adding onto this older post of mine, i wanted to toss another example of anakin’s, ahem, disorders, about his failure to wade through the horror of war:
this is from gambit: stealth, and it’s a pretty accurate summary of What Went Wrong With Anakin Skywalker, which is that this wound of death is just perpetually shredded open, and the method he adopts for coping with the senseless death he is surrounded by is ceaseless violence, because the structure of being at war is inherently, “if you can kill people really, phenomenally well, you do actually have a better chance of not dying, and so do the people around you.” partially anakin is someone who was raised largely by violence - his labor is coerced from him under the threat of a horrible death through an embedded explosive, to some extent he is evidence that overwhelming violence is key to controlling your world - but also he matures as a jedi in an environment where violence is the nature of success. in the world of the war, there is only one way to control whether the people you care about are going to die; and it’s to be the best killer on the battlefield.
he’s knighted as a jedi in large part because of his success on the battlefield; the council, extremely unintentionally, rewards a success that is borne out of anakin’s inability to forgive himself for the deaths of the people he cares for. the council can’t see what’s happening inside anakin’s head (for the most part - i mean, they do literally read his mind in TPM and yoda can sense his grief in AOTC, so for a bunch of psychics they’re really missing the nuclear meltdown poised in front of them) so they don’t realize the extent to which validating mindless violence and anakin’s insane personal standards for himself is… a really bad idea. but it’s a really bad idea, and it goes horrifically wrong, in short order.
anakin tries again in the comics to heal someone who is absolutely going to die, notably after the jabiim arc:
and then also loses his absolute shit when another jedi padawan is going to die:
i’ve talked before that anakin’s fall begins with his mother, because ultimately he can’t stand feeling at fault for her continued enslavement and then her death. he never forgives himself for that; he is contractually unable to handle his own inability to forgive himself for that, and having done what is to him the worst thing he could have ever done leads him down a slippery moral slope of, well, i left my mother in slavery and also let her die, so what’s intentionally killing some random people? but this same guilt is compounded; he replays it every time someone dies, and guess what, a lot of people die very frequently in war.
it’s not that anakin is incapable of losing people, that he’s desperate to possess them so that they’re always his. he watches ahsoka walk away from the jedi order, and aside from asking, “please don’t,” he doesn’t lose his shit and slide into a buckwild baby boy rage and physically bar her from leaving. at nine years old, he struggles, but he’s able to let her go. what shreds him, if the jedi quest novels are anything to go by, is the fact that he left her behind in slavery:
this is from path to truth, and anakin’s thirteen in that novel. it’s desperately fucked up that a thirteen year old has such a raging guilt complex, but it is the thing that’s the ground work for the even larger guilt complex surrounding his mother after her death. his obsession, his preoccupation, is an incredible struggle with accepting the reality of injustice, and slowly his field narrows to an inability to accept death whatsoever. he goes from being unable to stand the guilt he feels for his mother’s enslavement to being unable to stand the guilt of unjust death in wartime to being unable to stand even the premonition of padme’s death, and thus slowly becomes the one thing he could never handle, butchering everything in his path.
anakin lives in an unfair universe and fundamentally cannot handle it; shmi shouldn’t have died, and neither should the clone troopers, and neither should his fellow jedi. these deaths are all unnatural and violent. anakin fundamentally fails to reconcile that injustice, because one of the first things you learn about him in TPM is that he earnestly wants to free the slaves, that he earnestly wants to help people, and when he fails to do this it eats him the fuck alive. the chip on anakin’s shoulder isn’t possessive, controlling, wanting people to align to his idea of them - it’s inescapable guilt. it was always inescapable guilt. he’s luke’s perfect foil; luke’s intense desire to save people, to rescue them, is at the heart of the OT, and he performs a Daring Rescue at least once in all of those films, whether it’s (attempting) to save leia on the death star or (attempting) to save han and leia on bespin or (successfully, to the astonishment of everyone) saving vader on the second death star. helping people is at the core of who luke is; he would cease to be luke skywalker if he couldn’t. and he’s just like his father, who ceased to be anakin skywalker when he couldn’t help people. it’s an identity they share, a fundamental character trait, a piece of themselves too important to violate.
luke repeatedly bangs his head against the wall of helping people in the OT, jetting off for ill-advised rescues both at the end of ESB and ROTJ; both times, his teachers advise against it. he wasn’t ready on bespin to learn the truth, there is no saving darth vader, but luke says it himself - he has to try. he can’t help himself; he’s luke skywalker, and he’s got to rescue you. regardless of whether these decisions are intelligent (they’re really, really not, which is why everyone keeps telling luke not to make these choices) it would be a fundamental violation of luke’s sense of himself to not try. we see in ROTJ that the closest luke comes to the dark side is when he’s actively about to kill his father; because that’s not an action that represents who luke wants to be, so luke pulls back, defines himself again, he is a jedi, like his father before him. luke’s journey through the OT is essentially a long list of his escapades in trying to help people, culminating in the victory of saving the father he’d thought dead and always dreamed of.
where luke finds himself over the course of the OT, anakin loses himself over the course of the PT. he defines himself in TPM as anakin skywalker, who is a person, not a slave, and then by the end of the prequels he’s lost that. he kneels to a master. he has a new name, a new face, a new voice, a new frame, dictated not by him but by his master. anakin, mired in his inescapable guilt, trapped in that pain, all but sells himself back into slavery for a chance at stopping just the potential that there could be more of it. he lacks the ability to do what luke does, where luke tells genuinely everyone giving him advice to just shove it, he’s going to do what luke is going to do; obi-wan, yoda, the emperor, vader, even leia, they all try to shove luke in the directions they want him to go, and luke tells legitimately everyone to shove it. leia wants him to run away, luke says no. obi-wan says that he needs to kill vader, luke says no. vader says that luke must serve the emperor, luke says no. the emperor says that luke needs to give into his hatred, and luke still manages to say, “fuck off.” anakin lacks that kind of internal confidence, that stability of identity. anakin doesn’t know who the hell he is or what the hell he wants other than, “i want everything to stop hurting all the time,” and man, does it ever fucking show.
anakin doesn’t chase after his mother in AOTC the second he starts having those dreams, because he’s trying to be something he’s not, laboring under a confused idea of what being a jedi entails. even after his mother dies and he swears on his grave that he will never fail again, he doesn’t jet off to rescue obi-wan the way he wants to, because he’s trying to listen to orders - instead, padme makes that choice. note: i’m not saying these are smart decisions! anakin and padme busting into the ring at geonosis literally didn’t help anyone! but there are things you do because they’re the smart thing to do, and there are things you do because it’s you. luke trying to rescue han and leia on bespin was never going to be a smart choice, either. but the relative intelligence isn’t what’s narratively at stake, in a mythological story about the battle for your immortal soul, dark versus light the eternal cage match, it’s your you. it’s yourself. anakin sells himself - and everyone he thusly murders - because he can’t handle his innately shitty universe, and his innately shitty life, and to him his sense of self is mutable, changing. he’s hollowed out by an obsession with the agony of loss. luke could have been the same way, and was very, very close to starting down the same path. and imagine the kind of luke skywalker he’d become if he stopped trying! or just look at darth vader, the fate that luke would have suffered if he didn’t make the beautifully inept decision of disarming himself in front of two sith lords, and tossing himself to their mercy, just complete balls-to-the-wall, hope-this-works gumption. this is star wars, and being stupid is sometimes a virtue.
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