So I’m starting to realize that my personal perspective on characters like Snape, Kylo Ren, and (sorry) Darth Vader and their ‘redemption’ is basically based in the fact that I grew up watching Xena: Warrior Princess. (And if I get anything I’m about to say wrong, @meso-mijali , let me know.)
For anyone who doesn’t know, Xena spent like ten years as an evil murdering warlord. (Though – and this is important – she always had a Don’t Kill Women and Children policy. No baby deaths. An almost-baby death is one of the things that eventually started her on the path to Good.)
And she wears her infamy like a cloak – it follows her. She didn’t choose a new name when she started killing innocent people – she was Xena. The same Xena as the well-intentioned farm girl she used to be. And after she turned Good, she was still Xena. It was all part of her legacy. Throughout the series, many people hate her, spit on her, and try to exact their revenge for the things she’d done. She spends much of the series walking an interesting line – someone who knows she deserves whatever they want to dish out, but doesn’t want to die. Someone who’s come close to letting herself be executed more than once. There’s an episode – a terrible episode, but it had an interesting ending – that culminated in some of the other characters being cleansed/forgiven of their sins at some temple or another. Xena walked away because she didn’t think she deserved it.
And the thing is, she spends the series living. Because she might as well. Because no one thing – not her trial and death, not her saving someone’s life, or a thousand people’s lives, could ever make up for what she had done. Saving one life doesn’t cancel out taking another – and even if it had, she’d have had to toil for decades to even come close to evening the score. What she has to do, the only thing she can do, is spend the rest of her time on this earth doing Good. Helping people. Making things right.
Even while she has friends who would absolve her of her wrongdoings, the main narrative supports her perspective, not theirs. It reminds us that the scales will never balance.
One life saved, or one person loved, does not redemption make. Not for someone who has committed – or is complicit in – mass murder.
And that’s why for me – and I’m not saying it has to hold true for anyone else, but in the way I personally perceive these types of media – Severus Snape saving the Wizarding World and sacrificing himself for the love of Lily? Or Vader deciding EVENTUALLY that he didn’t want to watch his son get tortured to death? Or Kylo Ren doing LITERALLY ANYTHING THEY MAKE HIM DO IN THE NEXT MOVIES (THAT I CAN CURRENTLY FORSEE), it doesn’t even matter what?
It doesn’t actually matter to me. I am so, so sorry. I see how it could, personally and subjectively, matter to a person like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, when they see that sacrifice. But not to me, because at that point they’ve DONE TOO MUCH AWFUL SHIT for it to be overshadowed by one act.
Because it is VERY. EASY. to care about someone who is DIRECTLY RELATED TO YOU. Some of the worst people in history have been loving friends and family men. How Snape wanted to save Lily Evans or Darth Vader wanted to save Luke Skywalker (and I realize that Snape’s crimes were nowhere near as bad as Vader’s, but it’s a similar situation) DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING TO ME unless there is a massive, objective, ideological shift that comes with it. Every Muggleborn girl deserved to live unterrorized as much as Lily; every boy deserved to be saved from the Empire’s murderous oppression just as much as Luke.
And Kylo Ren? Kylo Ren stood there while billions of people died and an entire planetary system got destroyed. I have, hilariously, heard some people say that he ‘hadn’t wanted that to happen.’ Aww. Cute.
He’s the only powerful Force-sensitive on the freaking Deathstar 3.0. He could sabotage it. He could force the person in charge to make a different decision. He could defect and warn the planets to at least try to evacuate. He could have done A THOUSAND THINGS and because he didn’t and because ‘following orders’ is a BULLSHIT REASON FOR GENOCIDE AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN he is just as much to blame for the GODDAMN PLANETS BLOWING UP as Snoke or Hux (just like Vader was complicit in Alderaan).
So personally, they can GTFO with their fake redemption.
tora42's nonsensne 