Anghraine

Wow as HELL. This is an amazing piece of meta. And, like--- the "objective" or laying-out-of-logic part up front is awesome, and then the sheer fucking courage of laying out your personal stuff like that is amazing. And more to the point spot-fucking-on. (I could rant about how weird as FUCK to me fandom's othering of Kylo Ren is, but. I think I will just give my Kylo Ren plushie a hug instead; that's a more fun use of my time. ;) )

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.)