"...possibly sexual abuse given his relationship to Palpatine included going to bars and sharing the same sleeping quarters during that time. He also touches Anakin in super creepy ways in ROTS novelization that recalled me to my own abuse..."

You don't want to know how long my internal screaming and sick feeling over seeing Palpatine touch Anakin (who did NOT want to be touched) on screen took to click. Because I honestly confused being molested with being physically abused as a child. But once I realized...I.

And Palpatine KEPT putting himself alone with children too. No one saw. And for Anakin coming from Tatooine? It could have been worse he thinks. It's just the cost of social climbing. It's what HAPPENS to people like. He would have normalized it because of his history of trauma. And no one thought to check.

As a trauma survivor, watching anytime Palpatine touches Anakin in a frankly sensual way on the shoulder or arms in TCW or the Prequals always makes my stomach churn. It’s very predatory. It always reminds me of my own abuser. It’s part of the reason I headcannon him as explicitly sexually abusing him, though in cannon the covert sexual abuse is bad enough.

This is the definition of child grooming.

Palpatine purposefully exposes Anakin to sexually explicit and inappropriate situations to destroy his boundaries little by little, while also cultivating a relationship of closet close secrecy. He makes Anakin feel safe with him while slowly turning up the temperature in Anakin’s pot until he is boiling and none the wiser. As a child, he knows Anakin is desperate for a real connection to family after being separated from his mother. He knows that Anakin is vulnerable and that he has the Jedi at his mercy, so he uses that power to get Anakin alone to have private talks with the child in his private rooms. Deeply inappropriate at best and blatant CSA coding at worst.

You are not the only one to notice inappropriately sexual undertones in thier relationship. Just look at their exchange whenever Anakin is turned to the darkside. Anakins boundaries have been so thoroughly destroyed that he feels totally culpable with Palpatine even though at this point he has only actually attacked 1 Jedi. He technically speaking could turn back, but because of the grooming and secrecy and the isolation that Palpatine has inflicted on Anakin; Anakin feels as though he is just as guilty when in reality he is a victim. That is exactly how child predators keep their victims from telling. They tell their victims that they wanted the abuse and that they are just as guilty as the abuser, that they won’t be believed or will even be punished, that they will loose everything they love. In this case for Anakin it means loosing his place in the Jedi Order, loosing Obi Wan as a friend, and loosing Padme his only love. For Anakin, he is choosing the option where at least he can save one of those options, while the other two are a foregone conclusion. He believes because of the conditioning he’s been under since he was 9 by both the Jedi and Palpatine that he is a lost cause the moment he so much as toes the line of the darkside, which is of course a sunken cost fallacy that he has already sold his soul to the devil.

The sexual imagery in the scene wherein Anakin is on his knees and in total submission to Palpatines whims is not lost on me @komikbookgeek. It smacks of the power dynamic of an abuser who has completely subdued their victim into emotional slavery, and it is not a coincidence that many 18+ fics have interpreted the scene after as a sexual one. It’s a clear coding of their power dynamic reading to me the same as when my father sexually abused me. He told me that I had “done it once and liked it” so the other times made no difference. He had already sullied me, so me telling him no was a mute point and entirely unreasonable. I believed him much like Anakin believes Palpatine. You are already worthless to them. But you have great use for me. It is so heartbreaking to me that Anakin remains trapped in that horrific cycle for the next 20 years.

This scene was no accident in my opinion:

https://cptsd-skywalker.tumblr.com/post/688946571446026240/anakincito-this-scene-is-insane-bc-the

@merrysithmas

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@gch1995

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@ignobleknight

@mynameisanakin

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@dashingaudacity

This fandom has spit into two distinct groups.

Those who can talk about Anakin’a crimes in a complex way involving trauma and his own actions, and those who now delight in filling the tags with bad faith narratives victim blaming him for his own trauma. They even go so far as to claim “slavery for him was not that bad” or “if you say he was groomed your infantilizing him”. To the first argument? Fuck you, there is NO SUCH THING as a good experience with slavery. Why is it that when Anakin suffers everyone collectively decides to push it under the rug? Is it because he’s not “a perfect baby who grew up not affected by his trauma at all” and actually grew up ti have severe mental health issues? Are we only here to talk about “good victims” or are we here to talk about traumas affect on the psyche? Anakin was a child when he was groomed! Not an adult! Also it’s obvious some of you don’t know what grooming even is.

Grooming is the insidious(pun intended) way of gaining someone’s trust and breaking their boundaries little by little until they feel like they are so deep in with you that they are your accomplice. I.E. a child predator might molest a child and tell them they must have liked it because they let it happen. The child then feels too guilty and complicit to tell on their abuser. Palpatine did this to Anakin except with his outbursts of rage instead of sex (tho I head-cannon he might have abused him that way that’s for another post). Anakin was groomed in cannon. NOT JUST AS AN ADULT, but also as a child. Also Anakin is only 22 in ROTS, he’s BARELY an adult as it is, and his brain is not even fully formed. Yes he committed crimes I’m not denying that, but by the same token making arguments that he was never abused or groomed is bad faith and flies in the face of obvious cannon. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk :).

Hot take: Anakin should NEVER have been allowed alone with Palpatine at such a young age. All in the comics (some cannon some not idc, point still stands) they have a young boy going off to bars with a creepy old man trying to groom and abuse him. That’s so messed up. No one thought for a moment it might be a problem with The Chancelor taking a young impressionable formerly enslaved child with no agency to his private quarters and out wherever he pleases? It reminds me of my last child abuse and it honestly blows my mind. There was such a huge power imbalance between them. Its clear evidence that Anakin was groomed from childhood (with all the gross implications that come with that) to be palpatines slave. Anakin who so craved love and attention as any child would isn’t in the position to say no to anything Palpatine asks of him. The incompetence here is ASTOUNDING.

This is so wildly inappropriate.

First of all thanks for the follow! Read your headline and wanted to ask about Anakin. As someone with cptsd, what does Anakin's character mean to you? I have read others love him and relate to him because of mental struggles. With that, how do you feel about TCW!Anakin? Do you like his relationship with Ahsoka?

First of all, I can’t talk about why I relate to Anakin without talking about my own history of abuse.

Trigger Warnings: CSA, Grooming,Narcissitic Abuse,Child Neglect, Rape Mention.

Ok (deep breath). I was sexually and emotionally and physically abused by my father for years. His manipulations of me as a child so closely mirror the relationship between Anakin and Palpatine that when they are on screen together sometimes I can’t handle it because I get flashbacks so bad I get physically sick. Sometimes Palpatine goes as far as to use the EXACT words my abuser used on me to use on Anakin. It’s eerie really. Especially with the grooming and gaslighting. I was led to believe he was my fiend until he got me where he wanted me, the. He gaslighted me into believing that what he was doing to me wasn’t rape and that I was somehow his accomplice even though he had been grooming me since I was just a little younger than Anakin. It’s difficult for people who have not gone through that level of abuse to undertake how deep the Stockholm Syndrome and victim blaming goes. Even my own family sees me as complicit in the abuse as his accomplice because of how good a manipulator he was. I was neglected and the abuse was allowed to continue even when it was clear I was suffering and needed someone, ANYONE to see my pain. I am to this day made to sweep it under the rug to spare others’ feelings of guilt.

1. Anakin is a victim of Narcsissic abuse, possibly sexual abuse given his relationship to Palpatine included going to bars and sharing the same sleeping quarters during that time. He also touches Anakin in super creepy ways in ROTS novelization that recalled me to my own abuse when my abuser didn’t want to make it obvious that he was sexually abusing me but wanted to make it clear to me who I belonged to.

2. Palpatine isolated Anakin from those around him from a young age, utilizing the Jedi Orders neglect and emotional repression of Anakin to place himself as Anakin’s savior.

3. Anakin was groomed and abused for so long he was led to believe that he was complicit in all of it when in fact he tried to refuse Sidious many times. Yet no one was there for him and he had to face the rejection of the only person who seemed to care about him all on his own. Narcissist/psychopaths groom their victims over months or years of intense friendship and “no one can understand you but me” mentality until the abuser becomes the victims entire world and “just leaving” isn’t an option.

4. To this end, Anakin was enslaved to Palpatine. Even before the suit, he was so psychologically manipulated, abused and gaslighted into thinking he was evil by both Palpatine and the Jedi Order that his Stockholm syndrome caused him to identify himself with his abuser. His already fragile sense of identity was totally fractured and he created a “shadow” self to deal with this trauma.

5.EVERYONE ,including Padme ,tries to play Anakin against the Chancellor, ensuring that Anakin runs to him as the only man he can trust. This sets Anakin up for the black and white thinking that Palpatine wants to push on him.

6. Palpatine is the master of the 2 truths 1 lie mantra and what I like to call the “bait->push boundaries->switch” mentality, something a lot of abusers use. They initially introduce the child to sexually abusive media, then when the child is u comfortable they move on to pressuring the child and “you’ll do it if you love me” then when the child is forced into the sex act they are told “you must have liked it cause you went along with it”. This is EXACTLY the tactics Palpatine used to bring Anakin to the darkside. He abused Anakin until he forced him to have a psychotic break from reality. Read the ROTS novelization and you’ll see Anakin suffers from Derealization and Depersonalization very badly.

7. Palpatine uses Anakin’s trauma as a former enslaved child to play to his desperate desire for a family and his desperate desire for approval not being met by anyone else. He also uses Anakin’s fawning trauma response to force him to submit to him, through the terror of losing those he cares about most. The Jedi council exacerbates this by making “use” of Anakin without granting him any of the privileges that his sacrifices demand. They essentially served Anakin to Palpatine on a silver platter. The Jedi are a child predators happy dream come true. They do absolutely everything to ENCOURAGE Anakin’s relationship with Palpatine then punish him for feeling too much when it doesn’t suit them. (Yikes)

8. Anakin was exposed to horrific abuse as a slave. He saw Gardulla the Hutt murder and eat children in front of him with the knowledge that this could happen to him at any time. He lived under constant threat of his mother and his deaths on top of being terrified of being separated from her. He had absolutely NO security growing up as a child except his mothers who he was then taken from and forced to watch die in his arms of torture. Watto is always brough up as a “not so bad slave owner” (which wtf if you think this get off my blog for real) but since we’re here, he beat Anakin mercilessly and called him hideous names this emotionally scarring him. Anakin even says he only lasts so long because he is “useful” and “knows how to fix things”. That fact alone would have been hideously traumatizing. To top it all off, Anakin’s first memory is of a little slave boy trying to escape and getting his head blown off. Wow.

-We haven’t even gotten into the betrayal of Obi Wan faking his death or Padme making plots in the Senate against Palpatine without telling Anakin. Dump a bunch of war trauma ON TOP OF all that!

CPTSD occurs when the victim has several life altering trauma from which they cannot escape and to which their very brain chemistry changes. So yeah: He’s the Definition Poster-child of CPTSD.

When people blame Anakin for the abuse he suffered as a child and an adult and then say crap like “ohhhh it want that bad blahhh blahhh” I wanna bleach my eyes. Omfg stfu.

Ok to reblog.