Xuebing Du
JVL
bliss lane
taylor price
oozey mess
Misplaced Lens Cap
RMH
Mike Driver
No title available
No title available
noise dept.
wallacepolsom
Game of Thrones Daily
ellievsbear
d e v o n
$LAYYYTER
we're not kids anymore.
Jules of Nature
tumblr dot com
Sweet Seals For You, Always
seen from Malaysia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Bolivia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from Japan
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Ecuador
seen from Vietnam
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
@hedgehogindisguise
Everyone’s favorite Mon Calamarian angel baby Bant! One of my number one Star Wars blorbos who DOES NOT get enough recognition. I have so many ideas and headcanons about her and how it was never explicitly said she died during order 66.
I took major inspiration from @blueberry-ry and motivation from my sister @thats-ee for her padawan braid, and it was so much fun!!
It's crazy, but it's true There's nothing I won't do I'd risk it all for you...
Artwork by x_asterr
Note: The meta below wasn't written by me, it was sent to me as an Ask by an anonymous user. It was so good that sharing it without adding some images I had lying around and extra formatting (boldening/italics) to it would've been criminal, so that's my only contributions. Thank you anon, and enjoy the read folks :)
What more could the Jedi have done?
I think a lot of the discourse about the "Jedi being slavers" comes from a deliberately uncharitable and bad faith reading of them.
I agree with you that TCW raises these questions and chooses not to go through with addressing them because it is ultimately a kids show that isn't trying to tell a story about the clones' situation but about [the Clone War itself].
But whenever I see people choose to go into these deeper ethical debates, they almost always assign an unfairly disproportionate amount of blame onto the Jedi who are, for the most part, in the same boat as the clones. Even the clones themselves seem to understand the nuance of the situation and most are grateful to the Jedi for coming in and leading them.
Although, yes, the clones do have it much, much worse, the Jedi are still there, fighting, protecting and dying right alongside them.
The Jedi are blamed for being part of the Republic in spite of all its issues, far more than the Senate is for being the Republic, even though the Senate is the one with all the power.
I wonder what it is people wanted the Jedi to even do for the clones...
OPTION 1: Leave the Republic?
And let the Separatists (whose originally legitimate grievances have been hijacked by the Sith) freely commit mass atrocities and enslave other planets with their humongous droid army?
OPTION 2: Overthrow the Republic?
And then what?
Take control of the Senate and become literal dictators and the very things they sought to destroy?
And during this whole takeover process, does the Separatist army just magically pause committing its mass atrocities?
So in the middle of a galactic war, the Jedi, with their limited numbers and resources, decide to start another one against the Republic to free the clones and ignore all the other planets getting destroyed and enslaved, and then...? [Also] the Republic citizens were largely unwilling to fight their own battles and preferred to leave all the fighting to the Jedi and the clones. So, now:
Do [the Jedi] force their new "Republic" to make its own army to fight the Separatists? Do they enforce a draft on the "natborns"?
All of this ⬆️ is premised on the Jedi even being willing to throw away their democratic values, and on the clones even WANTING THEM TO DO SO. Yes the clones are in a terrible situation, but the harsh truth is that, canonically, they do share the same values as the Jedi.
People can argue that they're brainwashed into this, and I would even agree. But that doesn't make it any less true that these are still their values. Most of them want to fight for the Republic.
They should have the choice available to pursue another path if they wanted, but the show - and thus the clones and the Jedi - barely have the time to consider all these issues because they are in the middle of a war.
In the show, [the clones] are the conveniently available highly-trained army that the Republic was going to use with or without the Jedi because it was all a trap set by a Sith Lord.
The Jedi, who were supposed to be some hybrid of social workers, peace-keepers and diplomats, were drafted into a war they did not want, and did not fight [the draft] because they had made an oath to the Republic, and because the alternative was letting billions get killed.
They were between a rock and a hard place and chose to prioritize trying to end the immediate war first before fighting for the rights of the clone army (which - again - is not even their job! Padme, Mon Mothma and Bail and all the other politicians are RIGHT THERE!)
The Jedi were a minority religious order whose own situation in the Republic was precarious, as evidenced by the fact that the citizens were willing to cheerlead their genocide just a couple of years in and gleefully bought into anti-Jedi propaganda en masse.
A more charitable reading of the Jedi would take all this ⬆️ context into account before declaring them slavers/slavery-enablers and surmise that... no, they did not agree with how the Republic was treating the clone army.
They were most likely hoping the Senate would enact a democratic solution to this after the war, so they tried to end the war as quickly as they could.
And no, they didn't "selfishly decide to overthrow/kill Palps just because they found out the Chancellor was their religious enemy when they were unwilling to do so for the clones."
It was because they realised that - all this time - they had all been under the control of a Sith Lord who had orchestrated a sham war to destroy them and take power for himself.
Option 3 is apparently, "Do what they would have been doing anyway but be really self-flagellating and virtue signal-y about it." As in they want the Jedi to admit fault and apologize and be more loudly denouncing the clones' exploitation (and their role in it) and pushing for human rights in the Senate and maybe reprimand generals like Anakin and Krell for costing too many lives more but presumably... not change much else.
Because uppity Jedi would definitely have gone over well.
Because loudly denouncing a thing you're involved in yourself doesn't look hypocritical at all.
Because who even ultimately benefits from hollow performative activism like that? The galaxy writ large didn't really think of the clones as people and some scolding from the Jedi (AKA the people they shunted the responsibility of commanding and caring for the clones off on) wasn't going to convince them otherwise. The Senate certainly wouldn't appreciate being told what to do (and why isn't fandom harping on characters like Padme and Mon and Bail for "not doing more" like they constantly demand of the Jedi, they're the people with the ACTUAL power to affect that kind of change, all the Jedi can do is be a voice parroting agreement) and by and large had already been corrupted and compromised by decades of Sith manipulation. And the few actual military commanders they had (Tarkin) already didn't like the Jedi Order's habit of prolonging the war to avoid clone deaths, how much more resentment would they engender by constantly telling people it was wrong for them to exploit the clones?
Words without actions mean jackall. Ultimately the only benefit to more obvious verbal condemnation of the clones' situation does nothing but make the Jedi seem superficially more righteous. And what would that even accomplish? How would that in the least actually make the clones' situation any better?
It's all well and good to say something is wrong but meaningless if you don't put any plan of action behind it. And as already dissected and discussed, there was nothing the Jedi themselves could actually do. At best they could be cheerleaders for the Senate (again, the people with the ACTUAL power to enact clone rights who were already filled with apathetic corrupt bureaucrats who didn't care) to do something. Because otherwise they were busy actually fighting the war.
the clones were made to love the jedi.
whether it’s romantic, platonic, familial, just plain awe, or something else, the clones were made for the jedi. they were made for the jedi to love, because of course the jedi were going to love them! the jedi are compassionate and caring and it’s stated in canon that is their weakness, it’s their compassion. the clones were made for the jedi, to be close with them, to love them, to shatter their minds with their deaths. the clones were made to die, they were made to die to hurt the jedi. the republic could have easily used droids, palpatine could’ve gotten a droid army for the republic, but no. clones. leaving, breathing, loving people. clones, made for the jedi. it’s why no jedi was prepared for order 66. because those were their men. their clones. they trusted them completely. and their men turned on them in an instant.
the clones were made to kill the jedi.
THIS
I WAS THINKING THE SAME SINCE MY RE WATCH OF THE CLONE WARS
If they had a droid army, there would have been far fewer casualties from the order 66.
For me, this was exactly Palpatine Plan: make them love each other, then make one of them stab the other in the back. The ultimate checkmate to the Jedi order.
Damn I wish we could perceive Luke and Leia as their own people and not as Padmé and Anakin's children only. "Luke got it from his mother/Leia got it from her father" they didn't even raise them???
Even when they do, they compare Luke to the wrong parent.
For Luke, it's important that he is similar to his father. It's part of his arc. Luke didn't just idolised the man, he wanted to be like him. He wanted to be a jedi just like Anakin. That's also why the plot twist in ESB hits so hard. Vader being Anakin was earth shattering revelation not because Vader was Anakin, no no, it was because Anakin was Vader. Anakin was the brutal second in command of the empire. Anakin was traitorous jedi who betrayed his entire order and purged them from existence. Anakin was the man who helped in the destruction of an entire plant. Anakin was the man who held Luke's friends hostage just so he could get Luke. This was the man Obi-Wan and Yoda compared him to. This was the man Luke wanted to be. This was the man Luke can turn into someday. Hell, his whole conflict in ROTJ is whether he will turn like Vader or not.
That's kind of why dislike when people say he is more like Padme than Anakin. Because that takes away the complexity of Luke's character arc.
( This is a bit unrelated to OP's post but this point needs to be made.)
But for Leia, yeah, the need stop seeing as an extension to Anakin and Padme. Especially Anakin.
not to vague on main but i wish ppl would stop with this "oh leia would turn to the dark side instantly, she’s so much angrier than luke" they both have hot tempers and rash impulses but id say she is by and large more self-restrained than him (she became a senator at age 19 which means bail and breha trusted her to not fuck up their delicate political position) and honestly? it kinda smacks of misogyny to look at two siblings who both have strong principles and are occasionally hotheaded and say the woman is clearly volatile and out of control while the man is a soft cinnamon roll. like cmon. leia is also padme’s daughter. she has insanely strong principles. she would hella not turn to the dark side.
do you have that "it's hard for a guy like that to find a job" vader george lucas quote?
yes it’s from the star wars archives prequel book!
Paul Duncan: So why is Vader now subservient to Darth Sidious afterwards, if he cannot save Padmé? George Lucas: What else is he going to do? It’s hard for somebody like that to get a job, you know.
“I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.” (ANDOR 2022-)
This is an excerpt from a larger essay I am working on, I though it would be a good idea to post it:
"Although Yoda clearly identifies fear, anger, and aggression as the dark side of the Force, and warns Luke not to use the strength that flows from them, as they will rule him and he will forever have to bear the consequences of what he has done under their sway, many fans and critics have distorted these teachings. The dark side is often asserted to be a malevolent metaphysical force or principle of wickedness that operates through fear, anger, and aggression. In the Expanded Universe novel Heir to the Empire, Timothy Zahn even altered Yoda’s teachings, writing, “Fear and anger, Yoda had often warned [Luke], were the slaves of the dark side.” In the 2000s, Matthew Stover spoke out against what he identified as the “dark-side-is-the-devil” perspective in the Expanded Universe, attempting to steer the narrative back toward Lucas’ canon. However, a few years later, in James Luceno’s The Unifying Force, Luke declared, “Anger by itself is not of the dark side,” and nevertheless insisted on fighting to “eradicate” the dark side, calling it “Evil” itself. Moreover, video games such as Knights of the Old Republic II portrayed drawing strength from the dark side as calling upon a mystical entity for magical powers through anger and aggression.
By the mid-2010s, such distortions had led to the formation of a primitive yet increasingly widespread interpretation that Jedi Knights were forbidden from feeling fear, anger, aggression, or other strong emotions altogether; Yoda’s teachings were reinterpreted as declaring such emotions “evil” in themselves, replacing valuable and practical psychological lessons on emotional regulation with a caricature of emotional repression. This interpretation resonated with those who may have been raised to believe that anger is always wrong, that feeling it is itself a moral failure, or that anger must be suppressed lest one face punishment in the afterlife - however, it does not match with the original cinematic portrayal."
I don't think this is supported by the prequels, where Yoda says pretty authoritatively that "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate."
It's pretty consistent with the originals!
What Yoda teaches in the original trilogy is that evil behavior is the result of falling under the sway of, and being carried by one's own dark side - fear, anger, aggression, hate. In the prequel trilogy, he explains, all is rooted in fear. "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering" means, there's always fear behind anger, there's always anger behind hate, and these are adding up to suffering.
The arising of these negative states starts with the profound fear that you’ll be harmed in some way, that you won’t get what you want or that you’ll lose what you want to hold on to, and that you’ll be in pain as a result. Fear is closely related to attachment: the more attached we are to someone or something, the more we fear not having it or being separated from it. Fear is a predecessor to anger and hate – fear of loss, of not getting what you want, of pain etc. When fear arises, anger and hatred quick to follow. Anger acts as a strategy to protect ourselves and what we consider ours. This is the egoistic perspective that sees the “I” as the center of everything and “others” as sources of pleasure or pain that either keeps the “I” happy, thus must be attained by possession, or makes the “I” miserable, and thus must be pushed away and destroyed. This attitude eventually hardens into hostility and hatred.
Identifying these negative states as the cause of evil behavior is not the same as labeling them wrong, immoral or evil themselves!
IMO you're giving Lucas too much credit. Anger is exclusively mentioned in a negative context. One can argue that maybe Yoda would make allowances for justified anger, but the movies as written lean heavily against that and the prequels in particular have the Jedi give a heavy emphasis on detachment in general, even if, like a lot of things, it's somewhat to very contradictory with the OT. If Lucas did want to portray anger in a better light, he had all of his time spent heavily involved with TCW to do it. Every episode of that show stated it's moral out loud at the beginning and it was never "anger is justified sometimes" or "there's Good Anger and Bad Anger."
I don't necessarily disagree with the idea in principle or that anger being synonymous with the dark side isn't entirely logical, but I do object to the idea that works in the EU were violating canon in linking anger so heavily to the dark side and associating "the light side"/balanced Force with detachment.
I'm afraid you misunderstood my point. There’s no “Good Anger and Bad Anger” here, so Yoda – and Lucas by writing him – doesn’t have to make “allowances” for a type of anger, or portray it “in a better light.” That's because his story is not classifying anger on the basis of some externally imposed moral judgment such as “anger is evil” or “anger is sin." In Lucas' Star Wars, the dark side of the Force is not a metaphysical force of Evil.
In the original trilogy, Yoda tells Luke that the Jedi Knight feels the Force – the energy that flows through one and make one a living being with mental and emotional processes, rather than inert matter - running through him, and his strength flows from it. However, there is a dark side to this energy: fear, anger and aggression. They arise very quickly during a fight and they offer an easy, quick access to strength, but if you give in to them and let them carry you, there is no turning back, they consume you. This is what happened with Darth Vader - this is what makes him "twisted and evil." To discern these sources of strength from safe ones, "to know the good side from the bad," as Luke put it, one must enter into a peaceful, calm, passive state of mind.
The lesson is not that anger is "wrong" and "evil" and "bad" so it must never arise. The lesson is that whenever anger arises, a Jedi Knight should do as Yoda did in Clone Wars, when he tells the projections of his dark side: "Part of me you are, yes. But power over me you have not. Through patience and training, it is I who control you. Control over me you have not. My dark side you are. Reject you I do."
Legends writers contradicted canon not in “linking anger so heavily to the dark side.” They did so in that in (many of their) stories, the dark side becomes something separate from anger, something that operates on anger, an impersonal, but somehow still malevolent entity or principle of the morally wrong, that tries to snatch your soul by offering you power through feeling anger. In Tom Veitch's comics, the "dark side" is even used synonymously with the imperial "side" of the galactic conflict, framing "dark" as "evil." Around 2004, anger must have been declared “not of the dark side” in the Legends continuity, because the dark side came to be defined explicitly as “all that is evil.” This violates the whole cosmology set out in the original trilogy and frames Yoda’s teachings as erroneous - distorting the real story.
I think I agree with that a lot more, but maintain that the inferred lesson of emotional repression is more or less accurate to the films Lucas made. It might have arguably been a misinterpretation before the prequels, but before those were several BBY Jedi who had romantic relationships because no one writing the EU assumed that was the case, so I think they, and by extension Lucas himself even if only by accident, are what really set the idea Jedi are traditionally supposed to be detached to an unhealthy extreme.
Well, I would argue that this supposed lesson of emotional repression is assumed, rather than inferred. The fact that Star Wars fans were not supposed to use Legends/Expanded Universe works to try to interpret the movies is one thing. The fact that they saw that Jedi Knights are not raised by their birth families and that they do not pursue romantic and/or sexual relationships, and they concluded, on this basis, that they are "detached to an unhealthy extreme" is a whole another issue.
The reason why I struggle to complete the larger essay is that there are just so many things to unpack about the historical, cultural and social context in which these assumptions about the Jedi in Lucas' Star Wars were made.
For example, the romantic/sexual relationship thing - aside from the obvious attachment-based love concepts prevalent in American culture, one could argue that declaring Legends' Luke Skywalker as this great reformer of the old Jedi Order is an attempt to make the Jedi Order conform the American Anglo-Protestant ideal - this Luke is supposedly abolished celibacy, introduced a highly individualistic culture where each Knight can interpret the will of the Force etc. One Legends writer outright asserted that the Jedi Council is the Vatican.
And don't get me started on how the idea of the emotional repressed Jedi Knight is actually rooted in the Freudian "hydraulic" model of emotion, now recognized by modern psychologists as a dangerous and harmful myth.
Agree with all of @writerbuddha's points here, but that last part about there being so many historic, cultural and social factors to unpack really got me. It's why I'm so on-and-off with my own massive post about how the view of the Prequel Jedi was distorted by the fandom to a point where fanon is now canon.
Historically? We can point at the Second Gulf War, but also like the Catholic Church/Vatican scandals changed how an American audience viewed the Jedi. By the time Episode 2 is coming out, they're not just monks anymore, they're an "institution", which George never intended for them to be seen as.
Culturally? Well, we're fresh out of the 90s, the antihero archetype was trending, yellow-spandex comic superheroes were now clad in black leather, etc. More details in this pic.
So a morally-right ensemble of characters who isn't written likeably by a Film Director who doesn't like writing in the first place?
An early 2000s grown-up audience will INSTINCTIVELY dislike them.
So any nuance in the Jedi's teachings or any nuance in a Jedi character is now interpreted in the most extreme sense, and is now a "reflection of the Jedi's hypocrisy."
"Yoda says that you're not allowed to be afraid EVER."
"Mace is a stickler for the rules but when then is very cavalier about breaking them when it suits him."
As I get older, the entire moral arc of Return of the Jedi irks me more and more, even without getting to see Anakin's actual atrocities in the prequels or the fact that his act of defiance barely even mattered in the sequels.
I remember an Expanded Universe comic set immediately after RotJ where Leia tells Luke words to the effect of "Vader literally had me tortured and blew up my homeworld. What, am I supposed to feel kinship with him just because I discovered he's my dad yesterday?"
The important thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that the Emperor dies and the planet-killing superweapon gets blown up. Vader spent the last two hours of his life doing something good after 25 years of genocide, mass murder and torture, and even then, it was partly out of vengeful hatred. Vader fucking hated Palpatine for a quarter century and never had the spine to do anything about it. It was only after his own son was being tortured to death in front of him that he chose to act - and he'd cut off the kid's hand like two years before that! That's not a fucking redemption arc.
Darth Vader the fucking child-killing planet-murderer gets to stand there with Yoda and Obi-Wan as a Force Ghost, give me a fucking break.
"My father's name was Bail Organa, actually."
I have a whole other post I did about the original Star Wars trilogy that is relevant to this, but I'll try condense it:
So one, yes, absolutely it is entirely correct to take issue with Darth Vader's apparent forgiveness by the Force, there is no need for Leia to accept him as her father or to feel anything for him besides hate and contempt, redemption takes more than turning back for a couple of hours and then getting out of culpability by dying, all fair.
That said: the original trilogy is Luke Skywalker's story and the story of Luke Skywalker, on a meta level, is about being a young adult in the 60s and 70s who did not experience WWII or the depths of fascism personally, but who grew up with gaping familial wounds - family members who you never knew but who older people refer to or talk around, people they compare you to, figures who other children had in their lives but you didn't. Someone who as a child was given fantasies of heroes fighting daring battles, who was told it was all about nationhood and fighting for your people and the course of civilization, someone who internalized those principles as guiding lights for their own morality and who they want to be... and THEN finding out when you become an adult, and are permitted to know about the horrors, that it is not just honor and glory in your heritage, that you, 70s white boy, may have evil and darkness and the corruption of all your values as a potential to fall into just as your father did, the temptation to hate and cruelty and domination and atrocity. And the absences in your family are maybe not just because of death, of noble sacrifice, but perhaps instead because those people who shared your blood became monsters, severed from their family because of their terrible actions, and still live as awful hateful versions of themselves, enslaved to evil, and that could be you.
And what do you do with that? Will you strike your father down with all of your hatred, when the thing that corrupted him by his hate for its own ends is sitting there grinning and laughing, waiting to do the same to you? Is violence the answer against that creature, infinitely better at taking advantage from violence than you are? Or will you just die - and even just walking away here means death, sooner or later - and let the evil persist?
Or will you, privileged young person with ideals and hopes, with a family member who has done terrible unforgivable things but who still holds affection for you, make use of that affection to tempt them to just turn their back on that evil for a moment, the thing it will never expect from the person it made its slave for longer than you've been alive? Neither you nor he can pay back the crimes of those years, but perhaps you can stop the evil, here and now, from going on.
So you do that. And what is your reward? Is it appropriate for Luke, whose whole story has been about becoming the ideal he grew up admiring and defeating the evil that ideal had the potential to become, both halves of it embodied in the being of his father, to come back to his friends and then have the universe say to him 'your father was unredeemable, and had nothing good enough in him to deserve peace in death'? Or to say there was a darkness lifted from him, and a light restored?
The whole purpose of Darth Vader in the story of the original trilogy is to represent who Luke could be, and through Luke, the audience. He wasn't really supposed to have a character arc of his own, his redemption isn't for his own sake, the story isn't about him - or wasn't meant to be originally, in any case. How you depict the fate of Darth Vader is something that sends a very strong message, and there's a reason why it was chosen as the final message of the original movies, in the context of the world in which those movies were made and who they were intended to be speaking to. If you change that, you change the message. Which you can do! And you can take issue with the original message! But like, there was a message, that was chosen purposefully, and you have to lose the original message to add a new one.
This rebuttal is really good, but I actually think it also works as the culmination of Anakin/Vader’s arc… when you understand the message ISN’T “one good deed absolves years of atrocities”: It’s that it’s never too late to do the right thing, and be a better person.
It doesn’t mean people will forgive you - hell no. The things Vader did were unforgivable, and he knew that. But because of that, he believed the only path left was to keep committing atrocities, to wallow in self-hatred and anger for decades and take it out on the galaxy. He says it himself: “It’s too late for me, son”.
But what Luke shows Vader is that we ALWAYS have a choice: To be a better person, and to choose compassion. Anakin doesn’t kill the Emperor out of hatred, or even because he thinks it’ll make up for anything he did: He knows nothing ever will. He chooses to save Luke, and break the cycle of violence because it’s the right, kind thing to do.
Vader/Anakin isn’t fully redeemed by the end of Return of the Jedi: He simply takes his first step back into the light. Obi-Wan and Yoda chose to give him that second chance, but that was their decision to make. The people you hurt are by NO means obligated to forgive you - but you should still strive to be better regardless.
And I think that’s the message of Anakin’s sacrifice: No matter what we’ve done, we always have a choice to break the cycle and be better, with no expectation of forgiveness.
I think all of these things can exist at once in the sense that there is a really solid story here both for Luke AND for Anakin and it's important to recognize the way the story is sending its message about choice and identity through these characters and their story TOGETHER across the first six films, but that the final scene can also be really frustrating because it DOES feel more like we're supposed to believe Anakin has now been fully redeemed by his actions.
Because that ghosting bit? That doesn't feel to me like the intended read is "Anakin has only taken his first step back into the light and still has work to do towards redemption." That feels like "Anakin's redemption is now COMPLETE." Anakin's dead, the Emperor is gone (ignoring the Sequels for this), there are no more steps to take AFTER this other than him just... getting to exist as a ghost forever. And not only is he a ghost, but he is either (depending on which version of ROTJ you're watching) a version of himself that has NEVER EXISTED because he's the age he was when he died but unburnt and in Jedi robes, or he is back to the version of himself that he was before he became a Sith. And either way, it's as if the choices he made to betray everyone and be evil NEVER HAPPENED and he doesn't have to live with that particular truth anymore. That's not just a "first step" back towards being a better person or just Obi-Wan and Yoda choosing to forgive him, that is Anakin's ENTIRE LIFE AS A SITH being symbolically erased as a result of sacrificing his life to save Luke.
It's a very very clear cosmic redemption storyline. Yes, there are some really solid messages in this story about being able to always choose to be a better person no matter how deep in your own darkness you've gotten. There are some really solid messages on Luke's end about how choosing to show affection to someone who's making bad choices instead of meeting them with violence can save not just them but also yourself. All of that is great, and I love it! It's one of the best parts of Lucas's Star Wars. But it is ALSO a cosmic redemption storyline where Anakin is essentially ENTIRELY REDEEMED FOR EVERYTHING HE'S DONE by dying for his kid (Lucas may have said that Anakin can't be redeemed in that book, but he's said otherwise in other places, and the Force ghost sequence speaks for itself imo). It's not truly Obi-Wan and Yoda that have forgiven him, it's THE FORCE. Anakin makes one last grand self-sacrificial gesture and the Force forgives him. Lucas was Buddhist and a lot of that comes into his story, but he was ALSO Christian and this is one of the places where you feel that pretty heavily, too.
And you DO NOT have to find that particularly satisfying as an ending for this character. It is absolutely valid to find that frustrating and annoying and a little too easy. It is entirely valid to point out that the messages about choosing to be a better person and about showing affection to people you love who are making evil choices could've STILL HAPPENED even without Anakin becoming a ghost. I don't believe that excluding Anakin from the ghost brigade would've equaled a message that he was completely irredeemable. The movie's told you POINT BLANK that Anakin was redeemable, that he was capable of being better and that Luke's faith was rewarded. So not having him become a ghost does not take away from any of that. But it could perhaps serve as an acknowledgement that Anakin's last act, while proof that he CAN BE BETTER, does not undo a lifetime of evil, either. And, to me, it's just as important to recognize that those things still happened and still mattered as much as it is important to recognize that he always had the choice to be better.
And I'm sure for many people, Anakin's cosmic redemption ending really works and maybe it wouldn't feel as satisfying to them if he DIDN'T end up a ghost and get completely and utterly forgiven for everything he's done as if it had never even happened. I'm sure for some people, that IS the moral of the story in some ways.
But I think it's just as valid to say that the messages of Anakin's story are very strong and well executed for the most part, AND that Anakin's "redemption" as such has aspects that are frustrating to it if you don't believe in or particularly enjoy cosmic redemption narratives.
its out of touch thursday
thankfully wwx got expelled quick or else lqr would have seen jc's other side
You are just too lonely.
Jin ling looking like jyl re: mdzs manga and looking like jc re: novel means jc looks like jyl and jc looks like yzy re: every novel art and description of them ever so jyl looks like yzy so jfms genes really just crawled into a hole and died huh
YURIIII!!!!!
aang choosing katara over the avatar state being seen as a touching display of his love for her is honestly one of the most egregious misreadings of the source text that exists in atla fandom and i really wish this interpretation would stop being touted in support of kat.aang when it is anything but favourable to either the ship or aang himself as a character.
aang having to let go of katara isn’t — in fact, logically cannot be — about having to let go of love, because there is no mention of having to do the same for sokka, toph, appa or momo. and even if we make the caveat that pathik was referring only to romantic love, it still can’t be true because we know that previous avatars have loved and been loved romantically without issue. roku, kyoshi and kuruk all had romantic partners, so there is no reason aang cannot. then it follows that aang needing to let go of katara specifically can only be because what he feels for her is not love — true, pure, selfless love — but attachment. aang’s choice isn’t actually for katara at all; it’s a choice for himself, because he doesn’t want to let go of her.
there’s a reason that aang’s grief over the air nomads gets brought up in this same episode, because it is inextricably intertwined with both his feelings for katara and his role as the avatar. after all, it was his being the avatar that led to the fire nation’s attack; it was his abandonment of that role out of fear that caused him to survive instead of being slaughtered with the rest of his people. the weight of his responsibility, and his failure to meet it, is the weight of his grief, and he cannot accept the former without coming to terms with the latter. this is a large part of why aang has latched onto katara, as a crutch to avoid having to face not only the reality of his loss, but the reality of who he is, and why he has to let her go in order to master the avatar state, the embodiment of what he once ran from.
the narrative framing of the guru episode makes it clear that the audience is meant to view aang’s choice as the wrong one. there’s pathik’s ominous warning — aang intentionally concealing the truth about not having mastered the avatar state from toph and sokka — and even iroh’s advice about choosing love over power (which gets thrown around a lot to defend the narrative dropping this plotline later on) is notably given without iroh being aware of the actual nuance of aang’s situation. with knowledge of the full context, it’s highly likely that iroh (a proponent of meeting your destiny on your own terms) would have said something entirely different.
it’s also narratively inaccurate to attribute the choice of the avatar state to being the choice of power, just as it is to attribute the choice of katara to that of love. within aang’s arc and the set up of his character, the avatar state does not represent power but actualization: the manifestation of who he truly is, and must become. it’s the equivalent of aragorn taking up the crown of gondor, simba returning to pride rock — a staple of the classic hero’s journey, where the protagonist fulfills his goal by facing what he does not want to face and accepting who the story needs him to be. if we apply the Want vs Need paradigm here, then katara is the Want while the avatar state is the Need.
the same arc is mirrored with zuko in the book 2 finale, drawing upon the two characters’ relationships as narrative foils. both zuko and aang choose wrong — choose the Want — and pay the price. then comes sozin’s comet and the agni kai, and the conflict of love vs power returns again with katara as its lynchpin — but this time, when zuko leaps in front of azula’s lightning, we know it’s the right choice because the story has established the choice of katara as the Need, as the completion of zuko’s actualization as a character. in aang’s arc, the choice of katara represents divergence, leading him further away from his destiny; in zuko’s arc, it’s a convergence, the re-alignment of who he was with who he’s destined to be.
and if the show had followed through with what had been initially set up, this moment would have happened simultaneously with aang letting go of katara, making peace with his grief and so earning the avatar state on his own terms in his fight against ozai — completing the reverse triangulation of the CoD plot. but instead aang’s side of this story thread is dropped entirely, fracturing the narrative symmetry between him and zuko, and his own character development in the process. and so, despite how hard both the show and the fandom have attempted to retroactively justify it, aang choosing katara over the avatar state is less a grand romantic gesture and far more an example of one of the show’s biggest narrative failures and frustrating wasted potential.
Not to mention, given the full context of the situation, Katara probably wouldn't appreciate Aang choosing her over gaining mastery over the Avatar State in the first place.
Katara believes so deeply in Aang as the only hope of the world, so much so that it becomes the only distinguishing trait of actor!Katara in EIP. Katara is angry and resentful of her father for leaving, but understands that he had to put the fate of their tribe over her own feelings. And funniest of all, Katara has to live with the fact that her mother sacrificed herself for Katara's sake.
If it was such a romantic and good choice for Aang to make, then why was it never revealed to anyone else in the show, especially Katara? I'd have loved to see her swoon over the fact that Aang chose his attachment to her over controlling the Avatar State, therefore putting the Avatar Cycle and world in danger.
The most difficult thing for a Cdrama male lead to accomlish is having sex with his legally wedded wife
