I don’t understand how they made up the character of Anakin, a slave boy who wanted to become a hero and grew up to command an army of slaves, and decided to go with forbidden romance as the reason for his fall.
They had already laid out the perfect road to his rejection of the order and the republic and completely ignored it. Imagine if they had focused on the Jedi’s role in the republic and the clone wars. If they hadn’t brushed aside the fact that the Order was both under control of the senate and played a major part in the implementation and upholding of slavery within it. Because that’s what the clones are.
The movies had multiple chances to use this as a motivation for Anakin. They could have portrayed Anakin as a conflicted young man who sees that the Republic he’s sworn to protect has strayed from what it was and has instead become the thing he’s sworn to protect it from - they could have shown the good that the GAR does contrasting the atrocities that are committed by its mere existence, have him deliberating the means vs the purpose. The Phantom Menace set up Anakin’s backstory as a slave and his desire to free others, and Attack of the Clones could have built on that so easily. In the movie Anakin is frequently shown frustrated and angry that he is being held back and not recognized, which is to show the viewer that he’s immature and conceited. But how would the tone have changed if it had been about his inability to actually help people? About being stuck in a system that is beholden to the whims of the rich and powerful, instead of being free to bring freedom and peace to the galaxy?
And it would have taken very little changing of the movie to do so. One of the biggest changes would have to be Shmi’s death. It’s exclusively used as a catalyst for Anakin murdering the tusken and thus starting his descent to the dark side. That arc would have been much more meaningful if had been connected to her slavery. Not even necessarily while she was a slave, but because of it. Because of a health issue due to working conditions, because a former slave has many enemies, because she led a slave revolt (and damn do I have head canons about this. Shmi smuggling people, figuring out how to deactivate slave chips, organizing solidarity between different races and people, all while still being a slave herself.) (Imagine Owen and Beru as some of the people she’d helped free. Imagine “Mother Shmi” being whispered in awe, stories about her being told by people who never had any hope to begin with. Had. Imagine Luke as only one of the hundreds of grandchildren of Mother Shmi.)
So Anakin goes on to become a Jedi and he learns that the Jedi are just as much under the thumb of the rich and powerful as the slaves back on Tatooine. Any attempts to raise help people in the outer rim or the slums of Coruscant are smashed down because they’re “not logistically possible” or “ignorant of the other factors at play” or simply because “it’s not time yet”. And he’s not stupid. He knows what they’re really saying. They’re saying they can’t help these people because they’re irrelevant to the “bigger picture”. They don’t bring votes, they don’t bring profit, they don’t matter. The republic falls long before Anakin does.
And then, after being helpless to actually change any of the evil going on in the world, after having his mother die still in slavery, he’s suddenly made a general. Of people who were born to die in a war they never had any say in. He’s made a slaver. So he rejects the system that has accepted misery and mistreatment of the unimportant, that has encouraged corruption and welcomed slavery. He starts the uprising of the slaves of the republic, and starts the first fight that is actually deserving of the title Clone War because it is about the Clones. He finally fights back against the system that has kept them all slaves for so long (Cody, and Boil, and Rex, just as much as Kitster and Shmi and the rest of the family he left behind) - and he turns to the one person who always had his back, who always tried to change the system but was unable to despite being at the top of it. Anakin does everything right, and he still ends up exactly the same place. Anakin becomes Darth Vader trying to save the universe.
I think that’s where the movies went wrong. They had to write Anakin as the villain, and they had to show the signs early. They had to make his fall not just inevitable but undeniably because of his choices, instead of having him do the right thing and still fall.
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