#this isn't the obi-wan who had been so likable in the prequel trilogy

[antianakin]

It's so interesting how people reacted so drastically to the criticism against the Prequels, disliking both Anakin and the Jedi while liking Obi-Wan, that Anakin and Obi-Wan managed to be basically merged into almost the exact same character.

Anakin has the "relatability factor" of being the protagonist who goes on a journey and has the flaws that are explored within the story. But he's COMPLETELY unlikable as a character, especially in AOTC (and I hear people find child actors grating in general which is a personal taste problem but caused people to dislike Anakin in TPM too). He's whiny, rude, disrespectful, awkward, unforgivably uncool, and comes with a HEFTY dose of secondhand embarrassment in nearly every scene he's in.

Obi-Wan has the "cool factor" of being the one who is the Adult most of the time who is there to showcase how far the teenaged protagonist has to go still, so he gets all of the clever quippy lines and the better fight scenes (and his actor was a little older and more seasoned which probably helped a bit). But he's not the protagonist and so his flaws are not on display and it's not his story being told at all.

TL;DR Obi-Wan is an actually likable character with redeeming entertaining traits, but Anakin had all of the character story beats and protagonist bias.

And this meant Obi-Wan got out of the Prequel Trilogy a lot easier than the rest of the characters, especially Anakin (and the other Jedi).

So then we got The Clone Wars. And TCW is a show that is much lauded for being the show that "saved" the Prequels, generally by "saving" Anakin as a character. How did they do that?

They took away all of those pesky uncomfortable qualities of Anakin's and instead just gave him all of Obi-Wan's more fun likable qualities. TCW Anakin is turned into a dudebro action hero, with tons of cool action scenes to show off just how badass he is, endless amounts of quippy dialogue so he can equal Obi-Wan in their scenes together, capable of flirting with a Queen SO WELL that she doesn't even realize he's faking it until he pulls out a lightsaber. Gone is that secondhand embarrassment, gone are the whiny moments, gone is the inability to have a cool fight scene to save his life. The awkwardness stays just enough to make him ENDEARING, but not enough to cringe at so much you want to turn off what you're watching or just fast forward to the next scene.

And this is the version of Anakin that feels more "right" to people, more true to what they anticipated in a baby Darth Vader. He's angry a lot, violent, prone to lashing out if things don't go his way, but he's also just charming and suave enough that it's mostly understandable why people around him are willing to write off his worse behavior as a momentary struggle. Gone are the tears, gone is the fear of loss being his most obvious motivator. Because THIS is how people expected a villain like Darth Vader to act in his youth.

And then you get fanon Obi-Wan. Because people hated the Jedi, rejected the warrior monks who destroyed their visions of gallant medieval knights, and created a whole new interpretation positioning the Jedi as the villains of the story in order to try to make their peace with that dissonance. But they liked Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan CAN'T be the villain.

So how do you save him from that fate? You make him more like Anakin. He gets to keep the cool fighting abilities and the fun quippy dialogue of course, but he's now completely repressed to the point that he never told Anakin he loved him until Anakin was burning in pieces on Mustafar. Now he's someone who can barely keep himself together and regularly forgets to eat and sleep like a normal person and has to be taken care of by other people. Now he's constantly being portrayed as just as attached to Anakin as Anakin is to him, just as co-dependent as Anakin is in that relationship, just as inclined towards anger and willing to walk away from the more stuffy traditional Jedi Order so he can have the more natural, healthier domestic lifestyle he's always truly wanted and never known he could have. TCW even decided to help out here by giving Obi-Wan a love interest who is for all intents and purposes just a knock-off of Padme, his own forbidden star-crossed love story. He takes on ALL of Anakin's flaws that make Anakin so "relatable" as a character, keeps his more charming likable traits, and loses all of those things that make him a Jedi, that make him Obi-Wan Kenobi.

So now Obi-Wan and Anakin are both cool, charming, suave, silver tongued, attached, repressed, struggling against the Jedi Code. They're effectively the same person, but one of them just happens to commit genocide and the other one... doesn't. What made each of them distinct and interesting characters in their own right is washed away in order to merge them both into two copies of the One Perfect Character and who you like better at that point is probably just down to who you found more attractive or something equally banal.

And through fandom osmosis, this is what is considered their true/"canon" interpretation, regardless of how inaccurate it actually is.

[antianakin]

If you were in charge of the Star Wars Prequels how would you have written Anakin? (assuming the only thing you can't do is erase him from canon :P)

Would you learn into Anakin's evilness or try to make him more sympathetic?

Honestly? I don't have THAT much of an issue with Anakin's general characterization in the Prequel Trilogy. I think for the most part that Anakin is a really interesting character in the Prequels and pretty unique as far as villain origin stories and action heroes of the time tended to be written. The focus on Anakin as FEARFUL, as someone who CRIES a lot and is AWKWARD and honestly not suave or smooth AT ALL (unless he's giving himself over to darkness, generally) is actually a really interestingly novel choice to go for. And that unique aspect of him is, arguably, why Anakin was so despised in the Prequels for being "whiny" and "annoying" and people really did not vibe with this weird awkward dude as proto-Vader. Obi-Wan as the much more competent, smooth, suave character with all of the snarky one-liners comes off looking much better in comparison. Same with Padme, usually.

So I wouldn't actually change the CORE of Anakin, the journey he goes on and the way his vices tend to be shown. TCW has already done that, they've just replaced Anakin's less likable characteristics with Obi-Wan's much more affable personality. They gave him snarky one-liners, he's now suave and smooth and charming, etc. It's annoying and it's boring.

But there are two things that don't work for me that I WOULD change if I were capable of going back in time and influencing Lucas's mind towards certain rewrites.

One is that I would make his romance with Padme more believable. The problem with the romance in AOTC for me is that you can completely believe that Anakin would be into Padme, but it feels a lot more difficult to understand why Padme is into Anakin in return. Especially after he murders an entire village of people down to the last child (we'll come back to this one). So we need to be told more WHY Padme is so into him when he is this weird, awkward, whiny manchild. Like, sure, he's pretty, but being pretty isn't enough to explain why Padme is willing to jeopardize her entire career to marry him by the end of the film.

So Padme either needs to be more corrupt, more angry herself, more connected to this part of Anakin that desires power, or they need to show us a better genuine connection. One of the things from the extended/deleted scenes from AOTC that I think could've helped with this is the bits where Padme mentions she had thought she'd be a wife and a mother by now and we see how close she is to her own family when she takes Anakin there. We know how close Anakin was to his mother and I think it would've been REALLY easy to use that as an easy connection. You could even help along the next movie by having Anakin mention that when he was a kid, he'd always sort-of wanted a big family. He didn't HATE that it was just him and his mom obviously, but it had been a sort of dream of his that one day they'd be free and he'd find a beautiful wife and have a big family for Shmi to dote on later in life. This gives Anakin and Padme a shared dream that neither of them is allowed to pursue due to their chosen careers. They've both sacrificed a desire for a family in favor of duty to the galaxy so when they get together later, you can kind-of understand why. No one else gets it but each other, etc.

The second thing I would change is the Tusken Massacre. I think that going as far as completely massacring the entire village is too far too soon. This is something that works only if you as the viewer don't truly see the Tuskens as equal to humans like Shmi or a people like the Jedi. The Tuskens aren't QUITE animals maybe, but they're also just savages who torture innocent women to death, so their deaths aren't sad for THEIR sake, the massacre is sad because of what it represents for Anakin - it's the beginning of the end. And obviously from a modern viewpoint, this really doesn't work anymore, especially with the way the Tuskens are being written these days. It also feels a little redundant with Order 66. It's not as impactful that he murders Jedi children when we already saw him murder Tusken children in the last movie. Baby murder is baby murder, there's no escalation in the evil he commits aside from sheer numbers I guess.

So I would probably have Anakin either choose to just leave the village quietly without killing anyone, or have him stop at just the guards/men and leave the women/children alive and either way he admits to Padme that he WANTED to kill them all and only just barely stopped himself. This also helps the romance aspect in that now you don't have to figure out why Padme is super chill with marrying a MASS BABY MURDERER and her moral code is a lot less gray. If he only killed the people who attacked him in the village or didn't kill anyone at all but just WANTED to, then you can dismiss it a lot easier. The rage is sympathetic and understandable and relatable, but Anakin is still mostly in control of himself. Padme can say that she's felt the same rage and not acted on it, so Anakin is the same. She can insist he would never murder Jedi younglings to Obi-Wan in the next film without sounding like an idiotic hypocrite.

(There's obviously a LOT of other issues with the Tusken Massacre in terms of how the Tuskens are written and presented in this film that could be rewritten to be a lot better and make the Tuskens more sympathetic, etc etc, but that's not really what you're asking me about and I'm not necessarily the right person to speak to that anyway.)