I actually sympathized with him and felt bad for how lonely, isolated, and betrayed he was by his family.
Really? That’s not what I pick up at all. How do you think he was betrayed?
Han and Leia, while they loved him, didn’t spend enough time with him as a child. Both were busy leading the Rebellion (now the Resistance) while Ben felt isolated at times. Han was always jumping back and forth from still smuggling (before he went back full time after Ben’s downfall) and Leia became a hard-working senator in the new Republic. Both of their busy lives took up the majority of their lives when Ben was younger, as if he was abandoned. Even when they sent him to Luke’s academy, Ben still felt that he was being looked aside from his family, adding more to his depression and loneliness. This is the same abandonment and lonely feeling that Rey had been suffering from on Jakku. This is what led Snoke to manipulate him, as he was in a vulnerable place in his life and he was strong in the Force. Snoke had been successful in manipulating Ben at a young age, making him feel like he had a place with the him and the Dark Side. Once Luke had seen the corruption Snoke was causing to his nephew, he acted upon instinct. Rather than attempting to comfort his nephew and help him understand and be a good uncle, Luke thought only about the academy he had built. This is why Luke took out his lightsaber, thinking about his work over his family. This is something that Luke, Han and Leia all failed in. It isn’t until Luke realized what he was about to do when igniting his saber. Ben took it upon this moment to turn to the Dark Side and destroy Luke’s academy at this point. He still could’ve been saved in that moment, but because of the mistake Luke had made, the abandoning acts made by his family, and Snoke’s manipulations, he was led to believe that his uncle was going to kill him, which he very nearly thought about doing. Ben acted upon self defense and took Snoke’s advice. Even when Rey asks Luke if he created Kylo Ren, you could even see that he had a part to play in Ben’s turn.
Okay I see your point. I guess that makes him slightly more along the lines of a Hamlet. However, we never saw any of this in the movies.
And even if we did, those circumstances don’t seem like they’d be enough to explain why a teenager would go on a murderous rampage. That’s kind of a crazy jump to make. If my Uncle was a teacher, and he tried to kill me, I wouldn’t escape and then kill all of his students. Revenge like that is ridiculously immature.
All of these acts were from the influences and teachings of Snoke.
How did he influence him? What were his teachings? How did they even meet? We don’t know anything about these characters, and they make fundamental changes to the story.
I still don’t see how a boy who lets a stranger like Snoke influence him into killing people, makes him a sympathetic character. I can think of a lot of Nazis who have an arc like this, and we don’t sympathize with them. A person can always make a decision NOT to kill people. “Someone told me to do it” is not an excuse. It just reveals that the character is weak and cannot make decision for himself.
Overtime, Snoke was able to communicate himself to Ben through the Force. Ben was young and learning, and was still unfamiliar. I’m sure that he didn’t trust Snoke at first, but he listened to him and fell into his temptations and sayings about his family, as he was still isolated by them. Very much how Palpatine manipulated Anakin, as he was losing trust in the Jedi. Ben is not weak, but vulnerable, alone and depressed. Snoke acted as a mentor to him that Luke was never able to do for his nephew at his academy.