I have been trying to understand for a while what is all about Kylo Ren/Ben Solo that so many boys/men find abrasive, and to be fair, also some women. I am under the impression, correct me if I am wrong, that even though little boys or little girls do not have a problem with Kylo Ren per se (I would even say that children do tend to like him a lot, proof in case the reaction kids had to seeing Adam Driver in a street in NYC, or at meet and greet sessions in games or Disneyland parks), this resentment towards the character seems to affect young and grown up men. I am unsure about the type of women who react negatively to Kylo, I know there are a lot of outspoken women on the internet, but I am unsure if there is a tendency in age…

I am curious about this reaction because, for one, I absolutely ADORE Kylo. More than any male character I have grown attached to, and yes, I am looking at you Darcy, Edward Rochester, and your likes… Do not fret, boys, I still like you… a lot… But then, I am not a man, so what is it about Kylo that men do not like ?

Why the hate? the bad buzz? the name calling like Emo Ren and what not…? the insults and ridicule?

I first thought people had to do that, on design: Kylo is supposed to fail all previous expectations. Of course he will disappoint as a villain, because he isn’t supposed to be Vader. He is not the evil bad guy. And he will disappoint as a hero because he isn’t supposed to be Luke… or Han. And all these guys were the golden standards in terms of what masculinity was for so many boys -and girls- who grew up with Star Wars, how men are portrayed, and the types, archetypes, boys and men are supposed to identify with… and women to fall in love with, or identify with… I am not excluding that potential, even though, to be clear, this post will focus more on types of masculinity addressed to a male audience and as perceived by a male audience. Also, the ST has pitched two highly likable male characters that are supposed to be everything Kylo is not: so guys will root for Finn and Poe, but not so much for Kylo, because hell they are cool and he is not. Poe and Finn are reassuring because they evoke Han and Luke. And Kylo is, well,unpredictable and unchartered territory…But we’ll see later about that.

Kylo is confusing, I guess, to many men. Yet, he has probably the most amazing potential for a male hero we have ever had in Star Wars. And maybe it is why he is confusing. In the Star Wars universe, our heroes are usually limited to one or two specific archetypes, easily readable from the start. One man=one clear, identified function (though on clearer inspection, this is not as true as it seems). Kylo eschews that because he starts super clear as a villain but then gets more and more blurred. Which to me reads as a great sign that he has the potential to effectively blend many archetypes of masculinity while other characters had more linear development, and frankly very little room for growth or evolution. No one expected Luke to be anything but the hero and we knew from the start about poor Anakin. In this ST all about balance, Kylo is designed to not just bring balance to the Force but to a certain portrayal of masculinity. Maybe that is why he is met with some resistance from a lot of fanboys… maybe that is why he is so welcome and celebrated by other men, and many women.

I “chanced” last week on this book by Robert Moore and Doug Gillette called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, which is greatly influenced by Jung’s work. In this work, the authors offer to rediscover and explore archetypes of the mature masculine in a context of what they view as a deep crisis in masculinity. In most of our societies, boys are not initiated into manhood anymore, and this results into confusion for most as to what masculinity should be. Moreover, patriarchy stunts development, they argue, by fixating men into immature levels of masculinity. I am really roughly summing it up. Traditional patriarchy, according to the authors, is all about Boy Psychology and not Man Psychology. Boy Psychology, they state, is not something to root for. It



is everywhere around us, and its marks are easy to see. Among them are abusive and violent acting-out behaviors against others, both men and women; passivity and weakness, the inability to act effectively and creatively in one’s own life and to engender life and creativity in others (…); and often, an oscillation between the two -abuse/weakness, abuse/weakness.

To resolve that crisis, the authors argue that men need to reconnect with the potentials of mature masculinity through deep and instinctual masculine energies that they identify under these 4 categories: the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover.

They first identify different aspects of Boy Psychology, under archetypes with every time an active and passive subcategory such as the Divine Child ( with the High Chair Tyrant, the Weakling Prince), the Precocious Child (with the Know it all Trickster, the Dummy), The Oedipal Child (the Mama’s Boy, the Dreamer) the Hero (the Grandstander Bully, the Coward)… These archetypes are not mutually exclusive and are usually listed as stages in the development of boyhood, moving on from the Divine Child in stage 1, then Precocious Child/Oedipal Child, and last stage with the Hero. Each of this boy archetype has the potential to give rise to the full man archetypes: the Divine Child can become the King; the Precocious Child the Magician; the Oedipal Child the Lover; the Hero the Warrior. The idea is not to destroy the boy archetypes but to transcend them, to use them as foundation to access full potentiality of masculinity. Basically, that is what we call growing up.



As I was reading the book I was fascinated about how much of our Star Wars characters I was finding there, in their immature and possibly mature versions. Especially when you consider that these stories are all about growing up, and portray different stages from infancy to adulthood. And even though at first I thought the way guys were portrayed in Star Wars seemed rather simplistic (the Hero, The Rogue, the Villain…), this is not actually true. They become quite interesting to analyze through the book’s definition of male archetypes. And now a read on, as requested by @mytrash-mylife (see, I do listen, my dear).



Take Anakin. This character had the potential to have it all. He was after all the Chosen One. He could have become a King, a Warrior, a Lover, and a Magician. But that did not play out. He was stunted in his development. In his immature version, he was obviously a Divine Child, like literally, willed by the Force. With his skills as a pilot and a mechanic, his innate talents, he was also the Precocious Child. He is also clearly the Mama’s Boy, and the PT is pretty obvious how his unresolved relationship with his mother has disastrous effects onto his relationship with Padmé. And as a hero, in ROTS, he exemplifies a lot of characteristics of the Grandstander Bully, claiming center stage, and having an inflated sense of his own importance and his own abilities. A quotation I find particularly relevant is that one:

He is locked in mortal combat with the feminine, striving to conquer it and to assert his masculinity. In the medieval legends about heroes and damsels, we are seldom told what happens once the hero has slain the dragon and married the princess. We don’t hear what happened in their marriage, because the Hero, as an archetype, doesn’t know what to do with the Princess once he’s won her. He doesn’t know what to do when things return to normal.

Through Anakin, we do know: he kills the Princess and cannot fully move on to becoming a father. Anakin exemplifies all the active aspects of boy psychology, but remains stunted in his development as man in the negative aspects. Instead of becoming a full Warrior, King , Lover, and Magician as he could and should have had, he instead becomes the Shadow versions of these, which is apt with his new name and persona: Darth Vader, the Shadow Anakin, the Shadow man. He is the shadow of the great man/Jedi he was supposed to be. So the Shadow versions, as a man, make him more akin to the Tyrant, the Sadist, the Manipulator, and the …Impotent. He never turns into a King because he does not become a father, warps and twists the laws, and remains the obedient servant to his master. He thrives on killing, destroying, torturing. He tries to manipulate Luke. And yes, sorry, fanboys, but the great Vader is a formidable villain but he is symbolically very impotent. First, he is disconnected with human emotions, Obi-Wan calls him a machine in ESB. Then, he is the toy of his master: “on a leash”, Leia says in ANH. He has symbolically been castrated of all his members: no arms, no legs, no…? Instead of seizing the power for himself and killing his master, he has to wait to find a symbolic “phallus”, his son Luke, in order to try to overthrow Palpatine and finally reign. When his son refuses, he revealingly cuts him off, symbolically castrating his son in turn, repeating the cycle of violence and impotence.Funny thing is a lot of guys resented Anakin in his Boy phase, but adored him in his shadow mature version.



What about Luke? I remember in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath Empire’s End, he is referred to as “the golden boy”, that is to say the golden child, the divine child here again. But Luke, as a boy, is not Anakin, though he started with a lot of potential. He is precocious, like his father, and skilled at mechanics and piloting. But, unlike Anakin, Luke is not a Mama’s boy, and for good reason. He has never known his mother, something he pines for, despite having loving parent figures with his uncle and aunt. But he never called Aunt Beru mum, as much as a loving mother figure she was. His Oedipal phase is very different from his father. Sure, he has to kill Daddy, which he will refuse to do, and he has no mother to love, even though his twin sister comes to stand in for. Not being a Mama’s Boy, Luke is thus very much the Dreamer, a bit melancholy, something that is iconically represented in his gaze fixated on the horizon, and that Yoda will reproach him with later. And when it comes to being a Hero, Luke is neither a coward or a bully. He is very much the hero, ready to sarcrifice himself for the people he loves, or a cause he stands for. The mature masculinity that Luke stands for at the end of ROTJ is that of the Warrior, the Magician, and partially the Lover. I was reluctant about including the Lover because this is where we could be arguing. No problem about Warrior and Magician: he has completed his initiation in the ways of the Force and become a Master Jedi, and as a Warrior as portrayed by Moore and Gillette, he “knows when he has the force to defeat his opponent by conventional means and when he must adopt an unconventional strategy” (as seen in Jabba’s Palace, on Endor, or through his duel with Vader). Luke also shows that he has

an unconquerable spirit, that he has great courage, that he is fearless, that he takes responsibility for his actions, and that he has self-discipline. Discipline means that he has the rigor to develop control and mastery over his mind and over his body, and that he has capacity to withstand pain, both psychological and physical. He is willing to suffer to achieve what he wants to achieve.

This is the whole point of his final duel with Vader and how he defeats the Emperor. He is willing to suffer pain in the end in order to prove that his father is still good. This will prove useful too in TLJ a second time around. What about the Lover, because I was a bit iffy about that one… In the way Moore and Gillette define the Lover, I think Luke only partially achieves this archetype. He achieves it in the way he feels compassion for his father and friends, the way he is open to the sensual world around him through his mastering of the Force. BUT, this is where he will fail as a King and as a Lover. Luke may have sensitivity and empathy galore, and feeling the world and people around him, I would never call him deeply sensual and sensuous. The King’s job, besides order and laws, is also about procreating, and this is where it stops for Luke. Remember he was after all symbolically castrated by his father. This will be his curse. I got into very amicable arguments on my Growing Up meta with people that did not like my saying that Luke never fully matured because he did not have children or got married (something I know they let him do in the EU). Again, this is no personal conviction of mine IRL: you don’t need to become a parent to become fully matured. I am talking symbolism here. The ST as it is written implies that Luke is portrayed as Impotent, a bit like his father before him, and let me explain why. TLJ makes it very clear that Luke chose to cut himself from the Force: he has decided to disconnect himself from all the people he loved and cared for (Leia, Han, R2, Chewie, the Cause) but also the universe as a whole. He has decided to stop feeling. He also decided not to become King, by going into exile, refusing to be a leader, and by not procreating. The King is also very much about succession and the continuum: think The Lion King’s Cycle of Life and the traditional “The King is dead, long live the King”. The King is about going on. Luke in the ST is very much about ending, breaking the cycle. In conclusion, so far, all our male references do not achieve full masculinity potential.

What about Han, then? There is also a good reason why he was so long a fave in portrayal of masculinity. He’s the precocious child, skilled as a pilot (not so much as a mechanic), but to Luke, he is more the Trickster, defined as “characteristically smug, and often wears a cocky grin”. We may learn, probably through the Solo movie, that like Luke he has a touch of the Dreamer instead of the Mama’s Boy: a loner, who usually cuts himself from relationship. We already have that aspect from what we know of him through Last Shot. Like Anakin, he is very much the Grandstander Bully. Like Anakin he doesn’t know what to do with the Princess once he has won her over, but he doesn’t kill her, he goes back to his loner stance. Unlike Luke, Han procreates, but he doesn’t know what to do with the father status or the child, and doesn’t want to become a leader and be involved in politics. So, down with the King. He has a touch of the Magician, especially since we know he serves as mentor for young pilots in Bloodline. As for the Warrior, Han is brave but he has also gone into hiding and shied away from responsibility, notably when it comes to his son or his relationship with his wife. At the end of TFA, though, when he faces his son, after reconnecting with Leia, he is trying to achieve full potential of his possible roles in their fullness: by trying to bring back order and reclaiming his lost son as a King, by reonnecting with his loved ones as a Lover, by fighting back battles as a Warrior, and by playing sort of a mentor figure to Finn and Rey as a Magician.

So, arguably, the two main male characters of the OT, Luke and Han, qualify for possible full potential of masculinity in the ST… that they successfully achieve through their deaths… A death that they embrace, rather gracefully, for the sake of one individual… The Boy Ego… Kylo Ren/Ben Solo. Moore and Gillette state that, in order to achieve full potential of masculinity, there must be death, symbolic, psychological or spiritual. The boy Ego must die and resurrect. But the men I just mentioned, Luke and Han, do not die symbolically. They vanish and die quite literally . This does not lead to a new stage in their personal development except as in the sense of what Yoda explains in TLJ:” We are what they grow beyond”, a sentence that is really key as far as the theme I am developing here is concerned. Especially when you consider another key sentence uttered in TLJ: “The Supreme Leader is dead… Long live the Supreme Leader”. I do not think that it is by chance that this particular sentence is uttered here for the first time in the saga. Kylo/Ben is supposed to be what Han and Luke grow beyond, the former as a father and the latter as a mentor. As the legacy child, he is also the potential legacy man. So from boy psychology to man psychology.

Kylo, so far, is very much presented as a boy, a young teenager, not so much in age than in behavior and psychology. Which is why he is resented by many men. But as I have hopefully shown, previous main male characters were very much inscribed in boy psychology as well. It is the point of growing up stories.Like Anakin, he is quite the Divine Child through the potential of his bloodline, which means the Skywalker for sure, but for us the audience, he is also the son of uber fave Han Solo. When we meet him in TFA he is very much every active category of the different boy stages: the High Chair Tyrant, the precocious child who is a bit of a know it all, the Mama’s Boy, and the Grandstander Bully, which is reinforced by what we find out in the extra material about him as a child. But obviously we have already seen such a child take Vader’s route and this is not Vader 2.0, this is about finally accessing the full potential of masculinity. The Education of Kylo Ren. And TLJ shows him very much on his way. This is why Kylo will not die, or if he dies it will be symbolically, to resurrect as Moore and Gillette put it, “with a new, subordinate relationship to a previously unknown power or center”. He won’t die because Anakin, Luke, and Han already died for him to fully access his potential. They died so that, out of the Boy Ego, the King, the Warrior, the Lover, and the Magician could finally live to the full.



This is what we have at the end of TLJ:

1.Kylo has de facto become King … This is his status at the end of the movie, notably through the ritualistic “Long live…”

2.Kylo has shown that he was able of compassion, his whole relationship wih Rey is about feeling what the other feels, and it is as physical (ie sensusous, sensual) as it is psychological… we also know he used to practice calligraphy (connection with the arts, beauty)…The Lover…

3.The Magician… his skills as a pilot and as a Force user, the way he is mentoring Rey through their Force bonds. The Magician is also “the archetype of thoughtfulness and reflection, (…) the energy of introversion”, something that also fits Kylo who is a lot into meditation and introspection since TFA after all…

4.Kylo is obviousy a Warrior. Moore and Gillette state one very important thing about the Warrior: he is all about moving forward. I found these quotations on the full Warrior interesting in the light of what we know of Kylo:

We have already mentioned aggressiveness as one of the Warrior’s characteristics. Aggressiveness is a stance toward life that rouses, energises, motivates. It pushes us to take the offensive and to move out of the defensive or “holding” position about life’s tasks and problems. The samurai advice was always to “leap” into battle with the full potential of ki, or “vital energy” at your disposal.

This is very much Kylo’s stance, in the way he walks into a room or out of a shuttle, the way he leaps into battle in TFA or TLJ against, or even his stomp, or the way he is always motivating himself by channeling his pain (beating on his wound in TFA) or talking to himself (as for instance @madandmisquoted shows perfectly when lip-reading Kylo)… And finally, the way the authors use the training of the Marines as an example for the Warrior’s sense of self-discipline and split-second decision making struck a particular cord when you think of Adam Driver’s Marine training and the way he is still involved with the Army in his nonprofit organization that promotes the arts within the armed forces.

Potentially, Kylo has it all. Of course, naysayers can argue that he is still influenced by the shadow archetypes, as Vader was, when we see him as a sadist (torturing Poe) or a manipulator. His passion for destruction is also manifest through his anger in TFA and TLJ. This Shadow aspect is still very much him emulating Vader, and I would argue that this is probably more masochistic actually than sadistic. This is what the end of TFA and the whole of TLJ try to demonstrate: him accessing the shadow energies of Warrior and Magician has brought him nothing but physical and psychological agony. The deed of killing his father “split him to the bone”. On the other hand, when he accesses the full potential of the archetypes in TLJ and no longer the shadow versions,mostly the Warrior and the Lover in his relationship with Rey (let’s say throne room scene), this is him at his best, in control and powerful. According to Moore and Gillette:

Submission to the power of the mature masculine energies always brings forth a new masculine personality that is marked by calm, compassion, clarity of vision, and generativity.

This is how he appears when he “knows what he has to do”. And this is how I would love seeing him portrayed in ix when trying to access the full potential of King and Magician. And remember that the King needs a Queen, he needs to have children to signify generativity and generosity. Maybe we won’t get the generativity right away, just a hint, but I am counting on the generosity. Yes, I do believe in benevolent (Ben/evolution) Emperor. According to Moore and Gillette, men need to mix the “clearsightedness, deep understanding and reflection about ourselves and others” of the Magician with the “King’s concern for generativity and generosity, the Warrior’s ability to act decisively and with courage, and the Lover’s deep and convinced connectedness to all things”. Am I the only one who sees that Kylo has this possibly going on for him in IX?

This would be a tragic waste if they did not go this way, but , as we have said time and time again, why would we have all these allusions and references if this is not where the character and the story is going. We started the saga with a male character that wasted his potential at achieving the fullness of masculine archetypes and ended up in the Shadow, so to come full circle we need a character that steps out of the Shadow (that is also stepping out of the shadow of Vader) to “finish” what Anakin started. Kylo is a great male character. Period.

Maybe the reason why some boys and men resent him is that he is designed as to make Boy Psychology unattractive. He doesn’t obviously thrive on being the manipulator, the sadist, the bully, as Vader or any self-respecting villain would. So he can’t be the cool villain. Everything that some boys/men usually find cool in their villains or heroes is, through him, subverted. Kylo is not cool because Boy Psychology is not cool either. And as a mirror to immature personalities, it is tough to accept. But the glimpses we get of his struggles, and of the potential he has, and the man he could become and wants to become, those are awesome. This is a boy, a child in a mask in TFA, that really is all about becoming a man. A multidimensional man. It will be hard, it will be painful, it will go through trials and errors, but it will get there. Gloriously. Maybe guys who have a problem with Kylo not being man enough for them should wonder if they are not stuck in perpetual Boy Psychology…Men are not born right away into awesome great men.



To conclude, on another point, I think there are great parallels to draw with the other two main male characters in the ST. Finn, to me, has the same potential going on for him as Kylo. And I have already digressed on a post about the parallelism between the two characters. I could see Finn accessing all the full archetypes, especially if he ends up having a family with Rose. Finn is also a great male character. I am more on a fence about Poe… Arguably, Poe was not supposed to survive TFA, so maybe that is why I find his arc or character weaker. What I like about Poe as compared with Kylo, though, is that their respective arcs are chiastic in essence. In TFA, Poe is unequivocally a heroic figure and Kylo the bad guy. But TLJ subverts the expectations by bringing some shadow on Poe (he is dangerous) while simultaneously bringing some light on Kylo. It will be interesting to see if ix will pitch them against each other as irreconcilable or, because of this shifting in viii, will have them finally find some common ground. That being said, even if Poe also seems to receive an education in TLJ, I think the reason why he is more consensual is that he is a “safe” portrayal of masculinity. Add to that the appeal of charismatic Oscar Isaac. But safe does not mean better. More accurate. Or more inspiring. Poe has very little room for personal growth or development. So, as models, I think Kylo and Finn are way more inspiring. And awesome.

