Beloved Sandworm Of The Desert

HOW DOES HUX RELATE TO CHILDREN?

Since your ask alluded to the transport scene in Delilah S. Dawson’s Phasma, I’ll open with it here:

When faced with a traumatized young woman (Phasma, eighteen) and a terrified little girl (Frey, six), Armitage Hux (twenty-four) neither scolds the little girl for her outburst nor admonishes the young woman for her inaction; instead, he handles the situation with startling gentleness—and a clear aptitude for communicating with children.

Armitage’s motivations in this scene are opaque to the reader, but I see his attempt to soothe Frey as an attempt to spare everyone on the transport the ire of Brendol Hux. After all, who understands better than Armitage the dire consequences of disappointing his father? Or the fear and confusion of being torn from a homeworld at a tender age?

It’s not unreasonable to assume that Armitage sees a bit of his younger self in Frey, here, which is why I like to read this scene in light of the following passage from Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath: Empire’s End:

Funnily enough, the passage above is the second time child Armitage is packed onto a transport in as many books. We’re not shown the Huxes’ escape from the Arkanis Imperial Academy in Aftermath: Life Debt, but imagination can fill in the gaps; in the midst of a siege, perhaps under the cover of night, Brendol Hux rounds up his illegitimate son (Armitage, five), an attendant droid (DDM-38), and a few essential belongings before traveling with bounty hunter Mercurial Swift to join the Imperial Remnants on Jakku.

How well does Armitage remember the chaos of that flight? And how desperately did that redheaded boy want to hear words of reassurance from the adults around him? Very well and very desperately, I’d wager. So well and so desperately that his first instinct, when faced with a child in parallel circumstances, is to offer the comfort he was denied.

It’s hard to square this behavior with Armitage’s role in the First Order’s stormtrooper program unless we consider the idea that Armitage believes some of his own propaganda: that the life of a stormtrooper is a better future for the children absorbed into the First Order’s ranks than whatever might await them on their impoverished homeworlds. The First Order may be brutal, but its ordered brutality—contrasted with the “savagery” of the Unknown Regions—is virtually all Armitage has ever known. For all that it’s obvious to us viewers that abducting and training child soldiers is evil, Armitage genuinely believes he’s doing right—which isn’t all that surprising, if we consider the hand he’s been dealt.

One of the core tragedies of Armitage Hux’s character is that his sincere drive to “cure” the galaxy of its ills (to borrow verbiage from Kwame Mbalia’s The Last Order), combined with his upbringing in a military cult, grooms him into exactly the sort of zealot who can adopt a legitimizing narrative for geocide. While I doubt Hux has any personal desire to inflict cruelty on children, and I suspect he feels protective of them in a manner he considers shamefully revealing, he’s either unwilling or unable to let his suppressed empathy interfere with the Order’s purpose. In this regard, I find him an interesting foil for Andor’s Luthen Rael.

DOES HUX WANT CHILDREN OF HIS OWN?

My knee-jerk response is no.

Hux, at least in his private thoughts, canonically expresses a desire to build a legacy, but at no point does he connect his desire for a legacy with a desire for children. He’s too preoccupied with the war to take proper care of himself, let alone a child, and even in a hypothetical future where the First Order conquered the galaxy with Supreme Leader Hux at the helm (a Pax Ordinata, if that’s legitimate Latin), I doubt he’d be able to spare the time and attention a family would require while juggling the responsibilities of governance.

Also, as you pointed out, the specter of Armitage’s traumatic childhood looms large, and I suspect he’d prefer a childless existence to the possibility of becoming his father. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Armitage would ever treat a child the way Brendol treated him, but that fear would be difficult to shake.