the stars suck at fighting

it is a pretty ordinary thing actually. I don't understand why people call padmé selfish for falling in love? or even anakin? is it so out of place for people to both have a career and a relationship now?

in fact, their marriage ultimately saved the galaxy.

the clone wars appreciation week  →  favorite clone

Step One: Be born into slavery. Have a bomb placed in your body before you are able to remember. Be raised by the kindest woman person you know in a cesspool. Be filled with a desire to become a jedi and free the slaves. Be filled with a desire to visit every star. Know you will never do either (you will never do either).

Step Two: Risk your life to save people you have only just met. Find out you earned your freedom and have to abandon your mother in the same breath. Do so when she tells you.

Step Three: Give an unworthy token to an angel, a meager offering to the most beautiful being you have ever seen. Be surprised when she accepts.

Step Four: Be taken all the way across the galaxy to the Jedi, the ones you think should free the slaves but will not, do not want to. You were only free because you were worth something. (You have never been and will never be free). 

Step Five: Be condemned for your fear for your mother, a slave. A slave with a bomb embedded in her body, owned by a being who lost a slave and a bet. Be scolded for not letting go even when you have, not looking back when you left (your mother). Be told you cannot stay, that you are wrong and unworthy, which you already knew.

Step Six: Save a world on accident. Lose the man you thought would be at once your new master and your new guardian. Be taken in by a man who has no desire to do so. Be told by the man that it is not for you, it is for another. Feel grateful anyways.

Step Seven: Be raised in a cold place, literally and figuratively. Accept the chill that makes you burrow into your robes. Accept the scorn of your peers and the disapproval of your superiors (they are all your superiors).

Step Eight: Be told by the most powerful man in the galaxy that he believes in you (this will not end well). He takes you to (awful) places. He supports you and uplifts you (drags you down) and tells you the truth (lies). He will never leave your side. He will never stop whispering into your ear, into your mind. He is your closest, only confidant. 

Step Nine: Become a slave again (were you ever not?)

Step Ten: Do anything and everything to succeed and prove your worth (you know exactly how much you would be sold for). Be condemned as arrogant for doing so, even by the man you see as a father. The most powerful man in the galaxy tells you to ignore them. You can’t.

Step Eleven: Have nightmares. Have nightmares of your mother being tortured and murdered. Have nightmares of your mother being tortured and murdered for months. Be told you should let it go and agree with it (your mother, your mother). You cannot sleep. 

Step Twelve: Meet an angel once more. She has never been far from your thoughts. She is in gravest danger and you are her sword and shield. Expose your beating heart and its wounds to her kind eyes. Fall in love (you have always been and will always be in love).

Step Thirteen: Disregard your mission to save your mother. Find out that she was sold to a man who freed her only to then marry her. Doubt how free she was to accept or refuse. Doubt how hard they looked for her when she was gone. 

Step Fourteen: Find your mother and kill those who took her from you. Kill them like they killed her. You are more merciful than them. A lightsaber kills almost instantly and your mother, the kindest person you know, was beaten to death like the slave she (no longer) was. 

Step Fifteen: Bring your mother home. Bring your sins to your angel and kneel at her feet. Receive forgiveness but know it isn’t deserved. (It has never been deserved)

Step Sixteen: Learn that your master/teacher/father is in danger. You want nothing more than to free him. You want nothing more than to obey his commands. It is taken out of your hands (as so many things are). It is taken out of your hands by your angel.

Step Seventeen: Begin a war. Watch your angel fall and obey your duty anyway. 

Step Twenty: Be given a child in the middle of a warzone. She is a test. You cannot love her. You can’t not love her. 

Step Twenty-One: Be given men to lead and a battle to fight. Be the best warrior. The best murderer. Even when you try to heal you harm and when you try to harm you are devastation. 

Step Twenty-Two: Care about your men and your apprentice. Send them to their deaths anyways.

Step Twenty-Three: Kill an unarmed prisoner at the most powerful man in the galaxy’s bidding. Feel terrible. Feel right. Tell no one what you did.

Step Twenty-Four: Save the most powerful man in the galaxy with your master/teacher/father on your back. Bring them both out alive (you will still kill them both in the end)

Step Twenty-Five: Find out that your wife, your secret wife, your angel, is pregnant. You do not know what you will do. Slavery follows the mother and your children will call no being master. Who will you tell? How can you?

Step Twenty-Six: Save the most powerful man in the galaxy, the man you trust to never turn on you (only turn you), the man who has shown you the most (un)kindness. Be denied recognition for your good deeds. Object and be silenced and told to spy on the most powerful man in the galaxy. To commit treason. Who do you trust? How could you?

Step Twenty-Seven: Apologize to your master/teacher/father. He forgives you and tells you you are worthy and that he will fix it. He is always fixing your mistakes. (he is unable to fix the biggest one)

Step Twenty-Eighth: Dream terrible dreams. Dream dreams terrible enough to shatter you. Tell of these dreams to the leader of the Jedi, a being of utmost wisdom. Be told to let go (you have been told this before. you know how this ends).

Step Twenty-Nine: Give all of yourself to the war, to the Jedi, to the Chancellor, to your wife. Something must give. Something will. 

Step Thirty: Your wife, your secret wife, your angel, the mother of your freeborn child, tells you she thinks everything you have given is for nothing. She speaks like the enemy in a voice that sounds like love. 

Step Thirty-One: Become desperate to save your wife. Find out that the most powerful man in the galaxy, the man you trust the most, is a Sith. Have him reveal this to you. He is the only one who can save your wife. (you do not know that he is the reason she is in danger)

Step Thirty-Two: Expose your most trusted friend, the most powerful man in the galaxy. Reveal his secrets while concealing your own. You do not know who you want to win the fight. You join it anyway.

Step Thirty-Three: Watch one of your leaders, who has never trusted you, attempt to murder an unarmed prisoner, the most powerful man in the galaxy, your friend. Watch him almost fail the same test you failed (did you actually fail then?). Kill him before he can. Kill one man to save the life of your wife, your secret wife, your angel, the mother of your freeborn child. Kill all other possible futures. You can never turn back now.

Step Thirty-Four: The Jedi have proven to be duplicitous. They wanted you to spy and now they are committing high treason. The Jedi are not to be trusted (the Jedi have never trusted you). You are ordered to cleanse the temple. Weep as you do what is right (what is a wrong so unutterable). 

Step Thirty-Five: Kill the Separatists. End the war (the war was false and the war will never end). End everything of your own life. All is lost and gone. Your wife, your old master, command of your own body (your wife was a secret and turned against you by your old master who chopped off all your limbs and left you to die).

Step Thirty-Eight: Drift for decades, leaving a trail of blood in your wake that you cannot see. You have been in the suit longer than you have been outside it (you were only 23). You cannot see the blood because all you see is red (all you have ever seen is red). You cannot breathe on your own (you have never taken a free breath). Your hands and feet are heavy with steel and purpose (you worth has always been decided by the fruits of the labors of your own hands)

Step Thirty-Nine: Kill your false master/father/brother. He drifts away into the Force. He always has the last word. 

Step Forty: Escape the folly and the hubris of your master’s lackeys as one boy delivers a (death) blow to the empire you swore to serve when you were a child (it has always been your master’s empire). 

Step Forty-One: Find out that your son is alive. Find out that you did not murder your wife, your secret wife, the mother of your freeborn child. You will stop at nothing to bring him back to you (bring him home). You do not think about how your master lied to you (all masters lie, all masters ever do is lie).

Step Forty-Two: Use all of your canny to trick your son to come to you (to come home). He will never abandon his friends. (He reminds you of another Skywalker).

Step Forty-Three: Be proud of your son as you fight. Become angry. Chop off his hand. Stand in shock when he would rather fall to his death than to the dark side.

Step Forty-Four: Be punished for your folly. Accept that the emperor wants your son. There are only two, a master and an apprentice. Accept your death.

Step Forty-Five: Fight your son once more. Find out about your daughter. The daughter you thought you would have. The daughter you have tortured. You cannot stop hurting the ones you love.

Step Forty-Six: Have your hand chopped off by a Jedi. Again. 

Step Forty-Seven: Kill your master. You cannot stop hurting the ones you love.

Step Forty-Eight: See your son with your own eyes for the first and last time. Leave a message for your daughter. 

Step Forty-Nine: Become Anakin Skywalker once more.

And Palpatine’s attitude here precisely mirrors what Anakin has spent thirteen years learning from the Jedi. Attachments are forbidden. Your own personal feelings aren’t important. The only way to serve the force is total self-sacrifice. So Palpatine’s rebuke here doesn’t sound suspicious at all to Anakin. It’s what he’s come to expect from authority figures. 

On a deeper level, this ideology has deeply warped Anakin’s perception of himself and his surroundings. This is a boy who was taken from slavery at the age of nine (at a stage of development in which he was highly likely to blame himself for the trauma he’d been through). And when he first joined the Jedi, just at the time in which he most needed acknowledgment and validation for his emotions and help with working through his trauma, he was told that he needed to detach himself from emotion and let go of his attachments - a difficult feat for anyone, let alone a child and former slave who’s just been separated from his mother, friends, and everything he’s ever known in favor of a totally alien environment.

Anakin deals with this through unhealthy repression. He buries his anger and fear and insecurity and bitterness and feelings of attachment towards other people until they manifest in violent outbursts like the massacre on the Tusken Raiders. He doesn’t like these ideologies, but he’s also internalized them, to the point where he feels profound guilt over his emotions; there’s always a voice telling him, in the back of his mind, that he wouldn’t be struggling with this if he tried harder, that a good Jedi wouldn’t give into his impulses. 

thinking about how anakin grew up on tatooine and it's implied in TPM (and outright stated in one of the EU books, iirc the first time at 3 years old) that he witnessed other enslaved people's transmitters detonating.

imagine being 3 years old and watching someone explode from the inside out and die (possibly instantaneously, possibly slowly, always agonizingly) in front of you AND FEELING IT LIKE IT'S HAPPENING TO YOU. YOU ARE 3 YEARS OLD.