PT Did Lucas go too far in Revenge of the Sith?

oh i agree it goes both ways,

unfortunately it doesn't

Jedi kids= evil evil evil!

tusken kids: meh, well you know, look what happened to shmi, it's understandable i guess

some of us, don't agree

 

oh it's only too far when they a Jedi children, but not Tusken kids? Anakin was a sociopath before RotS

 

Yeah, killing the Tusken Raider women and children was going a bit too far as well, but it just shows how dark Anakin always was.

 

But it was different. Or at least it was to me.

Are you really saying you don't see how the two situations differ? That's not to say that it wasn't wrong of Anakin to kill the Tusken children, but his state of mind made it much easier to empathize.

To put it another way, if I found out a man had killed my family (including my ten year old brother) after my parents kidnapped and tortured his mother to death for over a month and she died in her son's arms, I would judge my family's killer far more differently than if he had simply arrived and killed them in the middle of the night to further his own gain.

Perhaps you would view the two situations as equal, and that's certainly your right. But I don't think there's anything abnormal with differentiating between the two situations.

It's not that it wasn't wrong to kill the Tusken children -- it's that it is much more understandable and that Anakin clearly displayed shock, guilt, and pain at his own actions (which wasn't the case with the Jedi).

 

again: when did I single you out in my post?

I was saying as a general statement that i've heard many times (often in more flowery language)

 

Are you really saying you don't see how the two situations differ?

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no, i don't when they are children

children don't understand "political differences or grey areas" all they know is big scary man running at them with a lightsaber, not "oh he must be pretty angry daddy wasn't very nice"

but anyway,

we differ, no point arguing any longer

 

sorry anakinfansince1983, but anakin skywalker, is a sociopathic child-murdering spousal abusing a-hole. Besides, nothing is too evil for space hitler.

 

The extremes to which Lucas shows the darkness in Anakin is something that weirded me out since AOTC. There, his killing of the Tusken women & children is something that went way beyond anything we ever saw him do in the OT, where the darkest deed he was party to was the destruction of Alderan, where it's really more a case of guilt by association. Tarkin was the one who ordered the planet's destruction, and Vader had been openly critical and contemptuous of the Death Star-- frankly, I always saw him as a rather noble figure, the lone voice of comparable reason surrounded by the Imperials, a bit like the cynical U-Boat captain of "Das Boot". Besides that, in the OT he only ever directly killed Rebel soldiers (who he was in a war with, after all) and Imperial officers (hard to feel much sympathy for them).

But in AOTC? It's such a strange experience to see Anakin begin his warpath with collateral damage right in front. Especially when we see him wrestling with how the Jedi are pushing him as well-- one of the finer touches on the film was that little bit where Anakin goes from playing good cop with Zam Wessel ("Who hired you? Tell us.") to bad cop after a short glance from Obi-Wan. That scene with the Sand People is darker than anything we ever saw in the OT, and it sets the stakes for what's to come in ROTS. The extremes are there, I feel, to push Anakin just far enough away from the audience, make it so they really can't identify with him anymore after a certain point. The off-screen slaughter of the younglings has to be there, to a certain extent, or else the audience is bound to relate to him and resist the idea of his fall to the darkside as a bad thing, really.

 

Not to the children, no, but you originally said "what seagoat said" after he posted:

"Everyone complains about Vader killing the younglings in ROTS, but I saw nobody complain when he confessed to killing the Sandpeople children in AOTC."

And my response is meant to show why some people look at the two situations differently. Yes, to the children, it is the same. But pretending that circumstances don't matter when it comes to how we judge someone's actions is, to me, unfair. Some people do judge Anakin differently in these situations not because a Tusken child's life is less valuable than a Jedi's, but because the circumstances of the situations were entirely different. In one (with the Jedi) Anakin made a deliberate choice. In another (with the Tuskens), he was at the very least extremely disturbed and triggered by his mother's death.

A life is a life, but I would never assign equal outrage to the two events in the same way that my view of the hypothetical killer of my family would differ depending on whether or not my parents had tortured his mother to death.

The reason I am addressing this is because there's a rather unfortunate undercurrent -- the implication that those who don't "complain" about the two events equally are doing so because they value the Tuskens children's lives less than the Jedi's. And that's not it at all.

 

goodbye.

 

Really, this coming from someone whose tagline is "Pimpin' is easy, when you can choke a b**** from across the room." ?

But I think you are looking at a very narrow definition of the word "fan" -- being a character's fan generally means finding that character's story compelling and interesting. You don't have to "agree" with the character and his actions.

Heck, I'm a fan of Palpatine and I disagree with everything he does.

 

Tuskens children's lives less than the Jedi's. And that's not it at all.
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then why not say that WITHOUT the need of saying

BUT or HOWEVER: Anakin was under stress

like it or not that is excusing his behavior
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and from what i've read (no it's not at you Anakinfan before I get accused) a lot of people do value the Jedi younglings more simply because they're Jedi children, who can't possibly grow up to be bad you know *cough* Dooku, Anakin *cough*

 

it's not an attack at all. Relax.

EDIT: It's not a personal attack on you, it's a personal attack on Anakin Skywalker, future space hitler.

 

Def not a fan of papa palpatine. I am a fan of Obi-Wan though, mostly cause he cut Anakin to shreds. It redeemed his whiny complaining in Ep 1

 

Because I believe that someone's frame of mind does affect how his or her behavior should be judged. I'm not about to say that a man who beats to death an individual who tries to rape his four-year-old daughter is at all equatable with a person who beats someone to death for ***** and giggles in the middle of the street.

In each case, a life was lost but I do not view the perpetrator's actions equally. You may do so -- that is your choice. But I don't think it's fair of you to say that the reason I don't judge the perpetrator equally is because I value one of the victim's lives less. That I take issue with.

But that wasn't my point. And that's why I felt the need to clarify. I'm not saying the Tusken children's lives are worth less. I'm saying I judge Anakin less harshly due to his frame of mind. You don't have to take that into account, but I do. And it has nothing to do with considering the lives of the Tusken children worth less than those of the Jedi -- I believe all lives are equal.

 

It's less a matter of seeing the Tusken lives as less valuable than the Jedi. Rather, it's a matter of understanding his state of mind in either case. With the Tuskens, he'd just found his mother, who he'd been having bad dreams about for months. He had a chance to save her, but instead found her tied up and brutalized (probably raped) and held her while she gave up her dying breath. It's natural that'd have an extreme emotional reaction to that, and as a Jedi, that reaction is going to be something like a meltdown. He might not have even been fully conscious of his actions there.

It's a stark contrast to the cold, mercilessly logical state of mind he was in as he killed the Jedi and the younglings. There, he'd literally made a bargain with the devil. Kill the innocent to save his wife. Even then, there's a smidgeon with which we can identify there-- his wife and unborn children have essentially been taken hostage. The position he's in isn't that different from, say, Jack Bauer in any given episode of "24".

 

Anakin's frame of mind doesn't make me judge him any differently killing the Tusken children or the younglings, just like if that dude who beat to death the guy trying to rape his 4 year old daughter wouldn't be judged differently if afterwards he went and beat to death the people who lived in the rapist's apartment complex.

 

to argue that point i'll say this in response

Tusken children were destroyed because he lost it after the treatment of his mother

Jedi Children were killed because

A) he was corrupted fully by the darkside at that point (however you want to view that, some might say "overtaken"

B) he was completely and utterly insane at that point thinking he'd lose his wife if he didn't,

now by that reasoning you could say the first was more shocking, because the second one was commited under insanity

 

ok seriously relax. You're get waaay too worked up over an internet forum regarding a sociopathic child murdering spousal abusing a-hole.

 

he was insane from birth. Sociopaths are born sociopaths; brain scans have proven this. They have a different brain than normal people.