PT Plot Holes and Inconsistencies in the Prequel Trilogy

I don't entirely disagree, in that Anakin obviously took his attachment to his loved ones to an extreme. However, my issue is the PT Jedi defining normal familial attachments themselves as somehow "bad" and therefore to be avoided, when the general world view is that a close-knit family is considered a good thing.

Anakin had the Force, otherwise he was just a normal person with a normal psychological makeup, at least as a kid--his mental instability later could be attributed to factors too numerous to discuss here.

But in TPM--of course he was afraid to be away from his mother. He was a 10-year-old kid and she was the only family he had. And if he was thinking more of how it affected him--again, he was a 10-year-old kid. There aren't too many kids who see the universe outside of how they are personally affected. And on his mother and Padme dying--when most of us grieve a loved one, the grief is for us, not the person who passed. We are grieving because we don't want to exist in a world where they don't. Anakin was perfectly normal in that regard. Where he went to an extreme, and stumbled into selfishness, was being willing to sell himself to the Sith to keep Padme alive. But the general desire to save both her and Padme was not selfish or greedy in and of itself.

I think the Jedi would have been better off acknowledging the normal psychological makeup of sentient beings and trying to work with it rather than fighting it via isolation. If that had been their policy all along, they would have had a far better understanding of how Anakin was wired.

 

I was on my fandom hiatus in 2005; I was thinking darth-sinister was around before then.

Valairy_Scot: Yes, that is exactly my stance--not that the Jedi should have "made an exception" and "allowed Anakin to have attachments" (that's the stance I've been accused of taking in the past, albeit not by you). Rather that "making an exception" shouldn't have been an issue in the first place because the "rule" itself shouldn't have existed, Anakin or no Anakin. And there was no "allowing" or "not allowing" Anakin to have attachments because no organization can or should make rules regarding how a member can feel, only how he can behave. He had the attachments; his psychological makeup can't change because the Order had a rule.

And as I mentioned, I think that if any of the elder members of the Order had had experience handling normal attachments, they might have had a better idea of how to teach Anakin to do so. And that to me is crucial; they could not teach what they didn't know or understand. But the other Order members had been immersed solely in Jedi philosophy and removed from normal sentient experiences from infancy so they had no clue.

So to me it's not that the Order's policies worked for everyone but Anakin, but that Anakin became the prime example of why the policies didn't work, of how removed the Jedi had become from the normal citizens they were meant to serve.

And of course they didn't deserve what they got, however, 10-year-old Anakin was not the only one who didn't want change. I certainly would have preferred a universe in which they were persuaded in a much less brutal way to adapt.

 

Adding: and maybe the policy itself and the "one teaching method fits all" approach that they used with Anakin, are two different issues. But I do think the policy itself left them with a lack of experience dealing with someone like Anakin who had a [semi] normal background, and that lack of knowledge hindered their ability to teach or help him.

 

ROTS was the main reason for my hiatus, and I still turn it off or leave the room after the first 45 minutes of it. It is a well-done film, but there are certain logic flaws (hey, someone has to put the thread back on topic) that were way too much for me at the time.

But I got over it and I'm back enjoying discussing the rest of the franchise with you fine people.

 

That's another topic altogether, and I could go either way on that one. My main question would be, if he weren't trained, would the Sith have found him anyway? If the answer is "yes," I would say that it's better that he was trained, because in the end, it was his Jedi training--along with his love for both Luke and Padme--that helped him find his way back to the light.

And that is a main part of the issue I have with the PT Jedi: I am accustomed to having to accommodate all areas of exceptions because it is so important to maximize learning for everyone, whereas the Jedi only made room for one "norm", and they got one exception and had no idea what to do with him.

I think Anakin's having been a slave contributed as much if not more to his mental instability, and his extreme fear of loss, as any other factor in his life. So no, his situation isn't necessarily applicable to any and all boys of his age who might have been separated from their mothers.

I do wonder how much the Order took into account the fact that Anakin had been a slave, and the effect that would have on him emotionally, however. Or if they were prepared to take that into account at all, if they knew how to address that.

 

Yeah, usually. The only POV that drives me bats is the "my opinion is better than your opinion" POV or its cousin, "there must be something wrong with you if you see the movie that way." Thankfully that isn't all that prevalent here though.

And I get why people like ROTS as much as they do; as I said, it is a well done film. I thought a couple of aspects of Anakin's turn were way overdone, and I initially thought those aspects were thrown in the film for the sole purpose of making the "Anakin was too whiny and not Vader enough" crowd happy. A few posters on this message board have shown me that Lucas probably had other reasons for putting those aspects into the story, reasons that fit in with the overall arc. Doesn't make the last half of the film any easier to watch, but I am much less irritated with Lucas than I was in 2005.

 

I also assumed it had something to do with the medical droid being told not to reveal the baby's gender; my guess was that the droid did not perform the GFFA equivalent of an ultrasound. The droid being literal-minded, and not being sentient and thinking, "Hey, she might want to know there is more than one baby," would make sense as well.

 

So why couldn't they simply teach the Jedi younglings in advance how to handle such a situation, instead of avoiding such situations altogether? The avoidance reeks of fear, which as I said, is ironic with their constant preaching against fear.

On the teaching spelling example, a few points: one, not all students are capable of learning how to spell by being told to sound out the word or look it up in the dictionary. I would say that most students of a certain age are able to do so, but we educators are still responsible for teaching spelling to the students who are not capable of learning through that method. We cannot simply write them off as incapable or unwilling to learn to spell--especially if a student has asked how to spell a word, which means he or she obviously wants to learn to spell the word.

As I said earlier, whether or not the Jedi should have trained Anakin is another debatable topic, but they did choose to train him, therefore, they were responsible for presenting the material in a way that he could understand. The Jedi Order attitude seemed the equivalent of a teacher who has always taught students from upper middle class families, who looks at the learning-disabled student who grew up in poverty and says, "I can't teach him. He won't understand the material if I present it to him the way I present it to my other students, and I don't want to try to find an alternate way to present the material."

Two, on motivation, before the "Anakin didn't want to" argument gets brought up again: motivation is a part of teaching. When I taught foreign language, I always introduced the course with a lesson on how foreign languages could be used in the "real world"--because when students understand why they are being asked to learn a concept, they are more motivated to learn it. I could have skipped that lesson and simply said "You're going to learn this because I said you are going to learn it and I'm the one who controls your grades," but what would be the point in that, unless I had some complex in which I needed to flex my authoritative muscles?

Now the need to learn emotional control is obvious; Anakin knew he needed to learn it, and said as much. The need to cut off/avoid all familial attachments in order to learn emotional control? I can't blame him for not getting why he needed to do that, because I don't get it either. If attachments lead directly to a lack of emotional control, 95 percent of the world would be completely out of control emotionally, and that isn't the case. I think the police officers and soldiers examples were brought up before--they arguably have a greater need for emotional control than the rest of us, but no one has told police officers and soldiers that they must cut off all contact with their families. I work with upwards of 200 children in any given day, I would certainly say that my profession requires emotional control, but I've never been told that I have to give up my husband and kids, or stop talking to my parents, in order to keep my job. As far as I know, Catholic priests are the only professionals who are told they can't marry, and as the PP mentioned, the priesthood is not exactly an order the Jedi should emulate.

I will add that Palpatine undermined the Jedi and Anakin himself in his motivation to learn emotional control, by convincing him that anger was a good thing. And that is where I laid the blame at Anakin's feet earlier--he trusted the wrong people.

Three, what Yoda did in ROTS was not teaching, it was telling Anakin what to do with no instruction whatsoever on how to do it. My split second reaction the first time I heard Yoda utter the words "Train yourself to let go of all you fear to lose" was, "And how the hell are those of us who are under the age of 9

 

I don't think Anakin had a "special personality trait" that made him more prone to "evil," however, I do think he was insane by the midpoint of ROTS, with several factors having contributed to driving him that way. The primary factor was Palpatine being so very good at manipulating Anakin's mind, but other factors include his childhood in slavery, his being taken from his mother at the age of 10 and leaving her in slavery, her death in such a brutal manner (and his having seen her death in visions and not acting on the visions), and the war.

So no, physiologically Anakin was no different from any of the other humans you mentioned, and what happened to him could happen to any of us under the same circumstances. But Obi-Wan, Yoda and Padme were right--by Mustafar, he was no longer the Anakin they knew.

That might be true, but I do wonder how and why Anakin came to trust Palpatine so much more than the Jedi.

This is true, and there are examples in the movies and more in the novelizations in which the Council did not listen to Obi-Wan. In the ROTS novelization, he tried to warn the Council that assigning Anakin to spy on Palpatine would go over like a ton of duracrete. If only the Council had listened.

Without having read much pre-TPM EU, I understand that the Jedi might have been traumatized at some point, leading them to enact such a policy--and I realize that they were doing what they thought was best. But the policy itself is still extreme overkill and in the end, counterproductive. I'm reading the Plagueis novel now and yes, the Sith evolved, whereas the Jedi stayed stagnant and dogmatic for so long that it became all too easy for the Sith to figure out their weak points and exploit them.

My point in posting that Yoda quote earlier was that the mindset of some posters appears to be that the Jedi would have lived happily ever after if Anakin had just been a good boy and played along, and to me it was nowhere near that simple. (And if it were, I would find Star Wars extremely boring.) As the Plagueis novel corroborates, the Sith were exploiting the Jedi long before Palpatine had heard of Anakin. Palpatine was already making his moves, and would have enacted his "Grand Plan"

 

There is truth to that, but this is also another case in which I don't think it was quite that simple.

Every day children trust their parents or parent-figures even when they are not constantly told what they want to hear. Even when they have other people in their lives who are willing/eager to tell them what they want to hear.

If human psychology worked such that telling a person what he/she wants to hear, automatically earns his or her trust, then all spoiled/indulged children would have great relationships with their parents. Slack teachers would be the most popular teachers in the school, as opposed to (generally) being the least respected. And that isn't the case.

There has been debate on these boards as to whether Anakin would have so easily turned to Palpatine if Qui-Gon had lived, and I don't have a hard-and-fast opinion on the subject but the question is worth asking. Anakin trusted Qui-Gon. And Qui-Gon didn't tell Anakin exactly what Anakin wanted to hear even in the short time that they knew each other.