you’re right, it’s not what i had in mind, but also i want to talk about this, because anakin’s fucked up brain is my favorite subject. my apologies for stealing your tags as an excuse to soapbox.
i see this all the time, which is fair, because this is how the narrative frames it. star wars words the answer to pain as letting it go. but i want to interrogate that narrative framing a bit, and also poke at how we replay that framing in debate - what does letting it go look like, if you are anakin skywalker? who are you after you have let it go, if you are anakin skywalker? what’s left?
the thing that’s wrong with anakin skywalker is that he was born on a slave transport. the thing that’s wrong with anakin is that he had a bomb implanted into his body to coerce his labor before he could form memories, before he could walk, before he could talk. the thing that fucked him up so badly was that he was property, that his mother was property, that everyone he knew and cared about was property, that he could be hurt for any reason, for profit or for pleasure and no one would give a damn, because he has a sign on his head that says this is not human. this is an item. he doesn’t grow up impoverished, which is its own kind of suffering, he grows up for sale - there is not a moment of his life until he is nine years old where he is not fundamentally and egregiously violated. he can be killed in a split second via a bomb under his skin. by the time of TPM, he is so inured to the actual horror of this that he freely jokes about it. i’ve read a fuckton of star wars canon, but nowhere has anyone mentioned hey, if you spent nine years of your life aware that you and your mother can be killed with the push of a button just to make someone laugh because your lives and your wellbeing don’t matter to people who have enough money to buy you, maybe there would be something hideously wrong with your ability to process death, but, man, if that was how you were raised, would you ever stop thinking that way? could you?
the jedi say let it go. this is perfectly valid advice. this is advice that would work for 99.99% of all the jedi younglings they raise, but that’s because they don’t raise younglings from situations anakin is from. they don’t raise kids built by trauma the way anakin is; they find toddlers in traumatic circumstances, maybe, but anakin is nine already. anakin’s pain is inextricable from his life; the thing that hurt him is the only reason he exists, and letting go of that pain, in his mind, is tantamount to letting go of himself entirely. how do you let go of your pain when it is a part of even every good memory you have ever had - when you born into it, when your mother suffered under it, when that pain decided what you did every day, when you woke up and when you slept and who you knew and who you talked to? when it’s in the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you eat - ever present, in everything you have lived up to that point? when that suffering is so much a part of who you are that this place - the jedi temple - is so strange and foreign because of its absence? when it’s confusing that there’s food and water for everyone, that people don’t get scared of getting hurt for talking back, that there’s no active bomb in you? what kind of motherfucking low is it that it’s weird to not have an explosive device violently coercing your complacency? every piece of who anakin is was forged in a violent system, both the good parts and the bad. he likes mechanics because he spent hours of his day working on mechanics to further the profit of someone else. he’s kind because he knows what it’s like to be deprived of kindness. he’s violent because he’s at the mercy of a might makes right mentality every day, and internalizes that if you’re strong enough to push people around, they have to listen to you. there is not a piece of him untouched by his childhood enslavement.
so how do you let that go, without it becoming a total annihilation of self? when your personality was created by every bad thing that ever happened to you, how do you let it go? there’s ways, obviously, because anakin’s situation does have real-world parallels. plenty of kids are raised in abusive circumstances and their personalities form around the hell they’re in. closure is one key way people move on; they leave the home, they escape, they cut contact, they take it to court, and once you’re not actively in danger or mired in the possibility of re-entering that danger, you can begin to heal.
that’s the problem, with anakin, though; the thing that’s wrong with anakin is systemic. there is no end to it until the system ends. the jedi cannot end slavery* and the republic will not end slavery and the hutts are definitely not going to end it; the only person in the entire series who makes so much as one noise about ending slavery is anakin himself, and he never breathes a word about it after the age of nine. it is clear that no one, anywhere, in that galaxy far, far away gives one singular flying fuck. the forces of nominal power in the galaxy all either have their hands tied, better things to do, make too much money off of the slave trade, or some murky combination of the three. in legends, in the jedi quest books, anakin even gets re-enslaved as a preteen kid, after getting separated from obi-wan during a mission. in the clone wars, anakin not only is sent to rescue the son of one of the people who famously profits off of slavery (and will one day enslave his own daughter, however briefly), he’s re-enslaved by the queen of zygerria. you can’t close a wound until you’ve stopped the bleeding, can you?
that’s the ultimate irony of anakin’s story. he, as the only person who ever gave a damn about ending slavery, could have given himself the closure he so desperately needed - but because he never had the closure he desperately needed, he never saw that potential as an option, and instead became the thing he hated most. i love his stupidity. i love his stupid circular narrative arc.
naturally it doesn’t justify anything anakin did, because nothing could justify that. but i don’t think the jedi were right, and anakin just chose not to listen. i think neither of them knew what the fuck they were doing, or where the other side was coming from in the least, and it ended fucking disastrously.
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