|olga|

Here are some illustrations of mine for Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which is SUCH a fabulous book.  Reading it is like sinking into a bowl of peppermint chocolate pudding!  *:･ﾟ✧

The bombing run shows Poe’s recklessness and disregard for chain of command.

The Canto Bight scene shows Rose getting what she wanted in wrecking such a corrupt town, then realizing it ultimately wasn’t as fulfilling as saving a single (fathier) soul.

The showdown with Phasma shows Finn rejecting his “run away” mentality and fully committing to a cause.

The throne room scene shows where Kylo’s allegiance lies and how seamlessly he and Rey work together.

The showdown with Luke allowed Luke to apologize for his mistake and allowed Kylo to take his anger out all while being unable to actually harm him and giving the Resistance time to escape.

Everything, even the action was saturated with meaning.

But no, none of that happened, so now Ben REALLY WAS Vader 2.0, his ending being exactly the same except worse, because unlike Anakin, he didn’t know with certainty that his mother loved him, he didn’t marry a woman who loved him, he didn’t have children who saved him and carried on his legacy. He just suffered from his conception to death and was then replaced in his family by a woman who didn’t even mourn him. And now they want to give us more “Ben Solo stories” as Soule excitedly claimed?

WHY??? Who is going to read that?!!! I’m assuming that they’re relying on all the fanbros who are only interested in seeing Kylo Ren be “a badass,” which is the same reason most of them read the Vader comics. And given Soule’s frequent use of the term “badass” in the interview, he’s on the same wavelength. They see these characters only as masculine power fantasies and NOTHING ELSE.

But that’s not what they wrote.

It’s kinda that Star Wars twitter post of ‘Did you know this esoteric fact about Exegol that explains a lot about TROS?’ and Elijah Wood piping up, ‘No. How could we know?’

Did we know Rey loved Ben and/or Kylo?

The kind of reylo vibes I used to hang around and support did not rely on literally one 10 second action/line to show that Rey loved Ben but spent the rest of the movie attacking and running from him.

Until. UNTIL. Little miss perfect gets herself way in over her head and of course has to see him as a hero now because she friggin needs saving over something really stupid.

I don’t know how to describe this without putting huge fanfic starters out there to describe the kind of plot they should have had, but I promise you there is so much more grey, uncertainty, Rey sounding like the bad guy because she loves him, Rey against her friends some times, them with her in others, more epic and complicated fights.

Or at the very least, Rey being a self-righteous little sh*t doesn’t last longer than half the movie before we find out and she has to admit that’s not who she really is.

All this fakery and performance we got in tros? Never should have happened.

And you know what I think would have been good visual story telling for that? Wardrobe change into plain clothes. Earth tones. Older resistance rags. Hair down.

Scenes of her crying just outside some desert city alone because self realization is them most painful thing, as well as being tired from running from the fear that this is who you were always gonna be: the person that just has to do everything alone.

A crumbling and a visual breaking of all the walls she’s put up to protect and guard herself… from herself and her fears.

Like, if running from your fears is not the destiny of a true Jedi, (the way the force actually intends it, not the way the extremes that have been presented in the films do it) then it all has to catch up to her at some point.

And she might feel terrible for loving Ben, and think it’s the worst thing she ever did. Except that when she sees him, really just sees him, she can’t help but feel the stabbing pain of a lonely child in a broken down atat in her heart, and there’s is such a raw part of her that can’t leave him there. Not willingly. She wants to fight and claw and scratch for him more than anybody she’s ever fought for. Because she’s been fighting for herself just as long, that she wouldn’t be left alone.

You know what’s sad? In tlj we thought it should have been Luke nurturing Rey, but it’s actually Kylo that is.

In tros, what we should have had was: the rest of the skywalkers that should have been fighting this hard for Ben for so long, but we actually see it’s Rey that is.

I’m just gonna leave that there.

Ben Solo had been facing an invisible voice in his head since a young age, as far back as when he was thirteen Maybe fourteen. It’s implied also a darkness was watching him before he was born. Implying that the actual contact between him and Snoke was long before he was thirteen.

It’s played as a joke in the novelizations, but at times Han and Leia left him with kitchen droids because, like typical Han and Leia , they had to go save the galaxy. Ben is nearly killed a few times by malfunctions. 

Ben Solo held Luke Skywalker in the highest respect. He was frustrated with his master’s lack of trust in him and the simultaneous high expectations, but from a young age he idolized his uncle, followed his uncles commands, and seemingly kept his frustrations to himself (except when he shared them with Snoke).

He called Luke ‘master’. Not uncle. 

Ben feared that he was inherently evil. 

Ben Solo loved Adeeran Myths, flying in ships, calligraphy, and studying Jedi relics. He literally loved and cherished his family and their legacy.

Ben found out that Vader was his grandfather over a holonet channel….Alongside the rest of the galaxy when it was revealed Leia and Luke had been lying to the entire Galaxy. This is what strips his mother of her role in the senate. This is one of the many reasons Leia creates an illegal militia. 

Ben knew nothing about the First Order when he went to Snoke. He saw Snoke as his only friend and believed Snoke would guide him to the Knights of Ren…Who would protect him and give him a home. 

After he tells his entire story to the leader of the Knights of Ren, he is shocked and horrified at the carnage they commit. 

Ben is described as ‘fighting this process [dark side] every step of the way’. 

Canon made the distinction that Ben, when dealing with a band of war raiders, was able to defeat them with less bloodshed than his grandfather Vader had. This comic is also played for laughs as Ben is scolded by an old Empire Stormtrooper for his various suicidal and near insane plots. 

Ben didn’t want Star Killer Base to occur

Ben reflects that the mask and the many things Snoke gives him feels like leashes and cages. 

A deleted scene in TLJ had Snoke possessively stroking Ben’s face.

Palpatine literally says he’s been every voice inside Ben’s head. Even imitating Vader. 

It then spent the majority of the last movie having him do very little actual evil…but instead asked the protagonist to help him and join him fight the big bad….Those people he’s fighting in the first scene ? Vader loyalists. He then proceeds to do the most selfless thing he can and gives his life to Rey with the thought that “People need her and I can’t imagine a world without her.” 

Issues With Writing Ben In Lucasfilm and Audience Perceptions:

Their unwillingness to put this stuff in TFA or TROS. 

Half of Lucasfilm wanting to actually write Luke, Leia, and Han as flawed individuals vs the other half who want to deify them. This didn’t help that fact that they introduced Ben as the ‘flawed son who ruined the happy ending of the OT trio’ 

Them having reylo be a central romance but also like…never talking about reylo and almost like forgetting it at every turn in marketing and other stuff. 

Their unwillingness to show Rey flawed or stick to some of the groundwork for Dark Rey that they laid out in TFA and TLJ. 

Their want for a brand new ruthless Vader whose badass/their desire for an anti hero. 

The fact that they harped on how legacy’s aren’t all their cracked up to be for two films…Just to back track on that in the last film. 

“She was more interested in protecting the light than seeming like a hero.”

Leia is talking about Holdo in this quote, but it’s important to note that when she says this the camera immediately focuses on the beacon.

The tracker that literally symbolizes Rey’s absent presence among the resistance.

It’s obvious that in this scene, Leia’s words also relate to Rey’s character. Before TROS was out, I genuinely viewed this quote as foreshadowing. I thought it would’ve given a glimpse into what Rey would be representing in the last film.

TLJ as a whole taught us about failure in both heroes and villains, but it’s the failure in those we think are legends that is so important to understand.

Luke knew that the old teachings of the Jedi didn’t make sense, and it ties perfectly into the idea of just protecting the light.

It ties into the fact that Luke realized too late when it came to Ben that he had to save who he loved rather than attack.

He had done the same thing with his father—he chose to protect the light.

It’s why Rose says this:

“That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate... saving what we love.”

Because saving what we love is protecting the light and simply fighting what we hate can only make us seem like heroes.

It’s important that the word seem is used when Leia refers to Holdo because seeming like a hero doesn’t mean you are one. You may seem like a hero when fighting what you hate, but you are a hero when you save what you love (even if it doesn’t SEEM that way).

Can you tell where I’m trying to go with this yet?

Rey wouldn’t be some hero that simply defeats the bad guy and “all is good.”

Rey would be more interested in protecting the light, a.k.a, saving what she loves.

In a perfect world, this idea would’ve been carried further had there been no Big Bad in the last film, and the war was just between the FO and the Resistance.

Here’s why.

Rey would be reunited with the good guys—the ones that now look to see her as their hero. The last Jedi. The Resistance wouldn’t dare to think that Rey would have any kind of link to, say, I don’t know... the new Supreme Leader or something like that...

Haha.

And to add onto that, Rey technically is partially responsible for the fact that Ben even became Supreme Leader in the first place because she helped him defeat the praetorian guards (even if her intention was assuming Ben would leave with her after).

The truth is that Rey does want to save what she loves, it’s just that doing so wouldn’t really make her seem like a hero.

She loves her friends and she would do anything to save them; extending that same love to Ben and having it be understood would be almost impossible.

Because we’d think saving the resistance would be Rey’s version of protecting the light—and to an extent it is—but Ben is also inevitably part of this equation.

Ben is literally the embodiment of the word “seem.”

I’ll even throw in the definition for good measure.

Seem: to give the impression or sensation of being something or having a particular quality.

Rey protecting the light in Ben would not make her seem like a hero because Ben seems like he’s the villain of the story.

By the end of TLJ it’s only obvious to see that Ben is not the Big Bad and was never supposed to be.

And for Rey? By the end of TLJ it’s only obvious that she is not the “fight what we hate” hero and was never supposed to be.

Rey protecting the light in Ben—in the case of there being no returning villain, and at best having Hux be the true bad guy—would’ve been her Holdo moment. That moment of saying, “fuck what other people might think of me—this is what I have to do because it’s right.”

The Resistance wouldn’t see it as something heroic because Ben is bad in their eyes and Rey should be fighting him (which mirrors Poe’s behavior towards Holdo) not saving him.

And so this relates back to my previous meta on Rey’s perspective of Ben compared to the Galaxy’s perspective of Ben.

Rey sees the light in Ben, which must be protected. The rest of the galaxy doesn’t see the light in him, which calls for action against him.

It would’ve been nice to have seen this truly play out in the end because Rey would have a hard time not only trying to let Ben back in after what happened in the throne room, but also probably dealing with the Resistance not being on board with the things she would do. Her conflict would be fulfilling that quote from Leia, of being a hero even if it didn’t seem that way at first—that in the end, protecting the light and saving what we love is what makes a hero, and fighting what we hate can only give an impression of that.