#thbs

Fan gathering yesterday 2025-10-25 at Times Square NY for the BILLBOAAAARDS

Save Ben Solo!!!

obviously the most popular theories about Ben's whereabouts post-TROS involve him being stuck in the WBW... but here's an alternative one 🦋

[additional context/details below the cut]

Poster by: @vividlittlevox.bsky.social

I am still reeling from this news, weeks later. I have a lot of feelings generally that are spilling out as creativity. I have talked about Apotheosis of Media before - the explosion of energy that comes when you are psychologically reunited with your missing half in a mini Alchemical union with the media we love. There is no separation in what we see happen on screen and what we dream might happen. During my recent conversation with Steve Ellerhoff we talk about how Mythology often “Jumps the Fence” and that as much as a company like Disney might want to control the narrative they can’t. Because the story and especially the collective dream that we create when playing with Mythological concepts like Symbolism and Archetypes doesn’t adhere to copyright. 

I talk about how when we experience Mythic Resonance with media it connects us to the story but when we experience an Alchemical Event with Media: it results in an Apotheosis. So what happened when Adam said “I have been working on this movie called the Hunt for Ben Solo”. Well Ben Solo is alive now in our minds. Death and Life existed together. The Piece of ourselves we had projected onto the character and his death was found. Like the myth of Isis and Osiris we are all treasure hunters, trauma and denial sheer off pieces of us. When we are reconnected with these pieces that we have projected out there then we are FILLED with energy. Robert Bly talks about how it's from the fact that a projected shadow costs us to continuously have it out there in the world. We see People engaging, sharing Art, and Creating. This is the Natural outcome of Apotheosis from a shared Alchemical Event. 

Ben Solo isn’t just some character that people really like, he is us. He represents us as a culture. He is our lost son, and our lost husband. He is the wounded masculine in us. Though he turned around from the darkside and came back, we didn’t get to keep him effectively making him unable to return from the underworld.. And our unconscious and more importantly our collective unconscious. He was a Lost Masculine! Don’t worry I have already asked to talk about Lost Husbands in Star Wars with Missy. It’s good because there is family history. 

Those of us who watch these things knew - I recorded this episode after TROS with Josh Johnson. The Importance of Ben Solo: https://youtu.be/eWbt4oZUA20?si=y3bRnUWtb8PJwCwL

But to start… I generally like to use the musical terminology for themes and motifs for Star Wars if we see a theme three times in a piece of media or across the story, this mythopoeia that we all love then it is a motif and it is something that we should be paying attention to with regards to our collective unconscious. It is something that is being pulled out by multiple authors or multiple writers potentially and is important to pay attention to within the context of humanity. The same goes with Greenlit stories and  the world that we live in there’s something so interesting about the lost husband motive that is being called out through the Hunt for Ben solo. 

The Lost Husband motif Theme really represents a fixing of the patriarchal wounded masculine that we see in our society so prevalent today today (Please see bell hooks). Our wounded masculine is all around us right now. So many Men have anger towards not only themselves but their shadows. They project that anger out onto women, minorities and different sexual orientations. bell hooks talks about how integrity is fundamentally the state by which you live as a whole person! That’s the balanced masculine that Star Wars tries to teach us almost and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we saw more fantastical stories, the return of somebody who was so deeply wounded by both his parents expectations, and also prayed upon by a predator in the form of Snoke and Palpatine.

This wounded masculine within the galaxy does what all Hero’s stuck in the underworld do. Hurt others, he does this as Kylo Ren. The return of Ben Solo means so much to the collective unconscious because he is not only a popular character, but also a character that represents the next generation and the Divine Child who has been wounded and needs to be recovered for Rey herself, the lost husband motive and many of us within the audience. This is how we feel we’re surrounded by the wounded masculine within the patriarchal systems of our society. All of these lost boys and men who do not know how to change themselves, what we need is old Archetypes. What we need is old wisdom. What we need is more stories to help them see themselves in the world Carl Jung often talks about how the only way that you can see what is in your subconscious is by projecting your shadow out there in the world! We have an opportunity to see our wounded, masculine healed fully on display on huge screens. Ben Solo, returned to the light and was found and brought home, which was both Luke, Leias and Han’s wish. I can't think of a better way to spend money.

Almost a month ago, we heard Ben Solo is alive in the mind of Adam driver. It’s not the Hunt for Ben Solo’s corpse, certainly and that too is so fundamental to Star Wars. The idea that no one‘s ever really gone and truthfully, I was so confused when I heard this news, I talked about it a bit on the podcast, but I was helping Kyle my husband install a walk on our front door and my phone. My notifications were blowing up. People were texting me my group chat with the fellow Reylo’s the discord server that I host for What the Force?, was going up and I was so confused because when I read the article and I saw the reactions that people had I was in a completely different state than everybody else. People were distraught and sad.

I was certainly shocked, Adam “Tight Lipped” Driver, who doesn’t talk about anything like this. He was sharing his feelings that he wanted to see this character return and in his mind, this character was alive or alive and enough of a sense to return and that made me so incredibly happy. I’ve been tracking this stuff since The Rise of Skywalker, and there has been no indication that this was even something people were considering, though there were certainly a lot of green lit auxiliary projects, especially comics that talked about Ben solo, talked about Kylo Ren. The Rise of Kylo Ren was a huge thing for Charles Soule and now we’re on the legacy of Vader, which is again a Charles Soule written comic. When you dig deeper more of the projects greenlit in the last years align with the timeline that they were planning to bring back Ben. 

So yes I was overwhelmed and also a bit confused. Yes I have struggled with the hard realization that although I was mad at Lucasfilm and Disney for the decisions that were made, that there was way more support within the ranks of Lucasfilm, almost from the beginning they saw what we saw. They saw that The Rise of Skywalker did not do what it was supposed to do (Mythically). This stuff is so ethereal, it’s effervescent in a way in that it can disappear if you don’t touch it and work with it correctly. We’re talking about how the human psyche interacts with story so many franchisees have found out that if you don’t get it right, people forget about you. They put your DVDs away on the shelf and they collect dust and The Rise of Skywalker is not the epic banger it should be. They have probably very direct stats from Disney+ on how much it’s actually watched. They have the DVD sales, they have the Blu-ray sales. Although some love the movie, it has been mostly forgotten but the General Audience. Perhaps a fitting punishment for breaking the mythological promise made for almost 50 years. 

Lucasfilm is in a situation where they have struggled deeply to move forward from this time and tell more stories. How do you move beyond what is being said because Anakin saved Luke because he could never he hurt me. When Ben Solo saved Rey (as the next generation the resurrected version of Anakin), he saved the one he loves and now we need to make sure that he is saved in the story so that we complete the cycle. But we expect the young healed man to come home. 

The Cycle I’m talking about is older then Star Wars it rhymes. The Cycle is that our oppositional archetypes need to both be rescued, the masculine saves the feminine and then the feminine saves the masculine. That’s what the Hunt for Ben solo means to me; it's fundamental. It’s huge. It’s fascinating to witness the palace politics of a corporation fight the power of our collective myth. I have had an incredible engagement with a very off the cuff episodes that we released but it very much plays into the major Masculine series that Missy and I have been working on over this past year. This is the inevitable conclusion that Missy and I probably need to do next is absolutely walk-through. The lost husband myth from a speculative perspective and talk about how it heals the wounded masculine and why although we have endless dad stories inside of Star Wars we need to save the young man, we need to save the divine child who had a bad shot at life.

The Masculinity Series we just Finished but now have to add to:

So, my missing Art Spoons all showed up today. So I spent today sketching out Miraculous designs for my crossover au The Hidden Butterfly: Sasakia! Now that Izuku has both the Butterfly and the Peacock, I wanted to make two alt versions of his vigilante persona.

The first drawing is his standard Butterfly, then a Peacock version, and a Unified version from using both Miraculous at once. There are a few smaller details in there that I plan to erase, but this is meant to be the main look of them.

I'm going to properly digitize/color all of these tomorrow but I wanted to share the sketches I managed to make. Bc I am very pleased/proud of them.

Someone made a comment about Inko using the Peacock to help Izuku on the actual fic, so i just had to give her a miraculous outfit.

I wanted to let her kind-of follow Izuku's fancy outfit themeing. But, instead of doing a fancy knight/soldier look, I went with the royal-multi-layer princess/queen kimono for her. That outfit is gonna be covered in pretty patterns once I color it. She's very much a "stand back and let the Amok handle things" kind of fighter. I'd wager her quirk would be very helpful for pulling small items/objects to her to make amoks from.

I don't think she'll actually be involved in the story like this, mostly leaving things to Izuku and supporting him at home instead.

She doesn't have a name bc of this. (and bc I can't decide on one for her.)

(Unsure of the canon status of these last two, but that won't stop me from playing with designs.)

Someone else mentioned Aizawa having/having to use the Bee miraculous for one reason or another and I was compelled to see if I could actually draw that.

Aizawa already has a very solid costume that is his preferred go-to for hero work. (and very little interest in changing it.) So that brought up the question of what the miraculous could even give him that wouldn't just be the exact same thing. Obviously it would add a new-ish, bright color to his pallet but what else would be there?

I'm okay with the overall design, but I'm probably gonna mess around with color placement later.

I'd say he didn't 100% agree with using a strange magical artifact. But he'd help Nedzu "test" it before the rodent could drop it on a student he was interested in with no warning. He's not a beacon of responsibility for the students, but he's not too keen on just letting Nedzu do whatever he wants with weird things he mail ordered from unknown sources.

And, of course, Izuku would end up the student that Nedzu was looking at giving it to. So he had to (quickly!) come up with a costume that couldn't be connected to Sasakia.

He picked a pilot/aviator theme bc that could come with some armoring that would be logical for a quirkless kid to want for their costume. (plus, he's looking harder at Rescue/Disaster relief and getting a flying licence for that could be useful.) The helmet works for communication, the antenna & mic aren't just for the look!