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Post #1324426

Author
Broom Kid
Parent topic
Does Kylo really deserve to be redeemed? Did he deserve to be Reys love interest?
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1324426/action/topic#1324426
Date created
10-Feb-2020, 12:24 PM

Here’s my problem with Kylo’s redemption - it re-centers the entirety of the trilogy on him and shifts focus from Rey/Finn. Now that it’s all done, Finn is obviously the biggest missed opportunity of the entire trilogy, and I think a lot of his story got subsumed by the level of importance Kylo’s potential redemption took up. Basically - starting the story one way, and then shifting to make it all about Kylo (which it ultimately ended up being) sucked a ton of air out of the story.

I think that maybe there was a way to achieve a redemption (or at least a measure of it) for the character without doing that, but I also think that the entire prospect of a shitty Skywalker son figuring out that he doesn’t need to be a genocidal maniac was only barely pulled off in the OT, and for a sequel trilogy so concerned with the weight and meaning of legacy, having a huge part of the story hinge on more or less the exact same dilemma felt counterproductive at its core. If this story was largely about how the next generation found their own way to move forward from both the victories AND the mistakes of the previous generation’s, then Kylo’s “arc” as it were shouldn’t have simply traced Anakin’s. He should have been the personification of the worst aspects of that previous generation’s failures. His should have traveled in a different villainous direction, much like Rey’s trajectory on the hero path didn’t go where Luke’s went. And like Finn’s probably would have gone, if not for the shift in storytelling focus away from him in the third movie and towards making Kylo a good guy and doing all the heavy lifting needed to not just refocus his arc, but center him as the most important character in the sequel trilogy - which he ultimately became. The Last Jedi did a great job in explaining how someone could believably and understandably corrupt themselves to that degree, The Rise of Skywalker then made the decision to forgive him for it, and I honestly think that was a mistake, and even worse, a mistake made for not much more reason than “That’s how Star Wars works.” It’s a mistake rooted in bad conventional wisdom and unexamined storytelling dogma.

I think TFA set up some amazing arcs, and TLJ complicated and enriched them. But the third movie needed to pay them off, and Trevorrow only got partway there (at least he managed to give Finn something great that realized the potential he was given in TFA) and Abrams fumbled almost everything that wasn’t named See Threepio or Babu Frik. Ultimately deciding Star Wars’ quality as a story would live or die on the successful redemption of this galaxy’s equivalent to Stephen Miller or Ben Shapiro was the wrong decision at PRECISELY the wrong time, and if people at Lucasfilm were adamant that decision NEEDED to be applied to this story or else it “wouldn’t be Star Wars” then they hobbled their own storytelling potential for no good reason.