lavender_sage

The reason for that is that these aren’t important relationships in the context of the respective stories.  Phasma is about Cardinal coming to understand the “real” Phasma through a second hand story told by a Resistance spy.  Armitage barely appears in Empire’s End, and while the one scene in which he appears is presented from his point of view, it’s with Gallius Rax, not Sloane.  Cardinal mentions Sloane’s name once in Phasma, and Armitage takes it as a threat, a piece of dialogue that raises far more questions than it answers.  What does Sloane have to do with Armitage’s reluctance to hear Cardinal’s evidence against Phasma? It’s anyone’s guess; Delilah Dawson isn’t telling us.  Apart from this line from Empire’s End–”Sloane likes him, but she worries about him”–we don’t know how either woman feels about him.

In spite of all these gaps in readers’ knowledge, I reject the idea that these relationships are simply unimportant in terms of helping us understand Hux as a character.  It’s not insignificant that both Sloane and Phasma cultivate relationships with Armitage through violence against his abusive father.  It’s not insignificant that they’re both women and that neither is Armitage’s mother or his lover.  There’s something interesting going on here in terms of how the novels, particularly Phasma, represent patriarchy.

Consider what the novels do show us about Armitage: Rax grooming him to take Brendol’s place and the pissing context between Armitage and Cardinal over which view of Brendol as a father figure is more valid.  The scenes and reflections readers of the novels are privy to emphasize patriarchy: the values and gifts that fathers bestow on their sons, both biological and adopted.  That Brendol is an abusive father is emphasized more in Aftermath than in Phasma, but Armitage has this reflection on his and Cardinal’s shared past: “Cardinal saw how the man treated his son. If he knew anything about the human heart, he should’ve understood that the stronger Hux would rise to supplant the weaker, older Hux eventually.” What an incredibly muddy sentence.  What does Hux imagine Cardinal saw? What did Cardinal actually see? What does “the human heart” have to do with the survival of the fittest.  What is clear, however, is that Armitage and Cardinal see his father quite differently..

When Vi Morandi draws a very unflattering, and feminizing, comparison between Armitage and Brendol–”the greasy ginger weasel birthed a greasy ginger weasel”–Cardinal gets so angry he almost hits her. He warns her, “Say what you will about Armitage Hux, but watch your tongue about Brendol.  That man was my savior and he did more for me than my own father.” Reflecting on his earlier view of Armitage as “spoiled, sullen, small, ratlike, soft,” and his assertion that Brendol held his biological son in lower esteem than his adopted one, Cardinal’s investment in patriarchal ideals becomes clear. He values Brendol because of what Brendol gave him–a better life through his position in the First Order.  From Cardinal’s perspective, the fact that Armitage loathed his father enough to conspire with his murderer reflects solely, and badly, on him. From a patriarchal standpoint, Cardinal is a much better son than Armitage.

It’s a little disappointing that novel so much focused on a non-patriarchal society in which men and women rule side by side also presents so much of its story from the perspective of a man who who is so entralled to the patriarchal aspect of the First Order. Or course, it’s clear that Cardinal has been brainwashed into holding these views, but by the end of the novel he has yet to let go of them.  Still, he is a character that we are supposed to like, while Hux is a villain, albeit a minor one in this novel.  What’s erased, or relegated so far into the background that it is difficult to see, is that Armitage flouts patriarchal conventions, too.  He has some privileges as a Hux, but when coupled with the fact that he has to work side by side with his abuser for the first two decades of his life, I hesitate to call them benefits.  Armitage has no illusions about this. He forms an alliance with Sloane against his father as a child, and when Cardinal “reveals” what Phasma has done he tells him, “I’m glad the old bastard is dead.” He did not get what he needed from his father, and thus sees himself as owing him no loyalty.  He gets the protection and liberation that he needs from those who are willing to give it, women whom his father has also abused (or attempted to, in Sloane’s case)

And yet, Hux’s relationships with men, based on fear, rivalry, and mutual hatred, are deemed far more deserving of attention than his relationships with women, which are based, at the very least, on mutual interest.  Why? My conclusion is that it’s precisely because his relationships with men bring out the worst in him.  He is the villain, after all. I haven’t read the novels featuring his interactions with Kylo Ren and Snoke, but I would imagine that the fear and loathing are only amplified there.  Perhaps his relationships with Sloane and Phasma are relegated to the margins of the novels because they are too interesting, to distracting from the role he is meant to play.  After all, if we start seeing Hux as an abuse survivor forming alliances with other survivors against his abuser, it’s harder to hate him.