I have a few anons asking me about the Jedi Temple incident as well as Snoke/Palpatine’s influence on baby Ben, so let’s go:
From the very beginning, when Ben was still in the womb, Leia could feel that something was off.
From Aftermath: Empire’s End:
“Luke. She reaches for him but doesn’t find him.
The dark, now lit with stars. One by one, like eyes opening. Comforting at first, then sinister as she worries. Who is out there, who is watching us? Hands reach for her, hands of shadow, lifting her up, reaching for her throat, her wrists, her stomach.
Inside, the child kicks. She feels her baby turning inside, right-side, up and down, struggling to find his bearings, trying so hard to find his way free of her. It’s not time, she thinks. Just a little longer.”[...]
“He is less a human shaped thing and more a pulsing, living band of light. Light that sometimes dims, that sometimes is thrust with a vein of darkness. She tells herself that it’s normal - Luke said to her, Leia, we all have that. He explained that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
Right now, her son is upset, tumbling inside her as if he can’t get comfortable. His light, flickering with dark. She centers herself and concentrates. The walls of the room fall away. Everything is white and then it’s black. Then she’s in the calm, airless void. As Leia finds her peace, so does her son. He stops turning.
The baby turns inside her again, troubled by something she cannot feel and cannot yet understand.”
(A heartbreaking detail: we’re told that as a child, Ben had trouble sleeping and Han would often lull him. Sob.)
In The Force Awakens Novelization, we get confirmation that Leia knew that it had been Snoke all along:
“Leia bit her lower lip, refusing to concede. “No. It was Snoke.”
Han drew back slightly. “Snoke?”
She nodded. “He knew our child would be strong with the Force. That he was born with equal potential for good or evil.”[...]
He had trouble believing what he was hearing. “So Snoke was watching our son.”
“Always,” she told him. “From the shadows, in the beginning, even before I realized what was happening, he was manipulating everything, pulling our son toward the dark side.”
(We’re not gonna talk about how a family of Force sensitivies couldn’t save this kid because I’m depressed enough as it is)
Fast forward a few years during which Ben is almost killed by a kitchen droid (for real) and is largely left to his own devices, because Han is off being Han and Leia is busy politicking, before he’s shipped off to Luke’s Jedi Academy.
We all know Luke’s version of events: he “saw darkness. Snoke had already turned his heart. He would bring destruction and pain and death,” and so in a moment of weakness, Luke Skywalker considers murdering his own nephew while he sleeps. “And the last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him.”
According to the story Luke tells Rey in TLJ, after Luke tries to attack him, Ben uses the Force to defend himself, causing the hut to collapse and trapping his uncle under the debris. It is then assumed that he goes on to murder his fellow padawans before running off with the handful of students who sided with him, earning the reputation of Jedi Killer.
In The Rise of Kylo Ren #1 comic (published on the day TROS came out) we finally learn the truth. Ben Solo did not kill a single student. The fire was set by an “unseen force” and when confronted by three other students who were off planet during this attack, he makes it very clear that he does not want to fight them. He just wants to leave, which he does.
He’s scared and alone and there’s a heartbreaking moment in the comic where he considers going home to his mother but ultimately realizes that he can’t because he thinks nobody will believe him. So he goes to Snoke instead. (This reminds me of the scene in TROS where he tells Rey that she can’t go back to his mother. Just like he can’t.)
And that is the tragedy of Ben Solo’s life: manipulated by the Dark side since he was conceived, feared by his family, haunted by voices he could never escape from.
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