Seamstress, Mother, Fangirl

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I have been trying to understand for a while what is all about Kylo Ren/Ben Solo that so many boys/men find abrasive, and to be fair, also some women. I am under the impression, correct me if I am wrong, that even though little boys or little girls do not have a problem with Kylo Ren per se (I would even say that children do tend to like him a lot, proof in case the reaction kids had to seeing Adam Driver in a street in NYC, or at meet and greet sessions in games or Disneyland parks), this resentment towards the character seems to affect young and grown up men. I am unsure about the type of women who react negatively to Kylo, I know there are a lot of outspoken women on the internet, but I am unsure if there is a tendency in age…

I am curious about this reaction because, for one, I absolutely ADORE Kylo. More than any male character I have grown attached to, and yes, I am looking at you Darcy, Edward Rochester, and your likes… Do not fret, boys, I still like you… a lot… But then, I am not a man, so what is it about Kylo that men do not like ?

Why the hate? the bad buzz? the name calling like Emo Ren and what not…? the insults and ridicule?

I first thought people had to do that, on design: Kylo is supposed to fail all previous expectations. Of course he will disappoint as a villain, because he isn’t supposed to be Vader. He is not the evil bad guy. And he will disappoint as a hero because he isn’t supposed to be Luke… or Han. And all these guys were the golden standards in terms of what masculinity was for so many boys -and girls- who grew up with Star Wars, how men are portrayed, and the types, archetypes, boys and men are supposed to identify with… and women to fall in love with, or identify with… I am not excluding that potential, even though, to be clear, this post will focus more on types of masculinity addressed to a male audience and as perceived by a male audience. Also, the ST has pitched two highly likable male characters that are supposed to be everything Kylo is not: so guys will root for Finn and Poe, but not so much for Kylo, because hell they are cool and he is not. Poe and Finn are reassuring because they evoke Han and Luke. And Kylo is, well,unpredictable and unchartered territory…But we’ll see later about that.

Kylo is confusing, I guess, to many men. Yet, he has probably the most amazing potential for a male hero we have ever had in Star Wars. And maybe it is why he is confusing. In the Star Wars universe, our heroes are usually limited to one or two specific archetypes, easily readable from the start. One man=one clear, identified function (though on clearer inspection, this is not as true as it seems). Kylo eschews that because he starts super clear as a villain but then gets more and more blurred. Which to me reads as a great sign that he has the potential to effectively blend many archetypes of masculinity while other characters had more linear development, and frankly very little room for growth or evolution. No one expected Luke to be anything but the hero and we knew from the start about poor Anakin. In this ST all about balance, Kylo is designed to not just bring balance to the Force but to a certain portrayal of masculinity. Maybe that is why he is met with some resistance from a lot of fanboys… maybe that is why he is so welcome and celebrated by other men, and many women.

I “chanced” last week on this book by Robert Moore and Doug Gillette called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, which is greatly influenced by Jung’s work. In this work, the authors offer to rediscover and explore archetypes of the mature masculine in a context of what they view as a deep crisis in masculinity. In most of our societies, boys are not initiated into manhood anymore, and this results into confusion for most as to what masculinity should be. Moreover, patriarchy stunts development, they argue, by fixating men into immature levels of masculinity. I am really roughly summing it up. Traditional patriarchy, according to the authors, is all about Boy Psychology and not Man Psychology. Boy Psychology, they state, is not something to root for. It

is everywhere around us, and its marks are easy to see. Among them are abusive and violent acting-out behaviors against others, both men and women; passivity and weakness, the inability to act effectively and creatively in one’s own life and to engender life and creativity in others (…); and often, an oscillation between the two -abuse/weakness, abuse/weakness.

To resolve that crisis, the authors argue that men need to reconnect with the potentials of mature masculinity through deep and instinctual masculine energies that they identify under these 4 categories: the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover.

They first identify different aspects of Boy Psychology, under archetypes with every time an active and passive subcategory such as the Divine Child ( with the High Chair Tyrant, the Weakling Prince), the Precocious Child (with the Know it all Trickster, the Dummy), The Oedipal Child (the Mama’s Boy, the Dreamer) the Hero (the Grandstander Bully, the Coward)… These archetypes are not mutually exclusive and are usually listed as stages in the development of boyhood, moving on from the Divine Child in stage 1, then Precocious Child/Oedipal Child, and last stage with the Hero. Each of this boy archetype has the potential to give rise to the full man archetypes: the Divine Child can become the King; the Precocious Child the Magician; the Oedipal Child the Lover; the Hero the Warrior. The idea is not to destroy the boy archetypes but to transcend them, to use them as foundation to access full potentiality of masculinity. Basically, that is what we call growing up.

As I was reading the book I was fascinated about how much of our Star Wars characters I was finding there, in their immature and possibly mature versions. Especially when you consider that these stories are all about growing up, and portray different stages from infancy to adulthood. And even though at first I thought the way guys were portrayed in Star Wars seemed rather simplistic (the Hero, The Rogue, the Villain…), this is not actually true. They become quite interesting to analyze through the book’s definition of male archetypes. And now a read on, as requested by @mytrash-mylife (see, I do listen, my dear).

Guys, read this! True, I’m a lover of psychological analysis, but this is really a MUST READ. It is very insightful about character arcs and plot development, as well as about men maturing as healthy individuals.

@clairen45​ I do think you are right when you say that what really bothers some adults and young people (mostly men apparently) about Kylo/Ben is this “reflection” process. Star Wars, as all fairytales and myths, thrives on the realm of the collective unconscious. So, if you feel “disturbed” about a character, it is highly probable that you recognize something in common with that character that you don’t know how to deal with or accept. Running from the unconscious is tricky, because if you don’t hear it out and mature you end up being bitten or eaten by it. Not pretty.

So Kylo, as the “monster” people want to believe he is (and that he wants to believe himself to be but is failing) is actually quite the slap on the face, because this is not what this story is about. He is not the villain, he is fighting his way up while maturing. Ironically, the unconscious can also be described as a “monster” you have to “fight”. LF and Disney made a great job with these archetypes, teaching children about them. As George Lucas have said, this is not about doing something new but about saying something that has always been there in a language that this generation can understand.

Trailling off of your meta a little, that part about the importance between the feminine and the masculine being balanced, and becoming King and Queen with children, made me consider that maybe a part of the problem people have with Kylo/Ben is similar with what some people have with Rey, calling her a “Mary Sue”, something she is not and never was intended to be and, as the story progresses, that slap people on the face.

@clairen45 , do you know if there is similar archetypes for mature womanhood? And it’s perhaps part of the confusion on the audience’s part that fact that while Rey is an action girl, she is still a girl journeying to womanhood and that is an unfamiliar story. Women in adventure stories can play a number of roles, including strong and strong adventurous ones, but they are typically static. They are either eternally young or already fully formed.

What’s interesting is that we’re getting this story told through Rey’s eyes. A number of men in the story have looked on her in awe, but the audience is not seeing her like that at all. If this story was seen through Finn’s eyes, or Kylo’s, the temptation to compare her to Beatrice or Galadriel would be strong, but while she is the anima in their hero journey, to her she is just Rey.

About Rey, I believe there are 2 reasons for some people to be at odds with her: 

1) It involves a wrong misconception of what a strong feminine character is, to some, in our days: They expected LF and Disney to make a “feminist character” whose femininity was dead.

I speak of this because I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of people criticize myths and fairytales, saying it teach girls to be “weak” and “walked over”. That couldn’t be more wrong. As George Lucas said, it is not about creating something new, but putting it in the language of the new generation.

Stories like Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Red Ridding Hood, all of them were written in the language and reality of a certain generation, what doesn’t mean the messages behind them are out of tune with the collective unconscious realm, especially when it comes to the Anima and Animus aspects of the personality.

So, as far as I’ve observed, the problem is that people mistankingly took her “infant girl stage” in TFA, with Rey being quite tomboish, to say she was a Mary Sue, when in all true she was just in her “infant girl” stage of the Heroine’s Journey. What lead us to the second reason…

2) The Heroine’s Journey can be uncomfortable to some because it is about sexuality awakening, maturing process from childhood to adulthood, compromising yourself to a significant other and creating new life. Some simply don’t want to “see” it or “hear” about it.

But here is an idea, a food for thought: Disney’s Hercules is a good example of a male character following the structure of the Heroine’s Journey. From boy to man, with the sexuality awakening/love interest, an almost death scenario that involves the healing/rebirth of a tragic heroine/his counterpart, and compromise/marriage to that significant other at the end.

Truth be told, some people expected Rey to be the opposite of Disney’s Hercules: a female character in the structure of a Hero’s Journey. And that is probably because Luke’s Journey was the Hero’s Journey.

The deal is, some people decided that LF and Disney were going to copy and paste the OT with some new special effects to make money, and that TFA proved their point. Problem is, they aren’t looking at the story JJ wrote, reason why they fail to see what is happening and why is happening. And Ryan’s amazing work in TLJ just made them more confused, because they were so sure that Rey should be in the Hero’s Journey, that they thought TLJ ruined SW.

Rey in the Hero’s Journey, in their minds, should probably go like this: the Jedi were great, lets restore it, kill the Sith and restore the Republic.

Problem is: Republic was cracked (once again), we have no Sith (ops, sorry, not sorry) and the Jedi were a weird bunch of conceited wizards with taboo issues. So there is no story to tell with those plot points in a mythopoethic structure, where you have to tie the missing knots and make right what once was wrong, and not repeat it. (Actually the OT trio tried to repeat some of it and we just saw how it ended up… yeah, not pretty).

As much as SW is a Skywalker soap opera, you have to tie things up in this mythopoetic story. So we get Rey (a “no one”, like Anakin in ep. I), who is strong with the Force and gets herself involved in this huge conflict in the Force and in this family drama. And because SW use what works, and they hadn’t used the Heroine’s Journey trope yet, and that would make a great story and bring a happy ending for the Skywalker soap opera, they went for Rey in the Heroine’s Journey…

And Rey in the Heroine’s Journey is going like this: from girl to woman, with sexuality awakening and the finding of a love interest, an almost death scenario that involves her tragic hero counterpart, who will be healed/comeback to life because she needs to marry/be together to become the Wife/Queen and Mother and complete the journey.

There, Skywalker Family gets a happy ending and the Galaxy far far away can get some peace lol.

This is required reading, guys- it perfectly explains much of the “divide” in the fandom regarding the ST - why certain fans (and a vast majority of critics) are wholeheartedly on board with its current direction, particularly in terms of what they’re doing with Kylo and Rey’s characters, whereas other (OT- and/or PT-loving) fans feel confused, angry, and even betrayed by it. It’s so important to understand that the root cause of these issues is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the filmmakers are trying to accomplish in this story, and the types of characters they’re trying to create.

I loved every word of this meta and commentary, but I wanted to highlight this passage especially:

“This is a boy, a child in a mask in TFA, that really is all about becoming a man. A multidimensional man. It will be hard, it will be painful, it will go through trials and errors, but it will get there. Gloriously. Maybe guys who have a problem with Kylo not being man enough for them should wonder if they are not stuck in perpetual Boy Psychology…Men are not born right away into awesome great men.”

In both work and observing, I have learned something about kids. A lot of parents try to get their boys to go fight. Of the young ones that do, they tend to be shy. You get the ones who just swing the boffer swords around with no regard for life, but, mostly, they’re reserved. It’s adorable. I mean, they’re kids.

At which point this six-ish-year-old girl whips out her certificate from the axe throwing booth and says “Nah, I’m fine.”

Let’s not even mention him throwing his family’s expectations under the carriage and working his frockcoat off to save the reputation of the woman he loves and her family even after she’s rejected him.