husborth: (star wars republic #59)and then, later:i am ascertaining that anakin maybe had some psych

husborth: (star wars republic #59)and then, later:i am ascertaining that anakin maybe had some psychological problems surrounding grief. i’m just getting the sense that maybe there was some trauma here. this arc directly follows jabiim, which i discuss more in the link, but a short-and-sweet summary is that it’s a brutal arc where every jedi in the campaign other than anakin dies brutally, including obi-wan, who Fake Dies But In An Explosion So Everyone Verily Believed It, and at the end, with too few ships to evacuate everyone, anakin has to choose whether to evacuate the clone troopers or to evacuate the republic loyalists they had been sent there to aid in the first place, and he chooses the troopers, damning everyone else to die horrible, bloody deaths at the hands of the separatist-supporting jabiimi faction. you know, war. this incident marks the second time anakin tries to use the force to, ahem, force someone’s body to stay alive, the first incident he does that being in the medcenter rotation he mentions in the first set of panels. i am downright obsessed with these moments. the psychological damages on display are as a vibrant as peacock’s plumage, my guys - i really dig this angle on anakin’s Horrific Tragic Fall To Follow more than i do other ideas that he was arrogant and self-absorbed, because aside from his insistence that obi-wan is holding him back in AOTC and the fabled TAKE A SEAT, SKYWALKER bit from ROTS, arrogance really doesn’t turn out to be anakin’s undoing. he kneels in front of palpatine without palpatine ever actually asking him to, and in ROTJ, the reason he refuses to just go with luke is because he has to obey palpatine - all of these moments are much less self-absorbed, and more palpatine-absorbed, and of course the focal point of that moment in ROTS is that anakin can’t stand to lose padme, and sells out everything he is and everyone he knows so he doesn’t have to.but i think - judging by these panels - it’s a lot less about padme, and a lot more about shmi, and how her death is anakin’s proverbial ground zero, that thing that broke him so badly he literally never recovered. every time someone dies in front of him, he’s reliving that, and he’s at war, so people are always dying in front of him. he feels responsible for this hideous crime against his mother, so what really is it, to be responsible for a few more hideous crimes? he dreamed of becoming a jedi and freeing the slaves, he’s a jedi now, and he still didn’t free his mother - he feels complicit in what happened to her, and it allows him to be complicit in a lot worse. Darth Vader Had Mommy Issues And They Were Terminal (For Everyone Else) is my official take on the matter.also, note - anakin trying to fix mechanical objects as an expression of his subconscious desire to Fix Everything, Ever is so good. it comes up all the time and it’s my favorite. are you ever so Problems Disease In Your Brain that even your hobbies are subconscious cry for help? like, come on. someone get this guy a pouch of fruit juice -- source link

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