#(also Obi-Wan has been pestering Anakin about becoming a teacher)

[tomicaleto]

I saw a post mentioning Ahsoka was originally assigned to Obi-Wan and I’m like ??? Like, yes Obi-Wan asked for a new padawan but the first thing Ahsoka says as she arrives is that she was assigned to Anakin

Edit: if you don’t want to read the tags: I rewatched the scenes from the movies and it’s said several times she was assigned to Anakin by Yoda himself and at the end it’s implied Obi-Wan helped. She was never assigned to Obi-Wan.

[ilovescarletwitch]

I don't understand why people call Anakin insensitive and casually hurtful when Obi-Wan Kenobi is right there.

It genuinely doesn't make sense to me. Anakin was a literal child slave, a small kid in a very abusive situation. While some abused children do turn out emotionally cold as a defence mechanism, it's way more common for abused children to become hyper aware of other people's emotions and turn into people pleasers as a way to keep themselves safe. Anakin spent the first nine years of his life knowing he was a piece of property, he could be sold at any moment or simply killed at a whim. Anyone could do anything they wanted to him and the only thing stopping them was that it would cost them money. Anakin learned as a child to be very perceptive of people 's emotions especially if they had power over him and how to make those people happy so they would be less likely to hurt him.

Obi-Wan during the course of the prequels showed himself to be way more insensitive and casually cruel with his words. At TPM Obi-Wan is twenty five years old, older than Anakin had been during the prequels. He called the child slave who had risked his life to help them a pathetic lifeform. No compassion and no gratitude, just complaining about the inconvenience of having to help the traumatized child who had already selflessly helped them. During the same movie he again calls Anakin dangerous and urges Qui-Gon to abandon him as the Council wants, not even bothering to make sure Anakin is out of earshot. At that point Anakin is a former child slave turned unaccompanied child refugee, separated from his only parent and thrust into an unfamiliar world.

Then let's move to the AOTC. At the very beginning of the movie Anakin clearly communicates to Obi-Wan his distress over his mother's wellbeing. He hasn't seen or had news of Shmi Skywalker for ten years, since he left her behind in a dangerous planet as somebody else's literal property. He has every cause for concern and now is getting nightmares that may be force visions of her suffering. He clearly tells Obi-Wan about it and Obi-Wan responds by telling him that the dreams will pass and to stop caring about his mother/pestering Obi-Wan about her wellbeing. Pretty darn insensitive in my opinion.

Then during the actual bodyguard part of the movie. Anakin and Padme together make a plan to lure out the assassin trying to kill her. That plan involves using Padme as bait while Anakin is on the other room using the force to sense potential threats. Obi-Wan arrives on screen, learns about it and immediately casts doubts on Anakin's ability to carry out the plan. To me that feels more like Obi-Wan doing this as a way to force Anakin back in his place because he is angry they made a plan without him. The whole point of Anakin is how incredibly powerful he is. He should absolutely be able to sense a threat literally in the other room. Moreover Obi-Wan was Anakin's primary teacher and they have already been together in a number of missions, so he should also have a very good idea about Anakin's abilities. He is just being dismissive because he feels Anakin is challenging his authority. A moment later Anakin does sense the threat in Padme's room.

Then Obi-Wan jumps out of the window to chase the droid. Anakin then acts as a model partner imo. He doesn't panic or anything. He checks Padme is safe and in no more immediate danger and then immediately finds an appropriate vehicle and runs after Obi-Wan. He catches him on time and then engages in a high speed chase with the assassin. During the entire time of the chase Obi-Wan keeps yelling at Anakin instead of just trusting him, the person who has the most experience among them in piloting and high speed chases. I am honestly surprised Anakin didn't tell him to shut up even once.

Then Anakin jumps of the speeder to catch the assassin. He does the exact same thing Obi-Wan did. I would even argue he is more successful because he does manage to disable her speeder. When Obi-Wan catches up to him he immediately scolds Anakin for doing the same thing Obi-Wan had done only five minutes ago. He specifically says:

"I swear you will be the death of me"

I know people usually take it as a light hearted joke. But in context it really is not. Obi-Wan and Anakin are Jedi and are often expected to go on dangerous missions together where they will have to depend on each other's skills to survive. It would be pretty hurtful to Anakin to be told by his teacher that raised him for ten years that Anakin's actions during a mission will cause his death. And he is pretty hurt by it, which he again tells Obi-Wan clearly:

"Don't say that Master. You are the closest thing I have to a father. I love you and I don't want to cause you pain. "

And Obi-Wan's response: "Then why won't you listen to me?"

Anakin clearly tells Obi-Wan that his words hurt him. He also tells Obi-Wan how much he means to him and that he doesn't want Obi-Wan to come to harm. Obi-Wan responds with a dismissive joke, doesn't even consider that his careless remark hurt Anakin and he should perhaps apologize. He never even addresses Anakin's confession of loving Obi-Wan as a father figure.

I don't say that Obi-Wan was a bad teacher. Anakin managed to catch up to and even surpass his peers while under Obi-Wan's tutelage, so he must have been pretty good. And they definitely had their good moments otherwise Anakin wouldn't care about him so much. And Obi-Wan is capable of compassion and kindness as evidenced when he tells Padme of her husband's fall.

But I am so angry at the fandom portraying Obi-Wan as this sensitive flower who always considers other people's feelings and is always hurt by Anakin's reckless and cruel words but never tells him and suffers in silence because he doesn't want to hurt Anakin/is afraid of Anakin's temper. Anakin was a child, a student under Obi-Wan's care for the majority of their relationship. And in the movies it's Obi-Wan who is repeatedly shown to make insensitive and hurtful remarks and then completely ignore and dismiss Anakin when he calls him out and/or expresses his hurt.

[ariainstars]

Rey Palpatine, Kylo Ren or Ben Solo: Who’s Got the Button?

Warning: longer post.

  Who Is Rey?

Sigh. I can’t believe I was this naïve. Really, I can’t.

There are narrative parallels between The Force Awakens and A New Hope, of course. But apart from desert planet and droid, the parallels between Rey and Luke, which many fans took for a sign that she might be a secret daughter of his, are few. 

Rey is a slave on a desert planet who collects and repairs spare parts. Her parents were nobodies. She doesn’t want to leave because it would make her lose the tenuous link she has with her family.

She saves someone she just met in a brave, crazy stunt where she proves that she is a very good pilot even with hardly any training.

She meets a kind elderly man who tells her about the Force. He is a father figure for her because she doesn’t have one, but he gets killed about a day after she met him.

She had barely known about the Jedi but finds out she has talent in the Force, so instead of going home she is sent to train with someone whom she doesn’t know and who is not very willing to do so, and not capable of being a father figure for her either. 

This is Anakin to a T! And Anakin ended up being the bad guy in the end. I’m sure that watching the PT, no one who was unfamiliar with the saga would have believed he would be. 

It is not a coincidence that Ben’s light sabre looked like a cross and Rey’s like a fork: that was another dead giveaway announcing that he would be the victim in this story, and she the perpetrator.

„Show me again the power of the darkness, and I will let nothing stand in our way. Show me, grandfather, and I will finish what you started.” Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens 

Ben and Rey are a dyad, meaning that in one way or another, their destinies parallel one another. It was he who wanted to “finish what his grandfather started”: but it was she who actually finished what her grandfather had started. Jedi and Skywalker family are extinct; Finn may or may not be Force-sensitive, but he’s not trained. All of this leaves Rey solely in charge. And everybody cheers her, the way Palpatine was cheered when he ended the clone wars. But the dirty work had been done by Anakin; same goes for his grandson.

It all fits together too well: Rey was always meant to turn out evil, while the “bad guy” in truth was the hero all along. If you watch the Sequel Trilogy again and feel annoyed by their development, try to look at it from this perspective. 

“Now, fulfill your destiny and take your father’s place at my side!” Palpatine in Return of the Jedi

Palpatine always needed someone young and fresh by his side to give him strength; which could be explained by the fact, finally addressed in The Rise of Skywalker, that he is some kind of clone. Not being capable of living on his own, he wanted Rey to kill him so that all of the darkness inside him would possess her, and he managed. Now he is reborn, and the young woman stepping into his shoes believes that the worst is behind her. The truth is that the Enemy is now an inherent part of her.

The good news is that by this time, Rey has also made the experience of unconditional love: Kylo / Ben saw her at her worst, but he still cared about her. Some viewers thought that Rey would be the key to Ben’s redemption, but honestly: that story had already been told with Luke and his father. The alleged bad guy saving the alleged heroine from herself is a new message in Star Wars; a message so powerful that I still didn’t get over it.

The Heir of Sheev Palpatine 

Palpatine’s role in the saga tends to be downplayed although he is the mastermind behind it all: in the PT he is literally one of the first characters we see. It is easy to say that he was the devil incarnate who wanted absolute power - he also was a sly and influential politician, and after the clone wars he did bring peace to the galaxy reuniting the Republic and the separatists under the roof of the Empire. Anakin and his heirs could not make up for his sins because they were busy with their own and the Jedi’s. 

As the audience, we want to see our heroes happy; yet their failures and unhappiness are often necessary.

Anakin and Padmé had to die so their children could grow up the way they did, two idealistic souls untainted by the Jedi’s sins.

Leia had to lose Alderaan, else the princess would hardly have had a chance to marry the scoundrel.

Luke had to lose his home with his uncle and aunt, else he wouldn’t have agreed to come with Obi-Wan in the first place; and he had to go through the trauma with his father’s revelation to become the wise and strong hero of Return of the Jedi.

And sad as it is, Ben had to spend almost all of his life in a dark place. The few moments of understanding he had with Rey in TLJ were probably the few rays of lights in his whole adult life; no wonder he fell so deeply for her that he would literally have done anything for her; he had to become a besotted idiot who saved the girl he loved although she had literally killed him and usurped his whole heritage. 

Meaning: Rey was always meant to take over. 

This is not only the story of the Skywalker family, it’s also the story of a galaxy in desperate want of balance and peace. And if you want to tell how that is accomplished, you can’t erase Palpatine from the equation. Palpatine is a “clone”, i.e. he is not wholly human; which makes him a parallel to Anakin who ostensibly had been generated without a father. Rey, flawed as she is, is a young woman of flesh and blood. 

The Prequel Trilogy humanized Darth Vader; the Sequel Trilogy did the same with Palpatine. Few viewers expected this because one hardly gets interested in the villain’s bloodline. Vader’s portrayal as Anakin Skywalker in the prequels was also largely disliked because the young man was everything but cold and sardonic like the villain he became later. And as many viewers did not like to see “their” Darth Vader humanized (portrayed as a good little boy and then an ardent, stormy young man), now we don’t like Palpatine coming back in form of a young woman, who for sure is deeply flawed but not by far the monster he was. Palpatine always wanted to use Anakin’s, the Chosen One’s, power for himself; and with his final plan he managed to blend his heritage with the soul of the last Skywalker scion. 

  The Heir of Anakin Skywalker

Vader had to become Palpatine’s ally and to serve him loyally to make the old devil let his guard down enough for him to kill him at last, just like Kylo had to fool Snoke that he was still on his side while in the Throne Room he was silently plotting his demise. Anakin always was the hero of the Skywalker saga, a fact that is largely overlooked. His son pushed him to do the right thing, but the decision was his own, and he paid with his life.

Many fans of the Original Trilogy and also of the prequels dislike the sequels heartily because to them it “retconned” or “cancelled” what had happened before. Which is not quite true; the original heroes did find their happy ending. We witnessed what came after that, which irritates us because it’s something we usually never face once the credits roll or the book covers are closed. That does not mean that the heroes’ accomplishments are obliterated.

My guess: these fans might be right and the Skywalker saga is indeed at its end with Return of the Jedi. The saga was Anakin Skywalker’s story, and he died.

What did not die was his heritage - his sins, his excruciating pain, but also his heroism, and his prophecy as the one who would “bring Balance to the Force.” The mistake of his heirs was having wanted to go back to what once had been. Their links to the past were tenuous, e.g. we never learn how Luke came to know what had made the Jedi fail (the content of his second lesson to Rey); in any case, he must have learned it only after the fall of his own temple, in order to explain why he wanted to give up on the Jedi. Obi-Wan never told about his own faults, the clone wars, the Republic, the creation of Darth Vader; most importantly, he never mentioned to Luke that his father actually was the Chosen One, and that the Force wants Balance. It is not surprising that Luke and his friends could not build lasting peace, not knowing what had caused the conflicts. They had to fail; “failure is the greatest teacher” means that only from understanding and moving away from those failures the galaxy will (hopefully) finally learn to avoid repeating the Empire, the First Order, the Final Order etc. over and over again.

I also did not like very much what the sequels did to the heroes of the original trilogy, honestly. But had they survived, found together again, and or proven more heroic and less flawed than they were this time around, the general audience would never have stopped pestering the studios with wanting more of Han, Luke and Leia. And that’s not how it’s supposed to be. They’ve done their time; they had their happy ending. They had their hero’s journey. They ended the Empire the way they wanted, their achievements were completed. It is up to the next generation to learn from the past and build something new and better. We, in our everyday life, also have to bring the people we once looked up to (parents, teachers, mentors etc.) down from their pedestal and to acknowledge the good they did but also see their failures and limitations, if we ever want to get on with our own lives.

In this light, the Sequel Trilogy is indeed not part of Anakin Skywalker’ story. If Ben is brought back and stands good on his promise of finishing the Chosen One’s work, then it will be a new saga - his. Not his grandfather’s any more.

Though a Palpatine, I believe Rey does have the potential for finding balance and unite the galaxy. If Ben, her dyad, comes back to do his part, the galaxy will be again under the rule of two powerful Force users the way it was when the OT begin; but this time they need a chance on something united and positive.

  Balance At Last?

The authors repeatedly stated that the sequels would be “very much like the prequels”: not incidentally. The prequels also were the story of a usurpation, where at the end everything that was good seemed forgotten or turned into the hand of the wrong person.

This sheds an interesting light on the next trilogy: by this logic, it ought to mirror the original trilogy.

Whatever you can say about the Star Wars saga, it never repeated itself. It has recurring themes, which do not run in circles but in spirals; like in any family, or political system, the lessons not learned always demand their price.

All of this is not to say that I like this ending. The Rise of Skywalker mostly is so dissatisfying because being Episode IX it ought to have been a definite ending, but it does not feel like an end. It feels more like a new beginning, or an interruption of a story that was largely not yet explored. The new heroes have wrapped up the past, but what about the galaxy’s future? A future that has maybe already begun with the Mandalorian’s mysterious adopted Child, who symbolizes faith where Yoda was all about (avoiding) fear?

Rey and Baby Yoda both are two younger and more innocent versions of someone we are very familiar with; and they are both paired off with someone who becomes a redeemed version of a familiar villain - Rey with Kylo Ren / Ben Solo, who is reminiscent of Darth Vader, and the Child with the Mandalorian, reminiscent of Boba Fett. Also, the Child knows Force healing, the way Rey does.

It seems to me that this must be announcing a continuation that fits to it all and brings the loose strands together. If the Force is at work, then it knows what it’s doing.

Luke was always one to give people a second chance: in A New Hope, we see him befriend literally anyone who is willing to go along. Star Wars is all about getting another chance. Are we really supposed to believe that Ben Solo is gone forever, and worse, that he deserved no better than dying after sacrificing himself for the girl he loved? Did Luke Skywalker in person come to Crait, sacrificing his life in the process, to give his nephew a second chance only for him to disappear never to be seen again? 

Ben and Rey being a dyad means that they mirror one another, in every way: what happened to one will happen to the other too, eventually. The iconic “You’re not alone” is so powerful because it comes from a person who knows damn well what loneliness means. If Rey finished what her grandfather started, then so must he. When the Republic fell everybody also believed Anakin to be dead; he wasn’t. and when Han left Luke and Leia towards the end of A New Hope, they did not count on him coming back; but he did. 

The next trilogy is not yet announced but it has been known for years that it’s in the cards; thankfully it’s in the hands of Rian Johnson, who already proved that he can tell a masterful Star Wars story; and who reintroduced the subject of Balance again. I still hope that this image was a foreshadowing, not an empty promise.

The ST doesn’t really make sense - not yet. That doesn’t mean it won’t make sense when the rest of Rian’s story is told.

“Hope is like the sun… If you only believe in it when you see it, you will never make it through the night”. Let’s keep our hopes up, fellow Reylos and ST fans. 😉