Nine Years After The Force Awakens, Star Wars Still Hasn’t Fully Explained How Kylo Ren Fell To The Dark Side

Star Wars still hasn’t fully shown the path Ben Solo became Kylo Ren while training with Luke Skywalker, and it’s been 9 years since Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The central villain of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Kylo Ren quickly became a fan-favorite character, and one that many consider as one of the best aspects of the sequels. With his iconic crossguard lightsaber and metallic mask, Kylo Ren is an incredibly cool villain and character with so much potential for future Star Wars stories, despite the fact that Ben selflessly sacrificed himself in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Truthfully, the biggest shame about Kylo Ren’s character is that there isn’t more of him. There will not be any more Ben after The Rise of Skywalker, and the amount of Ben Solo/Kylo Ren content before the events of The Force Awakens is very limited. There are some broad strokes, like that he was manipulated from afar while training at Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Temple on Ossus, but not too much more than that. The story of Ben Solo turning to the dark side is one of the biggest and most glaring holes in the Star Wars timeline.

Palpatine Manipulated Ben Solo For Years

The Sith Spoke Into Ben’s Mind During His Training

One of the things that’s known about Ben Solo’s fall is that Palpatine’s voice was in Ben’s head from the very beginning. Whether in the tone of Snoke or Darth Vader, Ben was manipulated by Palpatine through voices in his head for his entire life. In fact, the 2017 Chuck Wendig novel Aftermath: Empire’s End establishes that when she was pregnant, Leia felt both the light and dark side inside Ben within her. These voices emphasized Ben’s already significant insecurities about his family, his legacy, and his powers, but not much else is known about them – or when they began.

Ben Solo Was Shaken By Learning His Grandfather Was Darth Vader

The New Republic Political Reveal Damaged The Young Jedi

One surprising aspect of Ben Solo’s story is that he actually didn’t know Darth Vader was his grandfather. The Star Wars book Bloodline by Claudia Gray is one of the most important books in the new canon, and it definitely affects Ben Solo, as it deals with a public revelation to the New Republic that Darth Vader was Leia’s father. It’s intended as a political maneuver to sabotage Leia’s campaign for First Senator, but the news without a doubt reaches Ben at Luke’s academy – and in the book, Leia worries about how this disturbing news will affect Ben.

Ben was already struggling with the dark side and his legacy, so this news would be so incredibly world-shaking. The reveal happened very shortly before Ben’s destruction of Luke’s Jedi Temple, and it may have even been a part of the events of that night. Maybe Ben’s struggle with this revelation, and his actions following it, were what caused Luke to look into his mind on the fateful night revealed in The Last Jedi, which was the last time the two saw each other – but Star Wars has yet to tell the story.

Luke Skywalker Sensed Ben Solo’s Darkness

During His Training, Ben Revealed His Dark Side

Established in dialogue in The Last Jedi, Ben Solo’s turn to the dark side was not a sudden single instance of choice. It had built up over years. When describing the flashback, Luke says:

I saw darkness. I sensed it building in him. I’d seen it in moments during his training. But then I looked inside, and it was beyond what I ever imagined. Snoke had already turned his heart. He would bring destruction and pain and death, and the end of everything I love because of what he will become.

This intense darkness that Luke saw was what made him make the instinctual decision to ignite his lightsaber, which he regretted immediately after – but what made that lightsaber ignition so impactful was that Ben had been struggling with the dark side for years. He was probably told by the voices that Luke would betray him, or that Luke secretly hated him, so that night simply became a fulfillment of Ben’s biggest fears.

What any of that darkness during his training actually looked like is still unknown. Ben apparently seemed so bound by the darkness that Luke looked into his mind while he was sleeping. Whatever the dark looked like in Ben’s training, then, must have been very troubling to Luke.

Did Kylo Ren Ever Fall To The Dark Side… Or Was He Trapped By It?

The Rise Of Kylo Ren Was Seemingly Not Kylo Ren’s Fault

This begs the question whether Ben Solo even fell to the dark side himself, or if he was simply trapped by the dark side from the very beginning. The fact that he had Palpatine’s various voices in his head from his young childhood seems to suggest that he was a victim of the Sith, and they simply drew him to the dark side. This becomes even more clear in The Rise of Kylo Ren comic series by Charles Soule and Will Sliney, which is currently the most essential piece of Star Wars storytelling that details Ben’s fall to the dark side.

The comic picks up immediately after the destruction of Luke’s Temple and Academy, and gradually flashes back to Ben’s adolescence on Ossus. The story shows Ben as a young boy, having secret conversations inside his head with Palpatine, and eventually meeting up with Snoke after the Temple was destroyed. Snoke immediately ferries Ben off to join the Knights of Ren, a dark side group of marauders that would help mold Ben even more so into who Palpatine wanted him to be.

This is where Ben gets the name Kylo Ren and kills a former friend of his from Luke’s Academy, later even killing the leader of the Knights to become their new leader and Snoke’s apprentice. This comic makes it seem like Ben was manipulated from the get-go, and that he never even really had a chance. This makes Ben Solo’s story so incredibly tragic, and absolutely deserving of a more detailed telling in a future Star Wars story.

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