the TFA script is my friend
Jan. 27th, 2016 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineAwhile back, I was struggling with a quandary that only emerged as I tried to write my doomed-to-Jossing fic, but which had definitely been floating around the back of my mind for awhile. I wrote a post about it, but the short version:
1. Luke being absent is a huge deal, particularly for Leia. All indication is that he was very, very present in the family, and his disappearance was one of the ways the family fell apart in the wake of Ben's fall.
2. Sending Ben away--to Luke--was, also, a huge deal that estranged him from his parents.
If Luke being absent is so drastic a shift for the family, it seems strange that turning Ben over to Luke would also be a drastic shift.
Buuuut, now that I've finally got my greedy hands on the script, I think it actually does make sense, and fits well with what I was vaguely envisioning.
Han and Leia's summation is very brief, but this is what we have:
The script says this is the first time they've seen each other in years; the references to their fights and Han's departures/returns don't seem to refer to their relationship after the estrangement, but during the comparatively good times. It seems pretty clear that they must have been on Miscommunication Lane when they split. Leia doesn't know that Han thinks he's an intolerable reminder of Ben; Han doesn't know that she isn't trying to bury Ben's fall into her Alderaan-sized pit of painful things she tries not to think about. They have not had this conversation before.
Okaaaay. It's easy to kneejerk (at least if you're a Kylo Ren fan :P) to "what kind of asshole tells his wife that their son was just innately evil because of her genes?"
And that is what he's saying. They didn't make mistakes as parents, nor Luke as teacher/uncle; Ben inherited Vader's evil through Leia, and no matter what they did, he was going to turn out as Vader lite. There's a weird, sad comfort in it. It's awful, but it's not anyone's fault. This is Han's position. And the fact that this is his direct response to Leia saying she wants him back makes it sound like a warning, as much as anything. Not just that there wasn't anything they could have done differently, but there's nothing they can do now. He has too much Vader in him.
(The terrible irony: Ben's struggle is the exact opposite of Vader's, and he's no more like Anakin than Luke and Leia are--rather less, I'd say. And hell, Vader himself isn't a matter of too much Vader in him, much less Ben.)
Imagine being in Han's shoes. He's this atheist who gets by adventuring around the galaxy, but then the woman he loves turns out to be the daughter of his universe's Dark Messiah, and so is his best friend, they're twins with telepathy and assorted other magic powers. And he has a baby right away, and he loves him, and this child he loves turns out wildly magical and vulnerable and troubled. And if we go with the novelization, he doesn't know what's wrong; Leia hides it from him. She thinks that Luke is the only one who can understand their terrible heritage, and particularly worries that if Han knows, it'll just deepen the potential estrangement between him and Ben.
Han genuinely didn't know it was Snoke. He had no idea what went wrong, and just saw this fire-forged family of years blow apart. Something innately wrong is the only explanation he has, the only comfort he can cling to. And it's the comfort he tries to give Leia here; what she actually wants is flat-out impossible.
*ding*
Aaaaand there we've got it, folks.
Okay, there's a lot packed into this. But the main thing is that it doesn't actually make sense.
I mean, what she's saying makes sense. But it doesn't make sense as a reply to what Han just said. The "that's why" phrasing suggests an agreement with his position that Ben got his Vader Genes from her and was fucked from the get-go and nothing they did could make any difference. But what she goes on to say differs profoundly from what Han believes. Leia only agrees insofar as she thought that Ben did inherit the Skywalker vulnerabilities. She believed that being trained by Luke--the Skywalker uncle who came out the other side--would help Ben through the struggle, a far, cry from any kind of genetic fatalism. "There was too much Vader in him" is simply not what Leia actually believes.
Now let's consider those next two sentences: I just never should have sent him away. That's when I lost him.
This is an even more profound difference. She's outright rejecting Han's assertion that they couldn't have done anything, and instead insisting that the pivotal moment sprang not from any inherent quality of Ben's but from parental error. Her parental error: notice that she does not include Han himself in it. I should never have sent him away. I lost him.
So. Leia was the one calling the shots at home, which is ... well, honestly what anyone would expect. More specifically, she's the one who made that catastrophic decision. Leia sent Ben away. And the consequent loss of him to the Dark Side is Leia's loss.
There are a lot of ways to read that "I...I...I." It could be further emphasis on Leia as the primary actor, either in a somewhat egocentric way or in terms of culpability. But "I lost him. I lost you both" reads to me as more about Leia's sense of loss wrt Ben and then Han than about her responsibility for the loss. At this point, the loss of Ben is being framed as primarily Leia's loss, with Han more philosophical about it, though clearly pained.
Getting back to that in a sec, but there's another dimension to Leia's specific phrasing. "I did [x] because [y], I just should/shouldn't have done [z]" is ... a very common way to put things, actually. Like:
I could go on, but you get the picture. That formulation is always: what I was doing was in itself legit, but I made this one mistake in how I went about it, so the whole thing ended badly. It sounds like Leia is saying: I was right in having him train with Luke because of the Skywalker issues, I just shouldn't have sent him away from home to do it. Ben leaving home didn't have to follow from Ben training with Luke. As TFA suggests, Luke was around, not permanently cloistered in the Temple or whatever. He was training people to be Jedi, not 24/7 raising children.
Well. Maybe one child.
So. Ben could have trained with Luke without ever leaving home. Leia made the executive decision to have him sent to the Temple (or wherever) for the training, and in consequence, Ben and Han were lost to her.
So to cover the various dimensions going on here:
1. Han and Leia both thought (and still think) that Ben inherited his issues from Anakin.
2. Han believes that Ben inherited the wholesale Vader, and nothing they could do would have made any difference. There's no way to reach him because there's nothing to reach.
3. Leia believes that Ben inherited Skywalker issues that training with Luke could help him deal with; sending him away for that training was the fatal mistake.
4. Leia is the one who sent Ben away.
5. The loss of Ben to the Dark Side is primarily Leia's loss, though Luke and Han were both devastated in their own ways.
6. Han had no idea that Snoke personally seduced Ben to the Dark Side, which significantly alters his perspective.
7. Leia did know about it.
8. Leia also knows that Ben still has light in him and believes she and Han can extract him from the First Order. She doesn't hold his crimes against him; she just wants to get him out of Snoke's clutches and back home.
9. Han finds it difficult to believe he could reach Ben where Luke couldn't. Leia reminds him that he's Ben's father even though he's not a Jedi, and holds out hope. The script says that they both know it's very likely that he won't survive.
Furthermore, we know that Ben considers Han to be a disappointment, and knows he'll be forced to confront him eventually, even though it's Leia leading the Resistance and Han wandering around smuggling shit. Ben's actively seeking out a confrontation with Luke. He never mentions Leia or alludes to her existence, with the possible exception of this moment:
Right.
So obviously there's a lot in the air until VIII and/or IX, but there's also a lot to work with here. And we've gone from the Luke quandary that turns out to not be one to the Leia-Han conundrum.
So: in response to Leia's lingering hope for Ben's return, Han assures her that their decisions as parents are not the relevant factor. Leia responds that Ben's Skywalker temperament is why she--rightly--thought Luke would be the best person to help him, but she should not have sent him away. Han may very well be trying to lump their parental choices together to spare her any specific guilt; he certainly doesn't seem to hold it against her. My general impressions:
1) Leia was both the dominant parental authority in Ben's life, and the one closest to him. She made the decisions, she feels the greatest loss, she retains the most faith and drives the attempt to draw him back, she is the primary opponent on paper but he displaces that onto Han and Luke, and he's upset about the attack on the system she's in. She's also his connection to Vader, though we don't know how he feels about it.
2) Ben had a solid, respectful relationship with Luke, who was a significant presence in their lives even before Ben took up training with him. Han believes that Luke had a better rapport with Ben than he did, bound up in their shared affinity for the Force, identification with the Skywalker legacy, and master-apprentice relationship (possibly Leia did, too). One turn to the Dark Side later, all this gets warped into Kylo Ren's single-minded fixation on Luke as chief threat (and the only one that matters, until Rey).
3) Per #2, Han was somewhat insecure about his place in Ben's life by comparison to Leia and Luke's. He was actively kept out of the loop by Leia. Until informed otherwise, he finds it easier to believe that his beloved son is congenitally evil than that any of them contributed to his fall in any significant way. He nevertheless loves him and is willing to die trying to save him. Ben's feelings towards him are a mix of disappointment/contempt and real love; though he manages to follow his chosen path and kill him, he's shocked and horrified, and quickly descends into a total emotional meltdown.
But if that decision was specifically Leia's and not a mutual one, as it seems to be, where does Han fit into the picture at all? A few possibilities come to mind, though it's impossible to know:
1) The most obvious: Han wasn't in the picture at the time. We know he and Leia had a, let's say, tempestuous relationship:
So on the one hand, they had a loving marriage that was sometimes happy. On the other hand, they spent much (most?) of their time at each other's throats, and he'd periodically leave for awhile. One thing for adults with an on-again off-again relationship, quite another for a small child whose home life goes from stable with devoted, affectionate parents to explosions that culminate in his father up and disappearing for stretches. Over and over and over. It'd certainly work with adult Ben's bitter remark about his father: "He would have disappointed you." And with novelization!Leia fearing that if Han reacted badly to the revelation about Snoke, his relationship with Ben might be irreparably damaged--that makes the most sense if the relationship were already strained, and she worried it'd be the breaking point.
In that case, it's possible that Leia made the decision during one of Han's AWOL periods--possibly in part because it was one of Han's AWOL periods. She lost them both through the choice because Ben felt rejected even by his reliable parent, and was left particularly vulnerable to Snoke, and because Han was appalled when he found out she'd sent Ben away and they became largely estranged--completely so after Ben's fall.
2) The other one that comes pretty immediately to mind: far from being out of the picture, Han actually opposed the idea of sending Ben away. He and Leia fought about it, and ultimately he caved. Ben couldn't bring himself to resent Leia, and instead concentrated his resentment on Han as weak and foolish. Han disappointed him less through unreliability in terms of his actual presence, but rather in a failure to stick to his convictions.
3) The "eh" option. It's not that Han was completely uninvolved, and it's not that he was actively opposed. Han was a fairly easy-going, laissez-faire figure as parent, with Leia the one laying down the law. He was somewhat out of his depth by the time that Ben started having serious problems (especially because he didn't know where they were coming from). Leia came up with the idea of having Luke train him, and Han thought it seemed reasonable if his powers were causing that much trouble. She specifically thought it'd be best if he were sent away from home, to a peaceful and stable environment, and while it wasn't Han's idea, he regretfully went along with it.
For bonus sads: it's even possible that Ben already stayed with Luke on "vacations" while things were rough at home, specifically so he didn't have to deal with the issues of #1, and that actually seemed to work fine. So sending him to live with Luke might not have seemed that drastic a step to Leia--but to Ben, visiting his uncle and getting cool Jedi lessons and such was a world apart from his parents giving up on him and turning him over to his uncle. It could even have been the reason Leia specifically wanted Luke to train him away from home, even though it wasn't necessary.
1. Luke being absent is a huge deal, particularly for Leia. All indication is that he was very, very present in the family, and his disappearance was one of the ways the family fell apart in the wake of Ben's fall.
2. Sending Ben away--to Luke--was, also, a huge deal that estranged him from his parents.
If Luke being absent is so drastic a shift for the family, it seems strange that turning Ben over to Luke would also be a drastic shift.
Buuuut, now that I've finally got my greedy hands on the script, I think it actually does make sense, and fits well with what I was vaguely envisioning.
Han and Leia's summation is very brief, but this is what we have:
LEIA: You think I want to forget him? I want him back!
(Han looks at her with sympathy)
(Han looks at her with sympathy)
The script says this is the first time they've seen each other in years; the references to their fights and Han's departures/returns don't seem to refer to their relationship after the estrangement, but during the comparatively good times. It seems pretty clear that they must have been on Miscommunication Lane when they split. Leia doesn't know that Han thinks he's an intolerable reminder of Ben; Han doesn't know that she isn't trying to bury Ben's fall into her Alderaan-sized pit of painful things she tries not to think about. They have not had this conversation before.
HAN: There was nothing we could've done. (hard for him to say) There was too much Vader in him.
Okaaaay. It's easy to kneejerk (at least if you're a Kylo Ren fan :P) to "what kind of asshole tells his wife that their son was just innately evil because of her genes?"
And that is what he's saying. They didn't make mistakes as parents, nor Luke as teacher/uncle; Ben inherited Vader's evil through Leia, and no matter what they did, he was going to turn out as Vader lite. There's a weird, sad comfort in it. It's awful, but it's not anyone's fault. This is Han's position. And the fact that this is his direct response to Leia saying she wants him back makes it sound like a warning, as much as anything. Not just that there wasn't anything they could have done differently, but there's nothing they can do now. He has too much Vader in him.
(The terrible irony: Ben's struggle is the exact opposite of Vader's, and he's no more like Anakin than Luke and Leia are--rather less, I'd say. And hell, Vader himself isn't a matter of too much Vader in him, much less Ben.)
Imagine being in Han's shoes. He's this atheist who gets by adventuring around the galaxy, but then the woman he loves turns out to be the daughter of his universe's Dark Messiah, and so is his best friend, they're twins with telepathy and assorted other magic powers. And he has a baby right away, and he loves him, and this child he loves turns out wildly magical and vulnerable and troubled. And if we go with the novelization, he doesn't know what's wrong; Leia hides it from him. She thinks that Luke is the only one who can understand their terrible heritage, and particularly worries that if Han knows, it'll just deepen the potential estrangement between him and Ben.
Han genuinely didn't know it was Snoke. He had no idea what went wrong, and just saw this fire-forged family of years blow apart. Something innately wrong is the only explanation he has, the only comfort he can cling to. And it's the comfort he tries to give Leia here; what she actually wants is flat-out impossible.
LEIA: That's why I wanted him to train with Luke. I just never should have sent him away. That's when I lost him. That's when I lost you both.
*ding*
Aaaaand there we've got it, folks.
Okay, there's a lot packed into this. But the main thing is that it doesn't actually make sense.
I mean, what she's saying makes sense. But it doesn't make sense as a reply to what Han just said. The "that's why" phrasing suggests an agreement with his position that Ben got his Vader Genes from her and was fucked from the get-go and nothing they did could make any difference. But what she goes on to say differs profoundly from what Han believes. Leia only agrees insofar as she thought that Ben did inherit the Skywalker vulnerabilities. She believed that being trained by Luke--the Skywalker uncle who came out the other side--would help Ben through the struggle, a far, cry from any kind of genetic fatalism. "There was too much Vader in him" is simply not what Leia actually believes.
Now let's consider those next two sentences: I just never should have sent him away. That's when I lost him.
This is an even more profound difference. She's outright rejecting Han's assertion that they couldn't have done anything, and instead insisting that the pivotal moment sprang not from any inherent quality of Ben's but from parental error. Her parental error: notice that she does not include Han himself in it. I should never have sent him away. I lost him.
So. Leia was the one calling the shots at home, which is ... well, honestly what anyone would expect. More specifically, she's the one who made that catastrophic decision. Leia sent Ben away. And the consequent loss of him to the Dark Side is Leia's loss.
There are a lot of ways to read that "I...I...I." It could be further emphasis on Leia as the primary actor, either in a somewhat egocentric way or in terms of culpability. But "I lost him. I lost you both" reads to me as more about Leia's sense of loss wrt Ben and then Han than about her responsibility for the loss. At this point, the loss of Ben is being framed as primarily Leia's loss, with Han more philosophical about it, though clearly pained.
Getting back to that in a sec, but there's another dimension to Leia's specific phrasing. "I did [x] because [y], I just should/shouldn't have done [z]" is ... a very common way to put things, actually. Like:
I went to bed because I needed the rest, I just should have set the alarm.
I ate a big dinner because I missed lunch, I just shouldn't have eaten the shellfish.
I sang out loud because it's my favourite song, I just should have rolled up the window.
I could go on, but you get the picture. That formulation is always: what I was doing was in itself legit, but I made this one mistake in how I went about it, so the whole thing ended badly. It sounds like Leia is saying: I was right in having him train with Luke because of the Skywalker issues, I just shouldn't have sent him away from home to do it. Ben leaving home didn't have to follow from Ben training with Luke. As TFA suggests, Luke was around, not permanently cloistered in the Temple or whatever. He was training people to be Jedi, not 24/7 raising children.
So. Ben could have trained with Luke without ever leaving home. Leia made the executive decision to have him sent to the Temple (or wherever) for the training, and in consequence, Ben and Han were lost to her.
So to cover the various dimensions going on here:
1. Han and Leia both thought (and still think) that Ben inherited his issues from Anakin.
2. Han believes that Ben inherited the wholesale Vader, and nothing they could do would have made any difference. There's no way to reach him because there's nothing to reach.
3. Leia believes that Ben inherited Skywalker issues that training with Luke could help him deal with; sending him away for that training was the fatal mistake.
4. Leia is the one who sent Ben away.
5. The loss of Ben to the Dark Side is primarily Leia's loss, though Luke and Han were both devastated in their own ways.
6. Han had no idea that Snoke personally seduced Ben to the Dark Side, which significantly alters his perspective.
7. Leia did know about it.
8. Leia also knows that Ben still has light in him and believes she and Han can extract him from the First Order. She doesn't hold his crimes against him; she just wants to get him out of Snoke's clutches and back home.
9. Han finds it difficult to believe he could reach Ben where Luke couldn't. Leia reminds him that he's Ben's father even though he's not a Jedi, and holds out hope. The script says that they both know it's very likely that he won't survive.
Furthermore, we know that Ben considers Han to be a disappointment, and knows he'll be forced to confront him eventually, even though it's Leia leading the Resistance and Han wandering around smuggling shit. Ben's actively seeking out a confrontation with Luke. He never mentions Leia or alludes to her existence, with the possible exception of this moment:
SNOKE: Then the Resistance must be destroyed before they get to Skywalker.
GENERAL HUX: We have their location. We tracked their reconnaissance ship to the Ileenium system.
SNOKE: Good. Then we will crush them once and for all. Prepare the weapon.
Kylo Ren is stunned by the moment--that isn't what he meant at all--
GENERAL HUX: We have their location. We tracked their reconnaissance ship to the Ileenium system.
SNOKE: Good. Then we will crush them once and for all. Prepare the weapon.
Kylo Ren is stunned by the moment--that isn't what he meant at all--
Right.
So obviously there's a lot in the air until VIII and/or IX, but there's also a lot to work with here. And we've gone from the Luke quandary that turns out to not be one to the Leia-Han conundrum.
So: in response to Leia's lingering hope for Ben's return, Han assures her that their decisions as parents are not the relevant factor. Leia responds that Ben's Skywalker temperament is why she--rightly--thought Luke would be the best person to help him, but she should not have sent him away. Han may very well be trying to lump their parental choices together to spare her any specific guilt; he certainly doesn't seem to hold it against her. My general impressions:
1) Leia was both the dominant parental authority in Ben's life, and the one closest to him. She made the decisions, she feels the greatest loss, she retains the most faith and drives the attempt to draw him back, she is the primary opponent on paper but he displaces that onto Han and Luke, and he's upset about the attack on the system she's in. She's also his connection to Vader, though we don't know how he feels about it.
2) Ben had a solid, respectful relationship with Luke, who was a significant presence in their lives even before Ben took up training with him. Han believes that Luke had a better rapport with Ben than he did, bound up in their shared affinity for the Force, identification with the Skywalker legacy, and master-apprentice relationship (possibly Leia did, too). One turn to the Dark Side later, all this gets warped into Kylo Ren's single-minded fixation on Luke as chief threat (and the only one that matters, until Rey).
3) Per #2, Han was somewhat insecure about his place in Ben's life by comparison to Leia and Luke's. He was actively kept out of the loop by Leia. Until informed otherwise, he finds it easier to believe that his beloved son is congenitally evil than that any of them contributed to his fall in any significant way. He nevertheless loves him and is willing to die trying to save him. Ben's feelings towards him are a mix of disappointment/contempt and real love; though he manages to follow his chosen path and kill him, he's shocked and horrified, and quickly descends into a total emotional meltdown.
But if that decision was specifically Leia's and not a mutual one, as it seems to be, where does Han fit into the picture at all? A few possibilities come to mind, though it's impossible to know:
1) The most obvious: Han wasn't in the picture at the time. We know he and Leia had a, let's say, tempestuous relationship:
LEIA: No matter how much we fought, I've always hated watching you leave.
HAN: That's why I did it. So you'd miss me.
LEIA: I did miss you.
HAN: It wasn't all bad, was it? Some of it was ... good.
LEIA: ...Pretty good.
HAN: That's why I did it. So you'd miss me.
LEIA: I did miss you.
HAN: It wasn't all bad, was it? Some of it was ... good.
LEIA: ...Pretty good.
So on the one hand, they had a loving marriage that was sometimes happy. On the other hand, they spent much (most?) of their time at each other's throats, and he'd periodically leave for awhile. One thing for adults with an on-again off-again relationship, quite another for a small child whose home life goes from stable with devoted, affectionate parents to explosions that culminate in his father up and disappearing for stretches. Over and over and over. It'd certainly work with adult Ben's bitter remark about his father: "He would have disappointed you." And with novelization!Leia fearing that if Han reacted badly to the revelation about Snoke, his relationship with Ben might be irreparably damaged--that makes the most sense if the relationship were already strained, and she worried it'd be the breaking point.
In that case, it's possible that Leia made the decision during one of Han's AWOL periods--possibly in part because it was one of Han's AWOL periods. She lost them both through the choice because Ben felt rejected even by his reliable parent, and was left particularly vulnerable to Snoke, and because Han was appalled when he found out she'd sent Ben away and they became largely estranged--completely so after Ben's fall.
2) The other one that comes pretty immediately to mind: far from being out of the picture, Han actually opposed the idea of sending Ben away. He and Leia fought about it, and ultimately he caved. Ben couldn't bring himself to resent Leia, and instead concentrated his resentment on Han as weak and foolish. Han disappointed him less through unreliability in terms of his actual presence, but rather in a failure to stick to his convictions.
3) The "eh" option. It's not that Han was completely uninvolved, and it's not that he was actively opposed. Han was a fairly easy-going, laissez-faire figure as parent, with Leia the one laying down the law. He was somewhat out of his depth by the time that Ben started having serious problems (especially because he didn't know where they were coming from). Leia came up with the idea of having Luke train him, and Han thought it seemed reasonable if his powers were causing that much trouble. She specifically thought it'd be best if he were sent away from home, to a peaceful and stable environment, and while it wasn't Han's idea, he regretfully went along with it.
For bonus sads: it's even possible that Ben already stayed with Luke on "vacations" while things were rough at home, specifically so he didn't have to deal with the issues of #1, and that actually seemed to work fine. So sending him to live with Luke might not have seemed that drastic a step to Leia--but to Ben, visiting his uncle and getting cool Jedi lessons and such was a world apart from his parents giving up on him and turning him over to his uncle. It could even have been the reason Leia specifically wanted Luke to train him away from home, even though it wasn't necessary.
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on 2016-02-29 05:09 pm (UTC)Good luck with your scholarship :D
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