potboy

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ms-camucia:

Inktober, days 1 and 2 - AKA “I am a teacher, I have never finished Inktober, so I’m only doing absolutely tiny drawings, and only during my planning period.”

I was originally planning on doing an Edward Gorey entry for reylomuseum ‘s upcoming illustrator tribute, but settled on doing another Eric Carle for that one. Anyway, I have written an entire Gorey-style series of snippets in the style of The Object Lesson, all featuring our dearest Supreme Leader trying to win over Rey with various presents. In order to actually see if I can finish, these are absolutely tiny - all roughly business card sized, text included (I left in the pen for scale on the second panel). We’ll see if I can keep this up…

Prismacolor pen on cardstock. Font courtesy of this lovely person. Pen cap included for scale, I’ll probably scan each sheet of 8 panels when I’m done, since I just shot these with my phone in poo classroom lighting.

And yes, the Aurebesh reads “baby.”

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corseque:

On Friday I started to liveblog The Last Jedi, and I thought it would take maybe 3 hours to liveblog it because I would only pause when I thought of something to comment on

Anyway, live-blogging TLJ took me… three full days…. to watch this two hour movie because I was stopping every five seconds. So here is a very long 300+ Twitter thread of me analyzing the last Jedi. I really feel like my understanding of this movie is galaxy brain now and people found it interesting so you might too.

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chiclet-go-boom:

There’s a meta post from symptomofconvalescence going around this morning about Kylo Ren/Ben Solo that crossed my dash a couple of times, stating that the base of his character is wanting to be loved and valued and seen. I don’t normally involve myself with meta discourse but I quietly disagree with most of the opening statements although I’m in general agreement with the tone of the conclusions, so I’m going to take a minute to talk about why. I’ll quote the relevant passage below: 

Fundamentally, he wants to be loved, he wants to be valued, he wants to be seen. But he isn’t getting that love or understanding. Very early on in his life, he becomes convinced that his family betrayed him- justly and unjustly at the same time. His family loved him but they did make mistakes, grave mistakes, and Snoke was there to take advantage of that immediately. Understandably, he turns to Snoke who promised to make the pain go away, to make him a new person. But at some point he realizes that Snoke never cared for him either, and his heart and loyalties complete their shift to Rey. When Rey leaves him, he feels that he truly has no one left he can care for and no one who can care for him, so he spirals out of control into despair and anger.

Some quick notes on this:

Kylo’s had love and rejected it.

Kylo knows he has value - he’s had both sides of the sith/jedi line fighting over him his entire life after all and they’re still fighting. His entire life is a smoking battleground because of it.

Kylo doesn’t turn to Snoke because he thinks his mentor cares about him or is offering him less pain or an easier path. The Dark path is notoriously hard to walk. He doesn’t turn from Snoke to Rey because Rey cares more or that he wants someone to care about. Caring isn’t the problem here. 

What Snoke promised and what he killed Snoke for, was acceptance.

A statement to start with. Ben Solo is an extremely powerful Force user and part of his skill set includes both defensive and offensive telepathy, empathy and mental manipulation (along with incredibly fine-grained telekinesis and battle precognition but while I could absolutely get into that, it’s irrelevant to this post). He has the ability to break minds and extract information with ease and in movie-canon he appears to be Snoke’s chief torturer in that respect, sent to interrogate both Poe Dameron and Rey with the implication that this is just part of what he does for the First Order. 

Kylo knows he’s loved because he’s empathetic. He is also not unaware of what Snoke feels about him which isn’t going to be any kind of tender emotion like caring, except in the possible sense of how one might care for a pet - some amalgamation of possessiveness and pride and control for owning something rare and unique. When Han tells Kylo that he’s being used and will be discarded, that isn’t any sort of revelation; he knows that Snoke is trying to break him, trying to sift out the pieces that Snoke doesn’t want.

What Snoke offered to Ben was acceptance of who he was. Snoke wasn’t afraid of Ben’s anger - in fact, he praised him for it, elevated him for it, told him to embrace it, told him he could use it. Growing up with every adult in his life afraid of him on some level, that had to have been a very tempting feeling, to be wanted for exactly the flaw that everybody else wants you to carve out of yourself. Did Snoke stoke that feeling? Absolutely. Did he poison all of Ben’s interactions to make that crevasse, that disconnect wider and wider? You know he did. But it was still there to start with, Snoke just made it deeper and darker. 

That’s how the Dark works and what the Dark promises. That it’s possible to be self-contained, beyond all reproach, beyond all judgement if you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there. Self above everything, above all things — everything else, every one else irrelevant. Ben felt (and for practical purposes was) betrayed by everyone in his life and Kylo is on a quest to amass enough power now — secular, mystical, emotional — that he can’t be judged and found wanting by anyone anymore. 

He wants to stop feeling bad about who he is. Wants desperately to stop caring what other people think of him because for all this power, all this potential, he’s been told over and over again that his essential nature is wrong and always has been.

Circling back, there is no way Kylo’s unaware of what his mother and his father feel for him - he’s right in front of Han after all, who I will remind everybody has nothing in the way of Force defenses, while they talk on the bridge in that pivotal scene in The Force Awakens. Han is pouring out likely megatons of emotion at his son in those few minutes - love, regret, guilt, compassion, determination, desperation - along with his verbal words begging his son to please come home, that he is loved and that he is wanted. Han’s not lying. And notably neither is Kylo which is why the whole thing is so terrible. 

For while Kylo verbalizes his conflict, acknowledges that he still feels, still cares, he still sacrifices his father because what Kylo wants in that moment is more important than his father’s actual life. That’s a quintessential Dark side move even if the aftermath didn’t necessarily accomplish all that it was supposed to. In that moment, Kylo chose himself while looking love right in the face.

So love isn’t what Kylo wants because he’s got that and it so very clearly isn’t enough. 

(As an aside, he’s in communication on some level with Leia in The Last Jedi when he’s targeting the command deck of the Raddus, although whether its empathic or telepathic isn’t stated nor what specifically passes between them. Simple awareness? Actual conversation? It does, however, turn Kylo back from matricide so the question there is - why? Love didn’t stop him before so why does it stop him now? You could argue that since killing Han didn’t bring him what he wanted, he’s reluctant to sacrifice his mother for the same net zero gain. There’s a ton of nuance here, it’s not going to be a single, clean answer for this. Did he blame his father more? Does he blame his mother less? Anyways.)

As for the question of value, Ben Solo has been in the middle of a vicious tug of war since he was in the womb and he knows it. Yet neither side wants him as he is. He’s got too much Dark for the Light to trust him - hence Luke’s betrayal, Han and Leia’s abandonment. He’s got too much Light for the Dark to be able to use him easily - hence Snoke’s escalating disgust and ridicule, keeping Kylo unstable. Snoke is Dark but not Sith; it’s fairly obvious from the outside perspective that he’s not teaching his apprentice to surpass him, as a Sith master should, but to make him strong in the Force while keeping him emotionally weak and manipulatable. 

The Jedi espouse that there is no emotion, except in the abstract. The Sith espouse that the only feelings that count are the ones that aggrandize the self. Ben didn’t fit into the first and Kylo can’t fit into the second no matter how hard he tries.

So what Kylo is truly looking for is acceptance for who he is and how he is, which is why Snoke ended up dead on his throne because in that moment after touching hands through the Force bond with Rey, Kylo thought he’d finally, finally found it. 

Which bring us to Rey.

Rey is uniquely positioned to understand both Ben Solo and Kylo Ren. First, the Force Bond has made her confront her own prejudices as Kylo makes her question the lies she was told and the truths she wasn’t and she can feel what he feels, all that swirling rage and hurt. She’s also grown up alone and rejected and carries her own scars because of it, even as she managed to hang onto both hope and compassion when Ben couldn’t. Rey is angry over what was done to her. But better, Rey is furious over what was done to him. 

That isn’t abstract emotion. That isn’t generic Jedi compassion for all living things. That’s Rey, willing to confront the legendary Luke Skywalker over what he did to Ben specifically and then completely abandon her mission to recruit the Jedi back to the Resistance because of it. 

Rey is the only one who could look at Kylo Ren and see all that he is and accept it because fundamentally that’s who she is too. Look at Rey when she fights. She’s not in the least passive about it, she’s channeling nearly as much rage as Kylo does. She’s not trained in the Dark, she doesn’t accept the mandates of the Dark but she’s not Jedi either. She feels too much, just like Kylo does. 

But… she doesn’t accept him. In the home stretch in the throne room, Kylo planted his feet on all the choices that got him this far and chose himself, chose to consolidate personal power regardless of everything and everyone else — and Rey chose the good of the many over the needs of the one. They were both right. And they were both wrong.

But the crux of it is that it’s not about love or value at all, that’s not the essential problem. Rey and Kylo can love either to the ends of the universe and back if they want to, see themselves mirrored in each other, understand each other, and it’s still not going to change anything.

They have to accept each other, as they are, without trying to change each other’s essential nature. Rey wanted Ben and refused Kylo and that’s where it all blew up and we ended up with a kyber crystal that split itself in half rather than decide.   

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