There are lightsabers, and then there’s Kylo Ren’s lightsaber. As distinctive as Mace Windu’s purple blade, Count Dooku’s curved hilt, Ahsoka’s white shoto blades or Maul’s double-bladed option, the fiery crossguard above the hilt of the former Ben Solo’s lightsaber was instantly iconic, but beyond the undoubted coolness of its look, these smaller blades also fulfilled a very practical purpose, as The Force Awakens 3D Modelling Supervisor Jet Cooper explains.
“The original was in a saber shape without a flare on the end of it, because Kylo Ren was very much a knight but really, really crude. We’d suggested casually in a conversation one day that everyone was losing their hands. Luke lost his hand. Vader lost his hand. And the reason Europeans put quillons on swords was to stop that from happening.”
“His saber has the main beam with the cracked crystal, so it’s really irregular. But what happens if we split that beam and divert it at the sides? Then, of course, Europeans used that part of the sword like a weapon, like a blade. It was nice that J.J. had Kylo Ren turn that and then push it into the person up against a tree. So, basically it’s an old-fashioned broad sword.”
There was also another very practical reason why Kylo’s lightsaber was designed to be so distinctive.
“[Another] reason we flared the end out was so that, when you have a silhouette of it, that a 12-year-old could tell what it was.”
