#especially in the era when Jedi are trying to survive a genocide

[notaplaceofhonour]

also, like, the central event that marks anakin’s transformation from jedi to sith is anakin leading a literal genocide against the jedi for his master, the brutal dictator of the galaxy? murdering a room of jedi children with his own hands? murdering his wife? trying to murder his teacher & brother?

the story absolutely depicts the jedi order as flawed, but the flaws the jedi are shown to be guilty of are losing their way, and playing into the sith’s hand.

the sith, by contrast, are shown to be guilty of genocide and a fascist autocratic takeover of the galaxy—crimes that anakin’s transformation from jedi to sith are explicitly tied to.

i think it's great that people who've suffered religious trauma feel a connection to anakin. i also think it's deeply troubling that the majority of them are either unable to recognize or unwilling to admit that the religion he was indoctrinated into and abused by was the sith and not, in fact, the jedi.

[twilightofthe]

(oops a little late to the game) Unpopular opinion! Although I think that Padme's death in ROTS wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility (i.e. she absolutely could've given up the will to live, that's a thing that can kill humans!), I also think it was pretty sexist for LF to kill her off because her emotions were too strong/she didn't have the will to live without Anakin anymore.

(Ask game found here)

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

Thank you for this one! Ok so this is definitely a very complicated answer for me

Firstly, we gotta address the matter of the fact that Padmé, narratively, unfortunately needed to die in Revenge of the Sith. She needed to die because the sad truth was that she was dead, canonically, by the Original Trilogy, as both of her children confirm her as dead. This was a good 8 years before the Disney purchase. There were no other streaming service shows or lesser known comics coming out at this time that would show us what was going to happen in canon after this movie. If you wanted to give Padmé Amidala, one of the three main characters of this movie trilogy, a solid ending to her character and story, she needed to die in Revenge of the Sith.

So yeah, Padmé did HAVE to die here.

Now did Lucas do it well enough to give her character justice? No, in my own opinion I wouldn’t say so. He cut most of her written plot that was about her forming the Rebellion and standing up to Palpatine and actually finding herself on a different side than Anakin, all of that was cut out of the movie. I feel that was detrimental to her character, as what we have left is pretty much just her being the distressed mother to be that Anakin obsesses over. I feel her remaining plot that was left for her in the movie revolving near-entirely around a man is definitely on the sexist side, and her death also revolving completely around a man can be seen as a part of that larger issue.

But Padmé’s death on its own, without the rest of the movie in context? I don’t know if I would call it a particularly sexist death. Like, I really don’t think I could call her death a fridging like I would say other prequels-era Star Wars ladies’ deaths were— notably Shmi, Satine, etc. —because while yes, Padmé’s death did make the male main character sad and drive his motivations afterwards, she was not killed off just to make the male main character sad and drive his plot.

Padmé was killed off for story continuity as she had already been canonically dead before the original trilogy for at this point around 25 years, so she needed to die. Of course it was gonna upset Anakin/Vader because the dumbass decided to pull all his violent murderous bullshit that most male characters with fridged women pull while the woman in question was still alive.

So no, I wouldn’t say Padmé’s death is a fridging. You however mentioned specifically the whole “lost the will to live” part, which is something else, and I don’t know if I would call that sexist either.

Yeah it fuckin’ sucks that in a universe where any old Darth Spite can survive falling down a hole after getting chopped in half/blown up, where the universe personally pulls time travel fixits despite continuity to save you if the director the universe likes you too much to let you die, where the woman in question’s husband just got triple amputated and flambéed and is up and kicking like an hour after getting fixed, where Breha Organa and Fennec Shand can just get brand new roboguts to replace any of their internal organs getting destroyed— it SUCKS that in that universe, Miz Amidala unfortunately cannot escape the diagnosis of Terminal Sad.

But they never say that she can’t go on just because of her emotions over losing Anakin; in fact, her last words are a fervent belief that she hasn’t lost Anakin, that he can still come back, that she still loves him even after he tried to kill her and destroyed her life’s work. I think it’s a combination of all of the different kinds of heartbreak. Her husband helping commit a genocide, yes her entire life’s work she put all of herself into burning to the ground around her, Jedi who were likely her friends all being dead, ALL of that weighed on Padmé. ALL of that was likely a part of her just not having the strength to take any more of this bullshit. Yeah she had two new babies, yeah there was the Rebellion. New children aren’t all sunshine and roses, especially when you’re a newly single parent and your not-so-deadbeat father is trying to hunt you down and is also a murderous fascist. Being part of a rebellion against a corrupt authority??? Fucking SUCKS. Activism and standing up and doing the right thing and fighting to take down the authoritarian power structures is WORK and it’s HARD and it is EXHAUSTING. It’s not a shining crusade of light and hope. It’s gritty and dirty and time consuming and it kills people. Padmé’s been throwing her entire sense of self into serving others, fixing the government, since she was twelve years old. She’s been conditioned to it. It’s all she’s BEEN doing. She has never seen a therapist in her LIFE. She just went through a grueling labor after being strangled by the one she loved most.

The more and more I watch this movie and the more and more I’ve looked back at my own mental bullshit, I can’t help but watch her death now and be like “ok yeah, I get that. I get just not being able to fight anymore, even if it’s The Right Thing To Do to pull yourself back up no matter what.”

I personally actually do subscribe to the theory that Sidious drained Padmé’s life force and used it to save Anakin because I love how it’s a painfully ironic end to the unhealthy and tragic Anidala relationship, that it’s sad for both of them, just because that’s the exact kind of Star Wars bullshit that is fun and makes sense to me. But even if Padmé just genuinely died from not being able to go on, just, I can’t really see that alone as anti-feminist anymore

[susandsnell]

Alright, so, jumping off @mylordshesacactus‘ post about the utter horror of the Jedi Council in KOTOR-era with regards to Juhani (as well as earlier points about the ethical horror that is their handling of Darth Revan), let’s talk about some of their other abuse victims, ahem, prized students.

While I may make another post about how Bastila Shan’s narrative, no matter your playthrough choices, strongly parallels the story of Anakin Skywalker, down to the fact that her fall to the Dark Side was largely due to the simultaneous pressures and limitations forced on her by a Council whose ways were built to fail strongly talented but brash Force users (because while being tortured and manipulated by Malak certainly played a big role in her fall, given Bastila’s overall stubbornness, strength and understanding, it’s unlikely she would have fallen as completely as she did without truly believing to some extent in the wrongs of the Jedi), I think the blue ribbon of ‘fucked-over-by-the-Jedi’ has to be awarded to the player character of KOTOR II, The Jedi Exile. 

(Note that this is more in line with the canonical light-side playthrough of II, but the council treats you effectively the same regardless of alignment, which can either be accredited to the rushed nature of the otherwise-brilliant sequel, or is one of those times that limited story options are really telling about the nature of certain characters.) 

According to Bastila in KOTOR and Bastila’s subsequent presence in the flashback recruitment scene with Malak in KOTOR II, the Exile is a Padawan when they left for war. Since Master Vash comments that “the war has touched the youngest of the Order, causing them to lose themselves in battle” in regards to your character, as well as in-game comments about your character’s age, it can be reasonably inferred that the Exile is likely still within their adolescence when they were made to stand trial before the Jedi. 

If you can call it a trial.

So you have a severely traumatized teen who resisted the fall to the Dark Side but nonetheless had their hand more-or-less forced into war crimes with the Mass Shadow Generator (only because the Mando wars themselves had only grown so severe, as multiple characters point out, because of the Jedi isolationist policy) hauled back “in chains”, as Atton puts it, to face the entire council in what can only be called a kangaroo court. They are berated and barely given a chance to speak for themselves before the council, their only home since infancy, banishes them, and the canonically-acknowledged reasons behind this exiling are somehow equally horrible:

The council needed a scapegoat to make an example of for going against their wishes and, gasp, daring to try and intervene in situations of genocide (their isolationism really casts the treatment of Juhani in KOTOR in an ugly, ugly light), blaming them for the fall of Revan, Malak and the others despite knowing full-well the Exile hadn’t fallen.

 They knew the actions at Malachor had turned the Exile into a Force-wound, and rather than try to help them, turned them away in fear, without even so much as giving this traumatized Padawan the heads-up as to this change or the reason behind the connection to the Force being severed - Master Vash, hypocritical as she is, even points out that they’re owed the truth, and Vrook (good old Vrook!) shoots the idea down, arguing that the Jedi would be made vulnerable to Revan were the Exile to know. The Exile’s own Master, Kavar, even goes along with this, saying the Exile must “accept their journey,” with the potential that they will never know the truth about themselves, and Vrook outright states this is the future they have to accept. 

But of course - of course, their decisions not to tell the Exile come to bite them back hard when the Exile reassembles them throughout the course of the plot of the game. Even when the Exile plays as nice as possible, does exactly as Kavar says (“Sometimes, the one who suffers must come to the conclusion themselves), acting without knowledge but still locating and training the Lost Jedi and the scattered Council members alike, they are still condemned - still outright blamed for the temptation others feel towards the Dark Side, still accused of bringing the Sith to the galaxy, still accused of corrupting others (even if you are playing the game blindingly Light-Sided and using your Influence/Cipher thing only to make your party members similarly exemplary figures, pasts notwithstanding), and they still refuse to help the Exile in any way, maybe keeping them around to counteract the feared similar abilities growing among the Sith, or even just trying to understand Force-wounds, or hell, maybe allow them to use the Force-wound for good in a manner similar to Bastila’s Battle Meditation, or any option aside from casting this kid they failed out once again, all while chanting their maxims of purported purity that grow increasingly cult-like, culminating in insisting the necessity of cutting the Exile off from the Force. An action which, even as they assert is “painless” and “the Jedi do not kill their prisoners”, is proven to be potentially fatal moments later when Kreia pulls it on them. 

As party members later point out, they once again punish the Exile they did nothing to help or even inform for surviving despite their decisions making it so much harder to do so, and punish them further for a potential danger out of a fear of the greater threat. 

And to add insult to injury, they reduce any positive relationship the Exile has developed with others to being a mere casualty of the cipher, dismiss any protectiveness on Kreia’s part as proof of the Exile falling as Revan did, and essentially pull tactics that feel feel creepily like emotional isolation in terms of invalidating any positive exterior relations the Exile might have, reducing them to a monster they’re well-aware they created but also feel that they ought to have. 

Really, it’s interesting that the game posits Atris as so nasty and evil and abusive (in regards to how she treats the Echani Handmaidens, especially Brianna) a figure when her antagonism to the Exile is simply the most upfront. Whatever ‘dissent’ regarding the Exile amongst the other council members is deeply weak-willed, and effectively results in the same verdict: this kid did not adhere to our templar against the Dark Side standards, and as such, is a lost cause who is on their own until we see fit to blame and punish them again for things far beyond their control. 

[galaxycloseclosebeside]

#and that’s just in-universe#don’t even get me started on the meta aspects of the sith being inspired by the Nazis (and no I’m not just talking aesthetics)#& the Jedi having an entire underground railroad system to escape genocide reminiscent of those used to spirit Black ppl out of slavery#as well as efforts to spirit Jews out of Europe during the Shoah#and the prevelance of Hebrew names among Jedi#especially in the era when Jedi are trying to survive a genocide#most notably Luke & Leia but also Ezra & Caleb/Kanan#(Kanan -> Canaan??) (even Ezra’s parents have Hebrew names)#and the parallels between the destruction of the temple & being forced into exile with the events of Order 66#the guy in charge of writing the book of Sith literally said Mein Kampf is one of several books it was based on

i think it's great that people who've suffered religious trauma feel a connection to anakin. i also think it's deeply troubling that the majority of them are either unable to recognize or unwilling to admit that the religion he was indoctrinated into and abused by was the sith and not, in fact, the jedi.