(no subject)

[lotesse]

There's a strangely suspended quality to my interaction with post-TFA Star Wars fandom. Like - I appreciate Adam Driver's faaace right after Kylo Ren finishes his patricide, in an aesthetical sort of way, but I don't connect the father he's killed at all to Han Solo. Because I really can't figure out how Han Solo would be in that position, or Luke, or Leia. It's like - in my head, Kylo is killing this very abstract idea of "The Father," because there's a big Somebody Else's Problem field covering over Han's face and obscuring the specificity of his identity.

Comments

[anghraine]

Hm, I definitely feel a lot more about Ben than about Han, but I don't know how much of it's that I was never that much of a Han fan in the first place. (I don't dislike him, but I'm pretty eh.)

I do think a major difference is probably to what extent you're willing to accept--allowing for Snoke's fuckery--Han and Leia (and perhaps Luke) as parents who failed their child, and Han/Leia as fundamentally unstable.

If you go "yeah, I was never sure they'd be able to hold a conversation without their lives in danger" or "yeah, I can see Han as an unreliable father" or even "idk, sad but it makes a sort of sense," I suspect it holds together pretty well. But if it seems like it's ignoring all of Han's character growth and the fundamentals of who he is as a person, yeah, that's just Kylo Ren and a Han-shaped father figure (and since the poignancy of everything Han is in TFA depends on him being Han Solo, it has to hold together to work).

There does seem a pretty big gap between people who see the scene as Han Solo and his tragic/shitheel son Ben vs Kylo Ren and his sad dad, and not just as a generation gap.