"Crying Is A Free Action"

husborth:

husborth:

(star wars republic #57)

the jabiim arc from legends is an underrated goldmine of fucked up content, and specifically the fucked up content i really love to see - Padawans At War, The Chancellor Is Being A Freak In Public, Anakin Skywalker Has Enough Issues To Instantly Kill A Bull Elephant, all of the things that i consider important star wars content. for context, obi-wan and anakin are called in to support other jedi generals and a republic loyalist faction of jabiimi on jabiim, where they’re fighting against separatist-loyal jabiim soldiers, decrying the republic’s imperialism and doing normal things like chanting for jedi blood in the rain. there’s no hope of enforcements and over the course of the arc, every single jedi master (including obi-wan, who fake dies, as obi-wan does every single time he dies) on the planet dies, leaving these kids - the “padawan pack”, a group of orphaned padawans - the only military officials in charge of the campaign, and in this scene, anakin suggests that they all make a final stand in order to delay separatist forces long enough to evacuate the rest of the republic’s forces and officially retreat. Getting The Fuck Out Of Dodge has been an ongoing desire and problem for our band of heroes. but this suggestion is a death sentence for them all, but it buys everyone else a little bit of time to get away.

right after this bit, though, there’s this, which fulfills the quota for The Chancellor Is Being A Freak In Public:

“persistence”, or the fact that palpatine can snap his fingers and the separatists are like cool, let that one singular communication through. that’s just our man on the inside, no biggie.

what’s fun about this is that anakin doesn’t want to leave his fellow padawans, but palpatine leverages his personal relationship with anakin to make it happen; he doesn’t say I AM THE SENATE, he says i’ve put my faith in you time and time again, and then mentions the republic. palpatine does a really great job of making anakin do things he doesn’t like by presenting a worse reality - it’s his whole gambit in ROTS - but in this instance, the worse reality is failing palpatine. anakin’s made it very clear that if he absolutely feels it’s necessary, he’ll disobey orders, so what palpatine does here is really clever, in issuing a command in the one way that anakin can’t resist - staking their relationship, something anakin covets, on it.

when anakin leaves to go guide the evacuation, this is what happens:

because anakin most definitely did not go on to live a good life. in fact he lived the actual opposite of that. he fucked it up big time, dude. this line is like a sucker punch.

but, you know, all of these padawans die. one of these padawans even falls to the dark side in the fight where she’s watching all of her peers die horribly and violently, and then subsequently dies. every single jedi on jabiim died a brutal, horrific death, and at the evacuation, all of the orders fall on anakin because somehow, a nineteen year old is the highest ranking military officer left on the planet, which is really just, like, holy shit. how is that even a thing. but the chancellor promised an evacuation for the republic troops and the (now hunted) jabiimi republic loyalists, and then there’s too few ships to fit everyone on there, and the decision of who to save - the troops or the loyalists - falls on, again, the new highest ranking military officer on the planet, a guy who can’t buy a beer in the USA because he’s too young. anakin has literal seconds to choose what hundreds, if not thousands, of people he’s going to damn to death today, and he chooses to save the republic’s troops, and the loyalists open fire but - and it’s his baby boy time to shine - anakin strangles their leader with the force, which shocks them all so badly the republic forces have enough time to escape.

bonus points, anakin stumbles backwards and apologizes for strangling the guy, because it’s the first time he’s ever used the force to strangle anyone. so those are the circumstances baby darth vader learned his signature move. he even says so, later, while doing something fucked up:

because, well, the really great thing that happened was, after losing literally fucking Everyone, anakin was immediately (and i mean, like, he just walked off the ship from jabiim, immediately) stationed to a healer’s ward to go do healing. this will not be the last time anakin freaks out so badly at the concept of another person dying that he tortures them by trying to keep their hearts beating longer with the force. i rate the jabiim arc 10/10 at setting anakin up with more problems, a thing we all knew he needed.

what i really like, though, is how personally responsible anakin feels for all of this; he has to fix it, because he’s the one who broke it, even though he kind of isn’t, not here. i love that palpatine ostensibly created anakin his very own trolley problem, a thing that’s meant to be a theoretical, not a lived psychological experience. i like that a guy fresh from the horrific death of his mother, who makes a solemn pledge to stop his loved ones from dying, immediately tries to test it out with horrific results on his fellow jedi, because the alternative - being responsible for more death, feeling more grief, losing more people - is so untenable to him, and i like that ROTS isn’t just some one-off thing, it’s the culmination of years of this one guy getting the same wound ripped open, with no space or ability for any kind of closure for anything. it’s just damage all the way down. i like that anakin’s character begins as this really generous, kindhearted kid, feels-deeply kid, but it’s that same empathy, that same compassion, that makes it impossible for him to separate himself from this kind of massive, constant loss, that he can’t compartmentalize the horrors of war because he is just stuck living it. i mean, that’s fucked. that’s really fucked.

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.

isablooo:

Memento Mori rings 💀