“(insert protagonist) feels more intense emotions than anyone who ever came before them…”

…is a YA trope.

And this is not to insult the trope or the genre of YA—“I feel like I’m feeling more feelings than anybody has ever felt,” is a defining part of the teenage experience for a lot of people! There’s a reason this trope exists primarily in YA, and it is GOOD that those kinds of stories exist for people who feel this way to relate to, teenager or otherwise.

But this trope doesn’t exist in all stories, and applying it to stories intended for adults or for younger kids—or even YA stories that aren’t using it—is weird. It’s understandable that it happens when people seeing those characters are teenagers or read mostly YA stuff—our past experiences determine our understanding of present experiences—but it is very limiting not to be able to get out of that headspace of “narrator is special and can do special things because they feel more feelings.” There are so many non YA stories—and frankly real life adult situations—that are literally impossible to navigate from that perspective.

Star Wars

Star wars is about learning to understand yourself and the world, and then deciding how you are going to respond to the world. It is delivering a moral lesson, and while it uses relatability on some level to accomplish that (the flaws Anakin and Luke have are flaws all people have to some extent) relatability is not the primary goal.

All this is to say, Star Wars, while it is a relatively simple archetypal myth, is not interested in this trope at all. Anakin and Luke neither “love more” nor “feel pain in some deeper more interesting way” than other people. The difference in how Anakin and Luke respond to their intense but non-special feelings is where the moral lesson grounds itself, and how we know it’s useful for real people.

(note: your local tumblr post cannot account for every single relationship to emotions ever, but is aware that different people feel different emotions with different frequency, and that brain chemistry exists and can be very rude)