me: the idea is that this guy, perpetually, inflicts the pain he’s in outwards, recreates his own hells all the time. i think people are wrong when they assume that anakin changes. i don’t think anakin skywalker ever functionally changes; he’s in his forties and saying “i must obey my master” and he’s in his twenties and falling to his knees in front of palpatine and he’s a nine year old slave all at the same time, all expressions of the same scarred, wicked internal landscape. he lived this horrible experience when he was a child, so he’s always recreating his world in such a fashion that it looks the same way, so incapable of coping with the damage of his childhood enslavement that he never really leaves it. in the family at war novel, anakin thinks, “the jedi order had been his life. the jedi had freed him from slavery and offered him a home. despite all the reasons he had to follow ahsoka, abandoning the jedi felt like a terrible mistake. he owed them too much.“ but he doesn’t owe the jedi his eternal service - there is no good that you can do for someone that will earn your life’s service, but anakin is recreating this paradigm he was raised in, where he owes a greater power - an owner - not only his labor but his life, to repay the cost of his keeping. this is not a dynamic the jedi have forced on him; this is one anakin creates, because he is hitting the instant replay on everything he’s ever suffered. he is a nine year old slave and he is lying when he says he’s a person because he’s going to kneel to palpatine and he’s going to bring his son to palpatine because he must obey his master. he is a person, and he is lying.
me: vader as a character brings his past to the present, recreates the things that shattered him over and over because he can’t leave them behind - doesn’t know how, isn’t willing to, couldn’t begin to start. he strangles people with the force because the first time he did it, he was nineteen and had to make a choice between saving republic clone troopers and saving republic loyalists on jabiim, and either choice meant damning thousands of people to die, after every other jedi - including obi-wan - had been killed or thought dead in combat. when the leader of the loyalists attacked anakin for choosing to save the troopers, anakin strangled him, and stumbled backwards, and said “i’m sorry” but it was too late, he had already chosen to kill them all. he strangles people with the force because the worst thing he ever did in his own mind was strangle padme on mustafar, because he himself is attached to a breathing machine he has little control over, that he is forever bound to - but he’s always living in these places, these moments, so unable to get up and move on that he recreates his own twisted scars. it’s an obsessive act of re-opening the wound, bleeding perpetually. it’s stereotypical - it’s perpetual - it’s a caged parrot tearing out its feathers, seeking any kind of stimulation, anything to feel any kind of control. me: this is why he drags obi-wan through the fire; not merely as revenge, though revenge is such a large part of it, but because he’s insatiably recreating what he’s lived. he cuts his son’s hand off because he lost all of his to his own father figure, he burns obi-wan because he himself is haunted by burning alive on mustafar and has to inflict it outwards - without any ability to soothe these festering psychological wounds on his own, he inflicts them outwards over and over, desperately reaching for any kind of catharsis, any kind of power over his own agonized life, striking outwards like a beaten dog that’s suddenly remembered it has teeth. he is the bottom, rotting dregs of human existence, that hideous thing that happens to people when they experience violence on violation on violence, so that the only way they know to understand their experiences is to strike outwards, to replay it, to analyze it from the angle of the aggressor this time so that maybe the power of violence will soothe their souls. darth vader is truly frankenstein’s monster; he has love in him the likes of which you can scarcely imagine, and rage the likes of which you would not believe. if he cannot satisfy the one…… he will satisfy the other. person beside me in the harris teeter checkout line: are you good
