Can we talk about how chill Anakin is though?
Like, yes, he fell in love with a woman he met for, like, two days, and kept loving her for ten years without seeing her. He’s weird, I’m not saying he isn’t.
On the other hand, it took ten plus years of verbal manipulation, four-ish years of a gruesome war, his wife and unborn children dying, and what he felt like was the Jedi betraying him for Anakin to fall to the Dark Side. It took a lot of effort! I would have given up!
Anakin is so impossibly chill somehow?? As a child he is confident and self-assured, rightfully so since he has contingencies in place for literally anything that moght happen during the podrace. He is in a ship he has no control of in the middle of a gunfight, and he just ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯ “Qui-Gon told me to stay in the ship.”
When we see him again in Attack of the Clones, he’s a bit snappy, yeah, okay, but he also jumps out of cars without a care in the world. He really only goes haywire when his mother dies, and I think we can all confidently say that he was, at that point, under Palpatine’s manipulation for long enough that that probably had something to do with it. We know this because Anakin feels like shit afterwards. Anakin doesn’t even know why he did it! He is so chill at every other point. He flirts with Padme, he makes fun of Obi-Wan, he does incredibly dangerous things without thinking because he knows he’s powerful, he’s confident! He’s chill!
The third movie is the culmination of all of Palpatine’s effort to turn Anakin to the Dark Side. And Anakin, at this point, has been fighting in a hopeless war and watching his friends die for the past four years. Anakin has been secretly married to a woman and he just found out she is pregnant and he is twenty-three and has no idea what the fuck he’s doing. Yeah. He falls to the Dark Side. He falls because a man he trusted since his childhood told him the Jedi all hated him. Also, Obi-Wan did cut off all of his limbs and leave him to burn to death, like I would fall too if Obi-Wan cut off all my limbs after all of that happened, damn.
But as Vader! The Phantom Menace is the only time we know for sure we see Anakin not under Palpatine’s control, but we can assume Palpatine has loosened his grip on Vader, if only because they are barely ever together. And Vader! Is! So! Chill! Vader is not portrayed as very angry! If anything, he is unreasonably calm at every point! He is irrational, he is impulsive, but those are not the same things as being angry. He calmly chokes people because he feels disgusted by them. He is actually pretty pleased by how tough Leia is, because he thinks it’s neat (and because she lies to Tarkin’s face). He corners Luke to try and get Luke to join his side and when Luke instead chooses to fall thousands of feet to his probable death, Vader’s response is the stunned lowering of his hand a bit. Vader only ever really gets upset when Luke is baiting him and then when Palpatine is Force lightning-ing Luke. Aside from that? He gets angry for maybe a moment or two, then he’s cool with it.
But, if we’re talking about Anakin and how chill he is, we have to talk about Clone Wars. The tv show that proves Anakin is a “do as I say, not as I do” lind of teacher. Even when he gets upset at Ahsoka, he is still very kind about it? Like, he’s worried, not really angry, and he tries to cheer her up. He is impossibly calm throughout the series, unreasonably calm really.
Anakin is so chill. I don’t know how else to say it. He just would like to sit on the grass and stare up at the sky. Maybe spar with Obi-Wan. Hold hands with his wife. He is a simple man and it took so much effort to seduce him to the Dark Side that it honestly really isn’t all that surprising to me that it took Luke fifteen minutes to change his mind.
