is undoubtedly true and beautiful and noble. And it is, as
catefrankie says, something to encourage people to live up to. It’s the deepest form of selfless love possible. Why would we not?
HOWEVER, there is also another type of sacrifice we see in American story-telling especially and particularly in the much discussed death-as-redemption trope. And that’s where the character gives themselves up for someone else because either they or the authors saw no other way for them to live. It is, essentially, a glorified form of suicide. It says “there is no going back from what they’ve done/gone through; they can’t possibly have a happy life; there’s no other way out for them except to die, so they might as well give up their life, because Death is the only escape, the only way forward, that they can possibly have.” THAT is what sends a toxic message; and having waded through the discourse and looking at this from the perspective of the audience, especially the audience from within a culture of punitive justice who’s un acclimated to the concept of living redemption, Ben’s early death as his ultimate fate (it’d be a different story if he had given it up gotten it back again) feeds into the idea that, because he did bad things once, there is simply no other way out for him. He can’t really go home, be forgiven, and live. A “Noble Death” was the only possible good ending for him. And I think that’s what
allgirlsareprincesses is reacting to and arguing against. The general audience tends to sit in something like the position of the elder son in the parable of the prodigal son. They haven’t done anything, at least as bad as he did. For them, it’s watching him come stumbling home, seeing the father (the narrative) hug and forgive him, and then instead of breaking out the fatted calf, the father says “and now my son you must go forth and die because naturally you can’t come back into my house.” And the elder brother/audience expects this reaction because that’s what comes of being a criminals like him—maybe some nice sentiments of forgiveness but there’s no real coming back and happily ever after after what he’s done. And the few people in the audience who find themselves in the prodigal’s shoes also expect this reaction even if they dare to hope for something better. It’s saying their sins can’t really be erased by forgiveness and so they must die. By placing Ben’s death in the context of Ben’s “coming back” the narrative validates the general audience’s idea that there was no other way forward for him but death.
So I think what’s going on here (and I’m saying this because I was and still am writhing between these points of view) is the clash between Ben’s sacrifice within the context of itself and Ben’s death within the context of real-world perception. The first is true and good and so so deeply beautiful, and is something for all of us to aspire to in its Christ-like demonstration of deeply and fully selfless love, giving oneself up for the beloved. The second is a toxic, vaguely suicidal notion flying a flag of “forgiveness, but only so much” and denying that mistakes can truly be moved on from in any meaningful way in life, thus feeding into a cynical ideal fueled ultimately by despair. And these two ideas are largely at odds with each other—appreciating the beauty means to be able to separate out and disregard the other perspective, and looking from the latter perspective deprives one of the beauty.
(Of course, one might also argue that even if Ben sacrificed himself beautifully, the nature of the fairy tale that this was supposed to be should have granted it to him again; or that he should have had his sacrifice at least acknowledged and Rey should have been allowed to react; but that’s a whole other argument and not the point of this.)
By placing Ben’s death in the context of Ben’s “coming back” the narrative validates the general audience’s idea that there was no other way forward for him but death.
I love every part of this post but ESPECIALLY THIS BIT, because I think it hits on the real crux of why Ben’s death was problematic for so many fans: it basically lets the viewer decide whether or not Ben could have really come home again, and while I do firmly believe he could have (and that the Resistance would have accepted him), it hurts that we never get the catharsis of seeing that, of Ben seeing that.
The comparison I keep circling back to is Ben’s death vs Tony Stark’s. Both were selfless and beautiful acts of sacrifice that showed how much the characters had changed from their first appearances, but for Tony, the narrative made it really clear the he died because he had already become a hero—NOT because it was the only way for him to stop being a villain, and not because there was no hope that anyone would forgive his crimes.
Which is why I think that if Ben Solo were to die in TROS, he should have joined the good guys in Act I. Then we could have seen it was possible for Ben to come home and have a life after villainy, and then it would have been a lot more heart-wrenching but also more beautiful and moving that he chose to give up that life for Rey.
I agree with the last point made.
Death as a sacrifice clashes here with Death as redemption.
A redeeming villain or anti-hero could die to become the ultimate hero in their in the pinnacle of their becoming-a-hero arc. That’s Tony Stark.
A villain could also die as the first and last act of heroism, when it’s too late in the game for this villain to come back and reincorporate into society (and I mean late in the story, not late per se). That’s Darth Vader.
Ben Solo died as the former, kinda. He redeemed himself earlier and performed his first heroic act by showing up to help Rey and died later becoming the most selfless hero of the saga. However, he didn’t have a heroic arc. It was too late in the game to give him an arc of him becoming a hero, since he was a stagnant villain for the first two thirds of the story. He doesn’t evolve into one, he doesn’t learn to be one and he doesn’t have the opportunity to enjoy the life as one. Tony does. Tony lived the life of the hero and that’s why he could become the greater of them all. That’s not Ben. He never enjoyed the world of the Truth.
Those ten minutes of action as a redeemed Ben Solo left his character in between two kind of narratives. And that’s why either his death or his earlier redemption (depending on who you are talking to) feel so gratuitous.
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