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Agreed so hard. Language is such an important thing, and I am always here for language being used as a tool of self-empowerment. I love everybody’s different Tatooine / Skywalker headcanons about that, and the fact that there are so many great ideas about how to use Tatooine linguistics as a means of resistance.

Also I think language is probably something that was always really really loaded for all the Skywalkers, but probably especially for Anakin - Anakin, who was a displaced, undocumented, and quite possibly illegal immigrant to the Republic, who found himself in a radically different place with strange people and a strange culture and no one who spoke his language in his dialect, who spent his whole life trying to assimilate but also always being set apart, who was always so aware of his levels of difference in the Jedi Order, and who then spent twenty-odd years very explicitly denying his personhood and identity and (so so importantly) his name. His Tatooine name. His desert-born, ozone-tinged, freedom-singing name.

And when Luke insists on calling him Father, insists on calling him Anakin Skywalker, he’s doing so much more than it seems on the surface. More than even he knows, probably. Because Darth Vader is a slave name. It’s so incredibly important, I think, that at no point does Anakin actually name himself Darth Vader. That name is given to him, imposed on him, by Palpatine, and explicitly in the context of Anakin kneeling down and calling him “Master.”

As he spends most of the rest of his life doing. “What is thy bidding, my Master?” “Yes, my Master.” “I must obey my Master.”

But Luke never calls him by his slave name. Luke always addresses him as “Father,” and the one and only time he speaks of him in the third person, he calls him “Anakin Skywalker.”

And Luke, too, is from Tatooine. His context is different, of course. He’s never been a slave. In him, the freedom-name Skywalker is not just a defiant hope expressed, but a truth realized. And Luke may not be fully aware of all of that history, but I think he also has some of that Tatooine sense of the importance of language and names.

“Tell your sister you were right about me,” says Anakin in the end. Right about what? Right about there being some good left in him, yes. But more specifically, I think, Anakin’s last words are a reference to his earlier conversation with Luke. “I know that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father,” Luke had said, and Anakin had said, “That name no longer has any meaning for me.”

But in the end he says, “You were right,” and he takes back his name. And he takes back everything that his name means. It’s not just a denial of the Sith, or a confirmation that there was good in him all along. It’s a rejection of the slave name and the slave identity imposed on him. It’s a reclamation of his own name and identity (and all the long history of that choice-name, Skywalker). It’s a reassertion of his own personhood, and specifically in the context of family and community. He is Anakin Skywalker, father of Luke and Leia.

Luke’s ship post-RotJ should have been the Emperor’s personal shuttle. Because:

1. He stole that thing fair and square.

2. He bore his father’s body out of the fire on that ship, it was his salvation (which, incidentally, would have been a killer name for it). 

3. Sheev took the Jedi Temple and turned it into his palace, Luke’s going to take the Emperor’s ship and turn it into his ride.

anakin clearly did not like murdering the jedi. i don’t say that to absolve him of guilt - i don’t think crying because you murdered a bunch of children is really a great way of owning up to the fact that you murdered a bunch of children - i say that because anakin’s psychological state is important, given that it’s the axe he topples democracy (and a lot of elementary schoolers) with. but anakin did something he found personally hideous because he thought it was a good price to pay for the thing he actually wanted. this is a pattern, with anakin; he does the same thing in return of the jedi, when he brings luke to palpatine. he has to obey his master, in his own words, and given that vader really wanted to kill the emperor in the last movie, just surrendering his prize - luke - to his evil boss seems like the exact opposite of the thing vader would do. but the context of the prequels means that you know what this is; this is anakin, going “i will do this thing i really fucking hate, that costs me and a lot of other people personally to do, because it gets me the thing i want.” both times that thing he wants is emotional attachment. both times that thing he wants is to be with padme, and then, later, to be with luke.

i cannot emphasize enough the ways and levels that’s not a normal psychological response - the overwhelming majority of the time, people are really bad at doing things they do not like, which is entirely fair, because who wants to do shit that sucks? especially when the shit that sucks is, you know, toppling democracy and a bunch of elementary schoolers? who the fuck wants that? and, especially when the only thing anakin wanted was the idea that palpatine might be able to teach him to stop death - not even a guarantee that padme will be safe, just the chance that she might be. anakin sold his soul and several thousand jedi and an entire galaxy for that. but if you approach from the crucial contexts of:

anakin was born a slave, and as such was literally born doing shit he hated, and as such is an old pro at going “well, this is soul-sucking, makes me feel awful and is laborious and horrible, but i gotta do it”

anakin left his mother - the person he loved most in the galaxy, and the only person he felt safe with when he was young - in slavery, and the next time he saw her she died in his arms, specifically because he failed to respond quickly enough to prophetic dreams he had of her death, and as such has one singular and eternal pathological obsession with People He Cares About Not Dying (Because Of Him)

Because, in addition to other things, the self-righteous gremlin had this to say to a man whose mother had died in his arms after weeks of torture only three years prior:

"Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is."

Death is not a beautiful transformation in Anakin’s experience. It’s a brutal, horrifying TAKING of those who you care about, cutting them down in acts of senseless violence for no reason but to inflict pain and suffering. And here’s Yoda telling him to just let it happen to MORE people that Anakin loves?

Anakin Skywalker’s State Of Fuckbrain enthusiasts often talk about what it was like to try and recover from his childhood, but oftentimes people are talking, here, from the theoretical; no one engages with it as child abuse, so you get a lot of responses across the board that are about anakin responding to his childhood as an impersonal thing, as a galactic institution rather than a thing he lived that comes with a set of hard and painful memories. that’s only part of the picture. the truth is that abusive childhoods are a series of stories. it’s a series of memories that a person is left with, often scrambled up by the brain’s attempts to protect itself - anakin is, in-universe, a guy who can have personal furious reactions to the institution of slavery as a broad thing, but is also waking up at four in the morning because a memory from his childhood crawled up into his dreams. those early childhood memories scramble and un-repress themselves at absolute random. he is simultaneously touchy about the topic in history class, as people assume he would be, but also touchy about being touched, flinching when his brand new master moves too quickly near him, because abusive childhoods are a series of stories, and anakin knows how all of them end.

as that relates to his relationship with vulnerability, or the lack thereof - vulnerability is a state of existing, not, technically, an emotion. a child is vulnerable by right of being a child. a child cannot make themselves invulnerable. when abuse is the circumstance, that state of perpetual vulnerability is exploited; anakin, as a child, was by nature vulnerable, and associates that state of vulnerability with that exploitation, that massive fear of being hurt during that state. so it terrifies him. but because being vulnerable isn’t a state that feels safe, ever, it’s by psychological transition that it doesn’t feel safe among the jedi - to anakin, who just walked out of slavery and into obi-wan’s care, the prospect of being open with this stranger has to be indomitably terrifying. obi-wan can ask anakin, gently, what’s the matter, and anakin’s going to go cross-eyed with anxiety, because he knows how this story ends. it is hard to unlearn old circumstances. it is hard to unravel toxic stress. we see this play out several times - anakin doesn’t have emotions the second obi-wan is around, unless he can make them angry. if he can be angry, he can feel it near obi-wan, but the rest is embarrassing, a weakness, a failure, and in the back of anakin’s mind, asking to get hit. this relationship pattern, formed when anakin was small, is allowed to persist purely because it exists the way that it does.

but that makes anakin’s relationship with palpatine so interesting, because where anakin’s fear of harm from authority shoves its way between himself, obi-wan, and the jedi order from a very young age, anakin is also attached to palpatine from a very young age. and anakin is explicitly attached to palpatine because palpatine encourages that vulnerability, so he can exploit it, and anakin doesn’t recognize this form of exploitation because he is familiar with other forms - the idea of someone manipulating his mind intentionally is not an idea he’s used to. he’s gone from “slave, with no right to personhood, and therefore no one will have much interest in manipulating him when he is expected to obey commands by physical force” to palpatine’s, on the surface, much quieter methods of emotional control.

but i bet that anakin as a kid is really stuck on being vulnerable around palpatine as being safer because he can leave palpatine. an abused kid is a kid that analyzes avenues of escape, to protect themselves, and there is a huge difference, psychologically speaking, between showing your proverbial belly to the guy who has constant authority over you, and the guy whose office you pop over to a few times a week to chat. one of those feels, to a baby tweenager, a lot safer to be vulnerable within than the other, because anakin feels like he has more power to control where he is, how long he’s there, how often he returns. he has no such control within the order; and it’s not that this is a bad thing, because obi-wan isn’t hurting anakin, and neither is anyone else. it’s that anakin was hurt in the past, and perpetually operates on that expectation. there was even an exciting reward - the emotional release and affection palpatine offered, that kept encouraging anakin to return, even as palpatine started making moves like does obi-wan enjoy being around you, you think? every time i see you together, i daresay he looks like he’s swallowed a lemon. moves that made anakin feel like shit, but only outside of palpatine’s office, only about people who aren’t palpatine, because otherwise anakin wouldn’t return. and it’s imperative to palpatine that he gives anakin this illusion of control, when actually, palpatine is playing anakin like a grand piano.

we have to remember, palpatine's end goal with anakin, what he wants from anakin and why he engages with anakin at all, isn't to get a spoiled egomaniac with god powers. what palpatine wants is a perpetually terrifying second-in-command, a butcher on tap, a guy who listens to palpatine and only to palpatine and will do explicitly and only palpatine's will. spoiled egomaniac is the neophyte stage of the personality palpatine is invested in installing his sith apprentice project with. palpatine's self-appointed job probably imcludes shit like:

intentionally sabotaging anakin's relationship with obi-wan, sharing "stories he's heard" of obi-wan saying things about anakin that are negative, stories that never happened. subtly questioning anakin's faith in obi-wan, constantly implying or outright saying that obi-wan doesn't understand or care for anakin the way that palpatine does. when anakin vents about something obi-wan did, trying to understand why, palpatine takes an opportunity to paint obi-wan's motivations as cold and negative.

the above, but with the entire jedi council. emphasis on stuff like "no one understands you like i do" because it is part of palpatine's end goal that anakin trusts him despite all evidence that he shouldn't and that anakin, successfully corralled into Evil, will do whatever palpatine wants him to do. because that's what palpatine wants him for.

virtue signaling, in the sense that anakin as a child had clear goals about helping people, and a key to this is that palpatine can't just have anakin's trust, he has to have anakin's loyalty. palpatine has to Deep Sigh and Navel Gaze about how it sometimes feels like he's the only one trying to get anything positive done, how the world is on his shoulders. political moves palpatine makes that anakin disagrees with, palpatine either convinces anakin it wasn't actually up to him (it was), or that it's the first step to something better - if anakin questions too much, palpatine turns the tables, and starts acting hurt that he has extended so much trust and empathy to someone who will give him none, and then anakin ages nine to twenty three is an apologetic mess. easy to skip over any actual disagreement by creating a situation to pin the blame on the other person.

controlling both what anakin says about palpatine to anyone else - whether it's through something like the above, feigning hurt that anakin would discuss private conversation, and thus guilting anakin into behaving the way that benefits palpatine, or if it's by implying that if anyone knew about how much better palpatine is for anakin than they are, they would move to terminate the relationship. anakin doesn't want that, because it's an important source of emotional validation for him. it's excellent leverage to keep a kid quiet, if you're absolutely fucking evil.

convincing anakin that palpatine himself is frail and in need of defense, because palpatine is a public figure making public decisions that people around anakin are going to question. palpatine doesn't want that. the earlier tactic of Deep Sighing About How He Is The Last Good Politician is only one way, but i bet another way is playing up his age, alluding constantly to health problems that don't exist so anakin's in a heightened state of thinking of palpatine as just a gentle, suffering old man that people are unnecessarily harsh on. so even if anakin somewhat agrees with obi-wan saying "palpatine did [x] shitty thing" he is never going to agree with the concept of disagreeing with palpatine. palpatine as a guy in desperate need of anakin's protection is a really attractive angle for him, because again, what he wants is a devotee who follows his commands alone.

and also a whole bunch of other really shady shit that comes with attending the sith apprentice build-a-darth

so anakin as an anakin, in this reading, would exist in a positive feedback loop where his breaks from reality, the things that are warping his perspective, are indulged and thereby change his perspective in ways that don’t entirely connect with what’s actually around him. he is not altogether functioning as someone who is interacting with his circumstances as a reliable narrator of them. but this disintegrates further following his various horrible, awful crimes of terrible; because, in ROTS, anakin finds out that one man he considered his family has actually organized an intergalactic war just on the off chance it gives him power. anakin, already someone who is routinely questioning his reality and also has a warped perspective thanks to this same man. this ongoing, toxic stress of warfare, that he’s lost his padawan and years of his life and suffered and bled for, is palpatine’s great cosmic joke. palpatine is the sith behind everything, all that agony, laid cleanly at the feet of someone anakin loves like a father. that’s an earth-shattering revelation, especially for someone like anakin, who was obsessively dedicated to winning the war - to really negative extent - and seemed to believe that everything would be fixed if he could violently crush his opposition in the correct fashion. but his opposition, this entire time, has been someone he loves. it is a complicated, black mirror version of the choice vader offers luke in ESB, the one that luke refuses to make.

but, from that perspective, i think palpatine now has a new kind of power over his apprentice; palpatine has, in vader’s mind, established that he is capable of galaxy-moving feats of manipulation. even if the reality is that palpatine only created situations in which people reacted in directions that had the most benefit for him - even if the reality is that palpatine doesn’t force anyone, including vader himself, to make the choices he wants them to, he just makes sure those choices look impossible not to make - vader as a character isn’t going to recognize that in his own mind. he’s compromised; he is too busy trying to handle the weight of his own atrocities to spare a thought for the intricacies of the atrocities of his master, and how those came to be. to some extent, i think vader sees palpatine as all-powerful, because palpatine has set himself up to be seen as such in a variety of ways; the circumstances where he baits anakin to the dark side are centered on secret, illicit knowledge, and vader’s physical condition and what he looks like are determined by palpatine’s choice. so if vader is inclined to see palpatine as this dominating figure, palpatine’s new kind of power is that he can convince vader that he’s organized all sorts of things he really hasn’t, just to toy with his apprentice, to keep him paranoid and resentful. those are key elements of a religion based on fear and rage. palpatine is also a sadist, demonstrably, and enjoys that sort of thing. it’s also practically useful, because allying yourself with anakin skywalker has historically gone badly for everyone who ever tried it, and palpatine has to make it safer for himself to command vader by finding methods of control. one of those methods is physical, with vader’s armor, and i bet this was just another.

in the jedi quest novels - the one where baby anakin gets enslaved round two to a guy named krayn, because when a character is supposed to be darth vader (someday later) you can really load up on the possibilities afforded to you with industrial application of childhood trauma - there’s a line where anakin thinks that he doesn’t deserve to be happy if his mother is still enslaved. and aside from illuminating the internal mechanisms that really keep anakin from moving on, ever, i think there’s a possibility to explore anakin, his mother, and the idea that anakin didn’t just miss his mother, but leaving his mother in slavery was actual moral injury to him.

moral injury is the kind of personal violation someone feels when they, willingly or otherwise, violate their own moral code - you’ve probably at least experienced the shame of having done something wrong, but imagine that something wrong violated the principles that make up who you are. in TPM, as we’re introduced to anakin, we’re introduced to a kid who is almost ruthlessly giving - he fixes conditioning units for old ladies and chases banthas out of dunes so they don’t die, he puts himself in harm’s way to save jar jar and then does it again just so qui-gon and company can get the parts they need. he doesn’t race for his freedom in that podrace, doesn’t even know it’s on the line; he does it solely for his random new friends. he’s thoughtful, he cares a lot, and he had dreams about being a jedi and freeing the slaves - dreams are significant part of anakin’s story, and factor heavily in the next two movies, so we can assume that these dreams were really, really important to anakin as a kid. i would say that the destruction of slavery is key, even, to what he wants from the galaxy, and what he wants to do in that galaxy - but it’s also in this movie that he doesn’t free his mother, and won’t see her again for ten years.

if the destruction of slavery was closely held to anakin’s chest as an imperative moral value as a kid, we can combine that with the above line in the jedi quest novels, where anakin believes that he cannot deserve happiness if he’s free and his mother is not; and i would think it would be reasonable to imagine that anakin had actual, real, complicated moral injury over that. it violates his sense of self - he wants to help people, he wants to free the slaves, but he hasn’t done that for the person he loves the most in all of the galaxy. he is in a constant state of breaking his own moral compass, in the constant thrall of, “i can never forgive myself for living freely, when she doesn’t get the chance to.” and i think it’s fair to assume that anakin never goes to direct that anger to the place it’s richly deserved - slave owners, and slavery as an institution - because he is so busy blaming himself for not freeing the slaves, he entirely loses sight of why they’re there at all.

(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.

anakin, internally: oh god we made my new friends uncomfortable by existing as slaves with bombs implanted in our bodies

anakin: by talos this can’t be happening i have to fix it

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ASSHOLE.