Hope feels increasingly difficult to defend.
And of course, I don’t mean just within the Star Wars fandom. I mean generally, as a human.
Every day we are asked to absorb some new horror: war, authoritarianism, political violence, climate disaster, people seemingly becoming crueler to one another in increasingly creative ways. We have too much access information about human suffering and I, personally, don’t feel psychologically confident enough to process it all. I’ve begun wedging my phone between couch cushions; style me an ostrich.
Sometimes it feels like having hope, under these circumstances, requires a brainwave that I just don’t have. There’s something juvenile about admitting that you still believe things might get better. Cynicism feels smarter and sexier; almost certainly a safer choice.
So I’ve become more sensitive to moments where hope feels breathtakingly close. And of course like my exposure to worldwide widespread suffering, hope is closely tied to the media I consume.
Unfortunately (on a significantly less important but still spiritually relevant level), it is a terrible time to belong to a fandom.
We have been burned (a lot) in some many different directions. And it hurts my head and my heart. Style me a dramatic, fainting Lady. Where’s my kerchief? Where’s my fainting couch? Someone bring me my fainting couch. I’m so serious right now.
Forgive me for re-triggering all of us, but I’m still recovering from the final seasons of Game of Thrones. I’m not even going to bring up Conformity Gate because ugh.
And then there is Star Wars, a ride or die, a modern mythology, a franchise whose relationship with its audience occasionally feels like an elaborate psychological experiment designed to determine exactly how many times a person can say, “Okay, but maybe this will be good?” But more often, “Doesn’t Disney want to make money?!”
I say this with love. And like a smidge of rage and resentment, but whatever.
The strange thing about loving a story is that you have to give it some power over you. You have to care about what happens.
You also have to believe the details matter and trust that the people telling the story understand the emotional promises they’re making. You have to invest in characters knowing perfectly well that you have absolutely no control over what eventually happens to them.
In other words, being a fan requires hope.
And Star Wars, perhaps more than almost any modern mythology, has explicitly asked us to practice it.
Which brings me to the third and final essay in my increasingly elaborate case for why Disney should make The Hunt for Ben Solo.
In the first, I argued that killing Ben prevented the Skywalker saga from showing us something it desperately needed: a wounded man who heals and then actually has to live as that healed person. In the second, I argued that the sequel trilogy gave women something equally rare: the ability to believe there was goodness in a man, refuse him when he failed to live up to it, and ultimately be proven right.
Underneath both arguments was the same thing: Hope.
It’s not a hot take to say that the emotional core of every Star Wars film is hope. It’s pretty obvious at this point.
Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi hope there is still an Anakin underneath Darth Vader. (They were right).
Leia hopes her son isn’t gone. (She was right)
Rey hopes Ben Solo still exists underneath Kylo Ren. (She was right)
And we hope with them. That’s the deal.
There is a reason the first Star Wars movie is called A New Hope and not A Reasonable Chance of Success.
Hope is baked into the DNA of this story; it’s like the actual thesis. Hope is what remains when there is very little evidence left to support it. And that is precisely why Ben Solo’s ending bothers me so much.
Star Wars spends nine films teaching us that darkness is not destiny and that sometimes the person insisting, No, there is still good in him, isn’t naïve. In Star Wars, they’re almost always right.
The sequel trilogy asks us to believe all of that about Ben Solo. So we do. And we’re proven right.
But then he dies.
What happens after hope works?
This is where my beef grows bigger.
The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t leave Ben’s redemption ambiguous. It doesn’t suggest that Rey was foolish for seeing Ben Solo underneath Kylo Ren. Quite the opposite: she sees him more clearly than almost anyone else does. And eventually, he sees himself.
Kylo Ren disappears and Ben Solo returns. Hope worked!! But the story rewards all of that with death.
This is where I think Star Wars confuses redemption with hope.
We’ve already seen redemption through death. Anakin did it. He returns to himself, saves his son, kills Palpatine (not for good though!!), dies, becomes a Force ghost. Beautiful. No notes. Very mythological. Very demure. Congratulations to everyone involved.
But then, two generations later, we do literally the same thing to Ben. He returns to himself. Saves the person he loves. Dies. Copy and paste. Biblical. Lazy. Come on.
At this point I have to ask: is there anything on the other side of redemption besides a funeral?
Hope, at least to me, requires something more difficult than dying after you’ve finally made the right choice. It requires living with it— and that is the Ben Solo story I want to see.
I want to know how he lives with killing his father and how he faces the people he hurt. I wan to see an example of how you apologize when “I’m sorry” is hilariously insufficient because you’ve blown up someone’s home planet.
This is a harder story to tell but we need our writers need to be brave enough to explore it.
We need new stories
I think this ladders up to a larger problem: we need some fresh story architecture.
How long are we going to keep regurgitating the same biblical, Jungian, Campbellian archetypes? Man falls, descends into darkness, confronts himself, maybe saves a lady, and makes one enormous sacrifice. Then he dies. Sometimes he’s reborn/lives on, literally or symbolically, and we all go home.
At some point, I think we have to ask whether the stories we’ve inherited are capable of answering the questions we actually have now. Because we’ve gotten really good at telling stories about redemption as an event, but I’m much more interested in redemption as a practice.
Death is too lazy to be relevant anymore. Accountability and lived redemption is messy and mysterious and sexy.
If Ben dies saving Rey, we know exactly how we’re supposed to feel about him. But if we let him live and suddenly things get uncomfortable; there isn’t a clean answer for this. Or at least, there isn’t the one Hollywood wants to give us.
We live in a culture that is simultaneously obsessed with accountability and deeply confused about what is supposed to happen after someone takes it. We know how to expose wrongdoing, but we’re considerably less certain about what repair actually looks like. We need our stories to model moral authority, give us direction, not stop short because it’s easier.
This is the kind of story that feels useful to me now. At a moment when AI has us asking what human art is actually for, this feels like part of the answer. AI can replicate our stories and voices, but it will never have to live what we do to one another.
A mythology that can’t help us navigate the world we actually live in eventually stops functioning as mythology. It becomes nostalgia.
This why I find myself still hoping for this stupid movie.
A few months ago, I did something totally reasonable: I set up a Google Alert for “Ben Solo.” When you’re irrationally holding hope that a very cancelled sci-fi movie will somehow get greenlit, a Google Alert is a very good way of practicing hope.
It is, of course, my favorite email to open. Google delivering me Ben Solo-related scraps from the internet gives me tiny jolts of joy; a new interview, some new reporting, a rumor of questionable provenance, Adam Driver saying three words that are immediately analyzed like the Zapruder film. Tiny jolts!!
So far, nothing I would consider “good news”. But I keep opening it.
There are much bigger things in my life and in the world that I am desperately trying to remain hopeful about than whether a fictional man comes back from the dead. But I don’t think the small hopes are entirely unrelated to the big ones.
Stories are one of the places we learn what to do with hope. They let us practice believing in something before we know whether we’re right. Over and over again, Star Wars tells us that the person who refuses to give up isn’t necessarily naïve; sometimes they’re the only person who can see what hasn’t happened yet (or at least, that’s what I say when I gaslight myself).
Must be something in the air, I also felt the need to blog about Ben this week... Thanks for this series!
This was an amazing essay Alina!!