Ben Solo Is Really Such A Masterpiece Of A Character…the Only Child Of The Skywalker Lineage, Raised

ben solo is really such a masterpiece of a character…the only child of the skywalker lineage, raised by the greatest heroes in the galaxy, but still so lonely in his childhood because of his parents’ fame and their disapproval of his strong emotions. he feels isolated from his family because they’re all so good and he can’t live up to them. he’s so angry and passionate and human in the face of his larger-than-life role models.

then he finds out from a newsreel that the most angry, passionate, powerful Force-user in history is his grandfather, and it all makes sense. his parents were afraid he’d realize where those traits came from and justify them via connection to his grandfather, and he does. he clings to every bit of information he can find because he does have a family member like him, he’s not a lone hurricane in an ocean of peaceful warriors, but his family made him feel that way for years. so palpatine seizes his opportunity: he speaks as “vader”, playing into ben’s perception of his grandfather’s darkness and manipulating him into following the same path, and it works (for a while).

but goddamn if anakin skywalker is going to let his only grandchild’s life be destroyed like his was. he saved his son for a reason, dammit! so he fights right back against palpatine’s “vader” and relentlessly pulls his stubborn idiot of a grandson who is so much like him back towards the light. but he can’t do it alone and the Force knows this, so it does a favor for the Chosen One and creates the first dyad in generations between ben and rey. between a boy whose family ostracized him and a girl whose family abandoned her.

ben feels it the first time he meets her: the power, the connection, and he thinks he’s finally found his own apprentice. so he tries and fights and kills his own master to protect her, but he’s skywalker stubborn and can’t just let go of everything he’s done as kylo ren. can’t go back to being ben, the unwanted nuisance who felt too much and knew too little. but then she rejects his hand as kylo and says she wants ben. she wants the lonely, angry, passionate boy who laughed and cried, smiled and scowled, loved and hated, and that boy wants her too. but that boy is still guilty and haunted and has spent so much of his life (as kylo and ben) being told he’s not good enough, but she makes him want to believe that he is.

but then she dies, and the Force goes so quiet that ben wonders if he’s lost his connection to it altogether. he holds her and spirals because she was good enough and he couldn’t save her but then he realizes she’s not gone yet and he can save her, he can finish what his grandfather truly started and save the woman he loves, but it can’t be for himself. he saves her selflessly and smiles even as he feels the Force leave him because he did it. ben solo’s first and last act without palpatine swaying his mind is to sacrifice himself for rey because he knows she’s better than him, that she’ll do more good in the galaxy to undo all the bad he did as kylo.

just. something about a boy who didn’t even know the full skywalker lineage fulfilling the wish that started it all. something about a boy who never lived up to expectations independently performing the greatest act of powerful selflessness in generations.