All true (though 12 years is a bit of a stretch - casting directors aim closer than this normally), but I was stil surprised you thought he was 18 as he rather gave me the impression of being in his late 20s in the movie. I didn't know the actor was 32, I had to look it up to see if my impression that he was late 20s was a good one or very off.

And he's possibly close to that. Leia indeed gives the impression she sees him as a child/teen, but you know how moms are with their boys...

The novelization gives a few more clues, but so far (I'm halfway into it), the age of Kylo or the timing of his turn to the dark side aren't spelled out.

Rey, though, is 20. Kylo thinks of her as a "young girl" while FO and other characters describe Kylo as "a man", that's the best clue to his age so far.

As for when he turned and Han left Leia (they were, and still are husband and wife, btw) etc. there's nothing fully conclusive so far, though it has the feel of "ancient history", like 10 years ago or more. It happened before Leia formed the Resistance, as she indeed threw herself into that cause in order to cope for the loss of Ben to Snoke just as Han left her and returned to smuggling (he went away because he felt that every time Leia looked at him she felt the pain of the loss of Ben all over again, and time wasn't solving this - by his presence he was preventing her from moving on, and he felt guilty for her pain and so he left. Her answer to that comment is that he was a fool to think she'd ever want to forget Ben.., that "after all these years", even if it's late, she still wants him back home. Han thinks this is a mother's self-denial, that Ben was always dark - too much Vader in him - and he can't be brought back, especially not after Luke who had the wisdom and knowledge failed at turning him. Leia then explains what she kept secret from Han until now (because she felt that if he was involved, it might worsen things rather than help: Ben had a somewhat conflictual relationship with daddy): she had felt Ben's darkness very early, before she even realized he was under the influence of Snoke, who had observed and manipulated Ben "from the shadows" since childhood, knowing the offspring of Vader's line would have immense power and the potential for light or dark. She thought the solution was to send him to Luke early, but sending him away is "how I lost him, and you". She now feels (Force instinct, it's pretty clear in the book where Leia's powers are more obvious than in the movie - she has a violent Obi-Wan-style moment when Hosnian is destroyed and she speaks to her worried staff of feeling a "great disturbance in the Force" Han is the only one who stands a chance to bring him back to the Light.

It's also happened long ago enough that a confused Threepio has to run extra "visual processing" before he recognizes Han because his features were changed by time and altered by experience (then he throws himself between Han and Leia, just like in the movie).

Apparently there will be some information about this further down the line in the novelization, but for now all I can report is that Kylo has been trained "for many years", is trained to meditate for hours etc. He feels he can learn still further from Snoke about the dark side, and about resisting the seduction of the light side. He's really an inversion of the usual issues. He doesn't have Sidious's arrogance about the Light - he fears its seduction, nor does he have the fears/misgivings of the Jedi about the dark side.

The Disney tidbit didn't explain why Kylo's saber uses a primitive design, and nor does the novel so far, though it also hints that it's not as sophisticated as a modern saber. Once it's described as "very unstable", ragged. It doesn't have the elegance or sophistication of the Sith/Jedi models we've seen so far.

I think somehow Luke recuperated Anakin's lightsaber and that he had promised to give it to Kylo when he was worthy of/ready for it. That's the only way I find to explain Kylo's instant recognition of the saber and his obvious greed for it: he's seen it before.

How it ended up with Maz Kanata we may never know, though I suspect we're not done with that character who seems to have a connection to Luke. or his academy, Han may not be fully aware of.

In their old age - they've had a lifetime of "classical" Jedi or Sith training, though. What kind of training did Luke give to his new Jedi? That we know, Yoda didn't exactly train Luke extensively (if at all) in lightsaber skills, as for him the confrontation with Vader wasn't never to be about that. I wouldn't be surprised that Luke tried to pass on Yoda's more philosophical training rather than form warriors.

Reminiscences by Leia in the novel confirms that Luke took upon himself the burden of training new Jedi to serve the Republic, not by choice really but because there was no one but him. Kylo leading 6 others Knights of Ren (the book gives the feeling it's a kind of secret society/conspiracy of 7 people) killed them all at the instigation of Snoke, and Luke vanished.

The novelization kills that theory. Leia and Han clearly speaks of Snoke as a real person, they know him and have interacted. Before creating the First Order, he seems to have been active in the Republic somehow - enough to have access to a very young Ben Solo, but it's clear this is meant to stay a mystery for now, so there's really no detail.

Of course. It remains sword fighting. A neophyte won't last long against a trained practitioner, but it's not only about the Force - it remains a weapon anyone could use to a degree.

In the scene at Maz's castle, when Finn uses the saber the first time, Finn doesn't really know what to do with it (he considers it a ceremonial weapon) before he tries, than he finds it's not so different than using the weapons for close combat he's trained for. That and his fitness/athleticism (explicitly) do the rest.

The novel also emphasizes Rey's fighting skills with her "staff". Finn who dismisses it first as "not a real weapon" is duly impressed. He also finds Rey very fast.

She indeed appears to have a potential more similar to Anakin's than Luke's. A new "chosen one" to bring balance back to the Force would, I think, be a bad thing for the saga. It trivializes Anakin's journey and by extension, Luke's.

I very much hope they'll come up with a more clever angle than this, for instance the realization that perhaps The Force simply has to be left alone or used only passively, or at least that the Jedi have to become something new, or return to something very old. Maybe the resurgence of the dark side was triggered by Luke's decision to try to resurrect the Jedi Order. Lucas made it very clear that the Force is in balance (in the Asian sense of harmony) only if the dark side is left untouched. What's less clear is if there should be Jedi. Lucas wasn't all that kind to the Jedi in the prequels - Yoda himself lamented their decline. Palpatine maneuvered them into becoming warriors and military leaders, to very openly use their powers - and they lost themselves.

From the thoughts of Kylo Ren in the novelization, he is genuinely convinced that the Republic was chaos and disorder before the Empire, and that it produced the same thing once more after its defeat. He doesn't equate the dark side to evil, he equates it to order and peace, which can only come from control and power (so he's basically a fascist). He thinks the new Republic leaves half the galaxy to fare for itself, and isn't even able to truly serve the populations now under its wings. He speaks of lawlessness, which gets contradicted in thoughts by a First Order officer listening to Kylo's ravings (who thinks "in all fairness, the old Republic had codes of law and the new one brought back the rule of law" but he doesn't think Kylo is in a mood for a debate on this)

Leia in her own thoughts has, of course, a different vision, though she too has her frustrations. Her biggest is that planetary leaders )don't seem to understand how long and complicated it is to bring back free economy and democracy after over 2 decades of Imperial rule and ravages. She thinks the Republic has managed a great deal of it already, but that people will have to be more patient before it's fully restored, and the Republic can then expand again. The other frustration concerns the defeated attitude of the people: the Empire has all but destroyed people's free will and determination and it seems to take forever before populations understand they again have to do their part for the common good, not to wait for their government to take charge of everything. Leia apparently had a lot of power and influence in the early days of the Republic after Endor, but nowadays most of her allies there have long retired from politics, and she's no longer very influential, in fact it seems that quite a few even see her as half-mad/paranoid (or so Leia says).

There is a cut-scene from the movie (it was shot, as a photo from it is in the visual dictionary) that's still in the novel in which Leia sends an ambassador to the Senate. The ambassador's mission is to convince the leaders of the Republic to join the fight against the First Order in the light of the events on Jakku (which is a trash world, but not an out-of-the-way one) . The envoy thinks Leia should go herself, but Leia speaks of her lost influence and the fact many in the Senate have a bad opinion of her and the Resistance. The envoy gets killed during the destruction of the capital of the Republic by the First Order. Apparently most of the Republic's military fleet was in that primary system at the time of the attack on its planets, and probably destroyed. The worlds (hundreds) part of the Republic have not been destroyed, though. The First Order also lost its primary world at the end of the movie. It has other bases, and many worlds under its control.

Again the novelization casts some doubt on the popular theories (memory loss, daughter of Leia or Luke). In the movie we don't have Leia's thoughts or Kylo's, so the possibility is there that they chose to remain silent for their own motives. In the book, though, we get those. One Leia scene in particular is written in a way that seems to exclude the existence of another child from the Skywalker line. She's talking to Han about Skoke's interest in Ben "from the beginning" - because he's from Anakin's line. Let's say the way that scene is written would be a massive cheat if Luke also had a child, and at least totally excludes the possibility that Han and Leia had a second child whom they also lost. It's at least clear that if Rey is Luke's daughter, Leia and Han most likely know nothing of her existence (the only other possibility is that they think Luke's daughter is dead, but the context makes it doubtful as they speak of Luke's pain at losing Ben without any mention of an even more personal loss in his life, or a similarity between their tragedy and Luke's life), which would be most bizarre, given that she was abandoned on Jakku maybe at some point between 12 to 15/16 years ago (the little girl in the vision, whoh is Rey, is something between 4 to 8 years old, but probably more toward the lower end, or she'd had more precise memories.)

The novel also makes it a bit clearer that Rey doesn't suffer from memory loss - she was just too young to have real memories of her life before being abandoned on Jakku (she doesn't know which world she's from, for e.g.). She remembers being abandoned - she recognizes the whole scene in the vision as one of her painful memories. She always believed the promise from the man who abandoned her that "he would return for her", until Maz made her realize that it would never happen and she had to move on with her life and destiny.

I wouldn't totally rule out that Rey was indeed "hidden" on Jakku when she was around 5 y.o. and after the betrayal of Ben Solo (which would have to happen around 15 years ago, when he was a teenager...), but I'm really beginning to doubt it, because:

• Leia (and Han, and Kylo) clearly isn't aware of the existence of Luke's child, though she wasn't hidden/abandoned as a baby but as a young child. Very bizarre.
• It's one thing to hide Leia with Bail Organa and Luke with the Larses, but it's quite another to literally abandon a five years old to fare for herself on a world like Jakku. Rey was always on her own on Jakku - she didn't have an adoptive family - she was just dumped there by someone who promised that one day he'd return. I It's more like leaving the child to die...
• It's not really a clever plot device or mystery. It's too obvious, even for SW. It's a basic repeat of what was done with Luke/Leia, and once more we'd get a hero related to the villain she has to defeat. The only novelty is that Leia/Luke might not want Kylo's destruction by Rey, while no one gave a damn about Vader's (except Luke, after a fashion, but he was the only one to believe in any chance of redemption). Other than that, it's a big "duh", while coming up with another totally unexpected back story altogether for Rey would be the surprise - and a good red herring.
• Early drafts by Arndt focused on the children of Han-Leia and Luke, all force sensitive as Lucas wanted but Abrams-Kasdan scrapped that. Only to bring it back as a "mystery"? Not sure.

So I suspect that Rey's family (or what she believes to be her family) got rid of her, but why is a mystery for the second or even third movie. It gives her a troubled past and personal issues to deal with. It would not be uninteresting as such to have her cope with the fact Luke is her father and he virtually abandoned her to her fate, but it's a bit too close to Luke's own arc.

If she's Luke's daughter, then there has to be a very good reason why he kept her birth a secret even from Leia and Han (when there was already Ben a a strongly force sensitive child from Anakin's bloodline who wasn't hidden) and it's hard to believe that 20 years ago the dark side was such a threat yet that Luke hid the birth of a child, and whoever he chose as guardians for Rey seem to have gotten afraid of something around 15 years ago and got rid of her by leaving her on Jakku all alone, without a protector. But that's a long shot, I think. I have a really hard time imagining Luke, after all he went through himself, would be doing something so cruel, crueller even than Anakin's childhood as a slave, rather than quite simply raise and protect the child himself and train her talent as best as he could.

My gut feeling is more and more that only the villain of the new trilogy will be from the Skywalker bloodline, while Rey is something "new".

I do think it's still a distinct possibility that Rey was at Luke's academy and somehow managed to survive the attack that killed all the other trainees, as apparently her vision contains a clue to her past. One possibility to explain what happened next could be that her savior/guardian/father knew the Knights of Ren were after him, and he had no choice but to make a stop to dump the child on a nearby planet, without time to choose, without time to find her a family, and while he expected to return soon, he got captured and eliminated by Kylo Ren. Rey might thus be the young daughter of one of Luke's Jedi trainees, and Luke could remember a little girl named Rey.