When Disney released the very first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens way back in November of 2014, a shadowy figure — who turned out to be Kyo Ren (Adam Driver) — clad in a black robe ignited a lightsaber no Star Wars fan had ever seen before. It was red-bladed, so obviously he was a bad dude, but the real kicker was that it had a crossguard like a broadsword and it crackled like it was made of raw unfiltered energy.
Brauzzzt!
Ren’s lightsaber was unique. As the sequel trilogy played out, we didn’t get many clues as to how it was made. Now, thanks to a comic book series about Ben Solo’s fall to the Dark Side — The Rise of Kylo Ren by Charles Soule — we finally have some answers.
Some background: every lightsaber has a Kyber crystal in it; it’s the thing the gives the weapon its kick, that makes it go “brzzt.” The crystal in Kylo Ren’s weapon came from the same lightsaber Kylo had back when he was Ben Solo, when the blade was blue — Star Wars does love color-coding for good and evil. The original blue color changed when he bled the crystal in a process that all Sith Lords use to create the red-colored lightsaber blades.
However, while he was bleeding the crystal, he overdid it, causing it to crack, and when he tried to use the cracked and newly-bled red crystal, it caused the weapon to short out. So he created the crossguard to vent the excess energy and voila: a lightsaber the likes of which we’d never seen was born.
So essentially, Kylo Ren screwed it up; story of his life.
The Rise of Kylo Ren is a pretty good read: it shows how Snoke lured Ben Solo away from Luke Skywalker’s new Jedi Order, how Ben defeated the master of the Knights of Ren to become their leader, and how he hunted down the remaining Jedi who weren’t slaughtered when he turned to the Dark Side.
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