OK, so after a little reminder blog earlier, I had a good read through all of the posts about what is now being called ‘ashgate’.
The meaning of the tray of ashes Kylo Ren uses to store his helmet on in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

It looks like it all started from an Entertainment Weekly article which can be found HERE.

In this articles JJ Abrams is quoted as saying….

 “The backstory is, that that table has the ashes of the enemies he’s killed,” Abrams says. “That moment was actually shot for, and meant to be used in, the scene where he was talking to the Vader mask.”

He’s talking about the beautiful moment during Rey’s interogation where Kylo finally removes his mask to show her the ‘creature in the mask’ she is referring to.
He then slams the helmet down into a tray of ashes.
The reason for these ashes is never realised for the rest of the movie.

OK, so it looks like Kylo was originally going to be seen without the helmet much earlier in the movie and they decided to keep the reveal until the interogation scene for more impact.
The character is built up through half of the film as a heartless, merciless monster and then when we finally see the man/boy behind the mask we are faced with someone we imagined to be very different.

Young, fresh faced and yes, quite vulnerable. The vulnerability escalates when Rey fights back through his attempt to get information out of her head and he realises he’s got serious competition.

This was the moment millions of fangirls swooned and fell head over heels in love with the villain of the piece.
Forget Han Solo, there was a new scoundrel in town!

Throughout the force awakens we are shown that Kylo is actually quite unstable and prone to bouts of rage, however, the realisation that he stores his helmet in the ashes of his dead enemies when he is not wearing it, puts a whole new, and particularly creepy perspective on the ‘unstable’ issue.

The article had a never before seen image of Kylo with the aforementioned tray of ashes in his personal quarters.

It’s interesting to note that Kylo’s bedroom was named the “padded room” during production.  A padded room had the obvious associations to mental institutions and madness so this is quite obviously what they were expecting their audience to feel about Kylo.

This revelation about the ashes kick started much debating on Tumblr and fueled the fires of the shippers

From my point of view, the burning question is why?
Why does he feel the need to collect the ashes of his victims and keep them as a daily reminder of his murderous ways?
Is the pull to the light he is feeling so strong he needs this as a grounding to the dark side?
Is he truly being torn between the light and the dark constantly?
What has Snoke been telling him to make him favour the dark side?
What will it take to make him see the light? ….  and yes, I believe he will see the light.
I don’t necessarilyy think he will survive the trilogy but I truly believe he will be redeemed.

On a personal note I hope he survives and gets one hell of a redemption.
Just give me a box of tissues now either way!!