PT Anakin should not have killed the younglings

Well, he was his Apprentice outright who was carrying out his will. But following the confrontation on Geonosis, Palpatine used his knowledge of what transpired to set up animosity between Dooku and Anakin.

 

This is a guy who stood by impassively in tacit support as every man, woman, and child on Alderaan was murdered.

 

You guys all act like he enjoyed killing them. It obviously caused him a great deal of grief and regret

 

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic -- Stalin

 

Darth Vader: "Those stupid Younglings got their blood and viscera all over my lightsaber! Now I'm going to have to clean it!! I HATE THEM!!!!!!"

 

Vader was a mass murderer. Like kids who shoot up schools, or adults who go on a killing spree... You are right, he shouldn't have done it. But he let his rage and grief and anger at the world drive him crazy and he lashed out at everyone and everything around him... And like most mass murderers, he didn't really expect to survive the ordeal. Oh he'll keep on killing until someone stops him and ends his misery... But he doesn't die like most mass murderers, nor is he locked up for the crimes he has committed. He is in fact rewarded and promoted.

Vader has to live with the horrible things he did. In those hours of rage he did terrible things he can never take back.

He knows he will never be forgiven. He knows he is undeserving of love. He knows he is a monster, and that that is all that he is. Vader hates himself more than anything else.

That's why Luke's faith in him is able to move him so deeply. His childlike belief that his father is a good man deep down is more powerful than forty years of Palpatines false flattery and insincere praise. Somebody actually cares about him, long after he stopped caring about himself.

 

I wonder now, if Luke knew what horrible acts were committed with that lightsaber Obi Wan gave to him, how much would it have disgusted him.

Don't forget the midichlorian stains, they are very tough to get out and tend to clog the light saber's blade emitter.

 

Hence the tear that we see after he's finished with the killing.

I'm sure Luke figured things out on his own as time went on. He probably reasoned that his father used his Lightsaber in the service of evil, before his injuries. He'd rationalize it as Obi-wan wanting to redeem at least some part of Anakin, by using it in the service of good once again.

 

Anakin took it to the extreme when he killed the younglings, he killed innocent force sensitive children and at the end of the day padme dies........

 

Murder is murder. Why does age matter? He was order to kill everyone in the temple and he did it. Yes it was a terrible act, but Darth Vader is a terrible person so you expect him to do things like that.

 

I wonder how luke and leia are going to react when they found out their father killed younglings.

 

It would hurt to know this, but that doesn't change that there was still good in him even after all that. Though we don't know what Leia's status is in Episode VII, we do know that as a Jedi, Luke is capable of forgiving his father for all of his crimes. If he could for Alderaan, then he can for the Temple. There were children on Alderaan and he was in support of its destruction.

 

Let's not forget Anakin murdered children before the events of Order 66. I'm not saying he should get a pass, but Anakin at the time was not in his right state of mind. The events of Order 66 made Anakin push himself forward without really feeling what was right. He doesn't get to stop and take a breath of fresh air until after he killed the Separatist leaders on Mustafar. It is at that point when he knows what he has done and how his actions effect his emotions.

In the end, he was following his master's orders believing he could save his wife, blinding him from what he was doing.

 

As dark as Anakin's actions are, at the temple or elsewhere, I must say...

I've seen a lot worse this week. Dig around for videos of what's happening in the world right now. Start with Iraq.

And you don't have to move far from Iraq, as it were, to be confronted with more inhumanity and waste. In fact, you'll probably never leave the Middle East; unless you've got four or five lifetimes to spare.

A swift death by lightsaber is a compassionate end compared to first being raped, mutilated, and tortured. All of which is documented -- some of it in uncensored gory video detail -- on the very communication medium we all use to chew the cud about Star Wars on; and is no doubt happening as we continue to spout off with this opinion or that.

That's what starts to crack me up about discussions like these (no offence). A fictional character killing children, in a scene that isn't even fully shown, is neither here nor there, really. Art is cathartic. But people should save their emotion for what is actually happening in the real world. A lot of it ain't pretty; and some of it is positively revolting.

 

To be fair, society doesn't like to be reminded of such horrors. There are limits that some people will place when it comes to acceptable evil, in the real of fiction. Case in point, Freddy Krueger. The character became a pop culture icon in the late 80's and continues to this day. But Wes Craven, his creator, originally intended for the character to be a child molester on top of being a child killer. This was dropped due to real world events that were going on at the time. Later, "Freddy Vs Jason" made a nod towards it in the film's prologue which then sparked debates like this, as many have a hard time liking a child molester. Fans could accept that he killed children, but not that he had his way with them first.

Likewise here with Vader, they could accept that killed grown Jedi, but not little kids since as society, we condemn that worse than just killing adults.

 

It really is worse though. Children are innocent, the most pure of humans. Adults have made plenty of mistakes. Either way, killing is killing, but I'd weep over a child's death long before an adult's

 

Which is a crock of ****. Murder is murder no matter what age you are. Trying to put a condition on that is just moral superiority.

 

I'm sure you didn't mean it exactly that way, but that just sounds like "adults are less deserving of having their right to life protected than children", which is perhaps the basic premise of this thread, but which I have to disagree with.

No matter what mistakes an adult has made, that has absolutely no bearing on the moral wrongness of their murder.

As well, "children are innocent [and] pure" is a stereotype, surely. Children are often plenty cruel (have you ever watched a bunch of kindergarten-age kids interact? If there's more than two, deliberate ostracisation of at least one child is almost guaranteed to some degree). And adults can be full of and integrity and nobility.

 

No that's not what I meant. I meant like.... well I do think children are more innocent in a sense of like... ugh I suck at conveying my thoughts lol
I'll clarify that I believe no one *deserves* to die. Even the most evil people don't deserve death. The only kind of death I'm really ok with is natural causes, which still make me sad lol

Sorry I suck at what I'm trying to say lol

 

Thats something thats never been explored in the EU, i wonder will it be explored in the new EU if they ignore it in the ST? It certainly could affect Luke more than Leia, she's already witnessed Anakin at his worst.

 

They did explore it in the old EU. "The Swarm War Trilogy" came out after ROTS and featured a substantial subplot where Artoo starts malfunction and shows holo footage that he recorded from the night Anakin told Padme about his vision of her death, all the way through the duel on Mustafar and I think in the medical bay on Polis Massa. They even see Artoo's footage of Anakin killing Jedi in the Temple, including the Younglings, when he had hacked into the surveillance system during the attack. They both had to remain composed each time they saw something.

Whatever will happen in the new one, remains to be seen.

 

In my opinion it was essential that Anakin was shown to kill younglings. Anakin was following Sidious' orders in the hope if being shown how to save Padme. Also could it be argued that the younglings are there to remind us of young Anakin and his eventual fall to the dark side.

 

if you like the idea of Anakin having a killing rampage, check this thread where I defend what he did to the Tusken
http://boards.theforce.net/threads/defending-anakin-and-the-tusken.50022232/#post-51736762

 

- "Married to the order of the Sith, you will need no other companion than the dark side of the Force" : Sidious speech to Vader in the novel "Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader".
- " The essence of the dark side lay in a willingness to use any means possible to arrive at a desired end—which, in the case of Lord Sidious, meant a galaxy brought under the dominion of a single, brilliant mind" : Dooku thought in the novel "Labyrinth of Evil".
From the novel "The Revenge of the Sith" :
Padmé : “It’s like—it’s like—” Tears brimmed again. “I don’t even know who you are anymore …”
Anakin : “I’m the man who loves you,” he said, but he said it through clenched teeth. “I’m the man who would do anything to protect you. Everything I have done, I have done for you.”
Anakin was a good person but not enough to be a Jedi. Like Yoda had say in TPM when the council examinated him : "“The deepest commitment, a Jedi must have. The most serious mind. Much fear in you, I sense, young one”. The Jedi commitment to the Force, their acceptance to "its ways" and the rules that follow it frustated Anakin. He thought that being a Jedi was to explore the galaxy and free slaves and punish vilains (a nine years old thought) instead it was a life of seclusion and contemplation, constantly being monitored by someone and directed by masters. For Anakin, it was another kind of "slavery". And the fact that he was so gifted does not playedin his favor. Indeed, due to its high rate of midichlorian, Anakin could access control levels of Force that even some Jedi Masters couldn't reach. This and the fact that to be constantly being bolstered by Palpatine's praise, have made him arrogant, prideful and overconfidant in his abilities. He thought that he was the most powerful Jedi, superior to even Yoda and so disdained Obi-wan's teachings (And specifically, the teaching about the danger of succumbing to the temptations of the dark side). Indeed, in the novel "Labyrinth of Evil", Obi-wan said : "Clearly Anakin was as strong in the Force as any Jedi who had ever sat on the Council. But as Obi-Wan had told him time and again, the essence of being a Jedi didn’t hinge on attaining mastery of the Force, but on attaining mastery over oneself. Someday Anakin would come to accept that, and then he would be truly unstoppable". But Anakin had never let himself understand. In the end, he has fallen, has killed his wife before being "dismantled" by Obi-wan and left for dead in Mustafar. When Sidious find him and "repaired" him, he was more than the shadow of himself. Indeed, he had lost confidence in him, in his ability to use the Force and was demoralizing because of the death of his wife and the betrayal of his best friend. It was Sidious who gave him a reason to live in the incentive to seek deeper into himself the will to live and this desire was to succeed one day to the supreme power that Sidious held : the power of the side obscure of the Force. That's why he said, in "Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader" : "Just as Sidious promised, he was now married to the order of the Sith, and needed no other companion than the dark side of the Force. He embraced all that he had done to bring balance to the Force, by dismantling the corrupt Republic and toppling the Jedi, and he reveled in his power. It could all be his, anything he wished. He needed only the determination to take it, at whatever cost to those who stood in his way.But ...He was also married to Sidious, who doled out precious bits of Sith technique as if merely lending them–just enough to increase his apprentice's power, without making him supremely powerful.
There would come a day, however, when they would be equals