PT Did the scene of Anakin killing younglings affect your perception of him?

It was shocking but it did not change how I viewed him. Vader was always a very bad dude. They did not show him killing the younglings like the adult Jedi and Sep leaders, they just left it up to you to fill the blanks.

 

You're damn straight it did. That and especially his confession after the Tusken slaughter made me realize something shattering: He's like a school shooter.

 

It did a great job of showing how far gone he was to me, he didn't even hesitate once he found them, Anakin Skywalker the person was pretty much dead by the time he marched on the Temple.

 

I actually do see a lot of remorse in his face, but when he steels himself and activates the lightsaber, with that little boy jumping at the sound... Oh, dear.
Yeah. This was the scene that showed me exactly how far Anakin was ultimately willing to go to hold on to his attachments. He was actually willing to actively stop being Anakin and become something else in order to make things the way he wanted them to be.

Poor fool. He didn't stop to think that if he ceased to be Anakin Skywalker, he would also cease to appreciate the things that Anakin wanted.

 

It didn't really affect my perception of him, but I would much rather have seen him fighting Jedi rather than killing off children.

 

No. I was never one to view Vader as cool or badass. Dude was evil and committed multiple horrific acts of violence throughout the OT.

 

Hating the sand people enough to want to kill them was credible due to them being directly responsible for his mother's death

Having few qualms about the killing of totally innocent students at the suggestion of a man he has discovered was lying to him and is in fact his sworn enemy (as Anakin was all too happy to point out) is considerably less credible except for someone who has just completely flipped.

Anakin knows the Sith lord is a manipulator behind the whole separatist movement and the war. The one who must be revealed and defeated to restore peace in the Galaxy. When Palpatine admits to being that lord, it doesn't seem to take long for him to agree that the Jedi are traitors by virtue of the fact that the guilty party happened to have inveigled himself as chancellor. It's perversely illogical and naive.

 

I think it is as simple as Anakin not considering the Jedi to be his family therefore they are less important as Padme to him, he also feels that they don't trust him by not appointed him as a master, that they didn't let him go save his mother, that they told him to spy on a close friend to him and that's not even talking about TCW with the whole thing about Obi-wan faking his death and Ahsoka being expelled and leaving the Jedi order. I think his thought process is that killing the Jedi including the younger one is a necessity in his quest to save Padme from death, the only person he has left. So judging by all that, his decision to join the Sith, leading the attack on the Jedi temple and killing the younglings sounds credible enough for me.

 

Agreed. For him to be evil he has to do evil things and that is for sure among them.
I'm sure Luke was training children as well which means Kylo and the other Knights of Ren slaughtered them as well.

 

Anakin thinks the Jedi are traitors because he believes they simply want to seize power for their own benefit, not for the greater good of the galaxy. He knows Palpatine is doing it at least partially for the same reasons, but to his view at least Palpatine is self-aware and honest enough to admit to it, while also genuinely being the strong, wise leader the galaxy needs. Thus, from his point of view, the Jedi are the ones who are lying, evil traitors, while Palpatine is simply a realist who ultimately has the galaxy's best interests at heart. The key to understanding Anakin's turn is understanding that he has essentially become a moral relativist.

He kills the Younglings because it is necessary. Jedi teachings are strong. Leaving even one indoctrinated Jedi child alive runs the risk of a Jedi-led uprising in the future. Killing the Younglings is without a doubt a supremely evil thing to do, but it is also a wholly logical one. Once Anakin starts operating from a place of subjective, contingent morality posing as cold logic, there is no longer any compelling reason for him to object to carrying out such an act.

 

Essentially, Anakin is one of those people who justifies his own reprehensible thoughts, beliefs and/or actions by increasingly convincing himself that lots of people share them - but in a way that makes them worse than he is, the whole "at least I/Palpatine am honest about it!" thing, or "at least my reason is better!"

In this way he gets to reassure himself that he's completely right in selfishly desiring personal power over the galaxy for his own ends and everyone else totally wants that too, while simultaneously demonizing all the people who, despite supposedly agreeing with him in his delusional thinking, don't agree with him completely or correctly and therefore are the enemy and should die horrible deaths. He's an ugly person screaming "you're no better than me!" to feel less ugly until he - as Vader - finally breaks down and can't justify that worldview to himself anymore. Which means finally taking a good honest look at himself and what he's done, without the things he desperately told himself to have something to hide behind. He doesn't live long after that.

His character definitely taps into a very specific criminal archetype. Not even just a school shooter; there have certainly been a lot of mass killings perpetrated IRL by teenage/twenty-something men (not always that age, but some high profile examples in recent years have been) either seeking fame (power) or lashing out in rage because they feel the world owes them something they didn't get - and that that is everyone else's fault, because everyone else is out to get them personally somehow, everyone's jealous of them, etc. All sounds pretty familiar.

On the one hand I think this was a good creative choice for reasons I'll touch on below, but on the other hand it does create a kind of dissonance between the "safe"/unreal scary cartoon villain Vader who is fun to watch and the ugliness we see in Anakin that's a little bit too real for comfort once you set aside the space magic. (I mean, a guy obsessed with power, possession and control chokes out his wife because he suspects she might leave him after he's done something terrible. Yikes.)

This is probably why Lucas did it. I've seen a quote from him a few times to the effect of "people told me someone should kill Anakin's friend and then he gets really angry and kills them and that's how he falls" but that this specifically wasn't something he wanted to do; instead he went for something getting into Anakin's own flaws and how a person can go terribly, terribly wrong. And I look at that example of what people wanted out of this backstory and I think - thanks to action movies in particular, the audience probably wouldn't have batted an eye at that. We are raised on a steady diet of revenge stories; no matter how the story presented him in that scenario, he'd just be another action protagonist doing cool and justified revenge violence on Bad People. Somewhere in the backs of our culturally-trained minds most of us would probably be thinking "yeah he's the villain I guess but he's not that bad." Or we'd even be enjoying it, because whoever he was killing for killing his friend totally "deserved it."

Lucas seems to have wanted to break through that. He needed Vader to indeed be "that bad" for the fall and redemption to have real weight. And it may have caused some dissonance with cartoon villain Vader but I can't deny that it was effective.

Or at least as effective as it could have been without a more polished script. Even so, though, there are still plenty of people who want/ed Anakin to be that same cool and justified violent revenge hero they've been trained to idolize and will take any path of argument to try and reach that point - including arguing that some pretty horrifying things he did were actually okay and actually everyone's fault but his own.

Ultimately I find Anakin's long slide into evil (whether in the (admittedly flawed) films or TCW or whatever else) to be engaging, enjoyable fiction, but I definitely can't say I like him, even just as a character. And I still kinda have to not think about prequel era Anakin if I want to enjoy Vader in the same fun scary cartoon villain tone that OT-style Vader appearances tend to go for.

So I guess that's a lot of tl;dr about my own perception of Anakin.

 

I've always gotten the impression Anakin was never supposed to be likable, you could be empathetic to him sure, but I don't think George intended Anakin to be someone you would side with in an argument.

 

True, I just think that what with Lucas always going on about how the PT was the story of a "great man who became evil because of wrong choices", we were SUPPOSED to like him and feel bad that his life spiraled out of control.

Instead, what we got was the story of what amounted to a football jock who likes being all super cool and special with superpowers. Seriously, put Anakin in a football uniform and you wouldn't even see the difference.

 

Anakin seems a little emo to really be given the title of a football jock though.

 

He doesn't really seem like a jock at all. He's incredibly awkward and neurotic, for one thing, and filled with self-doubt.

 

I think "jock" is a terrible descriptor in general, but I've never seen Anakin as a jock.

Considering his background, he'd be messed up long before he really got the chance to even be a jock. He'd be the teenage kid who might be the best athlete in school, but isn't even on a team because he has so many problems (both visible and unseen).

He's a little like TV Tropes' Smug Super (I get the sense that this is how DARTHLINK meant it), but those comic book examples are usually one dimensional. Anakin has more to him.

 

I think in some ways Anakin fulfilled the requirements of being considered a great man on the surface, he was a war hero, a powerful Jedi, and had the respect of the public.

 

Vader helped the Emperor hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights.

That included the kids. Always. Nothing changed.

 

Interestingly the kids that Vader finds in the council chamber are all holding (training) lightsabers, infact the one that speaks ('there's too many of them, what are we going to do?') might conceivably be asking for battle strategy advice to use against the Clone-troopers. These aren't just ordinary children, these are miniature Jedi, instructed in the orders dogmatic ways since birth, willing to go into battle if necessary.(As the one played by Jett Lucas does.) Hence they have to be dealt with to make way for Palpatine's new Sith Empire.

 

I think the way they handled the scene with Anakin about to kill the younglings was done perfectly. We weren't spoonfed the scene, it was implied and left to our imaginations for the actual acts of killing. And that's the best way-cos our minds will naturally think of the worst and most heartbreaking scenario as to how it would've played out. It's very personal in that way. That's also why certain horror movies that don't show everything onscreen and leave much to the imagination tend to be the classics, or most chilling ones-because we will automatically conjure up the worst idea our own minds can think of to fill in the gaps of that scenario.

The only thing I didn't like as much about Order 66, is that we didn't see Anakin actually kill any Jedi at all-like straight up killed, onscreen. I wonder if that was intentional? The only thing I remember regarding that was the deleted scene of him killing Shaak Ti (which I wish would've been left in the film actually).

 

When he comes in and they're hiding behind the chairs because they're scared:

 

I suspect it was intentional. There are no scenes of Darth Vader being a badass in Episode III. In the film, he's portrayed almost entirely as a child-killer and a slaughterer of defenseless adversaries. At no point is Darth Vader made to come across as "cool" or as the fulfillment of an adolescent power fantasy.

 

Perfect comparison. It was a disgusting act. In his desire to save Padme, he became someone Padme hated and feared.

 

A lot of people say that Vader should have let the clones kill the younglings, but if anything, I think *that* would have made him cowardly. I don't really think we needed a montage of Vader killing adult Jedi, either, as we already know that he can. I like it the way it is. As has already been said, being an accomplice to the murder of millions, while watching from thousands of miles away in space is worse than the direct killing of a handful of children.

 

Killing the Separatists was pretty cool. I'd wanted Gunray to die just 10 minutes into TPM, and who better to off him?