Lit Did Anakin fall because of his love/attachment? Or because he had to hide it...

There's this idea that Anakin fell to the dark side because he was betrayed by his love/attachment. I wonder though... if the jedi order accepted what Anakin was doing, they could have freely helped him to deal with his problem. Instead, Anakin had to sneak around in the dark, and he eventually turned to the guy who promised to solve his problem. Maybe the problem wasn't Anakin's relationship, but the way the jedi order approached relationships.

Btw, I'm about to read TTT, Thrawn Duology, and the NJO. I realize they probably touch on this, but please no spoilers if possible

 

Because most of those were published before AOTC (it came out halfway through NJO) they don't really touch on it much.

The TCW novel No Prisoners does have other, "non-mainstream" Jedi comment on how the PT Jedi are making a mistake by banning attachments though. However, that author strongly disliked the PT Jedi for other reasons.

It's a recurring question - is the attachment ban Necessary or Dangerous? Even authors have been known to change their minds on it.

 

I think because he hid it helped a bit with his fall.

 

Both.

 

Not every Force-Sensitive who loses loved ones goes to the Dark - but it is a rather common reason.

 

There's an inherent logical fault in the initial question by associating love and attachment.

 

May depend on how you define the word.

From No Prisoners:

As with all faith, some basic messages become distorted over time. Why should attachment lead to the dark side? Loving commitment is the cornerstone of civilization, of society, and unites all living creatures. How can it be wrong? I assert that it's fixation- obsession- that leads to darkness and evil. That blind focus can corrupt any area of our lives. We may do terrible things because we're obsessed with a lover, with wealth, with power... or even with a set of inflexible beliefs that have come to mean more to us than the welfare of living beings themselves. Do you take my point, Master Yoda?
~Master Djinn Altis, in a rare exchange of letters with Master Yoda, some years before the outbreak of the war.


"Could you let someone go, if you loved them? Could you let them walk away? Could you live without them? How far would you go to stop them from leaving? What would you do to save them? Ask yourself, listen, and if any of your answers make you feel afraid … attachment may be fraught with misery, for you and those around you."


"Passion. Passion and anger and love. That's what this galaxy needs, not serenity. Passion for change. Anger at this brutality. Love - buckets of it, for everyone, love between child and parent, between spouses, between brothers and sisters, between friends. We need more attachment, not less. Attachment can stop us from tearing ourselves apart."​

 

Yeah well I would like to assume we're going by how the Jedi define attachment based on its Buddhist influence. I know if the word was "sin" or some Christian concept, people would not be equivocating over its meaning like they do over attachment.

Love =/= attachment

 

"Romantic love" on the other hand, seems to be defined that way by the Jedi. Even non-romantic love, maybe, if it's for a relative.

I think the "non-attached love" for the Jedi, is a kind of "unconditional compassion for strangers" - nothing stronger than that.

 

No, that's just what they banned.

They also banned training people past the age of infants.

 

Of all darksiders that were "drawn back from the dark" - how many were done so without the help of "loved ones" I wonder?

 

Yup - at some point between KOTOR and Path Of Destruction.

In the KOTOR comics, Alek talks to Jarael about it:

"Don't—Jedi refrain from…"
"Emotional connections? Physical contact? No. Oh, there's a school in the Order that's always been pushing for that—wherever there's three people, there's one who thinks the other two shouldn't have any fun. Their voices have become louder since the Sith War. Turns out the children of Jedi are often strong with the Force. So you could say that the proponents of love have a certain…practicality…on their side of the argument. Besides…in times like these, it helps to have something to hold on to."

 

Hm, its debatable. The Jedi could have handled Anakin better while Palpatine strung him along easily, but Anakin was screwed-up. The Clone Wars only intensified those flaws due to all the trauma.

Jedi don't just ban romantic love just to be old and stodgy. Basically when people lose loved ones, they suffer emotional pain. When Jedi suffer pain, that feeds the darkside and just makes things worse, so Jedi try to avoid the problem by teaching students to not hold onto something too tightly. Most people recover from losing loved ones, as did most Jedi, but Anakin was older when he joined the Jedi, had already lived a tough life, and was really attached to his mother... and when he had prophetic dreams about her death but wasn't able to rush back to her side in time to save her, it only made things worse.

Though I think there should be a distinction made between love/attachment and obsession. I'm not entirely sure, but I think part of loving someone is respecting their opinions, at least, and by the end Anakin wasn't listening to anyone, which is why he was Force-choking Padme and basically killed her, despite loving her. I know the general explanation is that Padme lost the will to live, but I think some supplementary material mentioned she had also suffered damage that those non-human doctors hadn't picked up, being unfamiliar with the species (and Obi-wan didn't have many other options by that point, being on the run).

Jedi doctrine on attachment changes over the centuries, but sometimes after an overtly emotional or unorthodox Jedi goes dark (Ulic, Revan) the Jedi Order tends to become more entrenched, which is one reason why the KotOR era Jedi Order is so set in its ways. And the prequel era Jedi Order had become stagnant, another reason why they were destroyed.

And in the end, love redeemed Anakin too, love for his son and placing Luke's life over his own.

 

Aaron Allston's comment on the subject in the LOTF Round Robin interview in Inferno:

Random House: "The Jedi of Yoda's day believed that romantic and family relationships between Jedi could only lead to disaster. Hasn't that view been pretty well borne out by the history of Darth Vader and his children and grandchildren?"

Aaron Allston: "I think the Republic-era belief that attachment leads to disaster is on-target, but I hope we're going to show that not all love matches constitute that form of attachment. My belief is that any number of Jedi could marry and have kids without invoking tragedy. I think part of the problem is that the Skywalker family is about as important as, and about as lucky as, the house of Atreus from Greek mythology. That is to say, very important ... but not very lucky."​

 

It wasn't healthy for Anakin to supress his emotions but the Jedi had nothing to do with the way he was looking at Padmé in AotC.

Then again, the Jedi were all about loving your fellow man but thought the only way to be rid of a Sith was by killing it.

 

To the point that Bail Organa is shocked somewhat when Obi-Wan explains how irredeemable they are and how impossible it is to Take Them Alive and Put Them On Trial, in Wild Space.

Of course, their experience on the planet Zigoola begins to change Bail's view some.

 

Everyone ignores the second part of it, though. "Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden." Is love forbidden? Hardly. Love is a cornerstone of Jedi philosophy, it is inherently bound to the concept of compassion, empathy, and self-sacrifice.

Marriage is forbidden, because marriage is fundamentally about possession. Historically, a man OWNED his wife. That has only changed legally in the last fifty years or so, but there is still plenty of that remaining culturally. Even in the modern context, a marriage is an exclusive form of love; the Jedi are to be available to al. Ultimately they fail at that by tying their service exclusively to the Republic, but that's part of the point: The Jedi fall in part because they are wed, not to the Force, but to the Republic, not to the people of the galaxy, but to the politics of this one governing body.

Anakin's fall is in many ways a microcosm of the macrocosmic fall of the Jedi; he MARRIES A SENATOR, if this weren't strongly suggested enough. It's not his love for Padmé that causes his turn; it's his desire to possess her. After all, SHE was just as in love, yet her morals held firm. She died for her ideals (not of a broken heart, that line is nowhere in the movie). It's a droid who says "she's lost the will to live," but Attack of the Clones establishes that droids only have knowledge; they don't have wisdom. Watch that scene again. It's a mirror in many ways of the scenes between Luke and Vader after their duel on Bespin. Padmé is under psychic assault from her husband; he literally reaches out to her at one point, even though she's a galaxy away. And it kills her, but she wins. Her face is serene in death while Vader's agony echoes across the cosmos.


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The prequel-era Jedi interpretation of attachment-related doctrine isn't the main issue; I think. It has more to do with Anakin's pride. If he wanted to marry Padme openly he could have left the Jedi Order. Not an easy choice, but he probably would have retained the respect of many in the Order, his rank in the Republic army, and his standing with the Chancellor. But Anakin wanted it all. He wanted to be a Jedi Master, and he wanted a position on the Council, and he wanted to be the most powerful Jedi ever. And he was willing to burn it all down when he didn't get what he wanted.

TC

 

Because of his attachment, though there's honestly no one reason he fell. It was due to multiple factors within and without.

 

Everyone already made my points. Love isn't attachment, and Anakin could have resigned.

 

Secret of the Jedi actually has Obi-Wan make a good observation about this at the end, and how he'd learned to love Siri Tachi with an open heart; he cared for her and missed her, but could live without her. This of course is the direct opposite of Anakin.

 

I tend to believe it was a mix of both but also neither. The fact that he had to hide his relationship with Padme meant he couldn't openly ask the Jedi for help with the visions he was having about her. Which left him open for Palpatine to slip in and manipulate his overbearing drive to protect and save her. Of course he ended up being the reason she died but his original motives were always focused on saving her and their unborn child. After her death, and the supposed death of his children, he gave himself over completely to the dark side. All in all I think that it's a lot more complicated than just whether it was because he loved her or because he had to hide it.

 

I never considered this. This just makes me conclude that Lucas is trolling when he includes stuff like Vader's "Noo... Nooo!" in ROTJ.

And this is why I love Shatterpoint, Dark Rendezvous, the ROTS novelization, LSATSOM, Dark Empire, and the New Jedi Order. These are the pieces of EU that have this level of thought put into them. Most of the time, it's WYSIWYG. But there's depth to be had in these stories and the films.

 

You'd think since The Empire Strikes Back came out thirty-four years ago people would have learned not to take the dialogue in Star Wars at face value. A New Hope even has a bald faced liar (Han Solo) as a main character. Kevin J. Anderson can come up with all the silly technobabble he wants about the Kessel Run; he never should have taken Han literally. Han is lying to who he believes to be a naïve kid and a doddering old man with delusions of grandeur. Look at Kenobi's face; the stoic nearly busts out laughing at Solo's nonsensical sentence. To paraphrase The Princess Bride, "Parsecs? I don't think that means what you think it means."

Anyway, I'm glad I could bring something new to the conversation. I think you're going to like the website I'm currently working on.


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