#anghraine's queue

On the meta level—the shape of the story as a constructed thing—Finn and Kylo are the direct inverse of each other. Just off the top of my head:

- Finn is one faceless stormtrooper among many, stripped of all familial ties; Kylo is the last (known) Skywalker, beloved only child of heroes and sent to his uncle

- Finn is brought up in the First Order from early childhood; Kylo is recruited into it

- Finn’s birth name (and any name) was taken from him; Kylo rejects his name, and takes a new one

- Finn is relentlessly trained for one thing by external forces; Kylo is psychically stalked and torn between conflicting influences

- Finn innately distinguishes wrong and right—the very first time that he is faced with a moral choice, he instinctively chooses right; Kylo’s sense of morality is a jumbled mess that has led him to Light = seductive evil and Dark = hard but right, and obviously he made a very wrong choice at whatever his moment of crisis was

- Finn seizes his earliest chance to leave the First Order, at considerable danger to himself; Kylo, though tempted, refuses to leave the First Order

- Kylo regards Finn as a traitor; everyone regards Kylo as a traitor

Etc. 

But the thing is—these are meta connections underlying what’s going on with the people and choices within the story. Finn’s character and development is not limited to being Kylo Ren’s opposite. His relationship with Poe, for instance, has virtually nothing to do with Kylo. His relationship with Rey has very little to do with Kylo until they’re attacked (and that fight culminates in Rey-Kylo, not Finn-Kylo). Even Finn’s relationship with Kylo’s father has approximately nothing to do with Kylo. And the same goes for Kylo, whose fixation on his grandfather, conflict over his father, veneration for Snoke, etc are all largely or completely independent of anything whatsoever to do with Finn.

This is a contrast to something like, say, the much stronger links between Luke and Vader in the OT. Those parallels exist not only on the meta level (for instance, scenes shot to mirror each other) but involve very real similarities of personality and interpersonal connections in the story that the characters themselves are aware of and influenced by. So when Luke sees the wires in Vader’s hand, then looks down and opens his own robot hand, it’s not only structural subtext but text, something real and present and absolutely critical in Luke’s own mind. 

The closest thing I can think of to anything like that between Finn and Kylo is … Rey is frightened by her affinity with the Skywalker lightsaber and it’s instead passed to Finn, and then Kylo nearly kills him to get it back, except he loses it to Rey, who beats him up with it and passes it on to Luke. It’s not that there’s no significance in Kylo claiming the saber and Finn wounding him with it, just that there’s a lot going on there that is not about Kylo-Finn (I would personally argue that the lightsaber primarily represents the connection between Rey and the Force/Luke, in fact). And the characters themselves do not experience a significance to it beyond “hey, fuck you.”

And even Luke and Vader can’t be entirely reduced to character connections, even those literal, explicit, in-story connections. They both have plenty going on that’s indirectly connected or not at all. The growth of Luke and Leia’s relationship has very little to do with Vader beyond biology. Luke and Han’s relationship has even less. Vader in ANH is only lightly tied to Luke and does not himself perceive anything beyond “huh, really strong in the Force. Oh well.”

Yet with Finn and Kylo, there seems to be this idea that, because there’s a connection built into the framework of the story, their characters are wholly yoked together. Any development of one of them, any choice that either makes, any plot point, anything, must somehow connect to the other one. And they’re on some teeter-totter where any attention given to one would otherwise have gone to the other, even though it’s very improbable in the writing sense. 

That is: less attention to Kylo almost certainly would result in more attention to other villains, not Finn. Less attention to Finn would likely mean more to Poe, Rey, and perhaps others in the Resistance, not a transfer to Kylo. Common sense should tell people this, but somehow, nope.

(You also get this extended in a still more peculiar way to fandom. In particular, I see this constant insistence that people who write fic about Kylo would be writing about Finn if not for Kylo’s presence, when it’s much more probable that someone who writes about Kylo would otherwise be writing about… someone at least remotely like Kylo.)