Oh, man, Matt Stover is GREAT!!!!! I love Shatterpoint; Mace Windu FTW and it's one of the SW novels where I actually feel like I'm in a real-life war memoir. And, oh, yes, Star Wars multiverse FTW. *looks at reams of drawerfic*
...so I almost never engage about Ben Solo with folks who don't love him like I do--- to each their own and there are plenty of popular characters in various series that I don't like! And I don't want to make you feel I'm jumping on you in particular.
...but this is possibly the first time I've seen a thread in Star Wars fandom where there is near-perfect context for me to talk about what I love about him, so I hope you can forgive my doing it here?
Namely, that trope that annathecrow and I were talking about up above, "Babies Ever After"? That we find really alienating and frustrating? And I'm not sure if this is entirely within the trope, but specifically the expectation that favorite characters in beloved pairings/families are always going to be in a good place to parent a biological child of theirs, especially at the "end" of a story.
And for me, I love how Ben Solo is such a subversion of this concept, and it's one I've wanted to see in some fandom I love since forever. And specifically he is exactly the person I would expect to come out of Han, Leia, and Luke trying to (more or less) co-parent a kid at the point in their lives that they did and with all the personal and professional situations/challenges/trauma they were dealing with, especially around family stuff. To borrow something Timothy Zahn's said about how he created both Mara and Thrawn--- when you put together all of the factors around the character/s involved, that is just who falls out. (I mean, I probably could do the equivalent of the margin notes that Zahn did for the anniversary edition of Heir to the Empire for how he created Mara and Thrawn about why Ben makes so much sense to me, but that qualifies as TL;DR and possibly pile-on territory.)
(The flip side is that I love Adam Driver's acting in the ST, and while on one level I could be sold on him as Jacen Solo, Ben is actually more interesting to me.)
no subject
...so I almost never engage about Ben Solo with folks who don't love him like I do--- to each their own and there are plenty of popular characters in various series that I don't like! And I don't want to make you feel I'm jumping on you in particular.
...but this is possibly the first time I've seen a thread in Star Wars fandom where there is near-perfect context for me to talk about what I love about him, so I hope you can forgive my doing it here?
Namely, that trope that
And for me, I love how Ben Solo is such a subversion of this concept, and it's one I've wanted to see in some fandom I love since forever. And specifically he is exactly the person I would expect to come out of Han, Leia, and Luke trying to (more or less) co-parent a kid at the point in their lives that they did and with all the personal and professional situations/challenges/trauma they were dealing with, especially around family stuff. To borrow something Timothy Zahn's said about how he created both Mara and Thrawn--- when you put together all of the factors around the character/s involved, that is just who falls out. (I mean, I probably could do the equivalent of the margin notes that Zahn did for the anniversary edition of Heir to the Empire for how he created Mara and Thrawn about why Ben makes so much sense to me, but that qualifies as TL;DR and possibly pile-on territory.)
(The flip side is that I love Adam Driver's acting in the ST, and while on one level I could be sold on him as Jacen Solo, Ben is actually more interesting to me.)