Tros Nonsense - Tumblr Posts
I promise I am not sending this in bad faith but it kind of surprises me that so many intelligent and well-read people in the Reylo fandom did not see Ben’s death coming in a mainstream American piece of media aimed family audiences. Unfortunately, a (redeemed) murderous villain settling down with the heroine was never a realistic expectation to have from such a massive franchise. Especially not on screen. But I can see them bringing him back in a book with a niche readership.
Not meaning to be rude, but it 100% was a reasonable expectation to have. Star Wars is (was) very unique among American franchises. It already eschews many models of American storytelling.
The entire Force in the OT is based on your "feelings", a concept ridiculed by modern unsentimental storytelling and culture. Luke is told to "trust his feelings." Luke wins not because he physically overpowers Vader or Palpatine but because he throws away his weapon because violence will only turn him to darkness, declares that he won't fight Vader because he "is a Jedi, like his father before him", and is saved by Anakin coming to his senses and redeeming himself by protecting Luke after Luke shows true love and compassion for his father. The day is not won by punching a guy, as it usually is in American storytelling. The day is won because a son refused to fight and instead merely reminded his father that he loved him.
Star Wars is explicitly based on mythic storytelling as interpreted and given lens by Joseph Campbell. As in, Lucas was friends with Campbell and literally told Campbell so. Lucas intended, very clearly, to make a story in the fashion of old myth. And in the fashion of old myth, old men may die, but youth must live. Lucas even is quoted as saying, "I believe you are redeemed through your children." Ben, being young, being the child in this scenario and not the father, 110% should have lived under SW's original mythic logic.
I have explained why Ben needed to live here in this pre TROS post and I stand by the logic which TROS abandoned and which therefore breaks the integrity of the story. Anakin did not die as Vader because it was punishment. It was framed as a release for an old man who had suffered for twenty years in a broken body. Obi Wan, Luke, and Han dying also do not die to be punished because they are old men who lived their lives fully and now die with purpose. Ben is none of these things and his death is a cynical exception.
It is pandering to the lowest common denominator to act like SW was always this way. Original Star Wars was created explicitly to counter the cynical American storytelling you are talking about.
"Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film…I realized there was another relevance that is even more important — dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing…Once I got into STAR WARS, it struck me that we had lost all that — a whole generation was growing up without fairy tales. You just don’t get them anymore, and that’s the best stuff in the world — adventures in far-off lands. It’s fun.” (x)
"You can’t, and how do you explain a Wookiee to an audience, and how do you get the tone of the film right, so it’s not a silly child’s film, so it’s not playing down to people, but it is still an entertaining movie and doesn’t have a lot of violence and sex and hip new stuff? So it still has a vision to it, a sort of wholesome, honest vision about the way you want the world to be.” (x)
Anyway. I am trying not to be aggressive but I have answered so many asks on this topic in the past. Those of us who insisted that Ben needed to live did not do so with some blind spot in our literary vision. Star Wars, until TROS, was not a Marvel movie, was not an "American story", was very explicitly textually by its creator built on ancient myth and non-cynicism. Ben dying breaks the integrity of this ancient myth logic and it therefore breaks star wars. SW wasn't about, in George's words, "garbage and killing." That it has now betrayed itself isn't my problem or our fault for believing in the shape of George's vision, not sorry.
in the film and in subsequent lucasfilm comments, they try to disperse everything that ben did across every character so they don’t have to give him credit anymore. every single jedi and member of the resistance drops by to tell the audience that rey was never alone and that love can conquer death and that they understand what she’s going through and that they are her family, and it’s pathetically obvious that everything ben ever did or said is Fine, True, Noble and Loving as long as it’s coming from a corporate-approved mouthpiece. but they are out here trying to say poe is her family? in what …world. the only evidence that any character loved rey comes from them ripping words out of ben’s mouth. he was the only one who backed up those words by giving everything he had to her.
I see people saying that Rey found her belonging with Finn, Poe and the Resistance.
I’m sorry, but no.
Rey was part of the Resistance for a whole year at the beginning of TRoS, she knows Finn, Poe and the droids for longer than that and we still see her searching for her belonging and isolating herself from them. When Finn tells her she isn’t acting like herself, Rey straight tells him “people keep telling me they know me. I think no one does.” (he doesn’t deny it)
And let’s not forget Ben telling her that he knows she wanted to take his hand in the Throne Room because he’s been inside her mind, which she later confirms in what is an obvious declaration of her feelings for Ben Solo:
“I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand.”
This makes it clear that that is what Rey wanted. She wants Ben Solo, she wants to be with him (which is why she has the biggest smile on her face and desperately smooches him as soon as she comes back to life and sees Ben staring right back at her).
None of this sounds like someone whose belonging is with her friends in the Resistance, and the final proof of that is she ends up alone in Tatooine. I don’t care if you think she was there on a mission and was only there temporarily - they chose the final shot of the movie to be Rey isolated in a desert planet. If the Resistance was so important for her belonging, why didn’t they show her surrounded by her friends the way Luke was in RotJ?
At most, what you can argue is that what Rey found with the Resistance was a sense of purpose. But the belonging she seeked… that, unfortunately, was taken away from her forever, seconds after she thought she’d got it.
in only five minutes, ben solo showed more sass, bravery, charisma and the stubbornness of his father than any of the one dimensional good lads that the writers tried so hard to pass as the ‘new han solo’
palpatine: kill the girl, Kylo. My boy, my baby boy Skywalker, kill her and I’ll give you all the power, the galaxy. Kill her.
palpatine: actually, kill me Rey. Your grandpapa. That’s my girl, my little 👶 girl. Kill me. I’ll give you all the power, the galaxy. Kill me.
palpatine: actually, I change my mind again!- fight together, die together! I’ll kill you and give myself all the power, the galaxy. It was all for me all along! Kill you!
me: just fucking kill me. kill me, now.
“Star Wars was built and branded around the Skywalker name, a legacy of the righteous Queen of Naboo and the Chosen One, princess and best pilot in the galaxy and all passed down to the little prince. I have no problem with Rey taking the Skywalker name at the end of the film, if it wasn’t for how the life and legacy of Ben was handled. No mention of him after his death, no recognition that the infamous Kylo Ren had come home like his mother always thought he would, nothing but a few seconds in Rey’s arms until he disappeared. He didn’t get a funeral like his grandmother and grandfather before him, no homage to his sacrifice was mentioned. He didn’t even appear as a force ghost in his family’s home as a final goodbye and to give closure to the Skywalker legacy. Disney had so much potential for this trilogy, for Ben Solo, and instead they gave it to Rey without even honoring the Skywalker lineage. It was a pathetic end for a story line that’s been going on since 1977.”
–Ayanna Branham, ‘The Tragedy of Ben Solo’ (Comicbook Debate)
Ben Solo, Anakin SKYWALKER'S grandson, crawled out of that fucking pit with his bare hands and without anyone's support but rey, whose only connection to the Skywalker name is that Luke was that cranky teacher she didn't get along with, standing up after getting a pep talk from force ghosts is supposed to be the rising skywalker I have to laugh lmfaoooo
It’s so weird right now cause I feel like I’m reading Darth Vader comics to cheer myself up because his grandson’s ending was much more pessimistic than his. Like “oh yeah Darth Vader the villain in the Skywalker family who had a hopeful ending” instead of the all-our tragedy with Ben
Same, lmfao. Because at least Anakin had a life before Vader, kids and a padawan and a mentor who was like a father to him, and he’s vindicated at the end of his life with a Jedi funeral and a ghostly reunion with his loved ones. At least there’s actual catharsis. And Anakin, during his dark side years, leans into it much more than Ben does. Anakin is a tortured soul too, but he’s much better at burying this than Ben, and he expresses a lot more agency than Ben does. His fall comes across as a hero failing because of a crucial fatal flaw, whereas Ben’s comes across as him straight-up being born under the wrong star and suffering for an original sin that was never his.
And Anakin at a certain point (esp. in the current 2020 issue and the 2015 issue) reaches critical mass and starts scheming against Palpatine and expressing a sort of fucked up type of agency, whereas Ben himself, being a person who his whole life has really only wanted acceptance and safety, convinces himself almost until it kills him that Snoke “is wise” and a good father to him. Anakin wises up quite quickly that Palpatine is a snake after he falls to the DS. Ben’s fall not only feels much more out of his control, but much more innocent. Anakin wanted to save his wife, which is an adult fear. Ben was betrayed by his caretaker and is trying to find a safe place, which is a child fear.
So much of Ben’s journey to redemption was slipped under the rug only to push this trio garbage down our throats. This could’ve been an awesome movie at one point...
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«Charles Soule’s The Rise of Kylo Ren has finally revealed how Ben Solo fell under the sway of Supreme Leader Snoke. […] The story has also confirmed what many Star Wars fans had suspected all along; Ben Solo never really fell to the dark side at all. Where Anakin Skywalker was seduced by the dark side, Ben Solo was instead trapped by it. […] Ben Solo never truly fell to the dark side of the Force. Instead, he was imprisoned by it, trapped by the Emperor’s schemes. […] In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, when Kylo Ren told Rey to “surrender” to the dark side — unwittingly hinting at the relationship he himself had with it, one of conquest and defeat rather than conscious choice. Importantly, this reframes the end of Ben Solo’s story, because he isn’t a man of darkness redeemed, like his grandfather. Rather, he is a prisoner who was freed by the faith of his parents and the woman who loved him, and who sacrificed himself to free the galaxy and give Rey the gift of a life of freedom.»
In conclusion, ScreenRant has many rights.
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lmao at that excerpt from the tros novel like did we expect anything else? you can’t make a good book tie-in of a movie that's garbage. ppl stil like “we’ll remain positive!” stop, it’s never gonna happen.
I’m still angry that they had the audacity to call the movie The Rise of Skywalker when all the Skywalkers died and their legacy was literally buried in the sand... 😒
Writer Jody Houser and artist Will Sliney will be teaming up to tell the epic story in STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER ADAPTATION #1. In addition to the shocking twists and turns that were present in the film, the five-issue limited series will also have brand-new story material for readers to enjoy. “As a lifelong Star Wars fan, it was an honor to be asked to be a part of wrapping up the Skywalker saga with Marvel Comics,” Houser says. “We have some fun plans to add scenes and material that weren’t seen in the movie.“ On sale June 2020.
Adam Driver in Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
I bet the people claiming that the Battlefront developers are ‘disrespecting’ Rey’s chosen identity by not calling her Rey Skywalker in the game are the same people who flat out refuse to call Ben Solo by his name even after he redeemed himself and rejected his Kylo Ren identity.
Also, Rey is a fake person. She didn’t “choose” anything. Shitty writing is shitty writing. This is the same bullshit logic as “oh well Ben ~chose~ to sacrifice himself for Rey so how can you criticize it” oh idk because Ben isn’t real? He was written by people whose writing choices I have every right to critique? If you can’t criticize a story because that’s disrespecting fake people then literary analysis is already dead. Fiction isn’t history. Someone sat down and made the whole thing up.
Rey Skywalker is a bullshit writing choice that turns SW into a “good victim/bad victim” purity narrative. And a grown woman “adopting” the name Skywalker after the whole family is dead, and dead specifically because they were targeted by her grandfather for their blood relation to each other as descendants of the Chosen One Anakin Skywalker, after the last blood Skywalker was thrown into a pit to die for the sins of his actual grandfather for no other reason than Ben was unfortunate enough to be born related to him which was also why he was targeted by Palpatine from birth…………is total bullshit. It reads like some kid finding a mass grave of a family execution and stealing their last name because that’s how we find our legacies now, by just taking them from people. They died for the sins of the legacy so you could LARP it without consequences.
And never mind that when Ben tried to deny who he was because who he was got a child predator in his head since birth, this was decried by the narrative and turned him into a villain. But when Rey does it….it’s fine. She can deny she’s a Palpatine and claim she’s a ~Skywalker~. But Ben never had the luxury to turn off and on when his legacy was going to make him the target of grooming and abuse. It’s vile and disgusting, because of the soulless thoughtless implications these hacks of writers couldn’t be bothered to care about.
Rey Skywalker can get fucked.
Ben saving Rey not only strips her of her status as a fairy tale heroine but also of her status as a SW heroine. It’s trash. SW heroes aren’t defined by killing the bad guy, they save what they love. There was no reason for Ben’s sacrifice but the fact that they wrote it that way recenters Ben as the hero carrying the spirit of SW, and by killing him off and christening Rey as the new Skywalker, LF says “Time for compassion is over, the heroes are just the pure good guys who kill the Big Bad”
I mean. Yeah. That’s exactly what it is and I think they did that on purpose.
That’s what I mean by ‘they did it to launch their SWCU’. SW doesn’t actually work as an infinite money machine full of loosely connected bland blockbusters and I think that has finally dawned on them. It’s in fact a very small world as it exists on the cinema screen, because it is entirely character-driven and the world exists solely to serve the emotional state of the characters. Lore, politics, alien cultures, daily life, all of that is glimpsed in the background but doesn’t matter in and of itself. The Force works however it needs to for the strongest character moment, to serve the story. What’s ironclad consistent are the themes and moral principles. The heart of SW is Luke throwing down his sword and refusing to fight when the fate of the whole galaxy is on the line for the sake of one dying villain who has done nothing to earn forgiveness; his faith is vindicated, he loves down the Empire, because love is stronger than violence. That is an idealism exceedingly rare in pop culture.
I was intimating in that previous post that they’re trying to keep what they think ‘sells’ while getting rid of what makes it difficult to produce. They don’t realise, I guess, that it wasn’t the name ‘Skywalker’ and wearing white in the desert that made us care about Luke’s journey. It wasn’t the iconography that endeared this story to us- it’s the reverse. They aren’t superheroes, they can’t pass a mantle. Disney want another MCU where continuity and character integrity and themes are all completely optional, the heroes can remain static, and they can keep pumping out new stuff with a new (cheap) cast without worrying about consistent storytelling. Nothing is super permanent or impactful, the audience has some illusion of choice without ever taking their business elsewhere. Unchallenging and never promising much of anything on a story-level because the films are self-contained. All sort of the same, crowd-pleasing action, witty banter, romance kept in its containment corner where dudebros won’t get mad about it, etc. Trappings, no need for substance.
It’s either that or it’s just cinematic Dadaism.
i love how certain dudebros have went from "the st is just a rehash of the ot!" to "ben had to die like vader bc he was so bad™ why would you want him to live?!" really amusing to me tbh 👌
sitting here waiting to see what further damage the tros novel will do