#this is not an indictment of nerd discourse of course

[bigskydreaming]

Krakoan discourse is a bunch of nerds sitting around arguing about which was the first true example of a mutant circuit in media: forming Voltron or summoning Captain Planet.

Hellion: Oh come on, you’re just being stupid if you think you even NEED a circuit to form Voltron, any telekinetic can do that all on their own, they just need like....five refrigerators and a bucket. But to summon Captain Planet, you need four different elementals to combine their powers to create a gestalt entity, now THAT’S a circuit!

Anole: Five.

Hellion: ....what?

Anole: It takes five people to summon Captain Planet. An earth, wind, fire and water elemental, and an empath for heart.

Hellion: Oh fuck off, you don’t need an empath to summon Captain Planet, that’s like....the perfect example of a non-essential circuit component.

Anole: How’re you supposed to save the planet without HEART, Julian? 

Hellion: Really? You’re gonna try and make your case with a METAPHOR?! Quick, somebody go run and tell the Five that they can’t bring anyone else back from the dead until they find a mutant to embody a METAPHOR for what they’re doing. LMAO you sound so dumb right now.

Anole: I know you think you really did something there, but joke’s on you asshole, cuz last time I checked, everyone agreed the mutant most essential to the resurrection circuit is LITERALLY NAMED HOPE. 

Mercury: I’m actually willing to pay the both of you to shut up, at this point. Our country doesn’t even have a system of currency but I’m ready to go out there and bring capitalism to Krakoa JUST so I can have something to PAY you both in exchange for just.....stopping this forever. That’s where we are right now. That’s how annoying this is.

[emperorren]

I mean...if the SL stuff is bad enough, there's only so far sympathy can extend from a non-invested viewer. Vader in ROTJ was super toned down compared to ANH and ESB: he never did anything in ROTJ that could make the GA fear or hate him any more than they already did. In Kylo's case, if the FO is invading a planet, that's on him. If Stormtroopers are killing Resistance members, that's on him. As long as Kylo is SL, every act of FO violence or evil in the movies/time gap is an extension of him.

I think it comes down to choice: of course he’s always had a measure of agency and bears the responsibility of his crimes, but if he chooses to do even worse things with Snoke gone, that’s a greater indictment of his character. I feel like he was at the height of his villainy (so far) on Crait, and if he’s depicted as a confident dictator or even just a passive one in the first act of IX, that means the story will have to work twice as hard to convince the audience redemption is possible.

You’re worrying too much, about things of ultimately no importance to whether or not Kylo will be redeemed. All this discourse re: agency and choice and responsibility is gold for in depth character analysis and fandom nerds will be discussing Kylo’s morality for a loooooong time but, in terms of “sympathy” and “the possibility” of redemption, the general audience doesn’t work like that. 

For one thing, nobody in the general star wars audience gives a real shit about unnamed Resistance members or /planets/. Oh, redditors and antis will write thinkpieces about how it’s horrible blah blah blah and deconstruct this shit in detail, of course, but casual viewers will barely register it. Only known and relevant characters’ deaths have a real emotional impact, not random redshirts. For the umpteenth time, short of killing Leia, Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose or Chewie, nothing Kylo does in IX will be worse than killing Han.

Secondly, convincing the audience that redemption is impossible might be the entire point, which is imo what Crait was for. Vader redeeming himself was a shocking plot twist, an existential triumph that was twice as powerful because the audience didn’t see it coming—the problem is that, in the ot, it wasn’t adequately built up. I think with Kylo they’re aiming to find the right balance between preserving the same eucatastrophic impact of a /shocking/ redemptive act while also building up a proper redemption arc throughout all the three movies from Kylo’s pov and not just from Rey’s (which so far they’ve done an excellent job of).

Third, it’s not worth draining our mental energies on the wild assumption that the SL stuff will be “bad enough”. I don’t think their intent at this point is to make Kylo more unsympathetic to the audience, or more of a villain—rather, they’ll want to bring his being a tragic figure to a climax (assuming that hasn’t already happened with Crait), so that the audience despairs he can ever come back for a while (10 minutes in the beginning? the whole first act? till halfway through the movie? I don’t know nor I want to come up with specific predictions in that sense), then things start to pivot and catharsis happens.