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[hamletisabitch]

im tired of online discourse. look at this family of quails

[hamletisabitch]

I've just read a meta that said Anakin was greedy about his relationships and how those relationships made him feel. Honestly i'm kind of confused about this cause besides the ending of Rots, i never got a hint of this from Anakin.

wah. there is a very clear relationship between horrible events in anakin's life and his violent beavior; it is motivated by a fundamental desire he has to not lose more people he loves. the three major precipices the saga presents the choice of light and dark to anakin - AOTC, ROTS, and ROTJ - never deviate from this path, it is always that same question, always that same point. the pressure is always the threat of violently losing someone he loves - he has no impulse to control anyone outside of mastering the forces of life and death, a thing that he swears on his mother's grave that he'll do. none of his speeches about controlling the galaxy ever amount to anything, it's the desperate grasping-at-straws that people who have to bend the knee for his bosses do.

this is, obviously, not a defense of anakin's actions; i just happen to think the problem with anakin skywalker is that he's wrathful. he wishes pain on people. he visits pain on people. death, to him, is an acceptable price to take from people, if he thinks the purpose is good enough, and he's gullible enough that he is demonstrably weaponized against his own principles, knows it, and does nothing. he genuinely thinks Might Makes Right works, that if he can be powerful enough, it will earn him all the things in life he's been denied; respect, freedom, family. if you look at his lines in the prequels, he is constantly talking about power as a means of accomplishing his dreams - he dreams he was a jedi (position of power) so he can free the slaves, he wants obi-wan to see that he's become a strong jedi because that will accomplish the emotional goal of getting obi-wan to be proud of him, he wants to become the most powerful jedi in order to stop what happened to his mother from happening again and he literally swears that on his mother's grave, he wants the power of the dark side to save padme. anakin has fundamentally gotten the universe wrong. he thinks power is what makes people happy, and this incredibly grave error on his part costs the galaxy far far away a lot, and i guess you could construe that as greed, but we have to remember that the things anakin wants actually really are not all that unfair. i think if you call the desire that people around you maybe don't die violently inherently greedy that's a bit of a weird definition of greedy. i suppose you could call his violence a form of greed, greedy for thinking he gets to take the lives of others, but frankly i think we should stick with the word with the definition that fits, which is violent.

i do actually think the specifics matter. if anakin is greedy for his relationships, which, by the way, i really don't think we should ever characterize the human social impulse as inherently bad, i do think, "it's bad to like having friends, and how having friends makes you feel," is a really shitty thing to say, but if anakin is greedy for his relationships, why is ROTJ a success? he did it explicitly for his son. why should we think that's good, which the movie clearly wants us to, if it's counterintuitve to the message, which anakin's whole story is the bearer of? it matters to me because on a character level, which is where the story resides, these things have to make sense. people, even evil people, have internal logic, a basis of life experiences and a personality that drives them in a specific direction. a greedy person doesn't settle for the ascetic life vader does; vader lives to work, his castle is at the site of his worst memory and is barren stone on a barren planet, he is friendless, save for the person who commands him, and he is frequently humiliated in front of his subordinates. if you take anything from the EU as canon, disney or legends, he is regularly tortured as a consequence for failure, his one piece of clothing was dictated entirely by his boss and serves to dehumanize and hurt him, and is more or less constantly tormented by the blood on his hands even as he adds to it, forced to live a life of pretty much just nonstop excruciating pain. there's one comic where an imperial general tells him to think of himself as his lightsaber, a useful weapon in the right hands, and vader just stands there and takes that.

none of that changes that vader's a monster, that goes without saying. but if his issue is a desire for excess, where is the excess? what is the excess, even? if he was relationship greedy, as this supposes, where are the excessive relationships? i really hate this next sentence, but where are all of the saucy, presumably platonic excessive flings? all star wars shows us is a very violent individual, who has isolated himself because of his neurotic belief that a certain level of magical power would make it so he'd never suffer again, and in doing that has ironically consigned himself to a life of more or less constant suffering, and only digs his grave deeper by murdering everyone in the near vicinity who breathes wrong, because that is the final and only form of expression he has. if vader exists because of anakin's greed, where is that? meanwhile there are many - kind of infinite - examples of vader being cruel, of vader bellowing about how the empire's power is the source of its authority, of vader slaughtering people for minor failures, of vader manipulating people with dramatic shows of strength and violence? there isn't a well-established sentiment of greed in anakin in any prequels material - obi-wan actually regularly refers to him as a generous kid - but there is one of vengeful thinking and violence. there are established settings in which anakin would draw the (horrible) conclusion that Might Makes Right; he grows up a slave, literally coerced by the threat of violence, he's sent to war, which speaks for itself, and he was best friends with a guy who was planning an empire since anakin was the size of 1 tater tot. a person can experience a kind of violence and then grow to not only identify with it but perpetrate it, no matter what horrible things it's done to them, it's actually rather common. we do not have to invent abstract reasons for anakin's abject failure at moral piety, the answer can actually be as simple as, "shit sucked, yet he did not hit the bricks." fun fact: he started throwing the bricks at people so their days sucked too i guess.

[hamletisabitch]

A work in progress. Finally getting around to a break-up robe

[hamletisabitch]

Crawford Wayne Barton: Gay Freedom Day - Couple Embracing, San Francisco, 1977

[hamletisabitch]

maths enjoyers and bug enjoyers and horror movie enjoyers and so forth all need to come together and unite against the common enemy of people telling you how much they hate something as soon as you mention you like it

[hamletisabitch]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[hamletisabitch]

-And you liked to pick flowers. -A little bit.

[hamletisabitch]

had a category 5 lesbian moment looping midwest princess for the past couple hours so i drew some stills from this vid

[hamletisabitch]

For those of you who (rightfully) don’t want to use Twitter to read my spicy comic - everything is up on patreon 🥰

[hamletisabitch]

unforgettable

[hamletisabitch]

saddest bisexual guy in the county left crumpled pathetic sopping wet at bus stop ;( and his feet hurt

[hamletisabitch]

Just a messy lil doodle for this evening; I was trying to see if I could remember how to draw their faces ✨✨

[hamletisabitch]

CHAPPELL ROAN paying homage to DIVINE | Kentuckiana Pride (2024)

[hamletisabitch]

do it scared. do it vaguely uncomfortable. do it mysteriously damp

[hamletisabitch]

[hamletisabitch]

dash is dead im teleporting to the past

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard?max_post_id=606474489540042752

[hamletisabitch]

Hello.. Please, I am Muhammad from Gaza.. I want you to contribute to spreading my campaign.. to repair what was destroyed by the war and try to survive this genocide.. Thank you 🇵🇸💔

https://www.tumblr.com/hamouda-az/752197712706977792/donate-to-emergency-help-my-family-in-gaza?source=share

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