[CaptainCrunch]

So lets talk about Kylo Ren and what he is

I can't help it, I find Kylo to be extremely interesting and a lot of it has to do with the job that Adam Driver did in portraying him.

He is a series of contradictions in one persona, the man in the mask, and the man without the mask. With the Mask on Kylo is a vicious killer, with a decisive and deadly personality. When he takes off the mask he appears to be a split and vulnerable teenager.

In the ROTJ novelization, when Palpatine was scarred by Mace Windu he peers into a mirror and sighs, "at last the mask has become the man, I shall miss the old Palpatine.". He muses. With Kylo the concept of his self is exactly opposite, he desires to become the mask and leave his old self behind, he even goes as far as mentioning this to his father in their confrontation where he blandly states that he killed Kylo Ren. Kylo wants so badly to follow his grandfathers footsteps that he fails to realize that Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker were not two different personalities, but that Vader was Anakin and Anakin was Vader. and Anakin desperately tried to bury the weaknesses that were in Anakin Skywalker that had failed him so badly, his compassion and sense of mercy and loyalty and love.

But is Kylo a Sith or even on the way to becoming a Sith. First of all, I want to restate that I firmly believe that in terms of canon the Sith are dead. When Anakin destroyed Palpatine and then died the last two Sith in the galaxy with thousands of years of Sith knowledge and training were lost forever. Now I know that the common argument at that point will be what about Snoke, he must be a Sith right? Well I'll get into that when I talk about Snoke and what I think he is.

We know that Kylo Ren was trained at the Jedi Academy, Leia alluded to that in her conversation with Han, but what we don't know how much knowledge Ren picked up there, but I have my doubts that Ren has received much in terms of training from his Master Supreme Master Snoke. We don't see any true dark side powers, like Lightning, or Force Chokes, what we do see are instances of Force Push, We saw the ability to stop a blaster bolt in mid air, and the ability to probe someones mind.

In terms of marital abilities, I'm not convinced that Ren has been heavily trained in light sabre combat, his form seems to be based solely around heavy power moves, and it works well in this movie because frankly he fought two untrained opponents, and one of them battered down his defenses fairly easily and wounded him severely. We didn't even see the true force ability of precognition that was so prevalent in the prequels and even the Original trilogy, as Chewbacca shot him once and wounded him severely.

So if I was to guess, Kylo's training came strictly from his training at the academy and has received little to no training from Snoke, this is important when we talk about Snoke another time.

One of the great concepts that I've read about the Sith is that they have to fully commit to the Darkside by sacrificing someone that they truly love. Anakin did this with the Jedi order, and then later his murder of his wife truly cemented him to the darkside and allowed him to open up fully to the power of the Dark Side. With Jacen Solo, he murdered his aunt and sacrificed the love of his family before he was firmly cemented to the dark side and the Sith path.

I firmly believe that until Kylo murdered or sacrificed his father he was in the middle world of the dark and the light side in a similar way that Anakin was before he sacrificed everything to become Vader. Once Kylo sacrificed his father and truly committed to his destiny Snoke became interested in finishing his training.

Here's another thing that I noticed, and that's the difference between Vader and Ren was that Ren raged and had little emotional control, Vader at the height of his power was self possessed and had a cold rage about him.

We heard in the prequels that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

In the excellent book Dark Lord which chronicled the rise of Vader. Palpatine muses about how the Jedi didn't understand the Sith. That a Sith used anger and hate and fear to call on the power of the darkside, but a true Sith needed to learn to use those emotions and transcend them in order to squash any morality in order to obtain a higher goal.

For Palpatine, he had great emotional control but could still use his anger and hate to become powerful in the force, but his higher goal was to conquer and rule the galaxy for the betterment of all non force using individuals that could not be trusted to rule and control the galaxy. For Vader, his higher goal was ultimately that his actions would bring peace and security to the galaxy and someday rule it. We don't know what Kylo's higher goals are yet. All we want to know is that he wants to finish the work his grandfather started, but if he believes that his fathers work was simply around the extermination of the Jedi to bring balance to the force, then Kylo is following a fools journey and being fed lies by his master. At this point if these are Kylo's goal then he is merely a tool and an assassin and not on the path to Sith Mastery.

Darth Plagueis in the very good book, taught Palpatine

You must begin by gaining power over yourself; then another; then a group, an order, a world, a species, a group of species… finally, the galaxy itself.”

Frankly Kylo isn't even near having control over himself or his rage so he's not even on the proper path to dark side mastery.

To me, Kylo right now is more of a Dark Jedi then even approaching what a Sith is.

Now what's interesting is what happened in the end of the movie to Kylo, what we saw was a massive facial wound, a obviously damaged hip and arm. I don't think its a stretch that he will return in the next movie even more consumed by Vader as he follows his path of becoming a shrouded and damaged or wounded man. I would think that we're going to rarely see Kylo with his mask off in the next movie and he will have some cybernetic attachments.

My last point that we can touch on later is that Han told his son before dying that Snoke wants him for his power, and when he uses that up Snoke will get rid of him. I think it will be interesting to see what kind of training or skills Ren returns with in the next movie because it will give us a hint as to who Snoke really is, and if Ren is on the path to bringing back the Sith line.