Star Wars Finally Confirms Timeline of Ben Solo’s Transformation Into Kylo Ren
Star Wars Timelines confirms that the public reveal of Princess Leia’s parentage directly preceded Ben Solo’s fall, recontextualizing Kylo Ren’s rise.
While Ben Solo’s transformation into Kylo Ren is a defining event of the Star Wars sequel era, the exact timeline for when the rise of Kylo Ren occurs has always been a little murky. Ben’s fall to the dark side now canonically occurs 28 years after the Battle of Yavin (shortened to 28 ABY), as confirmed by Star Wars: Timelines – From the Time Before the High Republic to the Fall of the First Order by Kristin Baver, Jason Fry, Cole Horton, Amy Richau and Clayton Sandell. Star Wars: Timelines also reveals that Ben’s fall occurs within the same year as the public reveal that Darth Vader was Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker’s father
This confirmation of the Star Wars timeline is crucial for the franchise going forward. Examining the pivotal events of 28 ABY as revealed by Star Wars: Timelines recontextualizes Kylo Ren’s role in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and shows how instrumental the secrecy surrounding Darth Vader’s role was in Ben Solo’s fall to the dark side.
General Leia Organa looking pensive in front of Kylo Ren in silhouette in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Star Wars: Timelines reveals that the downfall of 28 ABY began with the “Napkin Bombing Incident,” an attack on the Populist members of the New Republic Senate. While this attack might seem disconnected from Ben Solo’s fall, Claudia Gray’s Star Wars: Bloodline shows that Leia’s focus on her investigation unwittingly allowed her Senate rival and secret First Order lackey Senator Carise Sindian to learn the truth about Leia’s parentage. In Bloodlines, Carise manipulated Ransolm Casterfo into revealing the truth on the Senate floor. Because the reveal was public, the news spread quickly throughout the galaxy before Leia could even truly react.
Kristin Baver’s Skywalker: A Family at War confirms that Ben learned the truth from the Holonet rather than his mother or his uncle, who could have told him the truth with far more kindness and care. However, Leia also acknowledged her own role in this disaster. As A Family at War shows, Leia’s trauma and struggle to reconcile the truth ultimately led her to keep the secret for far too long. As confirmed by Star Wars: Timelines, Ben was 23 years old when he learned the truth. While Leia’s choice to keep her biological father a secret from Ben made sense when he was a child, he should have been told when he was a teen or a younger adult in a safer space that would have allowed him to process the information with family.
To make matters worse, throughout Bloodline, Leia had trouble contacting either Luke or Ben due to radiation interference in their communications. Therefore, her message explaining her reasoning for keeping the secret took much longer to reach Ben. These technical difficulties left even more room for Palpatine to twist the reveal of Anakin Skywalker’s identity as Darth Vader and manipulate Ben toward the dark side.
Star Wars: Timelines’ confirmation that the Darth Vader reveal and Ben Solo’s fall both occur in 28 ABY shows the profound effect this secret had on Ben and the rapid decline in his relationship with his family. In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Luke explains that he felt the darkness rising within Ben. This new rise in turmoil stemmed from Ben’s conflicted feelings over Darth Vader, which were compounded by the secrecy. However, Palpatine had also been manipulating Ben for at least a decade by this point, so Ben was already on a dark path. As Luke reveals in The Last Jedi, when he searched Ben’s heart and saw the darkness within, he had a momentary instinctual lapse in judgment that led to him contemplating murdering Ben to save the galaxy.
While this moment lasted mere seconds, these seconds still led to tragedy. On instinct, Ben lashed out to protect himself, destroying Luke’s training temple in the process and killing many of the other Jedi trainees. As Star Wars: Timelines shows, this confrontation likely occurred within weeks of Ben’s discovery that Darth Vader was his grandfather. Luke’s guilt over Ben’s fall also led to Luke’s decision to go into exile before the year’s end, cementing 28 ABY as one of the worst years in the Skywalker family’s history.
Star Wars: Timelines ultimately recontextualizes Kylo Ren’s fall and role within the Star Wars sequel trilogy. The films highlight Luke’s confrontation with Ben and Ben’s destruction of the Jedi Temple as the turning point in Ben’s transformation into Kylo Ren. Star Wars:Timelines shows that the public revelation of Leia and Luke’s parentage was a larger deciding factor in Ben Solo’s descent. Ben did not have time to healthily process this revelation before his confrontation with Luke sent him spiraling to Snoke and the First Order. This context gives more weight to Kylo Ren’s hero worship of Darth Vader in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which likely arose as a coping mechanism to deal with the disconnect between Anakin Skywalker’s heroism and Darth Vader’s evil. This context also shows how Palpatine was able to manipulate Ben Solo so thoroughly that he would turn his back on his family and the ideals of his youth.
Ultimately, Star Wars: Timelines plays an important role in contextualizing the events of the Star Wars galaxy, like Kylo Ren’s fall, which have been explored throughout multiple works. The secrecy behind Leia and Luke’s parentage does not excuse Ben Solo’s actions as Kylo Ren, nor does Palpatine’s manipulation of him. Still, the tangled events of 28 ABY make Ben Solo a far more nuanced character in his descent and show the multiple reasons why he chose to transform himself into Kylo Ren.
