You mean that First Order prison barge? The one that we have no idea about it’s contents for? The one Rey *accidentally* destroyed because Kylo was trying to aggravate her and drive her to the dark side? The one that might have nothing more than FO personnel on it, and the one that Rey is obviously horrified at the destruction of because she clearly didn’t choose to do that... compared to pretty much everything Kylo does?
You mean Kylo Ren, the mass murderer who introduced himself to the audience by killing an old unarmed man for daring to remind him his parents were good people then had a village killed because they were inconvenient witnesses? The same dude who tortured or allowed her to be tortured multiple times and violated her mind? The one who killed his own father when his father approached him with open arms and only peaceful intentions? The one who then waved the thing he murdered Han with at Rey during their Death Star duel while leading the First Order, a genocidal fascist empire that had murdered billions in a crime against sentience that he was currently benefitting from as the chief non-Palpatine power in the Galaxy?
And yeah, he was totally trying to have her killed when he ordered the Falcon fired upon. There’s no ambiguity in that. When he follows up that scene with his confrontation with Luke and declares he’ll kill her, he’s showing his current emotional state: “Kill everything because I’m not happy!”
Frankly, Rey could have let him die after justifiably stabbing him during their fight, and no jury in the world would convict her, and most would applaud and award her. He’s basically Space Himmler at that point in time; he answers to Space Hitler, and has nothing but horrible intentions for everyone.
There is *no* moral equivalence between Rey and Kylo. Frankly, Rey just not being Kylo would make her a better family member right off the bat. Her being a hero is just a bonus.
And unless Charles Soule reveals that Ben’s Palpatine’s “Force Schizophrenia” was clearly observable or reported to his parents and uncle before the night at the Hut, they owe him *nothing* before his fall that they don’t already give him.
Everything we have so far in the canon books shows them as loving parents, and thus far Palpatine’s manipulations have only been observed when he’s already at the academy and keeping it to himself. And frankly, if Han and Leia do observe that something’s going on in his mind, and do anything like take him to a psychologist even before seeing Luke, then it still ain’t their fault, and he’s still the one with the agency that lead to his fall.
The trick with Ben is that he either had agency in his fall and his redemption, or he had none in either. So either Han and Leia couldn’t have stopped him from getting brainwashed despite their best efforts because Palpatine was overriding his will entirely, and in which case Leia gave him back his agency, or he did have agency during Palpatine’s manipulations, in which case I’m afraid the responsibility for being a mass murderer and torturer are squarely on his shoulders.
Kylo can’t be held to some standard that no one else gets. The Galaxy doesn’t revolve around Kylo. His delusions don’t matter more than the people he killed.
Rey is simply a more worthy person than he is, even if both are dubious in term a of their literary merit as characters.
Frankly, most of the sentiments on screen are more worthy than Kylo. That’s the cost of being the mass murdering bad guy. You don’t get to be the poor little puppy.
