Armitage Hux is a human First Order general, played by Domhnall Gleeson across The Force Awakens (2015), The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019). He is the illegitimate son of Brendol Hux, born on Arkanis in the last year before the Battle of Yavin, and he grew up in the Unknown Regions among Imperial officers who had lost a war and refused to say so.
Starkiller Base
His signature act is the destruction of the Hosnian system: a planet hollowed into a weapon, a speech delivered to massed troops in the snow, and several billion people killed in a single shot to prove a point about the New Republic's irrelevance. The film treats the speech as the character — a man who has been rehearsing this moment his entire life and is finally allowed to perform it.
The joke the trilogy keeps making
Hux is written, increasingly, as a bureaucrat who has been handed a religion he cannot participate in. He commands the Finalizer and later the Supremacy; he loses ground steadily to Kylo Ren, who can do things Hux cannot and does not have to explain himself. By The Last Jedi his function in the story is to be thrown across a room. Whether that is deft comic deflation or the waste of a genuinely frightening antagonist is one of the sequel trilogy's more reasonable arguments.
Patricide
The novels give him the act the films only imply. In Delilah S. Dawson's Phasma (Del Rey, 2017), Armitage conspires with Phasma to kill his father with a Parnassos beetle toxin, and Brendol dies slowly of it. The First Order's most doctrinaire officer begins his real career by murdering the man who invented its doctrine.
The turn
The Rise of Skywalker reveals him as the Resistance's mole inside the First Order — not from conscience, which he states plainly, but because he would rather the whole thing burn than watch Kylo Ren win. Allegiant General Pryde discovers him and shoots him aboard the Steadfast in 35 ABY.
What the character is for
Hux is the sequel trilogy's clearest statement about inherited fascism: the First Order is not the Empire returning, it is the Empire's children, raised on a grievance they did not personally earn, building something louder to prove they were owed it. He is not a strategist and he is not a believer. He is a boy who was told the galaxy stole something from his father.
Where to read him
The three film novelisations, and Phasma, which is the only book that treats him as a person rather than a function.
