It's continuously frustrating that this show REFUSES to condemn Anakin for the things he's done or even really explicitly call him out on them, and they even go so far as to basically decide none of it even MATTERED.

But all they can say about the Jedi is that they failed.

When asked what Anakin was like, all Huyang says is that he was "intense."

The worst Ahsoka says is that he was "more dangerous than anyone realized" and then two episodes later she's calling him a "good master" despite everything he did to her and the rest of the galaxy. She never ONCE condemns him for committing a genocide against the Jedi and hunting them down for over two decades. She never ONCE condemns him for enslaving the clones and betraying their loyalty and using them as weapons against the Jedi they loved. She never ONCE condemns him for trying to personally kill HER.

He jokes with her, he gets to say that he wants to protect her, he gets to guide her into choosing to live, he makes recordings for her that she still uses years later. Anakin gets to be "more" than just his failures.

But the Jedi, somehow, do not. The Jedi are ONLY EVER their failures. Ahsoka never mentions them otherwise, she never remembers them fondly at all, she has no stories or connections about any of the other Jedi, she constantly disregards Jedi protcols as foolish and ridiculous at best.

The best thing they can say about the Jedi is that the "idea of them" had merit. But Anakin gets to be a GENUINELY good Jedi Master, more than just a good IDEA.

And this just feels like the WORST of double standards to me.

Ngl I think a lot of people, when they talk about Jedi and attachments and how "the Jedi should be allowed to have them," just plain ignore the single most important show of attachment in all of Star Wars.

Padme and Anakin.

Obviously people bring them up 24/7 when they want to bash the Jedi or pretend that Anidala is the epitome of a "healthy relationship" (lmao), but when it comes to the actual point of how their relationship is framed and how it highlights how attachment works/what it does---suddenly all the discussion around Anakin and Padme disappears!

Anakin's attachment to Padme and his unwillingness to let her go is LITERALLY what ends up killing her!!!

He has dreams of her dying, becomes convinced that those dreams are what's gonna happen (despite the unreliable nature of visions), and---instead of actually telling anyone anything in enough detail so they could actually help---he:

- Starts working with a Sith Lord

- Massacres a Temple full of children, the elderly, the injured, etc. and the people who were caring for them

- Helps commit a genocide

- Overthrows democracy

And then, once Padme won't support him vying for them to control the galaxy, he becomes convinced that she's betrayed him and attempts to kill her---then, later on, because of Anakin's actions Padme dies.

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THAT is what attachment is and what it does.

Attachment is being unable, unwilling, to let someone go, no matter what that might mean for you or them, because you don't want to go through life without them---and the people you try to hold onto so tight ultimately get crushed in your grip because of it.

Think of it like holding someone's hand.

Non-attachment would be, when the other person wants to stop, letting them slip away and being happy with what you had while you had it---being content whether they choose to stay by your side or run off to go do something else.

Attachment would be, when the other person tries to let go, tightening your grip or grabbing their wrist---hurting them because you don't want there to even be a chance that you would be without them.

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So no, the Jedi were not wrong to teach non-attachment and they should not have "changed their philosophies so they were allowed to have attachments" like some people have suggested, because attachment is unhealthy and selfish and all it does is end up hurting those around you.

It's probably been around a while and I just haven't encountered it before now, but the "yes everyone would have murdered a village down to the last child in that situation" take is a new one for me! Like would I have been justifiably upset in that situation? Yes. But what would I have done in that moment myself? Probably run. Granted I am not a person with a ton of unfathomable powers and a weapon I have spent a decade training to use that can cut through literally everything, but still. The argument that "well yeah EVERYONE would've done exactly what Anakin did" kinda falls apart when you think about it for two seconds because wow is that not what I would do when faced with being alone in the middle of an entire community of people who just captured and tortured my innocent mother for several weeks.

But it's also VERY hard to argue that this is even how everyone would react to this situation in Star Wars.

They literally have an entire arc where they explicitly have Obi-Wan's old nemesis who killed Obi-Wan's Master come to attack the home planet of someone he loves, captures her, and then murders her right in front of Obi-Wan with Obi-Wan helpless to save her. He then goads Obi-Wan into reacting in anger and Obi-Wan's reaction is to refuse to engage. He very explicitly refuses to even attack Maul because he knows he'd be reacting in anger and he's literally seen exactly where that leads before and overcome it. So when Obi-Wan IS put in an extremely similar situation, he chooses not to just go out and attack everybody as a result. He doesn't give in to his anger and fly to Dathomir to go kill every single Nightbrother on the planet as a form of justice for Satine, which is what this person is arguing is how literally anybody would react when placed in that situation.

Reva Sevander has every reason to despise Anakin, more reason than Anakin had to despise the Tuskens. And yet when she goes after Luke to try to kill him after she fails to kill Anakin, that becomes a line she can't cross. More accurately, it's a line Reva CHOOSES not to cross. So when put in that situation with all the same anger and grief as Anakin had with the opportunity to get her vengeance by killing an innocent child, Reva makes the active choice not to do what Anakin did. So while the impulse obviously was still there with Reva, she was fully capable of choosing not to go through with it. And Reva's been soaking in Darkness since she was about 8-10 years old, getting tortured and broken as an Inquisitor, surrounded by the corpses of her people, with zero support of any kind that she can turn to for comfort or guidance. Anakin had spent the last 10 years in a warm loving environment with people who cared for him and still had most of those people available to him to support him in this time of grief. And yet when faced with the same choice, Reva chose to pull back and let Luke live, but Anakin just kept going and massacred an entire village. It's a CHOICE, not an uncontrollable urge.

You know the only other person I can think up off the top of my head who DOES canonically have a similar reaction to Anakin's?

Aleksander Kallus.

Kallus explicitly states that he leads a genocide against the Lasat as vengeance for ONE Lasat killing a unit of Imperial soldiers in self defense. An entire species is nearly wiped out of existence because Kallus decided to let his anger control him.

But there are NUMEROUS other characters in Star Wars who we see lose people they love and proceed to not go on a murder spree against innocent people and children as a result. And the ones that do are pretty explicitly villains whose actions when in those situations are used to showcase just how villainous they are. Which indicates that it's NOT a normal reaction because otherwise it wouldn't really mean anything as a villain identifier. If it's something just about anyone would've done, it's probably not that villainous. The point of it NEEDS to be that most people WOULDN'T do that, even in justified anger.

Anakin is such an fascinating character because he’s tragic, but not in the sense that everything was stacked against him. He’s tragic in the sense that everything was lined up FOR him and he still chose the sith. Everyone gave their ALL for him and he let them down in the most horrific ways possible.

Obi-Wan, on the other hand, IS a tragic character because everything was stacked against him. This man tried his hardest to get through everything and help all that he could. But it always was never enough for the galaxy.

Imagine BEING Obi-Wan and seeing your former padawan, your brother, who had everything he could ever need and the galaxy’s favorite, destroy everything you managed to get from the galaxy’s cruel hands.

It just occurred to me why certain fans (particularly stanakins) have such rabid stupid hate boners for Reva...

It's because Reva does something rare for a higher canon character, she hates Anakin

See, hating Vader isn't uncommon in universe, most people do, but most aren't aware of anakin in the Vader equation, nor did they know him personally, and of the characters who know both anakin and Vader, most don't hate him

Yoda pities him

Obi-Wan is wrecked with guilt over him

Padme died believing in him

Luke loves him and still believes in him

Really the only one who hates anakin is Leia, but critically, this doesn't come up in higher canon, it's mostly a books/comics thing, the most we get of Leia's thoughts on anakin is shock and disbelief that he's her father in rotj

(Also I notice people give Leia a pass for hating anakin, a combination of "Leia's allowed because she's his daughter" and of course, racism, white characters are allowed to despise a white villain, but if a black character does then they're literally the worst)

But Reva hates anakin, hates him for what he did to her, to her family, for betraying the Jedi, and she's open about it, she doesn't care about the "good man" Anakin used to be like the others (minus Leia) above, she doesn't lend him sympathy

And that drives stanakins insane

Luke and Leia would have been so fucked up if Anakin and Padme actually raised them

at some point I'm gonna write a oneshot where obi-wan gets de-aged (to like bandomeer age or something, so we still got a nice lil sprinkle of trauma in there)- the old sith artifact trope, or something like that, that's not important because what i want is baby obi-wan sensing some deep and dangerous darkness in anakin and absolutely refusing to let him near him (or any of the other medics), and anakin's growing more and more frustrated and angry and helix is just about to hit him with a stunner because he's not leaving when obi-wan's eyes widen and in an instant he's off the bed and darting around anakin (who tries to grab him, but he's too slow) and into the hallway and then they hear an oof--

helix glares down skywalker and strides out--

and nearly trips over mace, kneeling on the floor, with obi-wan clinging to him like a koala.

the 187th had been the next-closest, after the 501st. and when cody had commed the council with the news, well... no one had to ask who would go to them.

anyway head empty no thoughts only anakin having to reckon with the fact that this kid version of his master absolutely adores mace windu, of all people, and wants nothing to do with his own padawan.

featuring mace and obi-wan fluff and h/c (because the concept of mace being his finder is SO IMPORTANT TO ME), anakin being an ass, the 187th and 212th fighting a custody battle to end all custody battles, and an eventual tusken massacre reveal, because what do you mean when you say darkness, obi-wan?

(and listen i know he's a fictional character but i think a mace windu hug would fix me.)

Don't mind me, just thinking about that one Star Wars Legends book where Obi-Wan was in love with another Jedi, who was in love with him

And when that Jedi died, Obi-Wan showed her killer mercy

And Anakin sees this and his literal inner monologue is "Clearly Obi-Wan could never have loved her because I would physically torture Padme's killer to death"

And i just want everyone to think about that for a second

I've just rewatched Revenge of the Sith for like a 5th time and you know what annoys me the most?

That some people think Anakin is the most tragic character of Star Wars.

Like, yeah he was a slave and his mother was killed but most of his other suffering was his own doing.

HE killed the Jedi, including kids (as he did sand people).

HE decided to get married to Padme despite his problem with attachments and hide it from the Order.

HE decided to save Palpatine for his own gain.

HE choked Padme!!! The woman he supposedly loved and couldn't live without!!!

HE chose to fight Obi-Wan and even when Obi-Wan told him it's over, he still chose to attack him.

Most of his suffering was self inflicted and seriously, I don't even feel sorry for him. He deliberately chose to allign himself with a literal Sith Lord just because he wanted to save Padme. And while yes, I could understand the sentiment, he did it selfishly ("I can't live without her!" he screams at Windu before cutting his hand.

When he tells Padme about his dreams, she asked what about their child and he doesn't care about it, he only cares about Padme because HE cannot leave without her, screw her feelings or thoughts on that matter), dooming all of the Republic, not even thinking about other alternatives before.

So no, I don't think Anakin is the most tragic character. But you know who I think is?

Obi-Wan

In a span of a short time he:

- was betrayed by the men he was fighting with for the whole war

- lost his home and family

- had to fight the person he considered his brother

- became a hunted down man

- was betrayed by the person he considered his brother (who also killed kids)

- was forced to go into exile to Tatooine and spend his time alone, guarding Luke, a son of the person who was directly responsible for all of his suffering

- he lost Padme who he valued as a good friend

And before that he also:

- lost his master after said master was ready to throw him away for the Chosen One™ (I hate Qui Gon with passion)

- lost a woman he loved (killed by the same man who killed his master)

And somehow, Obi-Wan till the end was loyal to Jedi teachings and never went to the dark side. And, guess what, none of the points above were his doing! He got dealt with shitty hand all the time and yet he still endured it and still had faith!

Man, I love Obi-Wan.

It’s so funny when fics about characters going back in time to the clone wars who are not Obi-wan, Luke, or Ashoka try to redeem Anakin. Like Cal Kestis is not gonna redeem Anakin the person who fucking caused the death of all his friends and helped the murder of one of his master and did murder the other. If you have change the character that much to feel your needs just maybe don’t use that character.

Also no other character besides the ones stated before Cal would ever try to redeem Anakin. Maybe Ezra but that’s big if. Leia would hate Anakin she feels no pity to the man who destroyed her planet and killed her parents. Also any clone would be down to kill Anakin especially 501st.

So yeah here’s my thoughts on the whole time travel to redeem Anakin trope.

What's crazy and really shows off how impeccably awful this show managed to be is how DIFFERENT Anakin feels between the Kenobi show and the Ahsoka show, despite the fact that he's being played by the same actor probably within a year of each other if that.

And it's so clearly not the fault of the performer, Hayden Christensen is doing the absolute MOST to give an authentic and familiar performance of Anakin in the Ahsoka show and on a STRICTLY acting standpoint, I think he succeeds. People have pointed out that the Anakin that Hayden is playing in the flashbacks, despite being in the TCW costumes, does not at all feel like TCW Anakin. There's nothing suave or charming about him. When he tries to joke and Ahsoka pushes back against it, he immediately gets defensive, which is perhaps one of the most in-characters thing about the entire performance. And obviously his performance as Sith Anakin is pure perfection.

But it's not just the performance that creates a character. It's the way other people discuss the character, it's the way that character impacts the world around them, it's what we as the audience are allowed to see of them.

In the Obi-Wan show, Anakin at his best is still a whiny little asshole. In the flashback scene, he's arrogant, he's overconfident, he's a little bit of a bully, he's stubborn, and he's a sore loser. It's left a little ambiguous as to whether this scene was a true flashback or something Else, but the dialogue of the scene and who is currently "winning" the match clearly are intended to parallel what's going on in the actual plot between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Which means you can just as easily interpret this as saying that the whiny little asshole you remember from the prequels is still the person behind that mask. Yes, he's got a vocoder changing his voice into something more menacing, his expressions hidden behind an emotionless mask, but that whiny teenager is still calling the shots here. That's precisely what motivates him. Even if it's intended as a more legitimate flashback, that's supposed to be Anakin at his BEST and he's... whiny. He's arrogant. You can say he can grow out of it at this point and that's clearly what Obi-Wan believes in the moment, but the best he's got is... still this.

And he never grew out of it, he never left that arrogance and entitlement behind. He decided to let it define him instead. He might've had promise if he'd chosen to outgrow his more negative traits, but he didn't. He just stayed forever in the mindset of that annoying little 19 year old asshole.

And at his worst, Anakin's a literal unhinged MONSTER. He's casually walking by and murdering innocents just to get Obi-Wan's attention, he's stabbing Reva just because he can, he's ripping open ships, he's burning Obi-Wan alive out of vengeance. His face when that mask comes off has a manic GLEE as he talks about having "killed" himself just to try to manipulate Obi-Wan and the way he screams Obi-Wan's name at the end is so intensely disturbing. So many people saw that moment as Anakin having this moment of mindfulness, but I didn't see or hear a single sane moment in the entire scene. The whole thing is off-kilter and it feels pretty intentionally off-kilter, both in the writing and the acting and directing. Anakin's made his choice. This is it.

In the Kenobi show, Anakin might've once had promise. But he also had immense potential for monstrous evil, that was ALSO there as well. And whatever promise used to be there is now squandered in favor of the arrogance and cruelty and entitlement, which means that it's not worth Obi-Wan's time and effort and energy continuing to wonder what if about it. Because, quite honestly, it doesn't MATTER. Obi-Wan isn't fighting for Anakin anymore by the end. He's not fighting to destroy Anakin, but he's not fighting to save him, either. And the whole point of his relationships with Luke and Leia is that he has to learn to care about them for who THEY are rather than because he cared about their biological parents. He has to see them for who they've become and allow them to grow without worrying about how much like Anakin or Padme they might end up being. They're not Anakin and Padme, they're Luke and Leia, and his relationship with them is ultimately better for letting go of seeing them as anything other than who they actually are.

The people who were in charge of the Kenobi show clearly understood that in order for Obi-Wan to stand on his own as a main character of his own story, they needed to clearly differentiate him from Anakin and FREE him from Anakin. Yes, Obi-Wan is built to be Anakin's narrative foil and has been since day 1. Yes, Obi-Wan's story is very tied up in Anakin's. But this was OBI-WAN'S story and just for this one moment, they could let Obi-Wan be more than just someone who revolves around Anakin. He's his own person who makes his own connections and relationships that have nothing to do with Anakin and he only truly starts to feel like himself again when he walks away from Anakin and leaves him behind and accepts that Anakin has chosen to be someone that Obi-Wan cannot change. No one writing the Kenobi show wanted Obi-Wan to be more IMPORTANT to the narrative than Anakin, but they were able to allow Anakin to take a back seat so that Obi-Wan could actually grow and develop into his own character.

The same cannot be said for the Ahsoka show.

In the Ahsoka show, Anakin is portrayed IMMENSELY positively. At his best, Anakin is a wise powerful sage watching over someone he cares about and pushing her to be better. At his worst, he's... pushing her a little? They MENTION he's intense, and we see visions of him as a Sith, sure, but if that was Anakin at all, then it leaves you with the impression that he only pushed Ahsoka because he cared about her and she needed it and he was ultimately right to do so anyway. Was it tough? I guess, but nothing that would ultimately truly hurt her at all. Anakin's worst sins aren't touched on at all. Anakin is constantly remembered as someone who was GOOD without really acknowledging that while he might've been good at times, he wasn't always. Even when Ahsoka remembers him as a good master, he was still someone who believed in fascism and had massacred an entire village down to the last child. That person Ahsoka remembers was still a bad person and this show desperately wants you to forget that any of that is true about him.

And via proxies like Sabine and Ahsoka herself, this show DEFENDS Anakin's choices across the board. It's not even just that he was a good master, but that he ultimately did the RIGHT THING by choosing Padme over the galaxy because he did it out of "love," turning the genocide of the Jedi into something that was caused by their OWN failures instead of Anakin's failures.

There's zero recognition that Anakin was, ultimately, a failure. He was a failure as a Jedi, a failure as a master, a failure as a husband and a father, and a failure just as a generally good person. Anakin was a bad person who did bad things. Maybe he wasn't always, maybe he had his moments, fine, but overall? What's the legacy he leaves? What are people going to truly remember him for most? Despite his choice to save Luke in his last moments, his impact upon the galaxy is still a net negative.

And Ahsoka can have good memories of him and still recognize that Anakin's impact upon the galaxy was a bad one. She can choose to focus on the good memories she has without pretending like he was in actuality a good master who did nothing wrong. It's not like those two things can't co-exist and that is, in essence, exactly what Obi-Wan has to do. It's why he can say honestly and genuinely tell Leia at the end of the show that her father was "passionate, fearless, and forthright" even though just a day or so ago he'd accepted that Anakin himself had chosen to be an evil person now. He can remember Anakin as the friend he'd cared for AND recognize that the person Anakin is now is not that person anymore. Anakin NOW is evil, Anakin NOW doesn't deserve Obi-Wan's time or focus or grief, Anakin NOW needs to just be let go of. They aren't two separate people, obviously, but people do grow and change, and Obi-Wan once loved Anakin, but the boy Obi-Wan loved is gone because Anakin has chosen not to be that kind of person anymore. He's not kind, he's not compassionate, he's not merciful, or thoughtful or any of the good qualities he used to have. The Kenobi show forces both Obi-Wan and the audience to recognize that no matter how good someone might once have been, it's important to recognize when they're not acting like that person anymore and it's better to let them go and walk away.

And the reason Ahsoka can't do that is because the writers can't. The people in charge of writing Anakin in this show see him so differently than the people who wrote Kenobi. The the writers of the Ahsoka show, Anakin is "the greatest of all of the Jedi," not even just for raw power reasons, but because he understood what love was all about and felt it so deeply. So instead of that love twisting him and being in so many ways his greatest flaw, it turned into his greatest strength, something the Jedi just didn't understand. They're coming at Anakin from a WILDLY opposite direction here and so the way he gets depicted and spoken about comes across so unnervingly different.

You CAN see it as Ahsoka just... viewing Anakin differently. Obi-Wan knew Anakin as a child and was a Jedi Master before the betrayal, so he is more capable of viewing Anakin as the whole of what he was and letting him go. Whereas Ahsoka was a lot younger, she barely got any training before the betrayal, so her perspective on him is intensely skewed by this. She can't truly conceive of Anakin as both the good master she remembers AND the nightmare monster she knows he became, so she just... picks one. She chooses to see him as a good master and that's it. Nothing else he ever did matters. She never has to think about the genocide, the murders, the enslavement, the betrayals. He was a good master, and that's the end of the story. This is the best way she can learn to cope with this particular trauma is to just... ignore it and decide it didn't happen and so her version of Anakin is the ONLY version of Anakin.

But the narrative itself sort-of presents this as the honest truth of Anakin rather than just Ahsoka's perspective on the matter. It's not that Ahsoka just can't cope any other way, it's that this is, legitimately, who Anakin was. Anakin WAS a good master and the fact that he abandoned Ahsoka to die and tried to kill her and genocided her people and desecrated her home apparently doesn't change that at all. Because he did all of it for love. And the fact that Anakin was the "greatest of all the Jedi" because of this means that Ahsoka gets exalted even more so because of that.

But Obi-Wan doesn't need that. He doesn't need to be exalted as better than everyone else, he doesn't need to be made important by manipulating the narrative. He already IS important and the people writing his story know that. He's not important because he's better than Anakin, he's important just because he is. He's baked into this story and can't be removed from it without completely undoing it and telling a totally new story. Obi-Wan and Ahsoka are, in some ways, total opposites. Obi-Wan is a massively important character to the narrative who's never been the main character of his own story before the Kenobi show, while Ahsoka spent a long time as the main character of her story but has never and will never be that important to the narrative. She can be added to it and give some extra dimension to it, but she can be pretty easily removed from it, too.

And their relationships to Anakin in their respective shows seem to reflect the way the writers feel about those facts and their understanding of the characters themselves.

Anakin and Ahsoka are “pick-me’s.”

Don’t worry, I’ll elaborate.

Anti-Jedi folks will always, always, lift these two assholes up as “better than all the rest of the Jedi.”

They’ll say that they have “empathy,” and “compassion,” and that they “care about the little people and not just the politicians in the Senate”—or whatever the fuck else they wanna say—all because Ahsoka and Anakin “Aren’t Like Other Jedi™️”

Now, theoretically, you could say the same thing about Qui-Gon, Kanan, Cal, etc. except for the fact that they themselves don’t believe that.

They loved being Jedi, they viewed themselves as being Jedi, they loved their fellow Jedi and the Order. They didn’t betray their family, they didn’t blame their family for their own fucking genocide or basically call their practices stupid because “look how much better I am teehee.”

Qui-Gon, Kanan, Cal…they loved the Order and being Jedi in a way that Ahsoka and Anakin didn’t.

Ahsoka’s change is partly Anakin’s fault, since she only changed after being his padawan, but that doesn’t change the fact that now she’s so entrenched in her own ignorance that she truly believes that the Jedi brought on their own genocide because they didn’t train non-Force-sensitives.

So yeah, Anakin and Ahsoka are massive pick-me’s and y’all are too.

I watched Dune: Part Two over the weekend, and I came to realize something: Anakin Skywalker has a lot in common with Paul Atreides, and none of them are good.

Funnily enough, I was also making comparisons between Dune and Star Wars when I saw it this weekend, but more positively. Not necessarily specifically between Paul and Anakin, but in the ways the two stories subverted the Chosen One storyline.

In Star Wars, Anakin is the Chosen One and it IS a good thing, but it's not INEVITABLE unless Anakin chooses it. He HAS to make the choice to be a good, balanced, selfless person in order to achieve the perfect prophecized ending. It is impossible to achieve it through brute force of will or selfish agendas.

In Dune (based purely on the story in the films, I have not read the books so I cannot speak to what the story was in there if it's different), Paul is the Chosen One by design of other mortal people around him, he is the Chosen One because they CREATED a Chosen One through specific breeding and manipulation of cultures and religions. They literally achieve their prophecized ending through brute force, Paul becomes a messiah by forcing himself to ride a sand worm, by killing and defeating the opposing forces on the planet, by using Fremen as weapons in a holy war, by drinking poison and coming out of it alive. The subversion here isn't in how the prophecized ending is achieved, but in how it was CREATED and the fact that achieving it is a BAD THING.

Anakin chooses to DEFY his destiny out of selfishness while Paul chooses to GIVE IN to his destiny out of selflessness, and then they both end up villains as a result. Both of them made their own choices, but were also manipulated onto this path by forces they couldn't control and people they should've been able to trust. They're both left feeling like they're out of choices and so the only one left is the one they KNOW is bad.

But I find myself somewhat more able to sympathize with Paul because he tries SO HARD throughout the entire film to keep this from happening, he knows exactly what's going to happen if it does, and in the end, he's just outplayed basically. He'll never be a match for the greater forces at play until he becomes one of them, and at that point he's lost in every way that matters. It's a completely lose-lose situation for Paul the way I saw it. Even with the visions, Paul has had multiple visions come true before he has the one about the holy war, and has a lot more reason to believe that it's true due to Jessica's training. And it felt like when he drank that poison that some part of Paul almost literally did die, that someone else came back to life in some ways and that's part of the whole tragedy. He's almost possessed by the powers around him by the time he declares himself Emperor.

The same is DEMONSTRABLY not true for Anakin. Anakin walks into the darkness with his eyes open and his head held high because he believes HE ALONE will benefit from it. There's no selflessness in this choice in any way shape or form. He has had ONE VISION come true that we know of before he gets the dream about Padme and the Jedi notoriously do not believe visions to be all that trustworthy to begin with, so all of his training tells him that just because ONE vision came true still doesn't mean that THIS one is true and even if it were, he can't trust that any action he takes to keep it from happening will actually have that result. But he's selfish and greedy enough to try anyway, to discard everything he's ever been taught, for power. He convinces himself that doing this makes him a hero, that murdering the Jedi, down to the last child, makes him a hero. There's no evidence that doing what he's doing will save Padme, or that Padme would even WANT him to do this to save her. He's not truly outplayed, he had all the tools at his disposal to make the better choice in that moment in Palpatine's office, he's just not a good enough person to make it. He IS a match for the greater forces at play in terms of power, he and Mace could've EASILY killed Palpatine together if only Anakin had chosen the better path. He just... chooses not to because it doesn't benefit him to do so. Anakin could've won, in every way that mattered. He only loses because he makes the stupidest choice imaginable.

Dune is a political sci fi epic about how people in power will literally create messiahs for the people they intend to subject as a way to consolidate their own power.

Star Wars is a children's cautionary tale wrapped in an space opera adventure about how letting your fears control you will bring about your own destruction, and only kindness and selflessness will save the world.

It's not exactly a secret that Lucas was inspired by Dune when coming up with Star Wars, so I find it really interesting to look at the similarities and differences in how they each approached their Chosen One storylines.

Thinking about when I was an Anakin Stan

I used to be a big Anakin stan as well as a huge prequels fan. I used to emulate him and was a bit of an edgelord. I would often act emotionally violent and immature as well as taking an imaginary lightsaber and slashing it all over. There were times I would advocate for a communist dictatorship while quoting him. But then I started to see how toxic that was and how nasty of a person he was. I don’t want to be like that kind of character after seeing what I was doing and I don’t want to relate to him. Looking back, he was basically every conservative white boy I met who would act friendly while spewing or supporting the most bigoted shit while getting defensive and crying “I’m just joking” or “you just cancel people you disagree with”. Seeing his stans on tumblr made me hate him more with many of them such as tragicfantasy-girl or Nerdychristianfanboy being right wing, Zionist, anti trans, trump supporters. Reading YouTube comments and seeing all the people who say they would do the same as him if their mother or wife was dying is pretty disgusting. While there are a few villain characters that I do love and sympathize with such as Princess Harumi, most of my faves are the opposite of Anakin. They’re all “chosen one” characters who are actually worthy of being called that. I’m not a Christian but Anakin doesn’t deserve to be called space Jesus after acting like a fascist, racist predatory douchebag for most of his life. Now, all my faves are characters who faced temptation, trauma and hardship but still chose to do good and keep seeing the good in people which include:

Ben Tennyson, Lloyd Garmadon, Steven Universe, Meg Murry (A Wrinkle in Time), Madoka Kaname, Luz Noceda, Ahiru/Duck (Princess Tutu), Usagi Tsukino

All these characters are far more worthy of being called Christ figures and are the kind of person I want to be. Plus they’re all teens and still chose better than Anakin who was a grown man. I have nothing against people who like villain characters and still like a few myself but emulating their beliefs/behaviors and justifying them is not okay. I have a whole other essay planned for why I like Harumi and hate Anakin despite their similarities. But I am a bit embarrassed of my phase where I acted like Anakin was the greatest thing since sliced bread especially as a person of color who’s met people like Anakin and the real nastiness of their beliefs.

Edit: while I’m not an Anakin fan, I’ve realized it’s a bit unhealthy to constantly hate a character. I don’t want to become intolerant or hateful of different perspectives as long as they aren’t villain apologism.

The thing about Star Wars Narrative

"The Jedi ... the Sith ... you don't get it, do you? To the galaxy, they are the same thing. Just men and women with too much power. Squabbling over religion. While the rest of us burn." - Atton Rand

Atton was a pilot back during the Old Sith Wars, around 3980 BBY. He was less loyal to any one cause as he was loyal to the people he served with. He would serve for the Republic until Revan became a Sith and he would follow by defecting to the other side.

What I like about Atton is that he wasn't a Jedi and wasn't a Sith, but he was force-sensitive. He was, in the beginning of his character development, an outsiders perspective. Although he wasn't discovered to be one until he was well into his adult years by a captured Jedi who was going to be tortured into a loyal Sith. So he booked it out of the prison he was serving at under Darth Revan, because he knows what they do to Jedi, to any force-sensitives. Afterall, he was trained to be a Jedi Hunter to turn Jedi into Sith. He was well versed in how this process went.

Yet because he was neither, he got caught in the middle of the cross fire between the Jedi and Sith. He would eventually be trained into a Lost Jedi, which were basically Jedi that went underground during the Great Jedi purge, and part take in forming the foundation of a new Jedi Order. Which would survive and endure the Sith Wars, and all the way until the events of the Skywalker saga where the fate of the galaxy would hang in the balance because of yet another war.

But this time, light does not prevail in this war. A war hidden in another war. A war between the Jedi and Sith, just as much as it's between the Republic and the Separatists.

Is this not what happened in these movies? Because even though there is a war going on, the war the really matters is always between the Jedi and the Sith.

"To the galaxy, they are the same thing." People (in-universe) could not tell the difference between Jedi and Sith, because they both look the same. They both wear robes, both are too calm in dangerous situations, both carry dangerous plasma glow-sticks of different colors. The only ones that know the difference are the ones the have personal experience with one or the other. Or even both on the off chance.

"Just men and women with too much power. Squabbling over religion." Because from an outside perspective, like Atton or even us, that's what is looks like without context. Both sides have literally the same abilities just different attitudes at using them, and that where most people turn a blind eye. Because they don't believe these different attitudes mean anything in the face of the power they harness.

(Yet as an audience, with more information as a given, we should know the difference.)

"While the rest of us burn." But, by this point, everyone knows that Skywalker was so self absorbed that he crippled the galaxy by letting it be ruled by a Sith Emperor with a corrupt empire while also being a compliant right hand to said empire. Basically, in the war between light and dark, the rest of the galaxy is just collateral during and after the battle.

This has been the case in "Revenge of the Sith" and in "The Return of the Jedi" and even in the Old Sith Wars.

My point is, the Star Wars narrative has always been about three things: the Jedi; the Sith; and the Galaxy. The Galaxy depends on the Jedi prevailing, the Sith depend on the Galaxy rejecting the Jedi, and the Jedi do what needs to be done.

That is the narrative of Star Wars.

A kind of funny thing about the discourse surrounding Reva that I''ve only seen a few others touch on is that she's supposed to act sort of like a younger Anakin. Her entire arc is that she's obsessed with getting revenge on him and it leads her down in the same path as him, only she pulls back at the last second where Anakin didn't.

So all the complaints about her being too annoying because she yells a bunch and is hung up on her past is kind of funny. Because that's pretty similar to how Anakin was in the prequels. And even as Vader he's hung up on his past he's just learned to project his anger into violence and mockery toward everyone around him.

So I always get a chuckle out of people saying she's a Mary Sue or that she's rredeemable because she almost killed a child and because she killed Jedi when, again, that's exactly what Anakin did only he didn't stop before killing children.

Heck, even the complaints about the acting are eerily similar to the prequels lol

I don't think she's a perfect character or anything. Like, for example, I thought her somehow figuring out Leia's connection to Obi-Wan was far-fetched but the idea that the show wants you to idolize her is completely wrong. She's supposed to be bad like Anakin, except she actually does stop and turn her life around.