#that’s also an Anakin move

[wlwanakin]

i think possibly my favorite anakinism and one i think about a rather unhealthy amount is his body language and how he almost always looks viscerally uncomfortable and vaguely like a child who is scared of getting slapped. even when he’s being confrontational he looks sooo defensive like wow girl you have never fully processed anything that’s happened to you and you will carry the weight of it forever

[ratbaby15]

Got inspired, made something, hope you enjoy.

Pretty accurate if I do say so myself.

[papanowo]

sometimes when the 501st/212th have downtime they turn down the artifical gravity on the ship for funsies. yes this is canon actually mr filoni told me himself

[chiis-art]

They talk of a team, of a king and his knight.

[meteor-moon]

there was a boy with stars in his eyes

[galactic-rhea]

Omg your art lives rent free in my head and i'm so happy that i finally found someone who loves anakin as much as i do! Also fun fact: i'm aroace and anakin was the only reason I thought i was straight (didn't understood the aesthetic attraction then lol). Lots of love💖

Omg hiiiii!! Hello, fellow aroace, I'm aroace too! :D

You're so nice, I'm glad you like my art! I was very hesitant here at first because of my previous fandom (which I basically ran away from) was tremendously hostile, so I didn't know what expect from SW fandom and being fan of Anakin of all characters, but hey, I found my niche! There's a lot of ppl that love him (otherwise I wouldn't get that many notes, i think 😆😆).

Maybe there's a very loud angry crowd out there that think you're bad for liking him, but compared to what I experienced on previous fandom, SW fandom as I have experienced it so far, is a walk to the park

Anyways, thank you!!!!

[legallybrunettedotcom]

ROT AND ASSIMILATE II STAR WARS II YOUTUBE LINK

[wileycap]

Anakin Skywalker

- eats bugs

- is tempted by an eldritch master who promises him unnatural power (but only seeks to use him as a pawn)

- dies grappling with the same master to save someone he loves

R. M. Renfield

- eats bugs

- is tempted by an eldritch master who promises him unnatural power (but only seeks to use him as a pawn)

- dies grappling with the same master to save someone he loves

i Will Not elaborate

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[weregonnabecoolbeans]

Will this ever not completely devastate me?

[ivvmell]

a big part of cody enjoyer group always forgets that cody has some experience as mace windu's commander and i cant stop thinking about their dynamic and what a big besties they could be

[starplusfourletters]

I just think that These Scenes

[tennessoui]

In the Anakin leaves the order au, does Obi-Wan continue teaching Anakin the force things? Bc i think an untrained kid like Anakin around could be pretty dangerous to have around idk

Oooo hooooo an anakin leaves the order au question!!!

so I think for this au it would hit that much more if we subscribed to the fanon/maybe canon (idk and idc) idea that if you’re force sensitive but you don’t draw on the Force, you lose your connection/it dims

I just think like. Anakin’s connection with the Force dimming as he grows older and so he becomes less powerful and suddenly maybe isn’t the chosen one or can’t believe he’s the chosen one anymore because he can hardly feel the Force….

Like this Anakin never asked for that burden, but he’d still have a moment when he tries to call on the Force to summon his textbook and it doesn’t move. he freaks out about his own worth without the one thing that made him special, the one thing that set him apart from the other slaves, that made him worthy of being free all those years ago.

Only for obi-wan to see him freaking out and tell him his worth isn’t based in his Force abilities but in himself and he’ll still be Anakin if he loses all ability to commune with the Force completely: obi-wan cares for him regardless and separate of his Force abilities. He’s never been the Chosen One to him. He’s just been Anakin.

[burntblueberrywaffles]

Star Wars fans learn to take a joke challenge

[jewishcissiekj]

so I have this super-self-indulgent-asajj-and-anakin-centered-highschool-/-modern-AU in my head that is like. the stupidest thing ever. but it's so fun to think about

[justanotherbookortwo]

look if ahsoka is stuck out there with the ghost of anakin skywalker she's going to remember how annoying he was very very quickly