Patricide and Greek Tragedy (literary influences)

@skystar

don't get me started on identity and persona! i spent most of yesterday trying to digest the various theories and how they relate to star wars. it's really interesting for me.

i think you can make a case like that and say ben was more dmitri and kylo is more ivan? although judging by the image from the trailer, i don't think he's particularly close to reason right now.

ivan always struck me as tremendously civilised and loving and i'm seeing and not seeing these traits in kylo. and i think his line about having killed ben because he was too much like his father surely is a dmitri line, right.

i don't know if you saw the above video that discusses RL patricide, it hits pretty close to what dostoyevsky is describing in the sense that there was neglect on fyodor's side and a lack of love. i think smeryakov actually gets very little time in the novel which i guess is part misdirection but it means that the empathy i felt was towards the other brothers more. it's an interesting choice.

i guess my take on ben/kylo is that 'kylo' is the legend he might keep around to intimidate but that ben wil eventually exist as well? or there will be a third, more integrated personality. i can't decide any of that. i think the important thing for me to bear in mind is that kylo exists for a reason and to go back to ben is regressive, it's something he already rejects.

the brothers karamasov doesn't feature identity issues (at least not in my memory), but hamlet does. hamlet's identity is much more tied up with his father 'job' and that's kinda telling when you hamlet through star wars. kylo feels that the part of him that was too much like his father needed to die, the weak and foolish (and romantic?) part of him. so he reinvents himself as kylo, fearless powerful dude without attachments.

and he doesn't strive to usurp his father (neither does oedipus btw) which is something vader wanted, but it's not there. he's neither striving to succeed his father and surpass him, because he is different from him and doesn't have han's goals (which is to say, no goals, i guess) but neither does he want to be domesticated.

but overall, in the light of all these other patricides, i think his motivation just really really isn't clear. because it's not his idea in the first place. i know i'm probably going in circles but i think i might get somewhere eventually ugh.

i think the people who read some form of emotional abuse into their relationship are kinda wanting his motivation to be about the relationship but the scene i think makes it fairly clear that the motivation lies elsewhere and that even though he's committing a crime with a very mythical backdrop, something which will cost him dearly, is really in service of something else.

Can I just say how much I appreciate this being the type of SW online community that's having a serious discussion about patricide as a motif in classic Greek and Russian literature versus the usual arguments about ranking the movies or Jar Jar jokes?

When I first learned about the whole "Dark Luke" scenario which was floated for RotJ, that sort of flipped my thinking about Ben/Kylo. It's a test of complete allegiance/trust from Snoke that he rushes into after it's clear Snoke doesn't trust/respect him the way he does Hux. And it's a hellish blood oath meant to completely estrange him from his family, decent human society, and likely eventually weaken him through the guilt/shame of what he's done. But it's also a callback to the "I can't kill my own father," especially with the other callbacks to setting up the paternity reveal in the Emperor's first appearance and Snoke talking about Vader's turn in RotJ. So everyone talks about Rey being the new Luke, but there's some sneaking in of "What if Luke had gone dark/wrong?" in Ben's story.

guardienne wrote:@skystar

don't get me started on identity and persona! i spent most of yesterday trying to digest the various theories and how they relate to star wars. it's really interesting for me.

i think you can make a case like that and say ben was more dmitri and kylo is more ivan? although judging by the image from the trailer, i don't think he's particularly close to reason right now.

ivan always struck me as tremendously civilised and loving and i'm seeing and not seeing these traits in kylo. and i think his line about having killed ben because he was too much like his father surely is a dmitri line, right.

i don't know if you saw the above video that discusses RL patricide, it hits pretty close to what dostoyevsky is describing in the sense that there was neglect on fyodor's side and a lack of love. i think smeryakov actually gets very little time in the novel which i guess is part misdirection but it means that the empathy i felt was towards the other brothers more. it's an interesting choice.

i guess my take on ben/kylo is that 'kylo' is the legend he might keep around to intimidate but that ben wil eventually exist as well? or there will be a third, more integrated personality. i can't decide any of that. i think the important thing for me to bear in mind is that kylo exists for a reason and to go back to ben is regressive, it's something he already rejects.

the brothers karamasov doesn't feature identity issues (at least not in my memory), but hamlet does. hamlet's identity is much more tied up with his father 'job' and that's kinda telling when you hamlet through star wars. kylo feels that the part of him that was too much like his father needed to die, the weak and foolish (and romantic?) part of him. so he reinvents himself as kylo, fearless powerful dude without attachments.

and he doesn't strive to usurp his father (neither does oedipus btw) which is something vader wanted, but it's not there. he's neither striving to succeed his father and surpass him, because he is different from him and doesn't have han's goals (which is to say, no goals, i guess) but neither does he want to be domesticated.

but overall, in the light of all these other patricides, i think his motivation just really really isn't clear. because it's not his idea in the first place. i know i'm probably going in circles but i think i might get somewhere eventually ugh.

i think the people who read some form of emotional abuse into their relationship are kinda wanting his motivation to be about the relationship but the scene i think makes it fairly clear that the motivation lies elsewhere and that even though he's committing a crime with a very mythical backdrop, something which will cost him dearly, is really in service of something else.

@guardienne

yeah, that is the problem with interpreting that scene, because the kill is ordered by Snoke to prove something. It is not an escalation of an awful relationship, it does not seem to me that Kylo is revenging something. I think a lot of other patricides are some kind of revenge, or something really personal.
A fictional patricide may as well feature "he is a tyrant I need to tear him down". But for Kylo it is more of a duty and not so much about Han, it is hard to compare it. It wasn't a misunderstanding, it did not escalate after something Han had done. People are angry exactly because Kylo killed Han after his father asked him to come home. Yeah, Han was never there for Kylo, but that isn't really patricide worthy I would think. Also, he chooses Snoke almost like his own father figure. He replaced Han and he needed to eliminate the real one. He didn't become free.

guardienne wrote:@armadeus but does it feature patricide?

i think a wife murdering her husband is pretty special as well, and worth examining but i was looking more into the particular bloodshed of patricide.

(i had to ad something to particide in the title because it was too short *facepalm* )

@guardienne

The second play, The Libation Bearers, deals with matricide.

I want to add another Greek literature example of patricide, but this time modern. I don't know if you are familiar with Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ e.t.c). In one of his novel titled The Fratricides, he describes the act of patricide during the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). In the end of the story the protagonist, a priest,gets murdered by command of his own son, who is the leader of the Guerrillas. It's an amazing moment as the father feeling responsible for his son killing 12 people decides to go from village to village and spread the message that people shouldn't follow either side in the war. He was standing between borthers and sisters murdering each other unarmed believing in good. So his son screams "Don't you hear him?He wants to be free!" "Kill him".
It's very complicated as the son chooses to kill his own father because he goes against his own views, but also because he wants to not choose a side and be free, while he is trapped. It's very spiritual as every Kazantzakis work.

@snufkin

you are most welcome!

here are my my favourite patricides:

1. han/kylo
2. commodus/marc aurelius
3. zeus/cronos

I was telling my boyfriend - so we have this really interesting patricide thread in the forum

This got me thinking about the opposite. How bad is it to kill your own child? Not in a general sense ( of course it's bad ), but do people consider it a worse crime in fiction than killing your parent? I mean they're all bad. Parents can be awful and neglectful, but say Han had been evil and killed Ben. Barring hardcore fanboys, would that even be forgivable? I think it's interesting because a parent's job is to care for their child, it's their 'role', but a child does not need to love a parent. It's not their 'role', although if someone is a jerk to their parent just because they're just an ***. Seems like an under utilized role outside of 'evil child is killed by sad parent' instead of vice versa. Like had Vader killed Luke would he be 'redeemable'? I'm mostly thinking ( at some point ) a happy, planned child birth and not a surprise baby the parent just wants gone. I'm shaky on the stance of it as a crime in fiction vs. patricide and matricide.

@helix

i think the morality of it is sort of secondary, to me anyway, i'm more interested in the symbolism. but anyway, i think the redeemability and/or forgiveness depend on how the story is told rather than what the particular crime is, i think. we forget that storytellers are making us empathise with particular people at their whim. we forget that when we look at bare facts. if you study the examples here, they pose different versions of what and how patricide can be ... done, i guess. and that it also serves a purpose. i think it's not so interesting to look at it in a legal context. it's murder in a legal context, there's nothing really special about it. but i guess any court of law would still analyse the relationships.

kylo's case, if you will, is rather complicated because he is not ready for the murder. in a mythical sense, it just doesn't work for him and maybe this is why it fails?

i guess infanticide (what if they are adults?) is an even bigger taboo socially. women who do that are vilified beyond belief. mothers are not allowed to feel this way towards their children. fathers maybe? i'm not sure. i can't think of a good example that isn't mythical. i mean, cronos eating his children is all about his fear of being killed by his offspring.

guardienne wrote:@helix

i think the morality of it is sort of secondary, to me anyway, i'm more interested in the symbolism. but anyway, i think the redeemability and/or forgiveness depend on how the story is told rather than what the particular crime is, i think. we forget that storytellers are making us empathise with particular people at their whim. we forget that when we look at bare facts. if you study the examples here, they pose different versions of what and how patricide can be ... done, i guess. and that it also serves a purpose. i think it's not so interesting to look at it in a legal context. it's murder in a legal context, there's nothing really special about it. but i guess any court of law would still analyse the relationships.

kylo's case, if you will, is rather complicated because he is not ready for the murder. in a mythical sense, it just doesn't work for him and maybe this is why it fails?

i guess infanticide (what if they are adults?) is an even bigger taboo socially. women who do that are vilified beyond belief. mothers are not allowed to feel this way towards their children. fathers maybe? i'm not sure. i can't think of a good example that isn't mythical. i mean, cronos eating his children is all about his fear of being killed by his offspring.

@guardienne

They can also fail spectacularly ( A Serbian Film and Salo, I'm looking at you ). Hence why some people hate Kylo, they cannot empathize with the him because of his crimes, symbolism or not. I feel like it can be really crappy if you go just for symbolism and have someone eat babies and then say 'but they were abused as a kid and this is symbolism for their devoured childhood!!'. I don't think all victim narratives work? I think some crimes are too great, even outside of a law context, to be forgiven even in fiction. People can't separate the two, you have to do it really well. But I'm not interested in legal, even in symbolism something might be... too much for one to really be able to throw away their emotions and swallow, so to speak. Even done well. I.E. Salo all about the symbolism of bad society and the rich but has graphic child torture and for obvious reasons, fails at the task due to being far to obsessed and gratuitous with the contents. Even if it is well done, some people can't get past that. Which you brought up it not working, but I felt like expanding on it because I've seen some really terrible examples of it. Like the stuff in those two examples are so hideous that even the strongest stomached people I know can't look past the things they do ( action wise ) and just look at what they mean symbolically. Others have handled the topic, but those two tried to be Dark! and Edgy! with it and failed real bad.

From a legal standpoint, it's all illegal, so why bother? I think killing the child is actually more interesting based on the parental link. The animal nature of caring for your offspring, while it's easy to hate and forget a parent in favor of your offspring. It's the whole basis of repopulating and humans. The bond in nature between Parent and Child is more important than Child to Parent. I think it would've actually been more interesting to bring up that in SW than patricide, dark or not, but I guess SW has already killed little kids. I guess it's just a fathers in fiction thing, despite most people I know thinking killing a mom would be more dramatic and having closer bonds with them. Dads are the expendable parent in fiction.

I guess the Han/Kylo thing never gripped me because I wasn't close with my dad and even post death there's still a huge gap between how I reacted to that vs. if it were someone else. I do like the analysis on it despite not being able to connect or feel it that deeply. Sounds really cold and I am broken up, but it never broke the character for me. Ford was tired of SW. Never liked Han much either, so that doesn't help. I'm trying to connect because I know it's big story and character arc wise.

My new character quirk is not connecting with any of the characters or things people in the fandom love besides the one obvious thing we're all here for.

Spoiler:

This is fandom heresy hour.

@helix

well done on the heresy! bring it on! (i'm with you on both counts mostly but i guess i'm ok with others loving them and stuff. i love what i love and they do love theirs and ... blahblah)

tell me about salo and a serbian film because i have no idea what you are referring to!

i think film and works of literature work on a symbolic level. they aren't 'literal truths'. it's important to keep that distinction. of course we are looking at murder, but if read you dostoyevsky for example, he clearly has the 4 brothers also represent something in his narrative. he makes narrative choices throughout, just like jj abrams made them for TFA. i get that the murder wasn't impactful to you, but it's a narrative choice.

it contrasts with obi-wan's death and also with qui-gon's, right? this is important when you look at who han is and how utterly unimpressive he is as a father and a husband as well. rey sees him as a surrogate parent but he doesn't cut a heroic and/or mentoring figure much in TFA. that's kind of where i put this.

it doesn't bother me personally when you're not invested emotionally in han's death and you could say it's the filmmakers' failure or something else, i don't know. all i know is that i found it reasonably surprising, but more in the manner of his death, not in the fact of it. and this is why it's interesting to me. he doesn't die a warrior's death, he dies a sort of sacrificial death. his son hands him the instrument of his undoing. he delivers himself but does so defiantly, not submissively. it's like a sort of contest of wills, i guess?

and maybe you don't feel that same way, but i feel that the filmmakers subverted a whole bunch of ideas you could have about han's death at the hands of his son right here and now, and make something that is unique. and for that reason it's a standout to me, not because i'm particularly emotionally involved with han or leia or an abstract idea of the three of them ever being a family. that didn't touch me so much throughout the film, that was something i almost had to learn to appreciate and i don't think the film tells that story well. but then the whole thing is a sketch, so.

anyway, i don't think i would give bonds degrees of importance, but i understand what you mean wrt procreation and stuff. i think this is why mothers killing their babies is such an enormous, erm, crime. but it happens and mostly it happens in very sad circumstances. (i took a whole class about child murder because that's the kind of cheery person i am) there are some literary examples from german realism (we aren't talking hänsel & gretel - i'm not sure what the english title of the fairy tale is) and the writers take great pains to allow the readers to empathise with the women. it's the whole point of that narrative, to allow the reader to feel their plight. in that sense, i don't think the fresh SW patricide here is designed to have viewers condemn the perpetrator but to feel his plight. it doesn't mean i agree with the solution he finds but i can see him struggle, which is all i really need as a empathetic person.

you know?

guardienne wrote:@helix

well done on the heresy! bring it on! (i'm with you on both counts mostly but i guess i'm ok with others loving them and stuff. i love what i love and they do love theirs and ... blahblah)

tell me about salo and a serbian film because i have no idea what you are referring to!

i think film and works of literature work on a symbolic level. they aren't 'literal truths'. it's important to keep that distinction. of course we are looking at murder, but if read you dostoyevsky for example, he clearly has the 4 brothers also represent something in his narrative. he makes narrative choices throughout, just like jj abrams made them for TFA. i get that the murder wasn't impactful to you, but it's a narrative choice.

it contrasts with obi-wan's death and also with qui-gon's, right? this is important when you look at who han is and how utterly unimpressive he is as a father and a husband as well. rey sees him as a surrogate parent but he doesn't cut a heroic and/or mentoring figure much in TFA. that's kind of where i put this.

it doesn't bother me personally when you're not invested emotionally in han's death and you could say it's the filmmakers' failure or something else, i don't know. all i know is that i found it reasonably surprising, but more in the manner of his death, not in the fact of it. and this is why it's interesting to me. he doesn't die a warrior's death, he dies a sort of sacrificial death. his son hands him the instrument of his undoing. he delivers himself but does so defiantly, not submissively. it's like a sort of contest of wills, i guess?

and maybe you don't feel that same way, but i feel that the filmmakers subverted a whole bunch of ideas you could have about han's death at the hands of his son right here and now, and make something that is unique. and for that reason it's a standout to me, not because i'm particularly emotionally involved with han or leia or an abstract idea of the three of them ever being a family. that didn't touch me so much throughout the film, that was something i almost had to learn to appreciate and i don't think the film tells that story well. but then the whole thing is a sketch, so.

anyway, i don't think i would give bonds degrees of importance, but i understand what you mean wrt procreation and stuff. i think this is why mothers killing their babies is such an enormous, erm, crime. but it happens and mostly it happens in very sad circumstances. (i took a whole class about child murder because that's the kind of cheery person i am) there are some literary examples from german realism (we aren't talking hänsel & gretel - i'm not sure what the english title of the fairy tale is) and the writers take great pains to allow the readers to empathise with the women. it's the whole point of that narrative, to allow the reader to feel their plight. in that sense, i don't think the fresh SW patricide here is designed to have viewers condemn the perpetrator but to feel his plight. it doesn't mean i agree with the solution he finds but i can see him struggle, which is all i really need as a empathetic person.

you know?

@guardienne

I agree, but I also understand why people can't look past it. Especially if they wanted a happy ending for the OT3 and loved Han, at least the non-hate spewing ones. I guess how beloved a character is also applies, especially when you give the task to a newbie ( child or not ). I do applaud LF for making a gutsy move for the story, though. Although I hope if they do a new trilogy, they don't continue with mentor deaths in the first film. It'll become too obvious who is gonna die?

A Serbian Film is an allegory about life in Serbia starring a porn star who eventually ends up in worse stuff like snuff

but features

it's really graphic and disturbing:

Salo ( which is a novel and a film, I hear the novel is ten times worse ) has similar content and also featuring

Spoiler:

the awful acts disgust and repulse from the film itself, instead of the message. They fail on that. Most don't care about the message it's symbolizing when it goes too far to show/sell it to you.

Thankfully SW never gets close to that by having boy with fine hair kill an old man on a bridge.

I do think the other would be even symbolically more impactful had Han killed Ben. He would literally and symbolically be killing a part of himself, something that actually came from him. Not that I would have 100% wanted to see that, but the impact might have been more resounding for me. To me the bonds are important, or else what would make any of the 'cides' have any impact? Even symbolically, it would just be killing someone you don't wanna kill. That's still impactful, but not on the same level.

I guess I don't have the same effect from it because I would never expect Han to go out against his kid fighting? It's a weird thing to expect, but the way he died made sense to me. I didn't see him in my mind running up to Kylo and saying 'Hasta La Vista, Baby' and shooting him.

SkyStar wrote:I was telling my boyfriend - so we have this really interesting patricide thread in the forum

@SkyStar

That's exactly what I meant, like other places are debating over schematics or "______ character is gonna be like ______ character" and meanwhile our group is holding a graduate level seminar on patricide as a motif in literature.

While I can understand why some fans are angry about his death and take it so personally, it's just not an emotional response I can relate to. And he's one of my favorite characters, but the fact that it was a very specific thing that the actor wanted for 30 years, suggested renaming the character in part as a tribute to one of his sons, and the scene was co-written by a father and son, that's really I need to know about it being about the complicated relationships between fathers and sons. If anything, I'm at the point where I wish people would recognize that some of this pain rooted in nostalgia is in response to SW being about man pain. And meanwhile what roles have there ever been about mothers and their children? That's a big part of what grabbed me about the ST was shifting the perspective to Leia and at least having a character who gets to be a living mother.

Also sorry, I'm skimming and tired. But I'd agree with the above thread comment that what distinguishes this situation from the classic motif is that it's not motivated by revenge or overcoming/taking on the role a la Oedipus. Ben's clearly looking for some kind of father figure from Han to Luke to Snoke. And Snoke's got that type of control over both him and Hux enough to manipulate the both of them. So killing his father isn't liberating for Ben because he's still trapped under the alternate father figure of Snoke.

guardienne wrote:but overall, in the light of all these other patricides, i think his motivation just really really isn't clear. because it's not his idea in the first place. i know i'm probably going in circles but i think i might get somewhere eventually ugh.

i think the people who read some form of emotional abuse into their relationship are kinda wanting his motivation to be about the relationship but the scene i think makes it fairly clear that the motivation lies elsewhere and that even though he's committing a crime with a very mythical backdrop, something which will cost him dearly, is really in service of something else.

@guardienne

I wouldn’t say it’s not clear, when Kylo himself states his reasons in the movie – i.e. “I want to be free of this pain”. He feels torn up and believes that killing his father will finally stop the pull to the light he feels. IMO it’s pretty straightforward.

I agree that the father/son relationship itself is not really a motivation; to put it bluntly killing Han is a simply a means to an end.

@skystar i do wonder how liberating it is to kill your father or your surrogate father in the first place? it didn't do much good for oedipus or anyone else. you're becoming a murderer for your own ambitions and/or trauma.

also, do you think kylo just embodies alyosha as well as all the other brothers in his monastic conviction?

@snufkin speaking of mothers and daughters, medea springs to mind! (sorry)

it's intriguing for me to think of luke and han and snoke all as kylo's 'fathers' who fail him. but of course luke counts as well. that man is just trapped searching for someone to guide him. i wonder why.

@helix

Although I hope if they do a new trilogy, they don't continue with mentor deaths in the first film.

i'm hoping that this will tell the story of the skywalkers and allow the story to find a place where it peters out a bit? because, like you, i can't imagine yet another reworking of the familiar tropes into some new stew, delicious as it may be. indeed, we'd all start to paint by numbers. it'd be nice if it was all a bit less epic after that, i like smaller stories as well, but i can see my interest dropping off if fan service resumes and things are being shoehorned into stories. i don't know.

i like to think that they will bring this baby home and make it worth our while.

i think a parent killing a child is far too nihilist for the SW universe. basically they tell uplifting stories (even if we are on a downward trajectory right now) and killing off your (biological) legacy is just ... dark. and not in a way that is particularly inspirational. i get that it happens (and certainly in the movies you suggested) but it's usually a pretty severe thing. i mean, what the biblical dudes name who god asks to sacrifice his son? abraham, right? and he's asked to sacrifice his son and god does it to test him. sorry, i just realised how close this is to kylo/han. except his 'god' doesn't stop him at the last minute.

i mean, what kind of god is this to ask that of their ... believer? my theology on this is flaky so i'm not sure what the going and accepted interpretation of it is. i wouldn't want to be worthy of that kind of faith. or have that kind of commitment. whilst we are being heretic and everything

I guess I don't have the same effect from it because I would never expect Han to go out against his kid fighting? It's a weird thing to expect, but the way he died made sense to me

yeah yeah it's logical but also totally not something han does? you know? it's wonderful to give him this moment of vulnerability.

@saracene

you are right he says that. my problem is that he either infers that his commitment will make things easier, that it's a price worth paying. the prime motivation is to please snoke, or to show commitment, it's nothing to do with han except of course killing han is more meaningful because killing in itself isn't all that hard when he puts himself to it, it's wanting to cut off that gangrenous limb that's hurting him so much in the shape of his family.

i can't decide wether that makes snoke a plain sadist or just really really nihilistically wise. i really don't know.

I would not say for sure that Kylo killing Han has nothing to do with Han. We don't know that yet. Something might have happened that really caused Kylo to resent his father.

Why should it be only one reason anyway? Could be many reasons that just layer up : his Dad was not here when he needed him, he wants to sever his pull to the light, Snoke asks him to do it as a test, etc. Maybe we'll never know which reason was the main motivator and it will be all left to interpretation because it has no incidence on the story.

The way I read the scene, I don't think the main motivator was to show his commitment to Snoke. It was maybe at the beginning of the scene but then he did want to go with Han until something made him suddenly go "scr*** it" and on was the lightsaber. And to me that something was the weight of his alienation and the feeling of not wanting to go back that road and end up hurt again. But I could be wrong - I am aware of how much I am projecting my own issues when it comes to that scene and Kylo in general - and maybe I will be proven wrong by TLJ. Or not because it will not be explained further.

I love Han and Leia. They are my favorite OT characters. I was shocked by Han's death on my first viewing. And I certainly was not thinking about Harrison Ford's death wish for Han or that the scene was written by fathers and played by actors who have their own father-son baggage. I just sat there gaping and thinking "OMG, Han got killed by his son." I was even too shocked to cry.

Still, I came out of TFA feeling for Kylo and rooting for his redemption and still am after 1.5 year. Why?

Maybe because I just went along with the story and saw that there was a real struggle within Kylo and that this gutsy move proved that LF was going to give us something different. Deeper, darker, more complex than the fast-food stories and characterization we tend to get nowadays.

And maybe because I could see parallels with my own relationship with my parents and it feels good to see it explored in SW where it will be judged less severely - or so I thought. And maybe that's why some people react so badly because there's a little bit of Kylo in all of us with a bridge scene in our subconscious featuring our own father or another person of authority and some refuse to admit it to themselves.

I have also difficulties to understand how people who claim they love Han and Leia, can actually hate on their son so much especially when he's showing some similarities to them such as bad temper, impatience, stubbornnes, self-righteousness, snark power. To me it's kind of a natural extension to root for Kylo if you're a Han / Leia fan.

@sangharen

i don't think there is a very strong case of murdering han being meaningful to kylo in the way that patricide has been meaningful in RL cases or even in the fictional cases we've discussed. obviously, this is my opinion and everyone is free to disagree.

the few things we learn about their relationship have more to do with absence on han's part and a reluctance to parent at all than specific abuse. for this reason the murder won't bring him any relief. he essentially behaves like the child of divorced parents where there is hurt in the sitation and he would need to be able to act out his anger and finally be able to direct it at the right person but instead kills the person who could reasonably even apologise or who he himself could forgive.

i'm not sure if any child murdering their abusive parent is ever *really* liberating and i can't speak for them anyway. what i do read from the scene is that han being there is a very complicated situation to han and to kylo and that perhaps snoke simplified it.

And to me that something was the weight of his alienation and the feeling of not wanting to go back that road and end up hurt again

i read it more as going back home being a step backward.

i think it's a very complicated situation to begin with because we know so little. but what i've found interesting discussing this here, was that the 'traditional' motives and motivations don't really apply because what he would really want from his father is not his power (he's much more powerful in many ways and they both know it) and i'm not even sure it's han's place by his mum's side (although i really don't know that and i wish they'd sent leia to talk him back to see what that conversation would have been like) but he would like his understanding and his presence and he robs himself of both for reasons unknown (snoke said so, yes, but i mean, surely he doesn't just do as snoke says, really).

i think that's how it counts as tragedy and that's how it is akin to oedipus rex even though oedipus will take his father's place so, you know.

the other assocation i had with god demanding a sacrifice from abraham (in the form of killing his son) is much more fitting in my opinion, actually. they've reversed it and snoke doesn't still his hand because snoke is not as *cough* benevolent as the old testament god.

here's some interesting readings of that story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac and https://rectorspage.wordpress.com/2014/06/29/the-binding-of-isaac-two-interpretations/

@guardienne

somehow I managed to miss your question about Alyosha there.
It is funny because I remember reading the novel and feeling like FD did care about him so much, and yet I found him the blandest of them. Probably because Alyosha was more like a spectator there, caught in all the drama of his father and brothers. Everybody loved him, he was a compassionate young man though.

Here is the most interesting bit about Alyosha in relation to Kylo.  FD planned to write another novel about a 33-year-old Alyosha (Christ's age) but didn't fulfill his plan.

In that novel, Alyosha goes trough the life in the monastery, leaves his monastic life and have come to the conclusion that there is no God and he becomes atheist and socialist. He participates in a revolution commits a serious political crime (in the year 1866. there was a murder attempt on Tzar Alexander II by Dmitry Karakozov) and is sentenced to death. So basically FD planned for Alyosha to become a terrorist.

I see parallels with Kylo, especially if Ben was a compassionate, lovable youth, that was more introverted while being young and then all the things he goes trough makes him become radicalized.

@skystar that's a pretty good trajectory

all this discussion makes me want to reread the novel quite badly. dostoevsky was such an interesting moral writer.

i don't think alyosha is ever suspected to have murdered his father, was he. he is very young and a bit non-descript. his older brothers are a bit more on edge and more involved in living.

you know the reason i read it in the first place was because (obscure reference coming) david duchovny cited it as an influence on an x-file episode where the cigarette-smoking man has a similar conversation as the one between christ and the inquisitor. which, to be fair (not remembering the x-file much at all) does not really belong in the story. in my copy, the book was separated into two books, the stuff leading up to the murder and in the second one the murder as well as al the aftermath. i think that was an intentional division? i can't remember.

anyway, who knew there were so many dostoyevsky readers in this fandom

@guardienne

haha, I read the novel as a teenager and I definitely also need to re-read it, because I think I wasn't really ready to understand a lot of important questions then. But I clearly remember that there was a passage where it was said "this is not important, you can even skip this" and I totally did. I felt so cool back then for doing it, lol.

but yeah, and it is probably also that a lot of people in this fandom love nuanced characters

sort of relevant to this and loving the analysis of cinematography

guardienne wrote:sort of relevant to this and loving the analysis of cinematography

@guardienne

After all this time, I think this is still my favorite scene in the movie. I always snark when in movies random characters with absolutely no backstory and introduction get conveniently killed - and here to just kill Han Solo like that - brilliant.

@skystar

it's a really wonderful scene, no doubt.

i love how his dude basically analyses how much time abrams spent so we would be able to just focus on the emotions as the viewers. it's pretty simple, thre's not a lot of trickery going on, not a lot of fancy editing, just camera work making it clear what's happening.

guardienne wrote:@skystar

it's a really wonderful scene, no doubt.

i love how his dude basically analyses how much time abrams spent so we would be able to just focus on the emotions as the viewers. it's pretty simple, thre's not a lot of trickery going on, not a lot of fancy editing, just camera work making it clear what's happening.

@guardienne

yup and that unpredictability he mentioned - I think I knew that Han is going to die, but I didn't know how. It's interesting how you almost feel that Kylo is going to go with him and then he sort of just pushes all the anger he has when killing Han and that is the moment when I think I felt almost uncomfortable as in catharsis because I thought why? The feeling of Han's kindness and Kylo's power and just anger. Everything about that scene just pushes out of the comfort zone.