The internet demands that its monsters look cool. We will forgive sociopathy, mass murder, and deep spiritual rot as long as the perpetrator walks away from the explosion in slow motion, clad in bespoke armor or a tailored suit. We worship Darth Vader for his towering, mechanical composure. We mythologize Tony Soprano for his sheer, brutal charisma and his ability to bend the world to his will, even while suffocating under his own psychic weight.

But the moment a narrative introduces the sons—the heirs who inherit the trauma, the crushing expectations, and the paralyzing dread, but lack the mythic swagger to carry it—the collective audience gags.

Kylo Ren and Anthony Soprano Jr. are perhaps the two most viscerally hated characters in their respective franchises. To mention either on Reddit is to invite a tidal wave of vitriol. They are derided as “whiny,” “pathetic,” “emo,” and “weak.”

But this is a violent, allergic reaction to looking in the mirror.

Audiences hate A.J. and Kylo because they commit the cardinal cinematic sin:

Suffering without dignity.

The Crushing Weight of the Father’s Shadow

In Jungian terms, both characters are drowning in the Shadow of an impossible paternal (or grandfatherly) legacy.

Darth Vader is the ultimate patriarchal monolith—a towering figure of pure discipline, control, and terrifying competence.

Tony Soprano is the archetypal mafia king, a man who monetizes his own rage and commands absolute authority in his domain.

These figures cast shadows so long and dense that nothing can grow beneath them.

Kylo Ren (Ben Solo) and A.J. Soprano are what happens when the next generation is handed the crown but denied the psychological infrastructure to wear it.

Kylo is a volatile, wounded adolescent trapped in a grown man’s body.

He literally punches his own bleeding bowcaster wound in The Force Awakens because he is desperately trying to use physical pain to ground his spiraling emotional panic. He worships a burned helmet, begging a ghost to show him the power of the dark side, completely unaware that his grandfather’s strength came from a cold, mechanical resignation that Kylo’s chaotic, boiling heart will never achieve.

A.J. Soprano inherits Tony’s panic attacks, his “putrid, rotten Soprano gene,” and his paralyzing existential dread. But A.J. is born into late-stage suburban decay.

He doesn’t have the old-world mob code or the brutal survival instincts that allowed Tony to function. When A.J. stares into the abyss of American nihilism he becomes a depressed, aimless kid who attempts suicide in the family pool with a cinderblock tied to his leg, only for the knot to be tied poorly.

He can’t even self-destruct with competence.

The Audience’s Refusal of Vulnerability

The intense hatred directed at these characters is a defense mechanism from the audience.

We want our villains and anti-heroes to be aspirational in their darkness. We want to believe that if we were pushed to the edge, we would become disciplined, terrifying, and in control.

Kylo and A.J. expose the lie.

They show us that actual psychic pain, confusion, and the terror of not knowing who you are isn’t “cool”, but more like Kylo smashing a computer console to pieces in an uncontrolled tantrum. It looks like A.J. crying in his bedroom, paralyzed by the sheer, absurd difficulty of just being alive.

When a Reddit mob mocks A.J. or Kylo, they are aggressively pushing away the reality of human frailty.

It is the collective ego screaming, “I am not like that!” because the alternative is admitting that most of us, when confronted with generational trauma or crushing expectations, would not become Vader or Tony.

We would become A.J.

We would become Kylo.

We would flail.

The Resonance of the Flail

For anyone who has spent their life navigating the world with a neurodivergent architecture—someone who has felt the intense, overwhelming friction of just existing—this hatred hits on a deeply personal frequency.

If your baseline operating system requires constant, conscious effort just to maintain the facade of a “normal” social interface, you understand the exhaustion of A.J. and Kylo intimately.

You know what it feels like to have the psychic load-bearing drywall crack and that, when the system finally redlines, it usually looks messy, disjointed, and utterly lacking in grace.

To relate to these characters is to accept the messy reality of the human condition and look at Kylo Ren’s desperate, furious insecurity, or A.J. Soprano’s profound, paralyzing depression, and say, “I see you,” and it requires a level of radical empathy that the standard pop-culture consumption model actively discourages.

The Path Forward: Owning the Mess

There is a profound liberation in stopping the performance.

Once you stop trying to project the impenetrable armor of the father—once you accept that you do not have to be Vader or Tony—you can begin to actually heal the wounds of the son.

For those of us who have spent years building up the ego just to tear it down again, who understand the necessary friction of pushing the biological hardware through martial arts training or creative output just to quiet the noise, these characters serve as a vital warning.

They show us the end state of trying to wear a mask that doesn’t fit.

The goal is to survive the flailing, instead of looking “cool”, and to find the physical and emotional grounding that actually works for your specific architecture, and realize that you don’t need a mythic legacy to justify your existence. Sometimes staying in the room when all your instincts are screaming to bolt, sitting with the discomfort and refusing the easy exit, is the most heroic act possible.