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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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)