can i just say that palpatine said the absolute weirdest shit about anakin just straight up in public, balls-to-the-wall just going for it, and no one ever was like “isn’t it a little bit weird that the chancellor thinks that random skywalker kid hung the moon? why is this nineteen year old so close to this guy?” like he just did this and everyone was like cool. looks like a total trainwreck over there but it’s cool.
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,andthen 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.
people will go “the jedi are beholden to the senate sweetie they’re legally obligated to fulfill a mandate” like they didn’t watch the part of the movie where the evil dark wizard goes I AM THE SENATE which indicates, in fact, that maybe it was a bad thing that the jedi were legally obligated to fulfill the orders of a political body. maybe it’s like dudes with telekinesis and laser swords shouldn’t be a thing you have on offer to George Lucas’ Metaphor For The Nixon Administration. it’s almost like there was a whole star wars movie where the head of state with full legal justification ordered a guy to go murder everyone he knew and despite that being perfectly legal, it was still a bad thing to do, like man now that i’m thinking about it, like really thinking about it, maybe “following orders” isn’t actually a justification for doing bad shit
i am ascertaining that anakin maybe had some psychological problems surrounding grief. i’m just getting the sense that maybe there was some trauma here.
this arc directly follows jabiim, which i discuss more in the link, but a short-and-sweet summary is that it’s a brutal arc where every jedi in the campaign other than anakin dies brutally, including obi-wan, who Fake Dies But In An Explosion So Everyone Verily Believed It, and at the end, with too few ships to evacuate everyone, anakin has to choose whether to evacuate the clone troopers or to evacuate the republic loyalists they had been sent there to aid in the first place, and he chooses the troopers, damning everyone else to die horrible, bloody deaths at the hands of the separatist-supporting jabiimi faction. you know, war.
this incident marks the second time anakin tries to use the force to, ahem, force someone’s body to stay alive, the first incident he does that being in the medcenter rotation he mentions in the first set of panels. i am downright obsessed with these moments. the psychological damages on display are as a vibrant as peacock’s plumage, my guys - i really dig this angle on anakin’s Horrific Tragic Fall To Follow more than i do other ideas that he was arrogant and self-absorbed, because aside from his insistence that obi-wan is holding him back in AOTC and the fabled TAKE A SEAT, SKYWALKER bit from ROTS, arrogance really doesn’t turn out to be anakin’s undoing. he kneels in front of palpatine without palpatine ever actually asking him to, and in ROTJ, the reason he refuses to just go with luke is because he has to obey palpatine - all of these moments are much less self-absorbed, and more palpatine-absorbed, and of course the focal point of that moment in ROTS is that anakin can’t stand to lose padme, and sells out everything he is and everyone he knows so he doesn’t have to.
but i think - judging by these panels - it’s a lot less about padme, and a lot more about shmi, and how her death is anakin’s proverbial ground zero, that thing that broke him so badly he literally never recovered. every time someone dies in front of him, he’s reliving that, and he’s at war, so people are always dying in front of him. he feels responsible for this hideous crime against his mother, so what really is it, to be responsible for a few more hideous crimes? he dreamed of becoming a jedi and freeing the slaves, he’s a jedi now, and he still didn’t free his mother - he feels complicit in what happened to her, and it allows him to be complicit in a lot worse. Darth Vader Had Mommy Issues And They Were Terminal (For Everyone Else) is my official take on the matter.
also, note - anakin trying to fix mechanical objects as an expression of his subconscious desire to Fix Everything, Ever is so good. it comes up all the time and it’s my favorite. are you ever so Problems Disease In Your Brain that even your hobbies are subconscious cry for help? like, come on. someone get this guy a pouch of fruit juice
