gffa:gffa:Another thing I love about this Rebels rewatch is how much I’m feeling both Kanan and the

gffa:gffa:Another thing I love about this Rebels rewatch is how much I’m feeling both Kanan and the clones’ trauma at what was done to them.  I felt it the first time through, of course, but the build-up to it (now that I know what’s coming) and the looming sense of having a bad feeling about all this, really adds a lot.Knowing who they’re going to find on Seelos, Ahsoka’s, “Trust him.” adds a whole lot more looming dread.  Ezra stating Rex’s birth number and Kanan’s realization, knowing that they’ll eventually have to put all this aside to work together, Gregor’s, “It’s the Jedi!  They’ve come for revenge!” and the fear that must have haunted them, knowing that the Jedi were betrayed and who wouldn’t be angry about that?, Rex telling him to ease up, “They weren’t the ones who betrayed us.”  Kanan’s struggle to trust them, when they lie about Zeb being bait for the joopa, when Wolffe alerted the Empire that Jedi were here, how many old feelings that brought up.  All of it has more weight for me now, having spent more time with all of them in The Clone Wars and settling into Star Wars and reading Kanan: The Last Padawan to actually witness the horrible betrayal on both the Jedi and the clones.Kanan:  “It was at the end, the end of the war. Our fellow soldiers, the clones, the ones we Jedi fought side by side with, suddenly turned and betrayed us. I watched them kill my master. She fought beside them for years, and they gunned her down in a second, and then came for me. Later they said they had chips in their heads that made them do it. Said they had no choice. Rex:  I didn’t betray my Jedi. Wolffe, Gregor and I all removed our control chips.Quoting it or even giffing it wouldn’t do justice to the way Kanan’s voice is breaking during this entire scene, how much this still hurts him every single day.It’s heartbreaking, because the show doesn’t deny Kanan’s trauma about the genocide of his people at the hands of the clones and the slaughter of his Master right in front of him, the horror of being hunted by the people you worked side by side with, who were your friends, who were laughing with you one minute, then trying to kill you the next.  It doesn’t deny that Kanan knows they had chips in their heads–what initially sounded like a denial of it, on rewatch, doesn’t quite seem like Kanan thinks that’s a lie, just that it doesn’t wipe away his hurt and anger and distrust, that it doesn’t mean he has to immediately forgive.“[They] said they had no choice.”  His voice is so angry and so hurt by this, it sounds like he’s rejecting that whole-sale, but the more I think on it, the more I wonder if it’s not that he doesn’t believe it (because it certainly would explain a lot, how could you go from being friends with someone to coldly gunning them down in a heartbeat?), but that he’s rejecting it as an excuse that it’s all okay.It really wasn’t the clones’ fault, even if some of them chose to have their chips removed and some chose not to, they had no reasonable way of knowing that was coming and it wasn’t on them, that Palpatine took their agency and their very minds away.  They were victims in this just as much as the Jedi, that both these groups can be victims of this horrifying shit without that negating the others’ pain, even when one group hurt the other side and that can be so incredibly hard to forgive.I love Star Wars because the message isn’t that Kanan’s pain isn’t valid or that it doesn’t matter, because it very clearly does.  But that ultimately keeping that pain inside him ate at him and he had to face it and eventually shed it, to let it go, to find his way back to the Jedi path he wanted.  Rewatching Rebels, knowing that that’s Kanan’s ultimate path, to find his way back to being a Jedi and everything that means, having this thrown in his face, the symbol of such terrible damage done to him and his entire people, seeing Depa gunned down in front of him, knowing the clones were used to wipe out his people, knowing they weren’t in control, but that doesn’t deny the valid hurt he feels from them, the difficulty he has in trusting them again, that it’s about the process of letting go, rather than never having to walk through it.That it doesn’t diminish the horror of what happened to the clones, that they faced a terrible betrayal from Palpatine as well, that both Jedi and clones were victims and it’s a complicated mess that both sides have a right to their hurts.  AS WELL AS ME.  I HURT FOR ALL OF THEM AAAUGGHH.magic-owlThe way his voice cracks on the word “second” always gets me, every time GIFS CANNOT DO THIS SCENE JUSTICE AND I’M NOT DONE CRYING.It’s the way this scene is delivered, in the voicework (even more than the animation) that you really get to the heart of what Kanan’s going through.  That his pain is still there, he’s still wounded, he hasn’t faced this and he hasn’t been able to let it go, and the reactions of the characters around him and the music and the framing of it, all support that Kanan’s pain at this is valid.  That the clones’ pain doesn’t negate his.  Rex doesn’t give ground on that they, too, were betrayed, but neither does he dismiss Kanan’s pain, and instead walks around it, gives him the room for it.And, god, the way Kanan’s voice breaks on the word “second”, the way it conveys so much, about how fast the clones turned on them.Reading Kanan: The Last Padawan really drives that home:THESE TWO SCENES HAPPEN ON THE SAME NIGHT, PROBABLY WITHIN AN HOUR OF EACH OTHER.Gray and Styles go from laughing and teasing with Kanan, giving him a head scrub because he’s a delight and they really like the kid, to trying to gun them down, no warning, no intention to be read in the Force, just confusion and terror and danger.  It’s not until later that Kanan finds out the why of it, the what happened, but that can’t take away the terror of what happened.The speed of it, the way Kanan’s voice breaks on “She fought beside them for years, and they gunned her down in a second”, that it didn’t even seem difficult, there was no stand-off where they weighed that friendship and loyalty and what they’d all worked together for.  No, it was thrown to the side in a second.  It didn’t matter how long they’d been friends or the shit they’d seen together and come through by supporting and saving each other.They gunned her down in a second.And then they came for him.All of it wasn’t something they could have predicted, so approaching it through logic is so much harder than usual, because it wasn’t about that.  And if it wasn’t about something logical, how the hell could anyone predict if it would happen again?  That you have to learn how to trust someone in a situation where you had already built that trust once and it meant nothing.  Why build that trust again when it couldn’t stop the Purge the first time?Because, as someone starting back towards the Jedi path, Kanan needs to face this and work through it and let it go, that’s his big character arc throughout the entire series.  This is absolutely part of that.Also, as @attonrand​‘s reblog tags point out:#OP THIS IS AN EXCELLENT BREAKDOWN OF THIS SCENE/EPISODE BUT GOD ITS HEARTBREAKING #ESPECIALLY BC KANAN IS ALSO ALWAYS TEETERING ON THE EDGE OF THINKING HE COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO STOP IT #NOT BEING ABLE TO FIX EVERYTHING IS HIS GREATEST FAULT IN HIS OWN MIND #WE SEE THIS IN HOW HE OFTEN CONCEIVES OF HIS ~FAILURES~ IN TRAINING EZRA #AND IT COMES UP ALL THE TIME IN THE LAST PADAWAN SERIES #AND I KNOW THAT A GOOD PORTION OF THIS PAIN IN THIS PARTICULAR SCENE COMES FROM HIM THINKING HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO STOP IT #KANAN JARRUS #LONG POSTThat, in addition to the speed and unpredictability and senselessness of it, Kanan also has to feel the weight of, “I should have done more.” that’s bumping up against everything he’s feeling with Ezra.  The entire first season was about him struggling under whether or not he was even able to teach Ezra, that he so badly wanted Luminara to be alive to do it instead, that the entire point of him repeating Yoda’s “do or do not, there is no try” was to learn that he was giving up before he even actually did anything, that he had to actually commit himself to this, because he feels like he doesn’t do enough/should be doing more.This episode is in the second season, so all of that wasn’t that long ago.  AND he’s still struggling with joining the bigger rebellion–”I survived one war.  I’m not ready for another one,” he tells Hera when he’s not feeling like he’s ready for this or that he can do enough.  All of that is bumping up against what happened during the Clone Wars, that he feels like he’s failing and he should be able to stop it and he can’t and now suddenly here’s a living reminder of what he couldn’t stop and what that cost him.  He doesn’t want it to cost him Ezra and the others, too.  He doesn’t want to fail them, too.And all of this is important and needs to be faced because of what Hera says as well:“I understand your fears, but I also remember when the Jedi and clones fought side by side.  They saved billions of lives, including my own.”Kanan acknowledges that he’s hearing her and I love that it doesn’t undercut his pain, but instead helps provide him a path out of it.  That something good can still come from all this and good things can be achieved if he can work through this.Nobody is ever owed someone else forgiveness, not even when the other person isn’t actually at fault, nor should Kanan’s pain be dismissed as nothing, just because the clones’ hurt is also real.  (As well as the clones’ hurt shouldn’t be dismissed just because the Jedi’s hurt is real.)  But healing, for your own sake and for something bigger than just yourself, is a really, really worthwhile path. -- source link

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