Lit Did the Clone Wars series end up "fixing" Anakin's character?

Rise and shine kids, it's a new day for Star Wars. Obviously the dreaded "C" word has been a huge topic of discussion, and I'm going to skip about 99% of it. Sufficient to say, the damage done to the Star Wars name by the prequels has a big chance to be mitigated. I honestly hate canon discussions, since in my mind the Prequels only happened in broad-strokes. I like TONS of moments in them, I liked the EU that followed... but like many the total package was a disappointment to me.

As an example. One of my favorite Star Wars comics was Vader vs. Maul because it gave Vader JUST enough characterization for us to empathize with him, while not kiddifying his status as a villain with a capital V.

The same is true with the classic Ostrander run comic featuring Anakin and Hett the Jedi Tusken, which finally dealt with Anakin's initial rampage in a way that was completely lacking in any follow through on the films.

The prequels of course wrecked a lot of people's image of what Anakin Skywalker was supposed to be. A brash young hero who's heart was in the right place... but was selfish and prideful and who ultimately became slowly corrupted.

So to come to the point, do you think the Clone Wars series, and other stories, have done a good enough job of redeeming Anakin Skywalker's character as a flawed, but still heroic, individual who took part in the Clone Wars? Agree or disagree? What other characters have fared better in fiction now that the prequel films are over?

 

In the early seasons, absolutely. We really got to see Anakin as a hero, and an actually pretty decent guy. He was a kind and funny master, got along great with Obi Wan, and actually seemed pretty good at this whole Jedi thing. However, the temptation to foreshadow him as Vader is irresistible, and the later seasons showed him in an increasingly less flattering light, particularly in matters related to Padme.

If nothing else, TCW Anakin was a huge improvement on the Anakin of the films, and the show finally gave the character a bit of nuance he was otherwise completely lacking.

 

Not sure if you mean TCW or the old Clone Wars multimedia project here. Generally, I preferred the former's take on Anakin, as I feel it really sold him as the character Obi-Wan told Luke about in ANH. The Clone Wars multimedia project had some good stories, but like many pre-TCW media featuring Anakin had a tendency to make him a bit too unstable.

I don't know if that's really such a bad thing. Seeing him gradually develop more Vader-like qualities is a lot better than having him just suddenly drop off a moral cliff. It's not purely naturalistic character development because of TCW's anthology nature, but it does feel like a pretty believable overall progression.

 

Even with the slow descent and fall to the dark side as portrayed in TCW, Anakin's actions in RoTS still don't make too much sense. Having Anakin just go out and kill a bunch of kids runs the risk of undermining his redemption in RoTJ.

 

Given that in the EU, well before the PT, Vader was described as having "the blood of billions on his hands, and a long career ahead of him" in scenes set before ANH, I wasn't too surprised that the PT would give him some horrible things to do.

 

Though I always figured that was more a he gets blamed for the Empire thing.

 

It's possible. I was thinking of both Darksaber, and the Alan Moore Devilworlds comic Dark Lord's Conscience. In the latter, The Shamer accuses Vader of having destroyed worlds, plural. And in the Han Solo book Rebel Dawn, the destruction of Caamas (or at least of its ecosystem and population) is blamed on Vader.

 

The Clone Wars Anakin was a lot more sympathetic for me as the gradual corrosion of the truly heroic Anakin into an embittered and jaded but still decent guy and then finally into a tragic villain who went further off the deep end in time makes much more sense when they have time to play with it. There were episodes when he was clearly tempted by the Dark Side, or at least his own anger, but managed to resist it. In the shorter story form of film, you'd only have time to play with that once or twice before you run out of time and he ends up a baddie, but the long form seasonal plots kept him recognisably the same character but gave him proper development into his villainous fall. (Character development DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN 'becomes a better/nicer person' as some corners of the Internet seem to remain convinced.)

The films had so much to do with the different threads it had to pursue - military fights, personal conflict, political scheming - that it couldn't develop any of them properly. As a result Anakin's fall seemed a bit too fast to be convincing. He basically went from feeling bad about cutting off Mace's hand to killing preteens without any apparent remorse in between scenes. But the tragedy of his repeated heroism never being enough to save everybody, and his friends suffering becoming too much then it makes more sense that he would develop deep rooted anger that being the Chosen One isn't good enough.

For me the difference is that in The Clone Wars series Anakin's overall fall towards (but not totally into) Darkness was not being able to save EVERYONE. In the movies it basically boiled down to having nightmares that Padme was going to die... and that's about it. Lucas is generally much better thematically and in wide scale story telling than character beats and this was the one thing that the show did better than the films simply by merit of having the time to actually explore the characters. Obi-Wan in the PT never really got a lot more character than 'good fighter, polite-but-sarcasm' heavy. You couldn't fit in something like his love story with Satine which let the writers explore the idea that there is anything or anyone Obi-Wan might forsake/defy the Council for, just for example.

TLDR; No, it didn't 'fix' Anakin's character, it developed it in a way I don't think the films actually could.

 

I can't decide if TCW "fixed" Anakin or made him more of a mess. Matt Lanter did a great job making him sound like a fun, likable guy. Hayden sounded like a total sociopath. Try to imagine Hayden saying half the lines ML did in TCW -- he wouldn't sound like a friendly older brother, he'd sound like a major creepster!

So TCW made Anakin more "likable" in some ways, but whenever he lost his temper it was against bad guys, like Clovis or Poggle or whoever, so to believe that he would suddenly snap and start killing the Younglings -- who he seems to know and be friends with -- is even more ridiculous than before. HC-Anakin I could sort of see doing that; ML-Anakin not at all.

I can't say either way about Republic comics. I only vaguely remember Anakin's role in any of those because he only showed up once in a while.

 

It's a fair point you make Barriss_Coffee but the animated Anakin is the one that actually became the ROTS Anakin, which sort of justifies the difference for me. During the actual wars he goes deeper into the rabbit hole of the Dark Side but maintains his innate heroism, he manages to rein in his temper but the times he does lose it tend to be very bad news - but it's a bad guy who ends up on the receiving end. If you take all the character development from the show and retroactively apply to live Anakin however, he's basically been unravelling at a steadily increasing pace and the dreams about Padme and Palps' little tale about Plagueis the Wise are actually only the final straw, instead of being the whole reason for the change as they would be if you took TCW out of the mix.

They work in synergy for me, TCW showing the anger slowly building up and resentment simmering away as Anakin (and the other heroes too) repeatedly win battles but lose the war, both literally and in the metaphorical sense for his soul. You add in all the ways the Council mishandled the Ahsoka trial and all the compromises they've made over the course of the war and instantly his problems with them are a lot more sympathetic than just 'they won't make me a master, grrr.' Without the TCW series, Anakin's fall happens over the course of the one film, essentially. With it, ROTS becomes merely the flashpoint for something that's been building for far longer, it works much better for me.

I also agree that Lanter's performance is better than Christensen's but Lucas has never been a particularly good 'actor's director' - you look at the best performances of the films and you're looking at the likes of Ian Mcdiarmid, Ewan Mcgregor, Christopher Lee. These are all much more experienced than HC was and that has to be borne in mind before I judge him too harshly for not handling a pretty clunky script.

 

IMO:1.His character was never broken to begin with as AOTC and ROTS were supposed to show his most problematic times with the dark side.
2.The Clone Wars series explored his good relationship with Obi Wan (as in the beginning of AOTC and the majority of the first half of ROTS)really well.
3.The Approaching Storm ,Labyrinth of Evil among other stuff (comics and books ,Skyewalkers) also have written his character pretty decent.

Jo

 

I'll agree with this just to be clear. However i'll also point out, as I have before, that TCW went an extra step and finally lived up to the claim that Obi-Wan made to Luke in the OT: That his father had been a good man, before he was killed by Darth Vader. It portrays him as still being very flawed, but for every negative there's a positive to be found in the character. Overall, I think this makes him more well-rounded, more interesting, and the entire events of his life more tragic in the long run.

 

I think it's interesting that in TCW, the Jedi Council gave Ahsoka to Anakin to train to deal with his one key weakness - his ability to deal with attatchment. Yoda points out in the movie that the real trial for Anakin won't be training Ahsoka, it will be letting her go at the proper time. He keeps losing things he has grabbed onto as his, and the Jedi are often right to blame in his perspective.

He lost his mother - the Jedi never allowed him to 'follow his heart' to free the slaves, and they were seen as holding back his power.


He lost Ahsoka - the Jedi Council drove her away.


He was NOT going to let anything, the Jedi, Death, whatever, take his last possession (yes, that's how I think he viewed Padme) away from him. Sidious promised him he could make Anakin's dream come true, as long as he was strictly obedient to his commands. Possessions were, for Anakin, the 'ring of power'. His Precious. He values them as if they were essential to his own life. His possessions were his life. He viewed himself as a sum of himself and his possessions. He could not be complete without them. (Calling back, and taking to a fundamentalist extreme Kenobi's teaching, 'Remember, Anakin. This [your lightsaber] is your life.")


The loss - the forceful taking - of Anakin's lightsaber can be seen as a highly symbolic act of the taking of his life. Anakin's last unique possession.


Anakin came into the Jedi Order never truly converted to their philosophy. The power was regularly unhinged without the checks-and-balances of the ingrained Jedi philosophy. It was easy for Anakin to fly free with the rules, because he never had a conviction for the core philosophy.

So when Sidious says, you can have more power and more power over your possessions - it wasn't a huge ideological leap. Power was always to be used to keep the things he held dear. The constraints of Jedi dogma didn't work. Now a new philosophy brought his self, and his possessions, to the center. He acted on it.

Of course, he was broken, deceived, and used - he became a Slave to Sidious. He was dead in many ways after that - he had no further possessions he held dear, the way he defined his life. Vader from ROTS until discovering he has a son is truly Dead Anakin. A shell with no moral compass apart from self-preservation for the sake of self-preservation.

The OT is Vader's story of regaining his freedom and identity. It is sparked by the appearance of Luke - the bearer of Anakin's Lightsaber.


Taken in this light - think of the additional meaning we might see of Vader severing it from Luke.

And then Luke forges his own unique identity, and what he does with that. (He voluntarily tosses it aside! He shows his willingness to give up his own life to save another. "I am a Jedi. Like my Father before me.")


It is then when Anakin sees in Luke who he wants to be. And then he, like he just saw his son volunatarily do, gives away his own life.


I think TCW adds to and creates a consistent story about Anakin, and nuances and adds to the significance and impact of the tragedy of his fall - and the reasons for his redemption.

 

The main difference for me is that in the TCW we get to see Anakin start out as a true hero and slowly lose control of himself and his destiny. In the movies, he's pretty much an entitled jerk from the word go, in the second film onwards anyway. In the show, the fact he is the Chosen One seems to weigh on him and make him want to live up to that kind of responsibility, in the films the fact he is the Chosen One seems to make him think that means when he says 'jump' the Council should ask 'how high?' Like I say, different format and a lot more time (in the sense they have more time AND that it covers more time) and we get a much more nuanced Anakin than the films have time to show (and more subtly done than Hayden is capable of frankly. He's not awful... but he's not good enough to really get at the real tragedy of Anakin, at least not with a Lucas script.) The actual turn in the movies is 'Oh my god, Mace is dead, no!... welp, time to go massacre the younglings.' The turn over the course of the entire series is Anakin losing his faith in the council, losing Ahsoka, and losing friends to the war.

TCW Anakin I can believe being an actually decent person who lost their way. Movie Anakin is a talented jackass who could have done with a slap upside the head.

 

I agree: It's a tricky balance to strike, and he had to show some rumblings of what was to come before Episode III. I think TCW does a much better job of it, though it would have been nice to see Anakin and Padme as something resembling a healthy couple for more than an episode or two. I think the closest we ever get it Anakin rescuing Padme from the Malevolence and that one scene in the TCW tie in novel that had the weird torture-porn between Bail and Obi-Wan (I forget the name and the author).

 

No, I don't think TCW helped either Obi-Wan or Anakin. Particularly, Anakin is worse. I honestly have seen nothing heroic in the least regarding the character or presentation of 'young Anakin Skywalker.' One of the rare cases where I do think fiction has helped is Dooku. I have always seen him of noble intent and heart and apart from Jedi or Sith and one novel and about three episodes show me a glimpse of a man that is a man, misguided but well-intentioned and that he suffers.

 

But I think the point is that they were never a healthy couple, even though they wanted to believe they were. I think the latest Clovis arc was a good representation of that. Anakin went from being property ( a slave) to being enslaved by his perceived property. Padme was, to him, his possession. And he refused to let anything, including Death, take it away from him.



What we DO miss is Padme's perspective. I think the AOTC novel did a wonderful job explaining why she allowed herself to get caught up in this. I understood the relationship a lot more after reading it. It didn't make it healthy - it made it tragically understandable.

I'd love a canon novel 'Amidala', or the likes, that followed her life. It might make her more understandable, but it might just end up being too depressing. Just like Anakin, she was both strong, and broken.

 

If there is one great unexplored chunk of the workings of Anakin's brain, it's the negative bits of what being raised as a slave did to him. This makes perfect sense, and I applaud you for it.

 

Succinctly, yes.

Movies Annie -> an immature crybaby never-grown douchebag, to whom we have little reason to root for (even as an effing kid) and I personally never bought as Vader

TCW General Skywalker -> an immature grown-up douchebag who lives up to stuff we've been told about him.

Now they gotta fix (or completely break, I'm ok anyway) Boba Fett

 

Yeah, for me this is where the seeds of Anakin's fall really lie. Everything comes down to those years of slavery for me, because whilst regular Jedi grew up with adherence to the code and having no blood family as totally natural and right to them, he didn't. In fact, in his moments of doubt they probably just reminded him of his slavery - arbitrary rules and solitude (as he saw it) especially when he joined up to the Jedi with his head full of being a Special Snowflake, the Chosen One. It wasn't necessarily wrong of the Jedi but they insisted on treating this exceptional being as totally normal and refusing to even consider whether the same rules should apply given he comes from a background like no other Jedi of the era.

 

Well I already liked his character pre TCW, though I am glad the series has more people liking his character.

 

Clone Wars 2002-2005 did a good job for me and gave ROTS a far sharper edge than it would have had without it.

 

Hm, I'd say maybe. Pre-TCW there were stories that showed Anakin as having some admirable qualities, but the whole Clone Wars grinder was quickly traumatizing him. Which was partially the point of the war, to help ruin Anakin and the Jedi. I remember in the comics for a while Anakin was separated from Obi-wan and thought dead, with only Anakin believing Obi-wan was still alive. Obi-wan returned of course, but the separation didn't help. Never much cared for the Hett arc, Hett showed up Anakin a bit too much for my tastes (Anakin was about to go berserk for most of that arc, due to the Tuskan thing, Hett was always calm, Hett kept quiet about the Tuskan massacre, heck, even Krayt isn't happy about it decades later), although I guess that Anakin would be very close to the AotC Anakin, the one who slaughtered the Tuskans.

Dark Rendezvous had a reckless or rather thoughtless Anakin. He was eager to go back and see Padme and only thought Yoda had missed killing Dooku. RotS novelization went a bit overboard with dark Anakin, but as that was right before his fall, no surprise. The novelization also did a better job of showing Anakin was sorry about his various... excesses and apologizing to Obi-wan, but that's partially due to Christenson's bad acting.

While I don't like Ahsoka, seeing Anakin dealing with her and acting as a teacher was pretty good. It was partially due to TCW's at times slightly lighter nature, but TCW couldn't do anything positive with the Anakin and Padme romance either. Moments like Jedi Crash when Anakin teaches Ahsoka were nice. Even in the last TV season, when they do their rip off of the Fugitive, Anakin is actually the reasonable character, telling Ahsoka to wait patiently while he sorts things out (while Ahsoka blunders around). Ahsoka being kicked out of the Jedi Order would be a sore point for Anakin, rightfully so considering how idiotic the Council was there (I think Obi-wan both objected and Yoda didn't say much). Even back in the introductory TCW "movie" Yoda said it was meant to be a lesson in attachment, and it could have worked... under better circumstances. Instead it only drove Anakin even further from the Jedi.

Mortis was stupid though- Anakin must go to the darkside now to avoid going to the darkside later and ending up as Vader. So stupid the Father just wiped the whole thing from Anakin's memories, heh.

 

For me, a cartoon could never fix the movies, it could never undo the damage already done. This not only goes for the dreadful TCW, but even the micro-series, which I adore, which features the best Anakin Skywalker I've ever seen, and my favorite A&P scenes.

As good as some of them were, the comics could never fix the movies, either.

Nor could the novels. (though I haven't read any of the novelizations of the movies)