legitimately one of my favorite crossroads in anakin’s characterization is his struggle surrounding vulnerability, and all of the contradictions that are in it, that don’t make sense and mesh together poorly; he is simultaneously terrified of vulnerability but excited by it around the right people, simultaneously in desperate need of it and simultaneously… not. there are a lot of caveats. his approach to the concept of vulnerable is from many directions at once, and not all of them even make sense when lined up together. not even most of them, i think, personally.
Anakin Skywalker’s State Of Fuckbrain enthusiasts often talk about what it was like to try and recover from his childhood, but oftentimes people are talking, here, from the theoretical; no one engages with it as child abuse, so you get a lot of responses across the board that are about anakin responding to his childhood as an impersonal thing, as a galactic institution rather than a thing he lived that comes with a set of hard and painful memories. that’s only part of the picture. the truth is that abusive childhoods are a series of stories. it’s a series of memories that a person is left with, often scrambled up by the brain’s attempts to protect itself - anakin is, in-universe, a guy who can have personal furious reactions to the institution of slavery as a broad thing, but is also waking up at four in the morning because a memory from his childhood crawled up into his dreams. those early childhood memories scramble and un-repress themselves at absolute random. he is simultaneously touchy about the topic in history class, as people assume he would be, but also touchy about being touched, flinching when his brand new master moves too quickly near him, because abusive childhoods are a series of stories, and anakin knows how all of them end.
as that relates to his relationship with vulnerability, or the lack thereof - vulnerability is a state of existing, not, technically, an emotion. a child is vulnerable by right of being a child. a child cannot make themselves invulnerable. when abuse is the circumstance, that state of perpetual vulnerability is exploited; anakin, as a child, was by nature vulnerable, and associates that state of vulnerability with that exploitation, that massive fear of being hurt during that state. so it terrifies him. but because being vulnerable isn’t a state that feels safe, ever, it’s by psychological transition that it doesn’t feel safe among the jedi - to anakin, who just walked out of slavery and into obi-wan’s care, the prospect of being open with this stranger has to be indomitably terrifying. obi-wan can ask anakin, gently, what’s the matter, and anakin’s going to go cross-eyed with anxiety, because he knows how this story ends. it is hard to unlearn old circumstances. it is hard to unravel toxic stress. we see this play out several times - anakin doesn’t have emotions the second obi-wan is around, unless he can make them angry. if he can be angry, he can feel it near obi-wan, but the rest is embarrassing, a weakness, a failure, and in the back of anakin’s mind, asking to get hit. this relationship pattern, formed when anakin was small, is allowed to persist purely because it exists the way that it does.
but that makes anakin’s relationship with palpatine so interesting, because where anakin’s fear of harm from authority shoves its way between himself, obi-wan, and the jedi order from a very young age, anakin is also attached to palpatine from a very young age. and anakin is explicitly attached to palpatine because palpatine encourages that vulnerability, so he can exploit it, and anakin doesn’t recognize this form of exploitation because he is familiar with other forms - the idea of someone manipulating his mind intentionally is not an idea he’s used to. he’s gone from “slave, with no right to personhood, and therefore no one will have much interest in manipulating him when he is expected to obey commands by physical force” to palpatine’s, on the surface, much quieter methods of emotional control.
but i bet that anakin as a kid is really stuck on being vulnerable around palpatine as being safer because he can leave palpatine. an abused kid is a kid that analyzes avenues of escape, to protect themselves, and there is a huge difference, psychologically speaking, between showing your proverbial belly to the guy who has constant authority over you, and the guy whose office you pop over to a few times a week to chat. one of those feels, to a baby tweenager, a lot safer to be vulnerable within than the other, because anakin feels like he has more power to control where he is, how long he’s there, how often he returns. he has no such control within the order; and it’s not that this is a bad thing, because obi-wan isn’t hurting anakin, and neither is anyone else. it’s that anakin was hurt in the past, and perpetually operates on that expectation. there was even an exciting reward - the emotional release and affection palpatine offered, that kept encouraging anakin to return, even as palpatine started making moves like does obi-wan enjoy being around you, you think? every time i see you together, i daresay he looks like he’s swallowed a lemon. moves that made anakin feel like shit, but only outside of palpatine’s office, only about people who aren’t palpatine, because otherwise anakin wouldn’t return. and it’s imperative to palpatine that he gives anakin this illusion of control, when actually, palpatine is playing anakin like a grand piano.
it’s undoubtedly true that anakin needs to be emotionally vulnerable, because the things that bother him literally eat him alive and leave the bones for the vultures; but that has to be navigated with the fact that, when anakin is vulnerable, he either associates that with pain or with the man who tells him no one else will understand you. it’s a hell of a thing to navigate - how to be weak when that act in and of itself flips every FUCK THE HELL NO button in the brain, when it isn’t pulling teeth merely because someone is stubborn, but because someone is convinced on a subconscious level that this is dangerous. obi-wan didn’t stand a snowball’s chance of untangling this in his teenager. i’m not sure anyone really did.
