I’ve noticed there’s a plot element that keeps getting repeated – Palpatine, his Empire and the First Order keep targeting children. I’ve put together a list of instances in the new Canon to illustrate how pervasive it is:

• Sidious kidnapped Maul at a young age to be his first Sith apprentice.
• Cad Bane kidnapped multiple Force sensitive children for Sidious.
• The Inquisitors’ secondary task is to locate and abduct Force sensitives – particularly young children (the Lothal rebels foil the abduction of two infants and the Sixth Brother investigates a four year old girl in Ahsoka).
• 20 year old Prelate Verge in Twilight Company was raised to worship Palpatine and saw himself as the future.
• Rax’s obsession with children in Life Debt unnerves Sloane. Gallius himself was recruited by Palpatine as a child.
• Brendol Hux’s ‘feral’ children in EE form the basis of the First Order stormtrooper corps.
• The First Order abducts young children and raises them to be fanatically loyal soldiers (the Visual Encyclopediamentions the FO’s officers are raised this way too).
• Armitage Hux is raised from age six to eventually take his father’s place.
• Snoke targeted Ben ‘since the beginning’.

While it hasn’t been directly tied to it yet, I would like to point out Rey was ‘abandoned’ at age five on a planet that just happens to be the last stop before the Unknown Regions and Snoke.

Evil isn’t born; it’s made.