lavender_sage (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lavender_sage) wrote2018-12-05 07:19 am
lavender_sage) wrote2018-12-05 07:19 am
Entry tags:
Thoughts on Hux, Kylo Ren, and Narrative
Not to complain, but there are easier things in the world than being a Hux fan but not a Kylo fan in this fandom. That said, I’m beginning to realize that my frustrations with the latter villain have been misplaced. The things that annoy me the most are not Kylo’s fault. As far as I can tell, he’s just being the best villain he knows how to be. And he’s doing pretty well! He’s making all the right decisions to further his career. You know, like Hux if he had been quicker on the draw. It’s not Kylo’s fault that so many persist in thinking he has the potential to be turned back to the light.
It’s also not Kylo’s fault that he gets to be the only villain in the (film) franchise who actually gets to be a messy, fucked-up person who does bad things.His claim to being that is as valid as anyone’s. The problem is that in the SW film canon, the moral division is so starkly black and white, and so reducible to the New Republic/First Order divide, that there is only room for one such morally complicated villain, and he’s not as complicated as he could be.
*I’m not trying to criticize fans of Star Wars here. I didn’t grow up with it and my lack of appreciation for certain aspects of it is probably owing to that. This is just a thing that has frustrated me.
If you take a look at canon in the wider sense that includes the novels, Hux and Kylo are more alike than they are different. They are both shaped by family legacies they did not choose, they’ve endured trauma and abuse, and they’re war criminals. They have a lot in common. The difference between them is, apparently, far more important and it is that while Hux is an unadulterated product of the Empire/First Order, Kylo was born into the New Republic. That he’s more conflicted than Hux is the result of the competing influences that have shaped him, but these competing influences have given him options that Hux has never had. Kylo gets two chances to abandon the FO and he unequivocally rejects both of them. Maybe that should tell us something? He may be conflicted internally, but his choices have been pretty consistent.
Meanwhile Hux, who the novel canon shows us has been taught to hate the Republic and weaponize his talents against it his whole life by everyone he’s encountered, gets held morally and personally responsible for his actions in a way that Kylo never is. We’re meant to despise him so much that treatment which would be horrifying happening to anyone else is hilarious when it happens to him. And his backstory is so completely erased from the films that Snoke might as well have grown him in a lab.
Kylo’s agency and Hux’s lack thereof have been treated as equally meaningless. To be fair, Hux’s encounters with the Resistance have been minimal and entirely restricted to situations where they are trying to destroy each other. It would be unreasonable to expect them to show him any clemency. But it should be unreasonable to expect Kylo Ren to reject the identity he has constructed for himself just because he can, and yet Han Solo and Rey have just this expectation. That he’s offered apparently consequence-free forgiveness on two separate occasions is troubling enough regardless of the fact that he chooses not to accept it. The innocent people he has killed are just as dead as the inhabitants of the Hosnian system, but he could just walk away if he wanted to? Alright.
Treating one villain as deserving of no more compassion than an organization he never chose to be part of will never be satisfying to me, but neither will erasing all the bad decisions another has made in the event that he finally makes the right one in the end. Honestly, Hux and Kylo both deserve better, but probably the only place either is going to get it is in fanfiction.
It’s also not Kylo’s fault that he gets to be the only villain in the (film) franchise who actually gets to be a messy, fucked-up person who does bad things.His claim to being that is as valid as anyone’s. The problem is that in the SW film canon, the moral division is so starkly black and white, and so reducible to the New Republic/First Order divide, that there is only room for one such morally complicated villain, and he’s not as complicated as he could be.
*I’m not trying to criticize fans of Star Wars here. I didn’t grow up with it and my lack of appreciation for certain aspects of it is probably owing to that. This is just a thing that has frustrated me.
If you take a look at canon in the wider sense that includes the novels, Hux and Kylo are more alike than they are different. They are both shaped by family legacies they did not choose, they’ve endured trauma and abuse, and they’re war criminals. They have a lot in common. The difference between them is, apparently, far more important and it is that while Hux is an unadulterated product of the Empire/First Order, Kylo was born into the New Republic. That he’s more conflicted than Hux is the result of the competing influences that have shaped him, but these competing influences have given him options that Hux has never had. Kylo gets two chances to abandon the FO and he unequivocally rejects both of them. Maybe that should tell us something? He may be conflicted internally, but his choices have been pretty consistent.
Meanwhile Hux, who the novel canon shows us has been taught to hate the Republic and weaponize his talents against it his whole life by everyone he’s encountered, gets held morally and personally responsible for his actions in a way that Kylo never is. We’re meant to despise him so much that treatment which would be horrifying happening to anyone else is hilarious when it happens to him. And his backstory is so completely erased from the films that Snoke might as well have grown him in a lab.
Kylo’s agency and Hux’s lack thereof have been treated as equally meaningless. To be fair, Hux’s encounters with the Resistance have been minimal and entirely restricted to situations where they are trying to destroy each other. It would be unreasonable to expect them to show him any clemency. But it should be unreasonable to expect Kylo Ren to reject the identity he has constructed for himself just because he can, and yet Han Solo and Rey have just this expectation. That he’s offered apparently consequence-free forgiveness on two separate occasions is troubling enough regardless of the fact that he chooses not to accept it. The innocent people he has killed are just as dead as the inhabitants of the Hosnian system, but he could just walk away if he wanted to? Alright.
Treating one villain as deserving of no more compassion than an organization he never chose to be part of will never be satisfying to me, but neither will erasing all the bad decisions another has made in the event that he finally makes the right one in the end. Honestly, Hux and Kylo both deserve better, but probably the only place either is going to get it is in fanfiction.