6 Years After His Death, Star Wars Creates a New Kylo Ren Mystery

He may have died in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but Kylo Ren has an enduring presence. That was recently proved when Adam Driver revealed he’d pitched Kylo Ren’s post-redemption return to Lucasfilm, in a film that would have been made if not for Disney’s Bob Iger and Alan Bergman. Driver’s comments led to a still-building campaign to make “The Hunt for Ben Solo” a reality at last. For now, though, those viewers will have to settle for an ongoing epic comic book… that’s just raised a whole new Kylo Ren mystery.

Star Wars: Legacy of Vader #11, by Charles Soule and Luke Ross, is set between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. It tells a story of Kylo Ren’s quest to become more like Darth Vader, and there’s a sense in which this tale builds to a head in the latest issue. Curiously, though, the comic also sees Kylo Ren briefly claim a new lightsaber, and he bleeds it blood-red through physical contact – a technique we saw last year in The Acolyte.

And then the crystal fractures, as though the process was somehow unstable.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. A dark sider “bleeds” a kyber crystal by pouring their anger, hatred, and rage into it, bending the crystal until it aligns to the dark side. The Sith use it as a symbol of their mastery of the Force, because they believe they are the masters and the Force itself must bend to their will. Kylo Ren typically uses a distinctive lightsaber because he didn’t quite bleed his crystal correctly, fracturing it, and his blade’s quillons are designed to channel the excess energy generated by the overheating kyber crystal.

Why Would Kylo Ren’s SECOND Kyber Crystal Break Too?

It’s one for this to happen to Kylo Ren once, given he bled his first kyber crystal immediately after falling to the dark side – at a time when he was a relative neophyte. But he’s spent years researching the Force, to the extent that he eventually recognized the Force Dyad before even Palpatine did. In Legacy of Vader #11, Kylo Ren bleeds a crystal with effortless ease. But it still fractures, cracking in his hand as his power flows through it. There’s something distinctly odd going on here.

Why are kyber crystals breaking when Kylo Ren tries to bleed them? One possibility is that it is because his power is so much greater than it should be, because he is part of a Force Dyad – a power transcending time and life itself. In Rey’s Rise of Skywalker vision, her future self had a lightsaber that emitted the same kind of unusual crackling sound, suggesting she too created a fractured kyber crystal in that averted future. If this interpretation is correct, no kyber crystal can properly channel Kylo Ren’s power (or Rey’s).

There is, however, another possibility: that it reflects the twisting of Kylo Ren’s life given he never really chose the dark side for himself. Kylo Ren was tricked into a place where he believed he had no choice but to follow the dark, all because of Palpatine. If this is correct, then the kyber crystals break because they are subjected to an impossibility; they are being mastered by a man who has himself been mastered, by Palpatine, who believed himself the dark side incarnate.

Legacy of Vader #11 is on sale now from Marvel Comics.

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