He couldn't have killed Snoke because Snoke wasn't physically present when the decision was made to fire the weapon, he was only there as a hologram. And the order to fire Starkiller came not on Hux's authority but from Snoke as the Supreme Leader, so if Kylo had killed Hux then some other First Order officer would have taken over and fired the weapon on Snoke's orders instead. Given that it took the Resistance's best pilot and several X-Wing squadrons to destroy Starkiller, and that they could only do that because Han and Chewie and Finn had infiltrated the base to take down the shields and plant bombs everywhere, I'm finding it hard to imagine any scenario in which Kylo working independently could have stopped the weapon.
And Kylo does believe the First Order has legitimacy as a governing power. He's wrong, of course, and entirely deluded to think that they can bring peace to the galaxy by military force, but he bangs on at tedious length about his political views in Alan Dean Foster's novelization (although those clunky bits of dialogue were mercifully excised from the movie). He's a twisted idealist and a religious fanatic, not a cynic.
We both agree he's on the wrong side and has done a lot of horrible things that can't (and shouldn't) be swept under the carpet. But I believe the filmmakers have left way too much questions open about Kylo's agency and culpability and spent too much time showing his inner struggles and doubts for the third movie to simply go, "Oh, he's really just a stock villain that Rey's going to chop in half so we can all cheer and go home." Like I said, he may still die but it's not going to be treated as a ding-dong-the-Sith-is-dead moment. (Especially since Kylo isn't a Sith. Even at his most rage-filled moments we've never seen so much of a flash of the yellow Dark Side eyes we saw on Palpatine and Anakin, which I find interesting.)
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And Kylo does believe the First Order has legitimacy as a governing power. He's wrong, of course, and entirely deluded to think that they can bring peace to the galaxy by military force, but he bangs on at tedious length about his political views in Alan Dean Foster's novelization (although those clunky bits of dialogue were mercifully excised from the movie). He's a twisted idealist and a religious fanatic, not a cynic.
We both agree he's on the wrong side and has done a lot of horrible things that can't (and shouldn't) be swept under the carpet. But I believe the filmmakers have left way too much questions open about Kylo's agency and culpability and spent too much time showing his inner struggles and doubts for the third movie to simply go, "Oh, he's really just a stock villain that Rey's going to chop in half so we can all cheer and go home." Like I said, he may still die but it's not going to be treated as a ding-dong-the-Sith-is-dead moment. (Especially since Kylo isn't a Sith. Even at his most rage-filled moments we've never seen so much of a flash of the yellow Dark Side eyes we saw on Palpatine and Anakin, which I find interesting.)