anyway, back to my regularly scheduled niche star wars posting. this is entirely conjecture. i am about to go offroading in the theoretical possibilities of the canon in a bronco. do not attempt to make contact with me by anything other than radio.
in the jedi quest novels - the one where baby anakin gets enslaved round two to a guy named krayn, because when a character is supposed to be darth vader (someday later) you can really load up on the possibilities afforded to you with industrial application of childhood trauma - there’s a line where anakin thinks that he doesn’t deserve to be happy if his mother is still enslaved. and aside from illuminating the internal mechanisms that really keep anakin from moving on, ever, i think there’s a possibility to explore anakin, his mother, and the idea that anakin didn’t just miss his mother, but leaving his mother in slavery was actual moral injury to him.
moral injury is the kind of personal violation someone feels when they, willingly or otherwise, violate their own moral code - you’ve probably at least experienced the shame of having done something wrong, but imagine that something wrong violated the principles that make up who you are. in TPM, as we’re introduced to anakin, we’re introduced to a kid who is almost ruthlessly giving - he fixes conditioning units for old ladies and chases banthas out of dunes so they don’t die, he puts himself in harm’s way to save jar jar and then does it again just so qui-gon and company can get the parts they need. he doesn’t race for his freedom in that podrace, doesn’t even know it’s on the line; he does it solely for his random new friends. he’s thoughtful, he cares a lot, and he had dreams about being a jedi and freeing the slaves - dreams are significant part of anakin’s story, and factor heavily in the next two movies, so we can assume that these dreams were really, really important to anakin as a kid. i would say that the destruction of slavery is key, even, to what he wants from the galaxy, and what he wants to do in that galaxy - but it’s also in this movie that he doesn’t free his mother, and won’t see her again for ten years.
if the destruction of slavery was closely held to anakin’s chest as an imperative moral value as a kid, we can combine that with the above line in the jedi quest novels, where anakin believes that he cannot deserve happiness if he’s free and his mother is not; and i would think it would be reasonable to imagine that anakin had actual, real, complicated moral injury over that. it violates his sense of self - he wants to help people, he wants to free the slaves, but he hasn’t done that for the person he loves the most in all of the galaxy. he is in a constant state of breaking his own moral compass, in the constant thrall of, “i can never forgive myself for living freely, when she doesn’t get the chance to.” and i think it’s fair to assume that anakin never goes to direct that anger to the place it’s richly deserved - slave owners, and slavery as an institution - because he is so busy blaming himself for not freeing the slaves, he entirely loses sight of why they’re there at all.
he forces himself to identify with the people he used to be owned by, in his guilt; in the AOTC novelization, when he sees watto again, in the span of a paragraph he goes from being angry that his mother was sold to justifying watto’s choice as that of a businessman, and it was anakin, solely, who was responsible for freeing his mother, and his failure alone. but recasting himself as the violent system that made him who he is in a lot of ways is an absolute shattering of his self-perception, his sense of identity and the principles that he held to strongly. in a way, he’s only able to violate his morals to the extent he does in AOTC because he’s already conceived himself as guilty of one of the worst crimes he can imagine; and that guilt, and simultaneously his capacity for truly heinous action, will only keep increasing.
