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frumfrumfroo · 4 years

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I’m new here and couldn’t tell from the tone of some asks (sorry) but did you like what they did with Ben in TRoKR ? I saw the discussions abt him lacking agency in it and I 100% agree but did you personality agree w/ the passive, “things only happen to me” vibe they gave him? And second question: can u give examples of how soule’s writing was telegrsmed in TFA? Thank u for taking the time xx

Like I’ve said before, it’s exactly the kind of backstory I would have written for him/always imagined. I had expected to find out he didn’t kill the other students/fought them in self defence/it was some kind of accident or emotional overload incident in TLJ. That was where everything was pointing.

Someone this insecure and conflicted about what he’s doing, someone who prays for help to resist his loving nature and cries when he sees his dad, who is so uncomfortable with himself he is covered head to toe not even his voice unmasked, who immediately latches on to the protagonist as a kindred spirit in loneliness and needs her to know he’s not a creature and wants to help her rather than hurt her- that’s not a person who had an eyes-open, all-in fall to the dark side full of decisive action and unhindered agency.

Leia saying ‘it was Snoke’ told us from the get go we’re in a situation where he was haunted and manipulated. His subservience and rote, childish repetition of ‘the Supreme Leader is wise’ when Han tells him Snoke doesn’t care about him. The constant, ongoing contradiction of his behaviour and motives tell us he has no conviction in the cause he’s supposedly supporting. His self-harm and naked suffering in the face of his own actions, his recklessness and inability to commit to selfishness and lack of ambition tell us those aren’t qualities which drove him here. He is highly emotionally driven, there’s no tangible goal and he doesn’t have a vision of the future. So why is he on the dark side?

It’s not that things only happen to him or that he’s passive, it’s that Ben has never pursued or been comfortable with what darkness really is and that has always been obvious. He tries very, very hard and fights tooth and claw to cling to something good in the comic until all of it is in ashes- he’s not passive, but he can’t win. No one can hold out forever against that kind of relentless onslaught. That he was absolutely a victim doesn’t mean he has no agency in his later choices. He’s not absolved of responsibility. But his reluctance and victimhood only makes sense, anything else would be incongruous with TFA.

There was never pursuit of power for power’s sake from him- there’s nothing he wants that the dark side can give him, he is there literally because he felt he had nowhere else to go. I said this before TLJ even came out. He felt he could not escape it, both because of the fatalism his family unintentionally instilled in him and because Snoke convinced him none of them loved him, that he is only useful or valued as a tool. Ben is a person who doesn’t believe he has any inherent value just for himself- just Ben, he believes that he can’t be forgiven for the sin of being born a disappointment, and that everything is his fault because he’s wrong and bad no matter what he does. None of his choices feel to him like real choices, all of his options appear to have been taken from him, and he feels compelled to plunge forward on the only remaining path. The comic provided an emotionally and logically cogent explanation for exactly why he would feel that way which is completely consistent with all the implications about his past and his characterisation from the films.

As I’ve pointed out before, there’s a reason he says ‘it’s too late’ to coming home not ‘I don’t want to’. There’s a reason he says ‘what I have to do’ and ‘he (I) was weak and foolish’- there’s a reason he needs Han’s help to go through with killing his father. It’s not about what he wants (he wants to go home with his dad- he thinks he can’t), he has never felt free to make his own choices or that freedom is possible for him.

Even at his darkest he never became cruel, he never enjoyed killing or hurting people, and he totally fails to suppress his instinct to be compassionate. He has a highly developed conscience and an overflowing core of empathy he can’t seal off. That’s why he’s so miserable as he pushes himself to do things he finds abhorrent- but he thinks he has to, there’s no escape, it’s the only way. In the sequence which establishes this character, even before any layers are stripped away or the investment we naturally have in him because of who he is is revealed, one of the first things we see him do is have compassion for F/nn. Those two characters are connected and a comparison is invited- this is visual storytelling showing you that they have something in common (it will be made clear later on that Ben saw himself in F/nn and that’s why he takes his actions so personally- cognitive dissonance).

F/nn was a good person trapped in the mask of the stormtrooper by circumstances beyond his control, but he is able to reject it and reclaim his identity. Ben is a good person hounded into the mask of Kylo Ren by his family’s failure to reconcile with Vader. The crushing weight of their expectations and their total lack of faith in him combined with their lies and Snoke’s manipulation convinces him there is ‘too much Vader in him’ and that Ben Solo isn’t and never will be good enough for anyone. That his love, compassion, and selflessness are all weaknesses which will only cause both him and the galaxy further suffering.

He is the most morally sensitive person in the new gen, he is the most outward-orientated and loving. His impulse is to be selfless and helpful, but that impulse has been relentlessly punished until he mistrusts it and thinks he must repress his wrong instincts and serve a ‘greater order’ guided by someone stronger than him. He has an acute sense of the impact of his actions and he considers it (even when he loses control of his emotions, he overwhelmingly targets things rather than people and his angry threats are empty).

In contrast, Anakin (who was committed on the dark side and successfully cut himself off from his empathy for many years) was all in on the pursuit of power even when he still had good intentions. Anakin also knew that power was the foundation of the dark side and he and Palpatine would always be at odds, that some day he would overthrow him and take his place. Ben only values power out of fear, and solely primal fear not more abstract, possessive fear like Anakin’s, he wants safety. He doesn’t go to Snoke thinking he’s ever going to take his place or gain his power- he wants Snoke to give him belonging and acceptance. He’s then convinced that the ends justify the means and doing things he knows are wrong and which cause him pain are necessary because his whole life and Snoke’s machinations have set him up to believe that. He is still trying to create safety and doing what he’s convinced must be done and will be done one way or another.

Ben is a beautiful compassionate person and always has been and that is why he’s in such constant, excruciating pain trying to shut himself off from love and vulnerability. He is following Snoke’s demands and trying to kill his past to stop the pain, to kill this vulnerability and need and weakness in himself. Connection was always what he wanted most and he is trying to cut off and cauterise all of the broken, abandoned bonds of love his family has left him with. And even here, he still wants Snoke’s acceptance, Snoke’s validation and esteem. He is still pouring himself out for an other, giving everything to please someone else, the last person left who tells him it’s possible he can achieve value.

He latched on to Rey instantly when he realised they were alike and did everything possible to lift her up and spare her what he went through. He only rejected Han and Rey’s offers to come with them because he thinks their love is conditional and that small, dirty, broken Ben Solo will never be able to meet the conditions. He thinks he is a tool or an obligation to them and it’s easy to understand why he thinks that. Han couldn’t wipe away a lifetime of baggage in a few words. Rey pretends it’s about the cause, she doesn’t tell him she loves him.

He thinks he must ‘become who he was meant to be’ and that his destiny is to become a new Vader. Everyone told him that. Whether with their fear or directly with words. When he finds out the truth about his grandfather, it’s a complete confirmation of what Snoke has told him and how his parents have treated him. Luke deciding he can’t be allowed to live because it’s that inevitable is the nail in the coffin in Ben believing there’s any place for him with his family. There is nowhere for him to exist as himself, he has to be someone else, someone less weak. And in running away from himself, his legacy, and his identity he puts himself under Snoke’s thumb and Snoke can finish inculcating his worldview.

Being able to love is freedom to Ben. He is an immensely loving person who feels like he is not worthy or allowed to love people, that his love has done nothing but make things worse for everyone. The tension and repression of trying not to need or care about people is what makes him so emotionally unstable. Kylo Ren is a mask and a shield and a prison built by Ben’s hurt and anxiety but equally built by Snoke out of his boyhood fancies to control him and shape him into an instrument of pain. Ben could never have conviction in it because it is so alien to his nature. He is so fundamentally unselfish that he never coveted like Anakin eventually did, his love never became possessive or jealous, he never sold his soul for a boon, the only way he could be selfish enough to murder is out of animal fear and pain. Wanting the hurting to stop. Rationalising it post-facto with the philosophy that the ends justify the means.

He pours himself out for Snoke because there is no one else left. All he wants is the safety and acceptance that he has literally never had anywhere. Anakin received unconditional love from his mother, Obi-wan, and Padmé and was warped from giving compassion into selfishness by his fear of loss and need for control. Covetousness became his tragic flaw and thus his fall culminates in trying to kill Padmé rather than lose her. Control became so important that others ceased to matter and love became possession. Anakin (despite also being a victim of manipulation and Jedi hubris) got to make real choices, he had real options, and thus he was a villain with conviction. Ben’s attempts to take control of his life are unfocussed and mostly involve abnegation, he pushes people away instead of trying to clutch them close; his response to loss is to isolate himself not seize power to recover the lost thing by force. Ben never received unconditional love until Han’s sacrifice on the bridge and the experience immediately shatters him from his already tenuous position in the dark. The only thing keeping him from coming home after that is sunk cost and the idea that he can never be forgiven. That it was too late.

He just needed someone to show him it wasn’t.

#ben solo #this is repetitive brain vomit my apologies #I can't words any more everything is too terrible #he is a good boy though okay #the fact that he's a broken person rather than someone more inclined to dark paths doesn't lessen his redemption #he still did Very Bad Things and being convinced it was necessary or inevitable doesn't make it okay when a part of you knows it's not true #healing is the thing everyone has trouble beleiving in #and it's just as difficult to heal from misguidedness you were traumatised into as willful shittiness #maybe more so #because it feels less like a bad decision and more like you're just fucked up and can't help being fucked up #he'd still be just as redeemable if he were far more evil #but he is baby and I LOVE that about him #because there's nothing I love more than characters who are not what they appear to be #anyway reason 487389750783 he needed to live #it's not that he 'deserves' it more it's that you have to show you can recover #that you're not worthless if you can't be the perfect victim and pull yourself up by your bootstraps

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bambamramfan · 7 years

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1/2 I know you frame many of your critiques in terms of "ideology", but you seem to use the term in different ways depending on the post. Sometimes you talk about abstract values: caricatures in media, nebulous culture iconography. Sometimes you're separating broad familiar political groupings and specifying their traits (this comes up when you talk about socialism). And sometimes you seem to be talking about communities (or demographics, but it's important to make a distinction between those).

2/2 I see these situations as different enough that I would prefer to use different words. Why do you use the one? Do they all reduce to one concept for you? If so, how?

So let’s start with why we are having these conversations. If you’re reading this blog I assume you’re familiar with the claim “both sides do it,” when you notice both sides of a political fight are acting badly. Ignoring evidence, name-calling, cognitive dissonance, even harassing members of the other political side, or obsessively focusing on a few instances of terrorism to prove the entire other side is bankrupt. You’ve probably been in the situation where you agreed with the fundamental beliefs of one political side, but didn’t know what to do about the fact that it felt like they were acting badly and betraying their beliefs, but the other side wasn’t really any better. Scott has certainly written about this dilemma a lot.

And we recognize “a lot of the way people talk about politics fails, and it fails in the same way.” That’s why politics is called the mindkiller. Now many people will say “Oh I just guess political discussion is terrible, lets just not talk politics or morality.” But that can’t be right either - we can easily imagine good political discussions - based on evidence and ethical principles, with respect for our opponents as human beings even when they disagree with that.

So to critique ideology is trying to find “the ways these political dynamics keep failing, what the whole system has in common, and how we can avoid that.”

I for instance am strongly opposed to dehumanization. It is the bedrock principle of this particular blog. The left wing side of American politics has policies more in concordance with this, but it must be admitted that liberal discourse has increasingly embraced dehumanization of its enemies. So why doesn’t American liberalism resist dehumanization, and how can you have a politics that consistently follows your ethical principles, without being seduced into thinking “your greatest values are worth violating as long as it hurts your enemies.”

That’s the aim. Let’s talk about why it’s all one big system, and not separable parts.

******

Question for you. What is the Republican Party? Especially if you’re looking at it from the question of “if there was one thing I could control, to thereby control the whole party with, what is it?”

(As with my previous post on Republican dynamics, you can say all these same things for the Democratic Party if you prefer to think of it that way.)

It’s not the Republican National Committee, or any other institutional organizations. They can��t really drive policy or discussion. Most voters or radio talk show hosts just complain about them.

It’s not individual politicians. Many of them are very different from each other - look at the passage from Dubya to Trump. But the torch passed with most of the same voters and supporters intact (despite a hostile takeover. Something was taken over. What was it?)

It’s not “the collection of all the voters or office holders.” These are many different demographics - rich bankers, white farmers in Idaho, oilmen in Texas, Cuban families in Florida. And what more there’s very little demographic test. While their policies are bad for black people and gay people and hispanic people, by and large individuals of those demographics are enthusiastically embraced as converts, to say “Republican policies ARE better for black people!” Just look at their love of Tim Scott and Colin Powell. By the same token, loyalty to current Republicans is very shallow - if you step out of line and disagree with the popular line of the day, you get labelled as a RINO, attacked by radio talk shows, possibly even harassed and driven out of the party entirely.

Are they defined by their particular values then? Well on a policy level, their lock-step-heel switch the Individual Mandate solution for health insurance, or Cap-and-Trade, showed alarming rapidity in how a favored policy can become an opposed policy. There wasn’t even cognitive dissonance really, just complete disavowal. Even on policies we think of as very fundamental to Republicans, like lower taxes, were not negotiated on by federal Republicans so long as President Obama was part of the deal. Any presence of any Democrat in the deal could ruin its purity.

You could say they are committed to certain philosophical principles in the abstract sense, but what are they? Would all the factions agree with those? Do they even consistently predict what policies will be proposed and voted on?

As I said before in the Senate Republicans post, I wouldn’t even identify this system within individuals. As individuals many Republicans believe sensible, similar object-level things like you or your liberal friends.

We could go all nihilistic here and say the Republican Party isn’t a real thing we can understand. But it seems like there are a lot of predictions we can make based on our knowledge of something called the Republican Party. We know the way all the Senators will vote, we know which candidate will win Georgia and by what percentage within ten percent, and we know what bills they will try to repeal.

How do we identify this ideology?

******

So you read my post on terminology: the Big Other, the Dark Other, and joissance.

Arlie Hochschild spent five years talking to various conservatives of different class levels that helped him understand the populist uprising that we eventually saw last year. They had a lot of different life circumstances, different politicians they were supporting of, and their expression of abstract political values was vague at best.

When I asked people what politics meant to them, they often answered by telling me what they believed ("I believe in freedom") or who they'd vote for ("I was for Ted Cruz, but now I'm voting Trump"). But running beneath such beliefs like an underwater spring was what I've come to think of as a deep story. The deep story was a feels-as-if-it's-true story, stripped of facts and judgments, that reflected the feelings underpinning opinions and votes. It was a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage—a story in which shame was the companion to need. Except Trump had opened a divide in how tea partiers felt this story should end.

...

What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.I checked this distillation with those I interviewed to see if this version of the deep story rang true. Some altered it a bit ("the line-waiters form a new line") or emphasized a particular point (those in back are paying for the line-cutters). But all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, "I live your analogy." Another said, "You read my mind."

Hochschild thinks this a sympathetic way to describe their beliefs, because it shows they don’t actually hate black people or whatnot. I think it’s abhorrent. And it precisely fits that triptych to define an ideology: the Big Other is whoever at the front of the line giving things out, the Dark Other is the people cutting, or rather leaders like Obama helping them cut, and joissance is the “American Dream” that is being handed out.

The story isn’t even a very effective way of handling problems. It’s about resentment at that Dark Other, and not what sort of compromises you could make to reduce line-cutting, or increase the amount of “American Dream” to hand out. These are fantasy concepts after all, and people’s feeling about them. Some policies or individual politicians will not reduce their impact on you nearly as much as “Someone speaking out against them!” feeds your sense of injured anger.

So that’s the best way to define it. What is the Republican Party? It is the system that follows this explanation for “what is wrong with the world” and everything that builds up around it. It’s the system’s memetic efficiency, and the people acting as a group to execute it, and the cultural artifacts they surround themselves with that share the same ideological message. (Art does have political messages, even the most inoffensive stuff.) But none of those epiphenomenon are responsible for the ideology itself, nor should they be held accountable for it.

Twenty-Four is a highly ideological show that talks about the need for harsh violence that offends our intuitions about virtue in order to defend our freedoms. That doesn’t make it responsible for the perpetuation of neoconservative ideology, more a reflection of what’s going on under the hood.

So you can’t really separate the “abstract values: caricatures in media, nebulous culture iconography” because I’m not even objecting to any of those on their own. The values, media, and cultural icons can all be good in different contexts. But as part of an overall system, I want to understand them and fight them.

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