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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2ddpZ6R:
I hope you don’t mind me answering this publicly but I thought it was a good question about Kylo’s motives. (And like, man, late comments are the bomb; if I could make AO3 space it out and only send me two or three comments a day to make it last, I totally would. This is why I don’t let myself answer them right away, because then I get to read them again.)
Aside, first, though– Kes thinking about Baby Poe with such nostalgia/grief is one hundred percent my baby niece being no longer a baby and being too grown-up to fall asleep on my chest anymore. I first babysat her when she was four weeks old and spent the entire, entire eight hour stretch with her on my chest (except for five minutes to change her diaper, and two minutes with my dude holding her [incredibly awkwardly, in his hands like a loaf of bread while she stared at him in utter confusion because who holds a baby like that] while I went and peed) and it was the sweetest thing, and she hasn’t held still since, and now I have to chase her down and yell at her to get in bed and she can get out of it by herself and come down the stairs to tell me that her imaginary friend poked her and that is why she’s not sleeping, so clearly she needs cookies etc. And that’s wonderful, of course, as all growing up is (and now she takes my hand and leads me places and makes me look at things and recites scripts she wants me to repeat ad nauseam because that’s how she thinks the world works), but my God, when she was tiny, there was just something so incredibly intimate about it, and how heavy her tiny body became when she finally fell asleep. And think of how little time Kes got to spend with Poe for his first two or three years of life, how precious every moment of it must have been, and how he’d have to tear himself away to go fight a war, and come back and maybe Poe would have forgotten him. And that’s what he goes back to in his mind, with this unshaven 32-year-old hollow-eyed wreck bleeding all over him, because what else do you do?
It’s certainly more accessible than remembering the sullen teenage years when every single thing you said was wrong. (More autobiography; I had a wonderful childhood and parents who loved me very much and a mother I simply couldn’t speak to from age 12 through 18 because we would just scream at each other for no reason. In retrospect, she was doing the best she could, and she mostly wasn’t wrong, but Christ I was twelve, I didn’t know any better and yelling at me wasn’t going to fix that.)
Kylo’s motives aren’t totally nailed-down in my head. I’m currently attempting to write another scene with him in that meditation space with his mother, so we’ll see what comes out then. I’m just– I’m tired of fics where’s just Cartoon Cardboard Evil Guy or, alternately, a sort of pastiche of exaggerated mental illness, but the alternative seems to be Weirdly Emotionless Redemption fics or sometimes He Was Never Bad Defend Him!!!! kind of stuff that I don’t get either. So, I’m adopting the premise that he’s deliberately set on some kind of path and is trying to accomplish something here, besides mindlessly thwarting anyone who opposes him. But I’m not one hundred percent committed to any one thing.
I have a feeling that his partnership with Hux is where the motive lies, and Hux is a young fanatic who is possibly a little smarter than that and has some interest in seeing what his options are, besides the Path He Was Set On From Youth etcetera. They’re not *good* people, particularly, but they’re working on a project here, and I’m not entirely sure what it is.
But Kylo doesn’t entirely trust Hux to be realistic in his expectations; Bolt was dying and he knew that the kid was part of the plan somehow, and wasn’t clear on whether he was supposed to actually die or if he was supposed to have recovered, so he healed him figuring he could always kill him later if he wasn’t supposed to have made it.
It’s dead easy to kill someone, even at a distance. It’s really not possible to bring someone back. And Kylo’s got a huge amount of his mental attention taken up by half-expecting to be instructed to murder his mother at any moment, so he’s kind of in a mood to not kill people just now.
I hope you don’t mind me answering this publicly but I thought it was a good question about Kylo’s motives. (And like, man, late comments are the bomb; if I could make AO3 space it out and only send me two or three comments a day to make it last, I totally would. This is why I don’t let myself answer them right away, because then I get to read them again.)
Aside, first, though– Kes thinking about Baby Poe with such nostalgia/grief is one hundred percent my baby niece being no longer a baby and being too grown-up to fall asleep on my chest anymore. I first babysat her when she was four weeks old and spent the entire, entire eight hour stretch with her on my chest (except for five minutes to change her diaper, and two minutes with my dude holding her [incredibly awkwardly, in his hands like a loaf of bread while she stared at him in utter confusion because who holds a baby like that] while I went and peed) and it was the sweetest thing, and she hasn’t held still since, and now I have to chase her down and yell at her to get in bed and she can get out of it by herself and come down the stairs to tell me that her imaginary friend poked her and that is why she’s not sleeping, so clearly she needs cookies etc. And that’s wonderful, of course, as all growing up is (and now she takes my hand and leads me places and makes me look at things and recites scripts she wants me to repeat ad nauseam because that’s how she thinks the world works), but my God, when she was tiny, there was just something so incredibly intimate about it, and how heavy her tiny body became when she finally fell asleep. And think of how little time Kes got to spend with Poe for his first two or three years of life, how precious every moment of it must have been, and how he’d have to tear himself away to go fight a war, and come back and maybe Poe would have forgotten him. And that’s what he goes back to in his mind, with this unshaven 32-year-old hollow-eyed wreck bleeding all over him, because what else do you do?
It’s certainly more accessible than remembering the sullen teenage years when every single thing you said was wrong. (More autobiography; I had a wonderful childhood and parents who loved me very much and a mother I simply couldn’t speak to from age 12 through 18 because we would just scream at each other for no reason. In retrospect, she was doing the best she could, and she mostly wasn’t wrong, but Christ I was twelve, I didn’t know any better and yelling at me wasn’t going to fix that.)
Kylo’s motives aren’t totally nailed-down in my head. I’m currently attempting to write another scene with him in that meditation space with his mother, so we’ll see what comes out then. I’m just– I’m tired of fics where’s just Cartoon Cardboard Evil Guy or, alternately, a sort of pastiche of exaggerated mental illness, but the alternative seems to be Weirdly Emotionless Redemption fics or sometimes He Was Never Bad Defend Him!!!! kind of stuff that I don’t get either. So, I’m adopting the premise that he’s deliberately set on some kind of path and is trying to accomplish something here, besides mindlessly thwarting anyone who opposes him. But I’m not one hundred percent committed to any one thing.
I have a feeling that his partnership with Hux is where the motive lies, and Hux is a young fanatic who is possibly a little smarter than that and has some interest in seeing what his options are, besides the Path He Was Set On From Youth etcetera. They’re not *good* people, particularly, but they’re working on a project here, and I’m not entirely sure what it is.
But Kylo doesn’t entirely trust Hux to be realistic in his expectations; Bolt was dying and he knew that the kid was part of the plan somehow, and wasn’t clear on whether he was supposed to actually die or if he was supposed to have recovered, so he healed him figuring he could always kill him later if he wasn’t supposed to have made it.
It’s dead easy to kill someone, even at a distance. It’s really not possible to bring someone back. And Kylo’s got a huge amount of his mental attention taken up by half-expecting to be instructed to murder his mother at any moment, so he’s kind of in a mood to not kill people just now.
