Obi Wan Needs Therapy - Tumblr Posts
palpatine and anakin works as one of the best ways to explain a horrifically abusive relationship, and it does an excellent job of the dangers of grooming and how abusers operate; it's absolutely killer. but i'm gonna be honest, i love anakin and palpatine's relationship as an absolute perversion of father-son bonds that are sprinkled across star wars, but obi-wan and anakin's bond has to take the cake for me.
obi-wan and anakin are fundamentally set up to fail; they literally have to objectively have the worst relationship ever, otherwise this plot will fall apart. like obi-wan has to be a shitty mentor- and that's okay! that's what makes him an actually interesting character; obi-wan's character set up demands him to be a flat, or flatish character, and its fun watching his flaws screw him over time and time again(which is why i don't like the kenobi show-moses ingram, you deserved your own show for reva) you can be like 'oh the jedi definitely didn't deserve their genocide; anakin, this one is definitely on you' and also see that obi-wan won the worst parent of the year award successively for the past sixteen years.
their bond is so toxic and filled with so much miscommunication, borderline abuse and just misery from both parties. like, i don't know where people get the whole 'oh obi and ani were close as hell- it was anakin that withdrew because of palpatine.' yeah they had banter and jokes, but it all has the veneer of imitation gold; it scraps off and it's all plain.
obi-wan blatantly lies to anakin and withholds affection simply because he doesn't understand its value, and anakin's view of his interpersonal relationships swing from obi-wan being the saviour that kept him around after qui-gon and the man who basically condemned him to this mess.- and he treats obi-wan based on what view he currently has of him. they cling to each other because of their debts to a dead man, and had it not been for this dead man, obi-wan and anakin wouldn't have spared two glances for each other. i cannot explain to you how much that fucking rules to me.
Something I wanted to ask you: which of Anakin’s personal relationships (Obi-Wan, Palpatine, Ahsoka, Padme, Luke, Shmi, etc) is your favorite to write/post/think about? I don’t mean necessarily which ranks up to each other in-universe, but the ones that you find the most interesting and like to talk about.
probably anakin and palpatine to be honest. not only is that the relationship that ends up dominating anakin's life, it has a lot of genuinely interesting - if acutely fucked up - dynamics that i think are pretty fascinating, like what does your life look like when it is completely and totally dominated by one person? when every facet of your existence is completely reinvented to be what this one person wants? anakin very genuinely sacrifices almost everything he has for palpatine; his soul, his body, his labor, the jedi he'd wanted to be, the father he'd wanted to be. the only line he's ever capable of drawing is between palpatine and luke, and even that takes visible and enormous effort - equally as important to the fact that anakin does end up saving luke is that he hesitates for so long, and that...... is enormously depressing. because you have to look at the choice he's making; saving the life of the son he wanted in the last film more than anything, or saving the life of the man who (and i do think vader is self aware enough to realize this) took everything from him. the fact that anakin hesitates even for a second is profoundly sad. the fact that he hesitates for longer than a second is really fucking depressing, and speaks to just the level of emotional attachment he had for palpatine, in spite of - and partially because of - the many very horrible things palpatine did to him.
and no one talks about it! fandom is so busy debating Are The Jedi Evil or Does Obi-Wan Suck Completely (the answer to this being no, of course not, they fuck up at the average rate most people do, that's not being evil jesus h christ) that no one seems to actually pay much attention to how thoroughly disturbing palpatine is. which is sad for me specifically, because i fucking love a thoroughly disturbing villain, and a lot of the things that are actually villainous about palpatine - his scariest traits - are things embedded into his relationship with anakin. if star wars is a story about parenthood making you a better person, palpatine and anakin are the chilling inversion of that, where palpatine uses the same love that vader embraces from luke in ROTJ to do.... horrible, awful shit. and all of that is right there in front of everyone! and no one talks about it! what the hell. so i have to do all the work myself.