The Chosen One

Not to mention that it looks like Shmi probably has Watto by a good sixty or seventy pounds. No funny tricks there or he'd probably be suffering from permanently broken wings.

 

Point.

 

Yep.

Hmm...
Watto's species has a flotation bladder filled with lighter-than-air gases. I wonder what'd happen if you poked a hole in him? Would he go flying around the room like a balloon?

 

Great, now I'm picturing the scene where Maul kills him in Visionaries with Benny Hill music.

Edit: But yeah, to try to veer back on topic, Anakin was the Chosen One and was created by the Force. We just don't know what moved the Force to action.

 

There are few conditions that make it harder to develop a relationship than low-caste chattel slavery, where you spend almost all your time in mind-numbing work, you can be sold away at the drop of a hat, and -- given that you're a cheap slave affordable by the merely well-off rather than the actual rich -- you may in fact be the only person of your rank in the household, as was the case with Shmi and Anakin apparently being Watto's only slaves.

If their servitude under Watto was typical, then it's quite likely Shmi spent most of her life being a single domestic slave for various alien masters and never even having the opportunity to get to know any Human males her own age long enough to develop a relationship. It certainly fits her rather introverted and reticent personality.

 

It would, but the fact that Shmi had her own hovel and that Watto apparently goes there so irregularly that Anakin was able to hide a podracer makes me wonder if their servitude under Watto was atypical.

 

Shmi actually says in the novelization that Watto is a kinder and more lenient master than other ones she's had, hence being able to have her own room and go about her business without regular beatings.

However, if previous masters were crueler and meaner than Watto, I don't think that means that she actually would have had *more* of a chance to develop a romantic relationship under them than she did with Watto.

 

Oh, if she ever did it would definitely be under Watto's ownership as she did with Cliegg. Do we know how long she was owned by Watto?

 

A very rough guess would be about five years.

Anakin and Shmi arrived on Tattooine as slaves of Gardulla when Anakin was three or so. Give him a year to even be able to remember he was owned by Gardulla, then they get lost to Watto. Anakin was nine in TPM, so five years sounds about right to me.

 

Dark Lord's apparent interpretation aside, the Opera Scene may be seen to imply that he believes Anakin to be a Sith creation. As far as not knowing how to do it, the specific passage refers to not being able to create one as powerful as Anakin. He knows the main idea behind it; that much is clear from ROTS. It has been theorized that he may have experimented with some form of the technique but that he was unable to use it well enough to create a Chosen One.

 

Well, that would be long after Anakin's birth, then, so Anakin being a "virgin birth" in the most literal sense would still be quite possible.

Although if she's not being courted by another slave but by someone far above her station, then the relationship will be illicit, dangerous and unlikely to last -- owners don't tend to take lightly to outsiders messing with their property. Cliegg, remember, made his first priority buying Shmi's freedom once he fell in love with her.

 

According to The Rise and Fall of Darth Vader, he used to beat Anakin quite frequently, but I'm not sure if he had the same jealousy and hatred toward Shmi.

 

It's not a correct term with relation to Anakin as a virgin birth because it refers to asexual reproduction. The use of the term "partheno", although greek for virgin when translated directly into english, does not imply virginity in english when combined with "genesis". It is used to refer to asexual reproduction and would translate as such with no implication of virginity.

We DO NOT know for certain that Anakin was at least created by the force. All we know for certain is that Shmi didn't know what happened, Anakin MIGHT be conceived by midichlorians, and that Plagueis could manipulate the midis to create life.

The only theory ever mentioned IN THE MOVIES of how Anakin may have been conceived by midis is stated during the opera scene.

 

In the Council chamber, Qui-Gon mentioned that he believes Anakin was conceived by the midi-chlorians, as that was the only way that a vergence in the Force could appear.

 

We do in that "created by the Force" covers both possibilities.

 

A vergence in the Force!

 

Created by....? Conception from the midi-chlorians?

 

Right. Jinn says it's possible he was conceived by midichlorians. He never says the force did it or offers a suggestion to how it happened. As I posted, the only explanation to HOW the midis conceived Anakin was given in the opera scene.

Btw, he never says that that is the only way a vergence can appear.

Not to mention vergence isn't even an applicable word, so we don't know what Jinn meant.

We don't even know that because we don't know for a fact that the force was even involved in any way at all. The midis could have started the process on their own (they are living organisms afterall), it could have been asexual, or Shmi could've been mind wiped by a darksider - we don't know. We don't know for sure that midis were involved, only that it's possible.

If the force was involved at all the only suggestion in the movies as to how is made during the opera scene.

 

The term refers to the fact that the Force seems to converge on one object or individual. That individual happened to be the Chosen One, Anakin Skywalker.

 

Sigh. Look, "parthenogenesis" is only the proper term *because* colloquially scientists referred to such things in nature as "virgin births", in reference to Christianity. It became the proper term because everyone knows you make a term proper by translating it into Greek.

The point is that the colloquial term that people understand for parthenogenesis is "virgin birth". Any other term -- like "miraculous birth" -- is harder to understand; after all, a "miraculous birth" or "miraculous conception" could mean anything, like a preemie who miraculously survives, or a woman who has sex and gets pregnant despite being previously infertile, etc.

People *get* that I can say that a conception without sexual intercourse is a "virgin birth" and know what that means without necessarily assuming that the woman is literally a virgin. This is how everyone uses the term. It's not a big deal. Nitpicking about it is pointless.

 

No, it's not pointless, since the "virgin" bit is quite important in religions were the virgin birth is a portion of dogma. Hence the Catholics even emphasis the perpetual virginity of Mary.

Sorry, just because people misuse a term is no reason to continue to do so.

 

Are you people for serious, it's been two days and you all are STILL talking about religion instead of Star Wars! I'm thinking this thread is dead.

 

Vergence isn't able to be used in that way. Convergence could but not vergence because it also applies to divergence.

vergence means:
Vergence, the simultaneous movement of both eyes in opposite directions, needed for binocular vision
Vergence (optics), the reciprocal of the distance between the point of focus and a reference plane
Vergence (geology), a property of deformed rock

sigh right back. The term means asexual reproduction with no implication to virginity. When discussing a birth like this in english the term used is asexual reproduction and not virgin birth unless it refers to Jesus. Asexual reproduction is the colloquial term in english.

People do not get virgin birth = asexual reproduction. People get virgin birth = Jesus and birth without a father in nature = asexual reproduction. Something is only a virgin birth if the mother is a virgin prior to giving birth.

 

Those are meanings the term has in real life. The term *also* has an additional meaning in Star Wars, referring to what Qui-Gon calls a "vergence in the Force". This is G-canon.

Um. No. "Asexual reproduction" is, first of all, not a colloquial term, and second of all, it is much, much broader than the idea of "virgin birth".

Virgin birth/parthenogenesis occurs where a species would *normally* need to mate in order to reproduce but suddenly, due to unusual circumstances, a female produces offspring without ever mating with a male.

"Asexual reproduction" refers to *any* form of reproduction that doesn't involve sex. Bacteria dividing, plants being grown from cuttings, ferns releasing spores, yeast budding, starfish fragmenting and regenerating into two starfish -- ALL OF THESE are forms of asexual reproduction.

By comparison parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, is a *very specific* form of asexual reproduction requiring an unfertilized female gamete to develop into an embryo on its own. It is not at all synonymous with the general term "asexual reproduction".

Please, for goodness' sake, don't lecture me about bio terminology.

Um, no. If this were the case then we wouldn't have made "parthenogenesis" the correct and proper scientific term, because, again, all that happened was that people took the term "virgin birth" that scientists were already in the habit of using and translated it into Greek.

Do you really think that "I haven't had sex since my husband died in a car crash 10 years ago! But now I'm pregnant! It's a virgin birth!" is contradictory to most people, even if -- in this situation -- the mother is not technically a virgin and the "birth" hasn't technically happened yet?

Well, whether it is or not, it's not contradictory to biologists, because "virgin birth" has been the term for this hypothetical occurrence for centuries. At the very least you can express a *personal* dislike of what appears to be a less-than-fully accurate term, but you have n

 

It isn't an obvious and deliberate parallel. Star Wars was created to have many interpretations. Religion isn't inherent.