not to fight or anything but since the topic made its way to my dash again, i oughta stick up for my guys while i'm here. without contention, bc tbqh the jedi aren’t everyone’s cup of tea and that’s alright, but it should be restated that the definition of attachments doesn’t come from atla, tho i get the connection. it comes from lucas and from the star wars source materials themselves.
i would personally be doing the topic an injustice when it’s all been said and jotted down before by fans who’ve been here longer than i have and kept their ears to the ground. (gffa & david-talks-sw are notable blogs who get into star wars lore a lot.) but there are two points specifically that i’d counter atm: 1) the source of the term “attachments” and that the jedi look down on love/relationships, and 2) the jedi stopped anakin from seeing shmi.
while most of these screenshots on "attachment" are from the author, they're from the same post that lists the concept being openly tackled within the movies and tcw series themselves. the term is consistent not with love or relationships but with selfishness and possessiveness, prioritizing the self-interest of wanting to cling to and control ideas/emotions/people past the time we need to let go for the well-being of a greater whole. (eg. choosing one loved one over the general betterment of everyone else, which is a specific example addressed more in the link). also, here's a really famous interview that went around where lucas talks about the darkside, his titular evil force in the story, and it has to be said that the language he uses to talk about the darkside in the video and attachment in text interviews are the same; at no point has he or the sw he worked on have described "attachment" as anything else.
i also get that this can feel like too much to go through, but that's the thing- fans who try to let others know where this idea of what attachment means aren't pulling it out of nowhere, or from filoni's other works. the very opposite: there is A LOT of star wars, and the jedi definition of the term very much hails from star wars itself - not even far spinoff's, but things lucas worked on himself.
it also has to be said that lucas professed he isn't the most skilled writer, and he really wanted help conveying his ideas and messages in the prequel trilogy, but most people he asked did NOT want to do it because working on a new star wars project back then was so daunting that it could make or break a career. he did the best he could and tries to make up for it, i think, by simplifying the story, sometimes overly so - and something about the final product's execution throws a lot of fans off what his intentions were in his writing.
but that relates to point 2, which focuses more on anakin and shmi. like one of the screenshots of his interviews say, he didn't go in the prequels wanting to paint young anakin as a monster, even though people told him he should! mind that at the time, people only knew anakin as darth vader from the 70's/80's, but lucas stuck to his guns and wrote a kid who misses his mom.
again, it's simplistic writing: shmi's last words to anakin in tpm are "don't look back" because lucas wants to hammer in this theme of letting go when the time comes, of not letting base impulses/passion get the better of you, even and especially in situations where it feels right anyway - because of how slippery the slope becomes once one starts! the moral fable of shmi's death is not that anakin loved her; it's that anakin drove himself from anger he could not let go, gunning not just after her murderers but the village they hail from. but what about before shmi's death? why didn't anakin go to her sooner?
that's where i think lucas's writing/simplifying the message missed. nowhere else in star wars is there any indication that the order prevents their members from visiting their birthworlds. in fact, several jedi are consistently shown to wear and practice aspects of their birthplace's cultures. when a family wants their baby back actually, the jedi (i think mace specifically) brings the kid back to them with no objections from the order.
when obi-wan tells anakin, "dreams pass with time," it's not esoteric or spiritual, but is meant to be taken as is. we the audience know something bad will happen, but no one in-universe is aware that anyone, anakin included, can tell the future by dreams, and obi-wan doesn't seem privy to the dream's details besides. there's no indication that anakin's had the ability before, and so the motivation to travel all the way to tatooine or find the means to communicate while anakin is at the climax of his jedi training is not strong enough based on what the characters know alone (particularly obi-wan). again, it's strong enough for us, the audience, because the language of cinema tells us that this is important, and we know he has to become darth vader somehow. the characters can't know that. it's the sort of thing like, i myself (irl) have had bad dreams consistently about some of my loved ones but i have yet to think they're premonitions.
anyway! again, i hope this is more of…at worst something to wave away because of how breadthy it is lol i get it, but at best it's kind of engaging and a nice look at some facets of star wars. i've been into sw proper for more or less a year and stuff like this has been one of the more interesting things i've read up on for it, but it's not for everyone
