Jay

I don´t believe Mace disliked Anakin and Anakin actually respected Master Windu and his force hability, the problem is that neither the Jedi Council or Master Windu treated Anakin like a regular Jedi since they meet him as a 9 year old. In fact, they didn´t treat him as a kid at all.

It was Master Windu who decided to accept to train Anakin as a Jedi after Anakin destroyed the control ship of the separatist in Naboo, allowing the Gungans win the battle. He believed it was better for the Jedi to train Anakin than anyone else geting to him, he did this even agaisn´t Yoda´s personal counsel. So it wasn´t Anakin´s kindness helping Qui-Gon and Padme or his care to help the Naboo during their crisis with no tought to himself, the actions that allowed Anakin become a jedi but his power.

This unfortunately set the theme between them, Mace didn´t dislike Anakin but he feared his power because as an untrained child, there was no way any of their young initiates would have been able to do what Anakin did after just some guide from Qui-Gon, so they wanted Anakin close but also keep him at arms lenght, they made him cut his bonds with his mother, which lead to him having his first real mental breakdown after Shmi was kindnapped, tortured and killed by the Tuskens raiders while also not offering him guidance for his force visions. Mace and Yoda could felt Anakin´s mental/emotional pain after losing his mother from Tatooine to Coruscant and decided to be more cautious with Anakin but also to use him for the clone war they wanted to win.

So they don´t talk to Anakin, don´t guide Anakin in his force visions, don´t trust Anakin but expect him to do their ugly work for them.

This set a toxic dichotomy between Anakin and the Jedi Council, the interesting thing is that Anakin kept being loyal to the jedi to the bitter end but becoming a jedi literally cost him his mother and his mental well being, he disliked it but he accepted to spy on the Chancellor, who had become like a father to him because he tought it was important for the Jedi and the Republic, and even when he reported Palpatine as the secret Sith Lord Master, expecting the Jedi to just arrest him and bring him to the Senade for Judgment, Master Windu tried to kill Palpatine, which convinced Anakin that everyone was corrupt. Anakin didn´t attack Windu seeking to kill him, just stop him from killing Palpatine, he didn´t consider Palpatine to use that oportunity to kill Master Windu.

But even if this wasn´t the case, by ROTS Palpatine already has won, the Jedi just didn´t know it, he only had to use a switch and say an Order and every Jedi would die at the hands of the clone army, the whole confrontation on Palpatine´s office was made purely to turn Anakin to the darkside, If Anakin didn´t go to the office Palpatine would have send the army agaisn´t Windu, the Jedi Masters and the Jedi Temple and tell them to capture Anakin and Padme.

This is why I believe the best path for Anakin was to leave the Jedi Order after AOTC. That would have given him the rest and perspective he needed to counteract Palpatine´s grooming in an escenario where being a Jedi no longer was a factor and so Palpatine could not use their distrust for Anakin to umbalance Anakin emotionally or at least it would have made it harder for Anakin to ignore Palpatine playing both sides to win himself an Empire.

Firstly, he did not accept Anakin & went against Yoda because of “power”. He accepted Anakin because it was Qui-Gon’s death wish to be trained by Obi-Wan but he held reservations because he felt Anakin was too old to be trained without it coming with issues involving theit tenets & emotional ties. The Star Wars Databank has clarified this (Yoda’s entry in particular but also Anakin’s). He’d carried this doubt throughput Anakin’s years.

What it doesn’t have is expansive media like the recent Glass Abyss or The Living Force explores his relationship & Qui-Gon & a little of a younger Anakin; Qui-Gon & Mace differed in their approaches but they were friends & Qui-Gon’s maverick approaches was respectful & from a good place. Mace also thought of Anakin, witnessing them extract the slave bomb device given to slaves to ensure compliance & even tutored him in Vaapad. Even with his concerns, he cares for Anakin like any other being or Jedi. There’s a bit of nuance in it.

On top of that, nothing in the movies implied the Jedi are overtly concerned with his power; the fact he has the highest midiclorian count in history & they still said no is proof they don’t take in members because theyre powerful.

Also there’s a bit of a revisionist history being done here; it was Mace who gave Anakin his first solo assignment & he recognized Anakin’s exceptional skills whereas Obi-Wan (throughout ATC) was the one doubting him (with valid but typical concerns). The concerns we see Mace exhibit for Anakin do not really appear until the time of the Clone Wars.

So there was no actual ostracization or making Anakin do the “ugly work” & what happened to Shmi was not a “cost” because that was beyond either’s control. They also never knew what happened to his mother because Anakin deliberately hid it given his reaction; his anger made sense but he took it a whole extra step by slaughtering Tusken families knowing full well the women & children had likely nothing to do with Shmi’s torture in particular.

He was not “loyal to the bitter end” because at the end of the AoTC onwards, he’s living a double life & married knowing full well Jedi don’t do marriages. He also had a habit of disobeying the Council, which sometimes created new issues, deviated from plans, and influenced his padawan (YET they never punished him because it never got costly, like Ahsoka’s case). At this point too, if Mace had an issue with Anakin, he’d open and he only had two concerns: emotional attachments clouding his judgement & his relationship with Palpatine.

Loyal to the bitter end doesn’t have you betray and kill children a few days after not getting the full promotion you sought with political maneuvering instead of genuine merit, raving about people not trusting you & having your wife respond “They trust you with their lives”, or playing the vague game when you go up to Yoda (which managed to be still be right bc the fact he obsessed about saving Padme created the domino effect & had he not done it, it wouldn’t come to pass but that’s part of the tragedy).

A lot of these assertions do a great job of undervaluing Anakin's agency and nor exploring it from Mace's (and the Council to an extent) perspective and giving the character his due agency; Sidious didn't have it and George Lucas and various canon sources made it clear Mace would of prevailed without Anakin's inteference. Palpatine is many things but he is still a man and Mace was the ONE Jedi Master he was not going to prevail against. That was the whole intent to add more gravity to Anakin's decision.

The only thing Anakin needed to do, in reality, was listen to somebody who was more experienced and told him what he NEEDED with a little confidence behind them instead of getting told what he WANTED to hear. I

If he had listen to Mace, Yoda, or his own wife he supposedly cared so much about, he would of curtailed so much trust problems. Ironically, all three of these people had issues with Palpatine (even well before the Sith Lord reveal) that he should of been paying attention and would have had a better chance of noticing his own grooming given he coulda realized his deceptive ways. He could of also been more forthcoming because if he truly believed Padme was in danger and cared for her like he should and claimed, he should of been explicit and accepted the consequences, which the only one he would received would be from having a secret marriage (Jedi aren't celibate and in canon, there's a of them having a child and the Council in particualr had a member of their own having a kid but that wasn't even a blip of a concern).

A white woman

A Latino man

A Black man

The white woman gets to shine in this beautiful nuanced story where she is basically perfect and only fails because she just isn't quite powerful enough yet rather than because she did anything wrong.

The Latino man gets reduced to being a reckless, trigger-happy idiot whose narrative is about learning to be more patient (like the white woman) because his plans will never work in the long run and are ultimately just destructive.

The Black man gets completely sidelined from the narrative and is not treated as an equal protagonist to the other two in any way shape or form and doesn't actually have a real narrative where he grows and learns anything.

Hm.

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS

1. That's how television storytelling works, this isn't a first person perspective story like a book or video game, you need other characters and their perspectives

2. This is not some unique to disney sw thing or even a new thing in general, shows/movies/etc have used a character's name for clout and at the same time given attention to other characters before, its an old trick

3. At no point was this show advertised as being Maul only, the only thing that "implies" (if you only think for no more than five seconds) no one else would get attention in this show is the title, which is nonsense, in any case, from the start the marketing has prominently featured Devon and Lawson, it has been very clear from the get go that they are important (more so than the background nightbrothers everyone obsesses over) and this is their story too, and that they have their own supporting characters (Daki, Two-Boots, Rylee)

4. Relating to that, Maul is an established character, Devon/Lawson aren't, we need to get to know them, we don't with Maul, we know who he is

5. Maul has a fundamental limitation that Lawson and Devon don't have, his fate is already written, and he has the same mindset that he has now when he dies 17 years later, this means he cannot grow as a character, or if he does grow hell just regress back to what he was before, thus the show needs characters capable of growing and changing with the circumstances, Maul on the other hand is doomed to fail, he will lose it all and die on tatooine, the peak of his accomplishments and relevance being when he killed Qui-Gon in tpm 27 years ago, but Devon and Lawson's fates are undetermined, they can grow

Maul is a static character, Devon and Lawson are dynamic characters, and if you spend too much time with Maul, his inability to grow and change becomes a problem, as you're just focusing on a guy who will never change, that's bad writing and storytelling, and it struggles to keep audiences interested

Ironically, Maul here is in the opposite situation of what he was in Clone wars relevant to other characters

In clone wars Maul was the one who's fate was unwritten, while almost everyone else had already been decided by revenge of the sith

But in Shadow Lord Maul's fate is decided, he will die in 17 years on tatooine, but what will become of Devon, Lawson, etc is unknown

6. Maul is the reason the plot happens, it all comes back to him, he is why these characters are here and involved in what he's doing, he brought Devon and Lawson in, they are people of interest to him, they are extensions of Maul's story, Lawson being Maul's major opponent and Devon struggling with the choice to join or oppose Maul

7. Less is more, yknow Maul wasn't in TCW or Rebels that much right? He's only in 6 episodes of the original (2008-2014) run of tcw, 5 episodes of the revival (2020) run of tcw, and 5 episodes of Rebels

That's 16 episodes, Maul only appears in 16 across two shows that have over 200 episodes between them

But he makes an impact with those few appearances, and as a stated in point #6, everything in this show comes back to Maul, even when he's not there on screen he's there

8. Speaking of episode numbers, using less of Maul and giving time to other characters (who were actually advertised as being major characters not just random side characters you latched onto and decided were important because you liked them) is important because we have far less runtime overall

We only have 10 episodes of 20-30 min runtimes, this is the shortest animated show season we've ever had, the glory days where clone wars, rebels, and resistance got 20 episodes a season and ample time to play around with the setting and characters are over, hell we're not even getting 16-ish episodes a season like bad batch did, even an 8 episode live action show season has more run time as they've got 30-45 min episodes

He is purple-haired and Asian coded which means I like him A LOT.

Pose reference 🤣👇

Aside from the plot there were also all these fun side quests. Some months it’d be Midnighter having his cute crush on Dick and some months it’d be gymnastics teacher Dick dealing with teenage assassins in training (also as someone who went to an all-girls school for 10 years I can confirm many of us would have 100% been crushing hard over a hot male teacher and been very very weird and embarrassing about it).

Aside from the plot there were also all these fun side quests. Some months it’d be Midnighter having his cute crush on Dick and some months it’d be gymnastics teacher Dick dealing with teenage assassins in training (also as someone who went to an all-girls school for 10 years I can confirm many of us would have 100% been crushing hard over a hot male teacher and been very very weird and embarrassing about it).