its loveliness increases; it will never

writing adult emails is awful

its like

hi [name of person], 

this formatting is making me uncomfortable but I have to tell you something / ask you something that is vital to my career as a student. 

I re-read and edited that sentence for an hour, but you’ll probably just glance over it for half a second.

thanks! 

Dear Person I am Writing To:

This is an optional sentence introducing who I am and work for, included if the addressee has never corresponded with me before. The second optional sentence reminds the person where we met, if relevant. This sentence states the purpose of the email.

This optional paragraph describes in more detail what’s needed. This sentence discusses relevant information like how soon an answer is needed, what kind of an answer is needed, and any information that the other person might find useful. If there’s a lot of information, it’s a good idea to separate this paragraph into two or three paragraphs to avoid having a Wall of Text.

If a description paragraph was used, close with a restatement of the initial request, in case the addressee ignored the opening paragraph.

This sentence is just a platitude (usually thanking them for their time) because people think I’m standoffish, unreasonably demanding, or cold if it’s not included.

Closing salutation,

Signature.

So, bottom line, please stop cribbing about violence in films clearly rated for violence. It makes you sound pretty fucking stupid. Also, if you think the violence shown in the film was too much, watch one of the documentaries made on Lyari or just go through the news of that time. Aditya Dhar didn't even scratch the surface of the actual level of violence prevalent in Pakistan at that time.

If you do choose to do evil things, some people WON'T forgive you for it. You're always capable of being better and making better choices and you can still be loved afterwards, but not everyone will do so. Sometimes, your actions will have consequences and those consequences will be that people who'd loved you once don't love you anymore and that some people won't forgive you for what you've done.

And that is a part of the whole process. As nice as it is for Anakin to just constantly be getting forgiven by everyone he cares about, it also feels incredibly unrealistic that everyone he cared about and betrayed keeps deciding to forgive him for it anyway. Part of the journey should also require accepting that some of those people WON'T forgive him, that he's hurt them enough that they can't look at him without remembering the pain he'd caused them. And that's okay! That's what happens when you do evil things, and it feels like it would be important to force him to accept that this is a consequence of his choices, to see him LOSE something or someone he genuinely cares about as a result and all he can do is accept that.

But Star Wars doesn't seem to want to showcase that. Pretty much all of their "redeemed" characters just end up getting universally forgiven. Crosshair gets forgiven by everyone and even gets apologized TO by someone he'd hurt for holding his crimes against him. Satine dies and Korkie disappears and anyone else who could hold Bo-Katan's crimes against her either forgets all about it or simply doesn't know it. Kallus not only gets universally forgiven and accepted as a rebel, but he gets literally taken to the secret homeworld of a species he'd led a genocide against and actively tried to eradicate from the galaxy.

It just feels like Star Wars doesn't want to deal with the idea that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much better you choose to become, some people simply WON'T forgive you for the things you've done if you've hurt them badly enough. And I'd love more representation of that, because choosing to let someone go when they've hurt you, even if they say they're sorry later, can be incredibly healing in its own right. It feels like it could be an equally important message to send as the one about forgiveness. Sometimes people won't forgive you and you DO have to learn to be okay with that. You could grow into one of the most moral people in the world and it won't necessarily make someone forgive you for your previous choices. Sometimes you won't be able to forgive people who hurt you and that's okay. It doesn't make you equally as bad as the people who hurt you if you decide you no longer want those people in your life anymore.

At the risk of pissing off most of fandom: what I wouldn’t give for fic exploring the idea that Obi-Wan can love Anakin and mourn for what happened—and still not forgive him. Because Anakin killed their Jedi family. Maybe he didn’t issue Order 66, but Obi-Wan watched him march on the Temple, on their home, and kill everyone in it. The younglings, yes, but consider who else was at the Temple—it would have been the Jedi who could not serve on the battlefront. The Healers, the sick, the elderly, the librarians and archivists, the cooks and cleaners, the crechmasters… Their most vulnerable, to put it mildly.

Yes, Obi-Wan blames himself for Anakin’s choices. We know that, whether it is appropriate for him to or not. He mourns him. But I would love to see something where he meets an Anakin who has turned back from the dark side (I know, I don’t believe it outside RotJ either but just for the sake of fanfic)… And maybe Obi-Wan can still love him. But can he really forgive him? Maybe. Maybe he can forgive him for himself, but I do not believe they could ever have the same relationship they had before.

(And I don’t mean forgive Anakin like… Forgive him and absolve him of what he did. But just stop carrying the pain of it and the blame. I’m not wording this well, but—like OP says, you can forgive someone and still not want them in your life.)

I have an entire AU in my head (based loosely on a fanfic I love) where Padme lives and manages to capture Anakin in an attempt to "save" him, but neither she nor Ahsoka nor Rex are able to actually get through to him and so they bring in Obi-Wan to see if Obi-Wan's able to actually do anything, and... it works. Not quickly, not immediately, but it works.

I know there's lots of reasons why Obi-Wan theoretically shouldn't be able to ever get through to Anakin, there's narrative thematic reasons for why it could have only ever worked with Luke, but Luke is like 5 years old in this AU and Anakin is stuck in a cell with no way out other than to sit there and talk to Obi-Wan and convince Obi-Wan that he's stable enough to be trusted with people's lives. And I am still convinced that Obi-Wan was the ONE PERSON that we ever see Anakin actually willing to be selfless with (other than Luke later, just that once). Obi-Wan is the ONE PERSON who truly manages to get through to Anakin, the ONE PERSON whose opinion of him matters enough for Anakin to not just do whatever he wants when he's angry. There's MULTIPLE moments in canon to back up that Obi-Wan's relationship with Anakin was the healthiest Anakin ever had and that Obi-Wan had a capacity to get through to Anakin in a way no one else really did. And above anything else, Obi-Wan was Anakin's guide. That's what a Master is, a guide for their student to figure out how to walk their own path. And that's what Anakin needs in this moment, he needs a guide that he trusts to show him how to get back to a better path.

And so, in this instance, it works. It works because it HAS to, because none of them have any other options and they're unwilling to just give up, so they push through the pain and the anger and the betrayal and the fear and it takes months, it takes over a year, but Anakin finally manages to come around. He's not the nicest person in the world, still, he's still a little quick to anger and has shit to work on, but he's not completely consumed by darkness anymore and he's willing to turn against Palpatine at least.

And once Palpatine is dead, they go their separate ways. It's the last lesson Obi-Wan has to teach Anakin, how to let go. It's the most important one, too, the one that got Anakin in trouble last time. Obi-Wan isn't dead, but the pain Anakin caused will probably always remain. Obi-Wan will never be able to look at Anakin again without remembering the bodies of the younglings covering the floor of the Temple and the smoke rising from the towers and the feeling of all the Jedi in the galaxy dying all at once and having to make that message saying that the Jedi's time was done just to save what few survivors might be left. Anakin will never again be just the little boy Qui-Gon picked up from the desert and left to Obi-Wan to train. He'll also always be the man who betrayed Obi-Wan and destroyed everything Obi-Wan had loved. And Obi-Wan does still love the boy he trained, but he can't continue to live alongside the man who betrayed him. He has to walk away, and Anakin has to let him. It isn't easy for Anakin, who has struggled SO SO MUCH with letting go, to recognize that Obi-Wan loves him and is proud of him and trusts him but doesn't want to be around him anymore. It's so hard to accept that this isn't something that he can fix, no matter what he tries.

Also I absolutely 1000% agree that Obi-Wan is the only person other than Luke who could manage to get through to Anakin, for all of the reasons you say. I mean, even Palpatine knows that he needs to separate Anakin from Obi-Wan before he can manage to turn him.

I also super love that you have Rex in there, that maybe he’s initially with Padme on trying to save/redeem Anakin, but by the end he’s done. THESE TAGS:

I do think that some part of Obi-Wan probably WOULD want to save Anakin for Anakin's sake, he loves Anakin of course, but it's all mixed up and complicated with all of the betrayal and anger and the uncertainty of whether he could've done something to keep Anakin from betraying them all in the first place. But Padme's tried, Ahsoka's tried, even Rex has tried, and no one has managed to get through to Anakin for months, so Obi-Wan takes a stab at it even if he's convinced it won't be any different for him than for the others, but lo and behold, Anakin REACTS to his presence in a way he doesn't to anyone else.

He lashes out at Obi-Wan still, of course, but as Obi-Wan starts to leave, he says something to the effect of "Qui-Gon would've been a better master than you" and... Anakin used to say that to him a LOT when he was younger. He grew out of it, but as a kid he'd say it any time they got into an argument and Obi-Wan decided to just walk away and let them both have time to take a breather. Eventually, Obi-Wan had realized that Anakin had been saying anything he thought would keep Obi-Wan around by goading him into a new argument. So the fact that he's using the EXACT SAME TACTIC now tells Obi-Wan that, as much as Anakin is lashing out and trying to hurt them, some part of Anakin doesn't want Obi-Wan to leave again. And that's potentially something Obi-Wan can work with.

Rex's presence is something that's from the fic I mentioned this AU was loosely based on, and he IS initially with Padme on trying to save Anakin and by the end he's not quite DONE with trying to do that but he is a LOT more realistic about their chances and about what Anakin's choices say about him. I tend to think that he'd stick with Padme and Ahsoka because he knows they need him, and because he believes that this could be a gamechanger if they can accomplish it, but by the time Palpatine is dead, Rex has no interest in ever being around Anakin anymore. The love and respect he'd had for his former general is basically gone. He's glad that Anakin turned on Palpatine, but he's had a number of epiphanies about how Anakin had actually viewed Rex and the other clones and what their relationship had actually been.

….That is good to know for. No reasons whatsoever. (I was absolutely going to ask if you had any fics out there, since. I basically agree with everything you ever post, lol. BUT I SUPPOSE THIS ANSWERS THAT.)

However, if you want to share the fic this AU was inspired by, well. Inquiring minds.

like we know precious little about shakespeare's life and even less about what was on his mind when he wrote each play, but....he wrote a story where the twins torn apart by fate reunite, where the brother thought to be dead and gone forever actually miraculously survived, where the emotional climax of the story isn't the various love triangles getting sorted out, but the twins finding each other again and getting to live happily ever after.