Ben Solo and the tragedy in the great lie of Darth Vader's darkness

No matter how passionately I feel about Star Wars (and I think my work here reflects that obsession), I try to respect other people's theories about what we already know and what is still to be released.

One notable exception was in 2019 when I attended a panel at Salt Lake City's FanX convention. During a panel on what we could expect from The Rise of Skywalker, they speculated on whether Ben Solo would ever stop listening to Darth Vader and break free of the Dark Side. It was at that point that I went to the audience microphone and said, "Anakin Skywalker died in the light. Whoever has been telling Ben Solo to turn, it is not his grandfather." As we now know, I was right about that.

Now years later with some retrospective, let's take a look back at the heir to Vader's darkness for now.

"I will finish what you started."

I remember when I first disagreed with something in Star Wars media. I had found Dark Empire at a comic store and saw Luke Skywalker kneel before the Emperor and say, "Yes. My father's destiny is my own." The caption read, "There is no other way." I kept reading because I wanted to see how it played out, but also because it gave context to a book I had just read. In Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Search, Luke says this:

"During the previous year of violent strife, Luke had been whisked away to the resurrected Emperor's stronghold in the galactic core, and there he had allowed himself to learn the dark side. He had become the Emperor's chief lieutenant, just like his father, Darth Vader. The struggle had been great within him, and only with the help, and the friendship and the love of Leia and Han had he been able to break free..."

- Luke Skywalker

With all due respect to Tom Veitch, Cam Kennedy, Todd Klein, and Dave Dorman, I felt bone-deep that Luke's father, who died a Jedi, would not have wanted him to take up the family mantle on the dark side. This is why I felt the same when Kylo Ren implored his grandfather to show him "the power of the darkness" in Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The helmet he addresses is twisted and empty, just like the promises of the dark side.

Joseph Goebbels, a famed propagandist in the Third Reich, said that, "A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth." We don't know nearly enough to judge Ben Solo for his turn, but we know that by the time of Claudia Gray's Bloodline, "[Leia] hadn't even told Ben yet" about his heritage, and "she needed to explain to Ben that they'd kept from telling him because they'd wanted to find the right moment." He was not raised to think of his identity as the grandson of Darth Vader, but we know from Kristin Baver's Skywalker: A Family At War that he felt disillusioned over the revelation.

Like Anakin Skywalker, Ben Solo began his turn to the dark side in a place of pain, and he turned on the Jedi who had betrayed him for his potential if any of the accounts in The Last Jedi are to be believed. The initial act of evil was cataclysmic, and further choices on the path to darkness became increasingly easy. Kylo Ren would sympathize with Darth Vader's assertion that "it is too late" for him to let go of his hate. He stops short of believing that Vader was wrong.

If we take it as true that "a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth," the lie is that Darth Vader has anything to do with his destiny. Just as Rey's fate is separate from her birthright as a Palpatine, Ben is meant to be heir to "that mighty Skywalker bloodline."

It is in dismissing the lies that he is able to return to the light.