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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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????
no subject
on 2006-01-21 06:47 am (UTC)On the other hand, candy does explain Palpatine's tooth decay.
no subject
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!