vestigial SW fangirlness, again.
Dec. 10th, 2005 01:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138Anakin still bugs the hell out of me in the prequel films. No matter how I try to contort my certain point of view, I can't get his character development or even basic setup to make sense.
First of all, let's start with the slave-boy thing, because we have to. From a plot-external perspective, this mostly seems to be dictated by the virgin-birth thing-- his mother has to be in a situation where his conception can't be explained, but also where she can't just pick up and go with him. So she can't be a single mother on her own, unless she gets trapdoored just in time for the Jedi to whisk Anakin away by himself, or unless she just doesn't care about the kid. If she'd already been married to Clieg Lars and dandling another baby, that would've explained her lack of mobility and also set up some later dimensions to Vader ordering the old homestead to be torched around his (step-)brother's body, but it also would've required some extra explanation along the lines of "Anakin was conceived before I married Clieg-- no, we weren't fooling around beforehand; some guy with wings played the sax at me while I was getting dive-bombed by a dove, and-- no, I wasn't just being a ho-bag with an earlier boyfriend-- no, honest; stop smirking!"
Hence Shmi's slavery, and hence also why none of her known owners are particularly humanoid (afaik-- I'm just going by what I remember of the movies themselves, regardless of whatever supplemental materials might've been published). But it's still a clumsy device for framing Anakin as the result of a virgin birth; it doesn't exclude possible interactions by Shmi with past human masters, co-slaves, or whoever. There's also no explanation of how she became a slave, or, since Anakin seems to have inherited his mother's status, why she hasn't been put to work breeding litters of separately sellable/workable siblings. The conditions of their slavery don't even seem particularly onerous, compared to the theoretical scenario of already having Clieg as a stepfather.
The previous paragraph was shifting toward plot-internal factors, of which the biggest hurdle for me is this: if you're a Dark Lord of the Sith (and who isn't?), and you want to create a Child Of Prophecy (TM) to plant within the Jedi Order to destroy it from within-- and heck, did Sidious even really *need* Vader to help with that, on top of all the clonetroopers?-- wouldn't you want to keep track of him, instead of letting him and his mother drift off to nowhere in the hands of random masters who might've airlocked the kid in a fit of pique? I doubt that Sithly powers from afar could've saved Ani-chan from being buried in a sandstorm or crushed by falling scrap.
Next, the bad-seed thing. Unless you simply postulate that he was conceived as Pure Evil (TM) from the start and nothing could've saved him-- which rather negates the supposed irony of "Oh, what a cute innocent sweetie he was to start with!"-- or that Sidious gradually used the Dark Side to make him Stupid, what step of his upbringing is supposed to've gone wrong? He loved his mother and she loved him (and yet their story is rather grim); how much should that really have screwed up the usual Jedi apprenticeship? (It makes his obsessive imprinting on Padme even creepier, when you think about her maternal gesture of giving him a blankie to curl up in.)
Yes, there were some initial rivalry issues with Kenobi, at least from Kenobi's point of view; I'm not sure that Anakin even noticed them at the time, and Kenobi seemed to quash them down pretty well after he was promoted and had to take charge of Anakin himself. Anakin lost his initial Jedi mentor, yes, but how traumatic should that have been when the kid had only known Qui-Gon for what, a few days? weeks? surely not longer than that. Definitely not longer than Anakin had known Shmi.
...I think there's also a proto-thought gelling toward the back of my brain cell about Padme, slavery, and different planetary prejudices toward aliens/droids, but that'll have to wait for a bit until I can find some Kool-Whip to garnish it with.
First of all, let's start with the slave-boy thing, because we have to. From a plot-external perspective, this mostly seems to be dictated by the virgin-birth thing-- his mother has to be in a situation where his conception can't be explained, but also where she can't just pick up and go with him. So she can't be a single mother on her own, unless she gets trapdoored just in time for the Jedi to whisk Anakin away by himself, or unless she just doesn't care about the kid. If she'd already been married to Clieg Lars and dandling another baby, that would've explained her lack of mobility and also set up some later dimensions to Vader ordering the old homestead to be torched around his (step-)brother's body, but it also would've required some extra explanation along the lines of "Anakin was conceived before I married Clieg-- no, we weren't fooling around beforehand; some guy with wings played the sax at me while I was getting dive-bombed by a dove, and-- no, I wasn't just being a ho-bag with an earlier boyfriend-- no, honest; stop smirking!"
Hence Shmi's slavery, and hence also why none of her known owners are particularly humanoid (afaik-- I'm just going by what I remember of the movies themselves, regardless of whatever supplemental materials might've been published). But it's still a clumsy device for framing Anakin as the result of a virgin birth; it doesn't exclude possible interactions by Shmi with past human masters, co-slaves, or whoever. There's also no explanation of how she became a slave, or, since Anakin seems to have inherited his mother's status, why she hasn't been put to work breeding litters of separately sellable/workable siblings. The conditions of their slavery don't even seem particularly onerous, compared to the theoretical scenario of already having Clieg as a stepfather.
The previous paragraph was shifting toward plot-internal factors, of which the biggest hurdle for me is this: if you're a Dark Lord of the Sith (and who isn't?), and you want to create a Child Of Prophecy (TM) to plant within the Jedi Order to destroy it from within-- and heck, did Sidious even really *need* Vader to help with that, on top of all the clonetroopers?-- wouldn't you want to keep track of him, instead of letting him and his mother drift off to nowhere in the hands of random masters who might've airlocked the kid in a fit of pique? I doubt that Sithly powers from afar could've saved Ani-chan from being buried in a sandstorm or crushed by falling scrap.
Next, the bad-seed thing. Unless you simply postulate that he was conceived as Pure Evil (TM) from the start and nothing could've saved him-- which rather negates the supposed irony of "Oh, what a cute innocent sweetie he was to start with!"-- or that Sidious gradually used the Dark Side to make him Stupid, what step of his upbringing is supposed to've gone wrong? He loved his mother and she loved him (and yet their story is rather grim); how much should that really have screwed up the usual Jedi apprenticeship? (It makes his obsessive imprinting on Padme even creepier, when you think about her maternal gesture of giving him a blankie to curl up in.)
Yes, there were some initial rivalry issues with Kenobi, at least from Kenobi's point of view; I'm not sure that Anakin even noticed them at the time, and Kenobi seemed to quash them down pretty well after he was promoted and had to take charge of Anakin himself. Anakin lost his initial Jedi mentor, yes, but how traumatic should that have been when the kid had only known Qui-Gon for what, a few days? weeks? surely not longer than that. Definitely not longer than Anakin had known Shmi.
...I think there's also a proto-thought gelling toward the back of my brain cell about Padme, slavery, and different planetary prejudices toward aliens/droids, but that'll have to wait for a bit until I can find some Kool-Whip to garnish it with.
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somewhere I have worked up an alternate version
on 2005-12-10 04:47 pm (UTC)compared to AOTC...
on 2005-12-11 05:06 pm (UTC)1.) Are we really supposed to expect that Palpatine used the Dark Side to control the battle droids' attacks on the queen's ship so precisely that A.) they'd be forced to land anywhere on Tatooine, B.) specifically within walking distance of Mos Espaa, and C.) needing a part which would only be available at Watto's shop? Who knew the Dark Side was so good at calculating orbital mechanics and planetary-scale inventory control?
[1.B.i.: Or is Mos Espaa simply the metropolitan area that was the most obvious from orbit, even if thirty years later, it didn't stand a chance against Mos Eisley in the Scum'n'Villainy pageant?]
[1.B.ii.: And good on Palpatine at foreseeing that Padme would insist on personally tagging along with Qui-Gon rather than sending one of her nearly-identical handmaidens for Ani-chan to glomp onto instead. Then again, maybe any pretty girl could've imprinted the kid with a decade-long countdown toward the Dark Side; when you look at the timeline, she wouldn't even nec'ly need to've been accessible off-planet during the interval. Just imagine Beru as a fellow child-slave, perhaps bought by Clieg Lars at the same time as Shmi, or perhaps re-encountered in Mos Espa during the search for Watto-- either way, available on the spot as a familiar yet grown-up babe to comfort Angsty!Anakin after his mommy died; unlike Padme, Beru would've grown up with a predisposed dislike for the Tusken Raiders, facilitating a brushoff of his single-handed My Lai.]
[1.B.iii.: Though really, the important part would've been getting a Jedi-- any Jedi-- to take a blood sample from Anakin and drag him offworld. But perhaps the kid's romantic imprinting would've been impeded if his first encounter with a girl who wasn't permanently dusty and sunburnt was with a whole ship/planet of them.]
2.) From the standpoint of the Trade Federation, what was the benefit of blockading Naboo? Yes, from Palpatine's perspective, it built up sympathy for him as the representative of an oppressed world, but what reason did the Senate have to pay any attention to the blockade in the first place? Naboo seems to've been a rather small, sparsely populated planet whose nonhuman (indigenous?) inhabitants were dismissed by the humans as scarcely better than dumb animals. (Not that they would've been wrong with Jar-Jar.) If Naboo had some sort of rare export that was either necessary or highly profitable (melange? blood diamonds?), there wasn't any indication of what it might've been or who might've missed it enough to eventually do something about it.
(All the Senate ended up doing, for that matter, was send two Jedi whose ship was promptly blown up, and then when the Jedi returned to Coruscant with the exiled Queen, the Senate just sent them back without reinforcements; the Federation didn't even get scolded that it had been very naughty to blow up the Jedi transport and conduct a military invasion of Naboo, and that they mustn't do that again or there would be no rice pudding for afters.)
yeah, worldbuilding is important!
on 2005-12-11 05:34 pm (UTC)What bugged the heck out of me in AOTC is that there's no logical reason for them not to have sent back to buy Shmi after reaching civilization. The Temple has no budget escrow at all? They don't think that keeping their star pupil comfortable and grateful is important, even leaving aside the humanitarian aspects? They'd rather have him worried and resentful on top of all his other issues? If they're that clueless, how come Palpatine didn't win long ago?
So my alternate scenario is that they go to redeem her - but in the meantime she's already met Mr. Lars, he's been captivated, she's enchanted, they've gone off to set up housekeeping together and she sends him bubbly letters about how happy she is, he's got a good career now and she has people who need her and like her, one door closes another opens - and he gets the major jealousy that she's got a life of her own now and doesn't need to be rescued by him, and this resentment never goes away - and the feeling of [irrational] abandonment and blame for her, too.
You could get a seriously twisted, but plausible, and pitiable, family dynamic going on that way - without making the Jedi look heartless and dumb. (Anakin getting more and more bitter when his Temple-mates ask him how his mom is doing, isn't it nice that she found someone, the Force was working there, and he's thinking "she doesn't love me any more!" and getting more and more needy/dependent/jealous of everyone else he still has around him.) And the guilt for resenting her, after she gets killed, making him choose to go on a rampage rather than self-confront. Because he can't blame *her* either, at that point, any more.
Oooooo,
on 2005-12-13 11:36 am (UTC)But on the whole (or at least by Lucas's standards), the Jedi Council might've thought it would be best to ignore Shmi altogether, in hopes of encouraging that whole detachment thing in the kid-- and yet, Kenobi was presumably brought up in the Approved Manner (TM), but was clearly devastated in a very personal way by Qui-Gon's death and Anakin's betrayal. Yeah, Qui-Gon was known to've had some odd quirks within the Jedi system, but still.
(Or should we ascribe more significance to Qui-Gon having been apprenticed to Count Dooku before(?) the latter went renegade? Then again, since I haven't been keeping an eye on the fandom, I have no idea whether there are long, involved theories about that already....)
I bet we could come up with a whole Phantom Edit script
on 2005-12-13 11:08 pm (UTC)But I'm sure it would be possible to improve on the plot logic, and the suspense and emotional angst at the same time. (We could go back and do Jedi while we're at it, and deal with Luke dealing with the fact that he's Vader Junior instead of just fastfwding to the New Enlightened Mature Luke, too.)
Alas, I'm already compromised...
on 2005-12-17 04:20 pm (UTC)From certain perspectives, TPM is very good at fitting all of its own pieces together into place, which I suppose is just another way of saying that it's facile and contrived, but to me it did feel more smoothly integrated than AOTC or ROTS. Except for the gratuitous "insert videogame tie-in here" podrace. And maybe the "dodging implausibly large fish through *how* much oceanic pressure through the *planet CORE?!?!*" WTF-fest. And, uh, never mind.
Re: Alas, I'm already compromised...
on 2005-12-19 04:34 am (UTC)Re: compared to AOTC...
on 2005-12-19 04:30 am (UTC)Enforcing trade-law or tax changes that would benefit them? Extortion of a seemingly well-off planet sufficiently remote for the Senate not to do much about it? But the TF leadership is never portrayed as very bright, in any case.
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on 2005-12-19 04:26 am (UTC)Once he has him, though--no, Sidious doesn't need Anakin at all, but he makes an intriguing possibility for a future Heir Of The Sith, if the previous candidates don't work out. I don't think there's anything more than that, at least during TPM.
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on 2005-12-19 08:45 am (UTC)While the line itself is arguably ambiguous as a proper explantion of Anakin's virgin birth, apparently there's some ancillary officialesque material that reinforces it-- DVD commentary, an all-about-Vader book, possibly the ROTS novelization, and I dunno what-all else. As for why bother creating the kid in the first place, there's that whole angle about "bringing balance to the Force" by whacking a thumb onto the Sith side of the scale to catapult off most of the Jedi. (Whee!)
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on 2005-12-20 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-01-21 03:47 am (UTC)Oooo, candy. Where do I sign up for Sith powers????
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on 2006-01-21 06:47 am (UTC)On the other hand, candy does explain Palpatine's tooth decay.
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on 2006-01-21 07:01 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-01-21 07:48 am (UTC)Bwahaha! I know! I'll send away my guards and stay here in this big room with lots of windows on the tippy top of an inches-thin tower sticking out of a space station whose location I've leaked to my enemies, because there's no chance at all that their fleet will be able to take out a half-completed structure with big holes in it! Especially if I tell my fleet of Star Destroyers not to attack them! Oh, and even better: why don't I throw a private party for a Sith who wants to replace me and a Jedi who wants to kill me and is his son? It'll be the best plan ever! I have foreseen it!