Istbor
Dances with Gnolls
One more thing. Disney Star Wars has crappy villains. I love Adam Driver in Indie films (e.g. Paterson, What if? etc) and he made Girls watchable, but he is terribly miscast and I can't shake the Darth Emo nickname. In fact, his best moment as Kylo Ren was in that SNL skit. Snoke was just a pale mockery of Palpatine. Compare them to Darth Vader, arguably the greatest film villain of all time (do you remember his sheer presence when you were a kid?!), and the truly malevolent Emperor - not to mention secondary villains like Jabba, Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters, etc.
Nah, I think Driver is perfect. Kylo Ren is also so. I don't want an endless parade of Darth Vaders and Emperor Palpatines. They are gone. And maybe that is very realistic. Vader was a great villian and he had great presence, but should every Sith? Should every villian be the same cookie cutter uber strong and domineering? I think not. We won't see Vader's like again, or at least not for a long time, and that to me is real. It's reflected in History even. Great and terrible people arise, and fall. Time goes on, and eventually they are over-shadowed by the next, or not.
And is Ren a Sith? Maybe at the conclusion of The Last Jedi, but before that? I think he is portrayed as a reluctant Sith well. We can see the division in him as he toils over what he thinks he must do with his father. We see him again, pause and then even refrain from killing his mother, and then that look of astonishment and maybe even a little of sadness as his wingmen follow through.
I watch the movies and see him as this reluctant Sith. In over his head, and like many who first start down that path, and maybe some of the most tragic, one who thinks they have now gone too far to ever go back. That to me is what makes a good villain. That thinking that you have gone too far, and there is only one way forward, that path of destruction. That path to the dark side.
Snoke? I loved it. He was some great schemer, or at least we were shown to think so, and then Ren, in his ascent to truly becoming a Sith, maybe even Darth Ren? He kills him. Gone, all that silly speculation about who Snoke was turned on its ear. I thought that was a great move.
It is my hope, that we see Ren start to settle into this role as the Dark Lord of the Sith and level out. Or not. I kind of also like the fly off the handle Ren. It makes him unpredictable and a different kind of frightening. He's not Vader and maybe now he can get from out behind that shadow to be a different kind of Dark-side user.