^This is from a discussion about Kylo Ren. NGL, as a survivor of religious abuse, this triggered me.
Look. If we accept the premise that the Jedi are a religious order… Ben Solo was and is, by the standards of his family’s religion, unclean. He is impure. He is tainted. “There is a darkness in him.” According to the Novel Of The Film, from the time Leia was pregnant with him, she sensed that darkness.
…And this is not to say that Han and Leia were abusive parents, or that Luke was an abusive teacher. But the principles of a religion can themselves be abusive, and kids aren’t stupid.
If your religion says that People With Dark In Them are Bad and Dangerous… and you’re a kid who’s heard your parents mention in whispers that you’ve got dark in you… and you see them worry when you get angry over something little, in ways that other kids’ parents don’t… you are eventually going to put the pieces together. The pieces that say that you are Bad and Dangerous.
The Organa-Solos sent Ben to Luke partly so that he could learn to control the darkness. And like, we all saw how that turned out, but put yourself in Ben’s horrible gothy shoes for a sec.
You were sent to go study with your uncle, because you are Bad and Dangerous and you need to stop being Bad and Dangerous. There is a little voice in the back of your head telling you that you’re not Bad and that people say you’re just Dangerous because they’re afraid, but listening to that voice is Bad and makes you Bad. You go study with your uncle. It’s your last ditch hope, your last chance to have the people around you stop treating you like a total monster.
…and then you wake up in the middle of the night to find the guy who’s supposed to fix you standing over your bed, for all intents and purposes looking like he’s about to kill you.
This isn’t just a ‘my uncle tried to kill me’ thing. It isn’t just a ‘my master tried to kill me’ thing. This is a ‘the person who was supposed to make me Not Bad anymore has decided that I am too Bad to be allowed to exist; I have no hope left’ thing.
…If you really think you’re Bad- or impure, or sinful, or touched-by-the-Dark-Side, whatever you want to call it- you will lose your goddamn mind. You cannot live your entire life without thinking that there is something good about you. The best case scenario is crippling anxiety and/or depression. And if someone comes to you when you’re in that place and says “no, you’re not really Bad- the thing that makes you Bad is really a gift, and as long as you do what I say, you’ll be worth something”… that kind of thing is a lifeline.
You are hurting; if someone says they can make it stop, you’ll listen. And if that someone happens to be an unscrupulous sack of shit, and they can manage to convince you that they are the only person that you should trust, and they can make you feel ‘good’ enough that you want to stay with them but keep you vulnerable and hurt enough that you won’t think about leaving… yeah you can see where I’m going with this.
…And no, that doesn’t mean that Ben Solo Is A Cinnamon Roll Who Did Nothing Wrong UwU, and no, I’m not triggered because someone insulted my problematic fave. I’m triggered because this is the same kind of thought process that goes into “well, why didn’t you just call the cops if he was hitting you?” or “well, if the pastor was touching you, why didn’t you just tell your parents?”
IRL trauma survivors do not always do things the way they “should” or “ought” to. Trauma survivors can get pretty fucked in the head. And sometimes in the process of trying to get out of that bad situation, whatever it is- you fuck up. You hurt yourself; you hurt other people. You make really, really bad decisions and you know they’re bad but you don’t see any other choice. Obvious, ‘safe’ choices seem dangerous. ‘Normal’ seems scary and confusing. That’s one of the many, many fun ways in which trauma fucks up your head.
Hurting other people is wrong, and being a survivor does not give you an excuse to hurt people. But at the same time, one of our society’s favourite ways to blame trauma survivors for their trauma is to go ‘well, you didn’t react in the Correct, socially acceptable way, therefore you must have really wanted it/you must have done something to deserve it/you must be Tainted and Bad’. And the thing is, no matter what your trauma was and no matter what you did, you will never be able to react in the Correct way. Sometimes something as simple as ‘being male’ or ‘not crying’ can mean that what you did is Incorrect, and therefore you’re not really traumatized or you’re some kind of monster.
… It bothers me a lot that people are willing to do this kind of victim blamey bullshit in the name of fandom-SJ. Applied to a fictional character? Yeah, it’s pretty harmless. And I know OP is very much against victim blaming when applied to real people, so I’m trying not to assume the worst of them. It’s just a show, I should really just relax.
But … gotta say, it doesn’t make me feel like your corner of fandom is a safe space for trauma survivors when I hear you throw around this kind of crap. :I
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So I’m gonna reblog again with commentary because this post expresses exactly what disturbs me about the conversation around Kylo Ren, The Fictional Character: a dismissal of his relatability for people who have been psychologically manipulated and abused as children, especially, but not uniquely. It’s not really about denying his guilt so much as about understanding that his environment was complicit and that this is absolutely what happens in real life to real people. Yes, most people will not go as far as Ben did, but he’s fictional. He’s the extreme. What makes him relatable is what he feels just before he crosses that line. Luke stopped right before doing a horrible thing like that- killing Ben. But, you know, Luke also wasn’t a child anymore, and had had decades of experience dealing with Jedi ideals and the Force. People come to the edge and turn back. Whatever that edge is, and for some it’s as ‘harmless’ as an evil thought. The point is they do very much come to that edge, and the anti-kylo wave on tumblr is really insistent that this, already, not the act, but the approach to the act, is evil, irredeemable, abnormal. Well.. see above for Luke. Kylo Ren’s murder spree is a fictional extreme. A person who relates to his failure to turn around before it was too late may not be a mass murderer, you know. Their personal edge, the absolute line they should not cross, it will be something more mundane. You know where my line was? Where I crossed it? I punched my mother in the arm, hard, in church, because I couldn’t take her comments anymore. I never want to cross that line again. No, I didn’t murder a bunch of people but I’m not a fictional magic space kid, either. How many of you relate to an extreme fictional experience you’ve never actually had in real life?