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anghraineI grumped under f-lock awhile back about a really bizarre anon on Tumblr who interrogated me about why I think intent and mental capacity affect moral culpability. Some three or four asks later, I lost patience with them, but my original response is maybe relevant to people's interests here.
(The immediate context was Kylo Ren wank, but I largely bypassed that for LET'S TALK ABOUT ETHICS.)
Anon:
Do you mind explaining what you mean about diminished capacity? I have a hard time getting where it matters. Even if the intent is not the same the end result doesn't change. In order to not excuse it, they both need to be treated the same.. I don't get how diminished capacity would make Kylo Ren somehow less immoral than Hux. He still did those things. Some things cannot be made up for.
Me:
The concept that intent does not alter the morality of crime is … completely contrary to how criminal law works. And most systems of ethics.
I’m a lot more interested in ethics than further villain wank, which I feel I have very thoroughly addressed, so I’m talking about the role of intent and capacity in morality here.
TW for murder, torture, rape, suicide, and disassociative depression/mania
Let’s start with the most obvious example. “Killing” and “murder” have different meanings. You can kill someone on accident–cause them to die through an action, but unintentionally. You cannot murder someone on accident, because murder by definition requires the intent to kill. They’re dead either way. The distinction is entirely in the motive of the killer.
Unintentional killing also varies in degrees of culpability by circumstance. A killer can be completely blameless, in that they were minding their own business and it’s through the actions of others that the killing occurred (someone jumping in front of your car, say). A killer can be criminally negligent; they didn’t mean to kill anyone, but they didn’t care enough to take precautions against it happening (drunk drivers).
With murder, it’s also differentiated by further gradations in intent. A murder in the heat of the moment is treated differently than a murder that is planned beforehand and carefully executed. Just as there’s an ethical distinction between killing by accident and killing on purpose, there’s a (finer) ethical distinction between impulsive murder and calculated murder. Acknowledging the ethical nuance does not excuse either murder.
For an even further dimension of the importance of intent in ethics and law, it’s possible for someone to be morally guilty of murder without themselves killing anyone at all. If someone intends the death of another human being, and arranges for that death to occur at the hand of another, they’re still ethically (and usually legally) guilty of murder. The person who does the killing may or may not be considered themself a murderer, depending on their capacity to act (a hired killer and a prisoner at gunpoint are ethically a world apart).
Coercing someone else to kill is a horrifying crime, by the way. Similarly, forcing someone to torture someone else is considered a form of torture in itself, and has similar psychological effects. The real torturer, ethically speaking, isn’t the person who flips the switch; it’s the one with a gun at that person’s head. The coerced party is another victim–who will have to live with what happened at their hand.
(In another fandom of mine, there’s a character who forces his young sons to torture animals; he himself is incapable of doing it. This is rightly presented as a matter of violence against the children as well as the animals.)
In US law, and implicitly in Canadian, there’s also the concept of depraved-heart murder, where the murderer commits an action not intended to kill, but which they knew perfectly well, or should have known, would result in someone’s death. It’s a matter of gross indifference to human life rather than malice. Again, the classification as murder comes down to the mindset of the perpetrator. This can also encompass a failure to act, out of sheer depraved indifference, that results in someone’s death. (Depraved-heart murder is also known as depraved indifference murder.)
(There is a very prominent case of a depraved-heart murder charge right now, but tbh I don’t want to trivialize it by naming it in the context of Star Wars villain wank. I’ll merely say that it’s a thing genuinely going on, and that any reasonable person would recognize what happened as murder.)
This is distinct from “oh my god did that person die” and from … just failing to save someone’s life. Not risking yourself for someone else is something to settle with your own conscience, but not a matter of murder. This only comes up when the action/inaction through indifference falls far short of the most basic decency.
(If you’re Christian, incidentally, this concept is implicit in the parable of the good Samaritan. Two people run across a severely injured, dying man and continue on their way. A third man acts appropriately and goes to help him. While they didn’t beat him, they would be ethically complicit had he died.)
I mentioned that capacity radically differentiates what would be the same action on paper. It’s also relevant on another end of the morality spectrum, so let’s leap there for a moment.
We talk about consent a lot (rightly!). But integral to the concept is informed consent. A person cannot meaningfully consent to anything, whether it’s surgery or sex, if they don’t understand what they’re consenting to. Real consent requires a capacity to consent to something.
This is the reason for the qualification of laws around sexual consent. A child cannot consent. Some mentally ill people cannot consent. Some drunk people cannot consent. And of course consent under coercion doesn’t count.
This is the basis of the concept of rape by fraud. That’s when, for instance, a man propositions the wife of his identical twin brother, and she consents believing him to be her husband. Because her consent was obtained under false pretenses, it is invalid, and thus the sex was ethically nonconsensual. Ergo, rape. (Likewise with similar circumstances to those mentioned before–coercion, complicity, gross indifference to someone’s current state, etc.)
Intent and capacity are absolutely integral to judging the morality/immorality of an action. They aren’t the sole determiners, no–it’s not murder if someone doesn’t actually die, say. But intent is what distinguishes murder from manslaughter from sheer misfortune. Capacity is what distinguishes the witness of a tragedy from a depraved-heart murderer.
And that takes us to diminished capacity.
It’s most notorious in the popular idea of innocence by insanity. However, traditionally the actual plea is “guilty by reason of insanity.” It’s understood that the person in question is the guilty party. But just as ethical consent requires the capacity to understand what one is consenting to, ethical culpability requires the capacity to understand what one is doing. It’s a matter of both what you understand and what you’re capable of understanding.
If someone lacks all capacity to make a moral judgment in the case, through no fault of their own, they cannot be considered moral agents. Even if they are at other times. This isn’t common, but it does happen. Capacity can be diminished to the point that someone can’t be held responsible for their own actions.
What’s much more common, of course, is the fuzzier area of what are usually termed mitigating factors. These are … very poorly understood, in my experience, because people seem to have difficulty conceptualizing anything between complete moral responsibility and a complete lack of it. All that matters are 1) feelings!!! or 2) choices!!!
Both are wrong. There would be no distinction between murder and manslaughter if intent were not relevant; there would be no distinction between murder and attempted murder if consequences were not relevant.
Most simply defined, mitigating factors are circumstances which lessen the gravity of an offense. Ethically speaking, then, mitigating factors are circumstances which lessen the moral agency of the offense’s perpetrator. “So-and-so made their choice” (this rhetoric is really, really not just about Kylo Ren) is predicated on the understanding, or assumption, that So-and-so is fully capable of making moral choices.
Mental issues are rarely exculpating factors, in crime or anything else. But they are almost always mitigating ones, because they affect the capacity to accurately perceive and/or understand and/or process and/or act. By “rarely exculpating,” I mean that in very few cases do the various mental issues that affect people’s judgment completely do away with their judgment. There’s still a certain amount of agency.
But one of the problems with mental issues is that they skew your perception of reality–including your perception of how much agency you have. That can go either way: a sense that you can’t choose anything when you can, but also you might be unable to recognize the thought processes that are really symptoms or results of your condition. They seem reasonable at the time–it feels like you’re the one seeing clearly and everyone else is irrational.
Consider: an extremely common symptom of trauma is lashing out at “safe” loved ones. It happens pretty often with autism, too, for different reasons. In both cases, they can be considered to be acting wrongly. But they cannot be considered morally equivalent to someone who lashes out at others out of pure selfishness.
Going deeper down that rabbit hole, here’s some anecdata that will probably make it clear why I find the “people sympathize with Kylo Ren? HOW DARE” rhetoric so repugnant.
I’m bipolar, with mild mania and disassociative depression. If you don’t know, disassociation is a sense of detachment from reality (not lack of reality, as in psychosis, but feeling separated from it). In my case, it’s depersonalization–a subtype where the sense of detachment is from your own body and emotions. You cry, and it feels like you’re not sad, your body is dripping water from its eyes of its own accord and you can’t control it. You look in the mirror, and it feels like it’s not you. You remember the past, and it’s like clips out of a movie about someone else.
If you do remember, that is, because severe disassociation can strain the psyche so much that you “check out.” You pass beyond feeling that your experiences aren’t really yours, to actually forgetting them. And you’re faced with the things you did or didn’t do when you were disassociating that you would never have done in your right mind. It feels like it was someone else.
At the worst point in all of this, I could only describe it as “sometimes, I’m myself, and I understand everything and remember. But sometimes, I’m not myself. When I’m not myself, I don’t care about things that are actually important to me, and I get upset over things that I don’t really care about, like I’m a separate person, even though I know intellectually that I’m not. And then I’ll be myself again, and it doesn’t feel like it was me. It feels like waking up, but I know that it’s going to come back, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when I’m not me again.”
And the thing I had to wrangle with was that when I wasn’t myself, I was myself, and to a certain extent I operated on the same values and reasoning. But my ability to understand myself, and what my choices actually meant, and what the consequences were–those were shot. In that mental state, my understanding and agency were incredibly compromised. But it didn’t feel like they were. I felt like I saw everything clearer that way, to my own despair.
Eventually–this was nine years ago last Christmas, which unlike the rest is seared across my memory–I switched back to “myself” and was horrified by suicide notes I’d written as not-myself. I became terrified that I would commit suicide in one of the not-myself phases. I soon started flipping back and forth constantly, and in a not-myself phase in February, eventually did try to kill myself. At the time, I did it for what seemed a perfectly rational reason: I’d missed a paper in my Shakespeare class.
It seems absurd now. Thankfully, it also seemed absurd five minutes after I’d overdosed, and I called my mother in terror.
But–okay, this is an enormous reason I loathe the “but choices!!!!” rhetoric, especially as applied to Kylo Ren, with all my soul.
As myself, I thought suicide would be wrong and selfish of me, because I had people who loved me and would be devastated. And I simply didn’t want to kill myself. I was afraid of it. To this day, I’m terrified of dying. But I did it, and while myself/not-myself remain the only way I can conceptualize what this is like, I was myself. At my best, I identify my value with my academic success and worry obsessively about my performance. It was kicked off by my own values, just hideously warped.
Can a hideously warped version of myself be considered really me? Am I responsible for what I do when I’m mentally compromised? I wouldn’t say that I’m not at all. It’s not like I lose all capacity–I get up, usually eat, might go to class, write. I certainly wouldn’t say that I can’t take any credit for things I write in altered mood. But it’s also not the same credit.
Normally I’m a slow writer, but I once wrote a YA novel-length fic in two and a half months of mania and depression. It’s in my style, about my favourite characters, filled with my interests and preoccupations and tendencies–very much an “Anghraine” thing. It’s mine. It’s even under my AO3 account, for those who want a ring-side seat to the crazy. But it also doesn’t feel like mine in the way that something I actually remember writing is. My brain is behind its existence, so yeah, mine, but it seems less something I did than something that happened to me.
If the same rationale applies to less neutral actions, then–yes, there’s responsibility. But it’s not the same responsibility as when I’m more or less in my right mind, nor as someone who commits the same wrong but has no mental issues to compromise their judgment in the first place.
I believe firmly that the same actions in different states of mind–that is, with different capacity and intent–are not morally equivalent. I do not see how anyone could honestly see it differently.
But I also have to believe that to live with myself. I spent years afterwards coming to terms with not just that incident, but the many incidents that happened, and still happen, with disassociation and mania. I constantly struggle to balance personal responsibility with the impact of my diseases.
And here’s the thing: subjectively if not literally, I’ve had someone inside my head. If you’ve never been through that, you don’t know what it’s like. You have no idea. Nobody can know how terrifying it is, how enraging, the actual horror of not knowing what you might do when that seeps into your head (or, in the moment: when it seeps out). You can be surrounded by people that love you and you can’t hear them because it’s someone else’s life. You can have everything, on paper, and “throw it all away” because living like that is an intolerable burden, and some of us are “weak” enough to break.
Quotes because fuck that.
(The immediate context was Kylo Ren wank, but I largely bypassed that for LET'S TALK ABOUT ETHICS.)
Anon:
Do you mind explaining what you mean about diminished capacity? I have a hard time getting where it matters. Even if the intent is not the same the end result doesn't change. In order to not excuse it, they both need to be treated the same.. I don't get how diminished capacity would make Kylo Ren somehow less immoral than Hux. He still did those things. Some things cannot be made up for.
Me:
The concept that intent does not alter the morality of crime is … completely contrary to how criminal law works. And most systems of ethics.
I’m a lot more interested in ethics than further villain wank, which I feel I have very thoroughly addressed, so I’m talking about the role of intent and capacity in morality here.
TW for murder, torture, rape, suicide, and disassociative depression/mania
Let’s start with the most obvious example. “Killing” and “murder” have different meanings. You can kill someone on accident–cause them to die through an action, but unintentionally. You cannot murder someone on accident, because murder by definition requires the intent to kill. They’re dead either way. The distinction is entirely in the motive of the killer.
Unintentional killing also varies in degrees of culpability by circumstance. A killer can be completely blameless, in that they were minding their own business and it’s through the actions of others that the killing occurred (someone jumping in front of your car, say). A killer can be criminally negligent; they didn’t mean to kill anyone, but they didn’t care enough to take precautions against it happening (drunk drivers).
With murder, it’s also differentiated by further gradations in intent. A murder in the heat of the moment is treated differently than a murder that is planned beforehand and carefully executed. Just as there’s an ethical distinction between killing by accident and killing on purpose, there’s a (finer) ethical distinction between impulsive murder and calculated murder. Acknowledging the ethical nuance does not excuse either murder.
For an even further dimension of the importance of intent in ethics and law, it’s possible for someone to be morally guilty of murder without themselves killing anyone at all. If someone intends the death of another human being, and arranges for that death to occur at the hand of another, they’re still ethically (and usually legally) guilty of murder. The person who does the killing may or may not be considered themself a murderer, depending on their capacity to act (a hired killer and a prisoner at gunpoint are ethically a world apart).
Coercing someone else to kill is a horrifying crime, by the way. Similarly, forcing someone to torture someone else is considered a form of torture in itself, and has similar psychological effects. The real torturer, ethically speaking, isn’t the person who flips the switch; it’s the one with a gun at that person’s head. The coerced party is another victim–who will have to live with what happened at their hand.
(In another fandom of mine, there’s a character who forces his young sons to torture animals; he himself is incapable of doing it. This is rightly presented as a matter of violence against the children as well as the animals.)
In US law, and implicitly in Canadian, there’s also the concept of depraved-heart murder, where the murderer commits an action not intended to kill, but which they knew perfectly well, or should have known, would result in someone’s death. It’s a matter of gross indifference to human life rather than malice. Again, the classification as murder comes down to the mindset of the perpetrator. This can also encompass a failure to act, out of sheer depraved indifference, that results in someone’s death. (Depraved-heart murder is also known as depraved indifference murder.)
(There is a very prominent case of a depraved-heart murder charge right now, but tbh I don’t want to trivialize it by naming it in the context of Star Wars villain wank. I’ll merely say that it’s a thing genuinely going on, and that any reasonable person would recognize what happened as murder.)
This is distinct from “oh my god did that person die” and from … just failing to save someone’s life. Not risking yourself for someone else is something to settle with your own conscience, but not a matter of murder. This only comes up when the action/inaction through indifference falls far short of the most basic decency.
(If you’re Christian, incidentally, this concept is implicit in the parable of the good Samaritan. Two people run across a severely injured, dying man and continue on their way. A third man acts appropriately and goes to help him. While they didn’t beat him, they would be ethically complicit had he died.)
I mentioned that capacity radically differentiates what would be the same action on paper. It’s also relevant on another end of the morality spectrum, so let’s leap there for a moment.
We talk about consent a lot (rightly!). But integral to the concept is informed consent. A person cannot meaningfully consent to anything, whether it’s surgery or sex, if they don’t understand what they’re consenting to. Real consent requires a capacity to consent to something.
This is the reason for the qualification of laws around sexual consent. A child cannot consent. Some mentally ill people cannot consent. Some drunk people cannot consent. And of course consent under coercion doesn’t count.
This is the basis of the concept of rape by fraud. That’s when, for instance, a man propositions the wife of his identical twin brother, and she consents believing him to be her husband. Because her consent was obtained under false pretenses, it is invalid, and thus the sex was ethically nonconsensual. Ergo, rape. (Likewise with similar circumstances to those mentioned before–coercion, complicity, gross indifference to someone’s current state, etc.)
Intent and capacity are absolutely integral to judging the morality/immorality of an action. They aren’t the sole determiners, no–it’s not murder if someone doesn’t actually die, say. But intent is what distinguishes murder from manslaughter from sheer misfortune. Capacity is what distinguishes the witness of a tragedy from a depraved-heart murderer.
And that takes us to diminished capacity.
It’s most notorious in the popular idea of innocence by insanity. However, traditionally the actual plea is “guilty by reason of insanity.” It’s understood that the person in question is the guilty party. But just as ethical consent requires the capacity to understand what one is consenting to, ethical culpability requires the capacity to understand what one is doing. It’s a matter of both what you understand and what you’re capable of understanding.
If someone lacks all capacity to make a moral judgment in the case, through no fault of their own, they cannot be considered moral agents. Even if they are at other times. This isn’t common, but it does happen. Capacity can be diminished to the point that someone can’t be held responsible for their own actions.
What’s much more common, of course, is the fuzzier area of what are usually termed mitigating factors. These are … very poorly understood, in my experience, because people seem to have difficulty conceptualizing anything between complete moral responsibility and a complete lack of it. All that matters are 1) feelings!!! or 2) choices!!!
Both are wrong. There would be no distinction between murder and manslaughter if intent were not relevant; there would be no distinction between murder and attempted murder if consequences were not relevant.
Most simply defined, mitigating factors are circumstances which lessen the gravity of an offense. Ethically speaking, then, mitigating factors are circumstances which lessen the moral agency of the offense’s perpetrator. “So-and-so made their choice” (this rhetoric is really, really not just about Kylo Ren) is predicated on the understanding, or assumption, that So-and-so is fully capable of making moral choices.
Mental issues are rarely exculpating factors, in crime or anything else. But they are almost always mitigating ones, because they affect the capacity to accurately perceive and/or understand and/or process and/or act. By “rarely exculpating,” I mean that in very few cases do the various mental issues that affect people’s judgment completely do away with their judgment. There’s still a certain amount of agency.
But one of the problems with mental issues is that they skew your perception of reality–including your perception of how much agency you have. That can go either way: a sense that you can’t choose anything when you can, but also you might be unable to recognize the thought processes that are really symptoms or results of your condition. They seem reasonable at the time–it feels like you’re the one seeing clearly and everyone else is irrational.
Consider: an extremely common symptom of trauma is lashing out at “safe” loved ones. It happens pretty often with autism, too, for different reasons. In both cases, they can be considered to be acting wrongly. But they cannot be considered morally equivalent to someone who lashes out at others out of pure selfishness.
Going deeper down that rabbit hole, here’s some anecdata that will probably make it clear why I find the “people sympathize with Kylo Ren? HOW DARE” rhetoric so repugnant.
I’m bipolar, with mild mania and disassociative depression. If you don’t know, disassociation is a sense of detachment from reality (not lack of reality, as in psychosis, but feeling separated from it). In my case, it’s depersonalization–a subtype where the sense of detachment is from your own body and emotions. You cry, and it feels like you’re not sad, your body is dripping water from its eyes of its own accord and you can’t control it. You look in the mirror, and it feels like it’s not you. You remember the past, and it’s like clips out of a movie about someone else.
If you do remember, that is, because severe disassociation can strain the psyche so much that you “check out.” You pass beyond feeling that your experiences aren’t really yours, to actually forgetting them. And you’re faced with the things you did or didn’t do when you were disassociating that you would never have done in your right mind. It feels like it was someone else.
At the worst point in all of this, I could only describe it as “sometimes, I’m myself, and I understand everything and remember. But sometimes, I’m not myself. When I’m not myself, I don’t care about things that are actually important to me, and I get upset over things that I don’t really care about, like I’m a separate person, even though I know intellectually that I’m not. And then I’ll be myself again, and it doesn’t feel like it was me. It feels like waking up, but I know that it’s going to come back, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when I’m not me again.”
And the thing I had to wrangle with was that when I wasn’t myself, I was myself, and to a certain extent I operated on the same values and reasoning. But my ability to understand myself, and what my choices actually meant, and what the consequences were–those were shot. In that mental state, my understanding and agency were incredibly compromised. But it didn’t feel like they were. I felt like I saw everything clearer that way, to my own despair.
Eventually–this was nine years ago last Christmas, which unlike the rest is seared across my memory–I switched back to “myself” and was horrified by suicide notes I’d written as not-myself. I became terrified that I would commit suicide in one of the not-myself phases. I soon started flipping back and forth constantly, and in a not-myself phase in February, eventually did try to kill myself. At the time, I did it for what seemed a perfectly rational reason: I’d missed a paper in my Shakespeare class.
It seems absurd now. Thankfully, it also seemed absurd five minutes after I’d overdosed, and I called my mother in terror.
But–okay, this is an enormous reason I loathe the “but choices!!!!” rhetoric, especially as applied to Kylo Ren, with all my soul.
As myself, I thought suicide would be wrong and selfish of me, because I had people who loved me and would be devastated. And I simply didn’t want to kill myself. I was afraid of it. To this day, I’m terrified of dying. But I did it, and while myself/not-myself remain the only way I can conceptualize what this is like, I was myself. At my best, I identify my value with my academic success and worry obsessively about my performance. It was kicked off by my own values, just hideously warped.
Can a hideously warped version of myself be considered really me? Am I responsible for what I do when I’m mentally compromised? I wouldn’t say that I’m not at all. It’s not like I lose all capacity–I get up, usually eat, might go to class, write. I certainly wouldn’t say that I can’t take any credit for things I write in altered mood. But it’s also not the same credit.
Normally I’m a slow writer, but I once wrote a YA novel-length fic in two and a half months of mania and depression. It’s in my style, about my favourite characters, filled with my interests and preoccupations and tendencies–very much an “Anghraine” thing. It’s mine. It’s even under my AO3 account, for those who want a ring-side seat to the crazy. But it also doesn’t feel like mine in the way that something I actually remember writing is. My brain is behind its existence, so yeah, mine, but it seems less something I did than something that happened to me.
If the same rationale applies to less neutral actions, then–yes, there’s responsibility. But it’s not the same responsibility as when I’m more or less in my right mind, nor as someone who commits the same wrong but has no mental issues to compromise their judgment in the first place.
I believe firmly that the same actions in different states of mind–that is, with different capacity and intent–are not morally equivalent. I do not see how anyone could honestly see it differently.
But I also have to believe that to live with myself. I spent years afterwards coming to terms with not just that incident, but the many incidents that happened, and still happen, with disassociation and mania. I constantly struggle to balance personal responsibility with the impact of my diseases.
And here’s the thing: subjectively if not literally, I’ve had someone inside my head. If you’ve never been through that, you don’t know what it’s like. You have no idea. Nobody can know how terrifying it is, how enraging, the actual horror of not knowing what you might do when that seeps into your head (or, in the moment: when it seeps out). You can be surrounded by people that love you and you can’t hear them because it’s someone else’s life. You can have everything, on paper, and “throw it all away” because living like that is an intolerable burden, and some of us are “weak” enough to break.
Quotes because fuck that.
no subject
on 2016-04-27 06:46 pm (UTC)Also, but I just went back and read the original question and HOLY HELL WTF, I am looking at this person being like "I have a hard time getting where [diminished capacity] matters". Because, apparently, to this person, if, say, a little kid ran up to someone at a pool party to hug them and knocked the person into the pool and they drowned, that is totally the same thing as a grown-ass adult deliberately pushing the person into the pool and they drowned. Augh, I am sitting here alternately flapping my hands in horror and trying to type this. AUGH AUGH AUGH. HOW. HOW. HOW. HOW can people not get this? Would they throw a small child in jail forever for wanting to hug someone? Because, hey, either way, the person died, right?
And the idea of "things that cannot be made up for"... would you like me to start on that one? Would you? Because. Ugh. I mean, setting aside the fact that the entire arc of the preceding six movies in the series plus two TV shows and assorted now-decanonized tie-ins is, in fact, the idea of the very person Kylo Ren worships most doing tons of awful shit and then being brought back to the good side, hello, this is Star Wars, redemption arcs are go?
But, more generally, it's like, repentance and the choice to change (and getting help for mental-health issues on the other hand), what are those even? (And concomitantly the absolute right of people who have been wronged by a repentant person to decide that that would very much prefer that the person go repent somewhere that the wronged person is not.) (I always think Leia would be like this with a post-RotJ!Anakin if he'd lived. Like, "Fine, I know Luke is glad to have you, but my actual father was Bail Organa who's dead because of your crony Tarkin and also there was that probe droid thing, I get that you're back on the Light side, but go be on the Light side somewhere I don't have to deal with you." Which I would expect a redeemed!Anakin to respect, albeit possibly with occasional puppy-eyes-of-woe-at-one-remove for Luke, who would be like, "No, Father, I am not getting in the middle of you and my sister; for one thing, that's the unstoppable force and the immovable object, and for another I love you both.") (Wow, I wandered far afield fast on that one, but, seriously, I can't talk about Kylo without talking about his whole fucking family both Doylistically and Watsonianly, not least because almost nobody else in the movie seems to be able to, either. I mean, literally the second thing anyone says to him on screen is "I know where you come from." Oh, Kylo, your family legacy BS is as epic as your family itself.)
no subject
on 2016-04-28 12:30 pm (UTC)