Soareblod - Untitled

They’re talking about Palpatine

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Padme Design

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female Anakin

uhh watercolor :) i do traditional sometimes too i think its more fun tbh

(star wars republic #57)

the jabiim arc from legends is an underrated goldmine of fucked up content, and specifically the fucked up content i really love to see - Padawans At War, The Chancellor Is Being A Freak In Public, Anakin Skywalker Has Enough Issues To Instantly Kill A Bull Elephant, all of the things that i consider important star wars content. for context, obi-wan and anakin are called in to support other jedi generals and a republic loyalist faction of jabiimi on jabiim, where they’re fighting against separatist-loyal jabiim soldiers, decrying the republic’s imperialism and doing normal things like chanting for jedi blood in the rain. there’s no hope of enforcements and over the course of the arc, every single jedi master (including obi-wan, who fake dies, as obi-wan does every single time he dies) on the planet dies, leaving these kids - the “padawan pack”, a group of orphaned padawans - the only military officials in charge of the campaign, and in this scene, anakin suggests that they all make a final stand in order to delay separatist forces long enough to evacuate the rest of the republic’s forces and officially retreat. Getting The Fuck Out Of Dodge has been an ongoing desire and problem for our band of heroes. but this suggestion is a death sentence for them all, but it buys everyone else a little bit of time to get away.

right after this bit, though, there’s this, which fulfills the quota for The Chancellor Is Being A Freak In Public:

“persistence”, or the fact that palpatine can snap his fingers and the separatists are like cool, let that one singular communication through. that’s just our man on the inside, no biggie.

what’s fun about this is that anakin doesn’t want to leave his fellow padawans, but palpatine leverages his personal relationship with anakin to make it happen; he doesn’t say I AM THE SENATE, he says i’ve put my faith in you time and time again, and then mentions the republic. palpatine does a really great job of making anakin do things he doesn’t like by presenting a worse reality - it’s his whole gambit in ROTS - but in this instance, the worse reality is failing palpatine. anakin’s made it very clear that if he absolutely feels it’s necessary, he’ll disobey orders, so what palpatine does here is really clever, in issuing a command in the one way that anakin can’t resist - staking their relationship, something anakin covets, on it.

when anakin leaves to go guide the evacuation, this is what happens:

because anakin most definitely did not go on to live a good life. in fact he lived the actual opposite of that. he fucked it up big time, dude. this line is like a sucker punch.

but, you know, all of these padawans die. one of these padawans even falls to the dark side in the fight where she’s watching all of her peers die horribly and violently, and then subsequently dies. every single jedi on jabiim died a brutal, horrific death, and at the evacuation, all of the orders fall on anakin because somehow, a nineteen year old is the highest ranking military officer left on the planet, which is really just, like, holy shit. how is that even a thing. but the chancellor promised an evacuation for the republic troops and the (now hunted) jabiimi republic loyalists, and then there’s too few ships to fit everyone on there, and the decision of who to save - the troops or the loyalists - falls on, again, the new highest ranking military officer on the planet, a guy who can’t buy a beer in the USA because he’s too young. anakin has literal seconds to choose what hundreds, if not thousands, of people he’s going to damn to death today, and he chooses to save the republic’s troops, and the loyalists open fire but - and it’s his baby boy time to shine - anakin strangles their leader with the force, which shocks them all so badly the republic forces have enough time to escape.

bonus points, anakin stumbles backwards and apologizes for strangling the guy, because it’s the first time he’s ever used the force to strangle anyone. so those are the circumstances baby darth vader learned his signature move. he even says so, later, while doing something fucked up:

because, well, the really great thing that happened was, after losing literally fucking Everyone, anakin was immediately (and i mean, like, he just walked off the ship from jabiim, immediately) stationed to a healer’s ward to go do healing. this will not be the last time anakin freaks out so badly at the concept of another person dying that he tortures them by trying to keep their hearts beating longer with the force. i rate the jabiim arc 10/10 at setting anakin up with more problems, a thing we all knew he needed.

what i really like, though, is how personally responsible anakin feels for all of this; he has to fix it, because he’s the one who broke it, even though he kind of isn’t, not here. i love that palpatine ostensibly created anakin his very own trolley problem, a thing that’s meant to be a theoretical, not a lived psychological experience. i like that a guy fresh from the horrific death of his mother, who makes a solemn pledge to stop his loved ones from dying, immediately tries to test it out with horrific results on his fellow jedi, because the alternative - being responsible for more death, feeling more grief, losing more people - is so untenable to him, and i like that ROTS isn’t just some one-off thing, it’s the culmination of years of this one guy getting the same wound ripped open, with no space or ability for any kind of closure for anything. it’s just damage all the way down. i like that anakin’s character begins as this really generous, kindhearted kid, feels-deeply kid, but it’s that same empathy, that same compassion, that makes it impossible for him to separate himself from this kind of massive, constant loss, that he can’t compartmentalize the horrors of war because he is just stuck living it. i mean, that’s fucked. that’s really fucked.

anakins a gamerrrr

I really do like looking at Anakin and Obi Wan because they’re so similar but also so vastly different from each other and I know I’m not the first person to point this out, but I do think the fandom has a habit of exploring a dynamic that’s really just divorced from canon. and I do think canon should go out the window more often than not, but also, I think with their particular dynamic, it’s so embedded into the storyline that you lose narrative value when you ignore that. 

I think one of the things that really ties them together is just how selfish they are but they way they are selfish is different from each other and that selfishness is also born out of different circumstances. 

In Anakin’s case, he’s selfish because he finally gets something/someone in a world where nothing belonged to him and nothing about his life was ever certain. He doesn’t know how to let go, nor does he want to let go, so when he has someone or something that he cherishes and loves, he holds them close to his chest and refuses to give them up. It’s why his love turns into possessive attachment and why he’s willing to throw other lives away (even if he doesn’t really register it) if that means the people he cares about live. The whole driving point of RoTS is that Anakin is selfish! He does selfish things, and I think, to an extent, he’s self aware enough to know he’s being selfish but that also doesn’t stop him which is why his fall makes so much sense. It’s in the text.

But on the other hand, Obi Wan’s selfishness is shown but not really explored. Obi Wan is selfish in the way that he’s willfully ignorant. He doesn’t want more but he doesn’t want things to change either. It’s why it’s easy for him to turn a blind eye to Anakin’s spiral, the corruption in the Republic, etc. etc. And he’s also selfish in the way that he views himself, because he is arrogant in a lot of ways, it’s the same way that the Jedi continue to call themselves peacekeepers when the clones are not afforded that title. He does mental gymnastics when looking at his actions in order to avoid confronting the fact that he’s actually breaking the moral framework he holds himself to, and it allows him to skirt around acknowledging the actual issue at hand (the clones’ enslavement, the fact that he benefits from his position in the Republic, etc.). 

And then when you boil it down to the basics, really, Anakin wants to change the galaxy whereas Obi Wan wants things to remain the same. And Anakin isn’t willing to let people go but Obi Wan is (unless said person is Anakin). So then you get this clash between them that Obi Wan refuses to acknowledge while Anakin doesn’t know how to bridge the gap. And I think they both know it’s there but they can’t communicate with each other about it, so it festers until it reaches the breaking point because even if they’re family and even if they love each other as brothers do, they can’t ever address the main issue of their relationship. 

the trope where arthur makes a move on merlin, and merlin being the oblivious idiot he is, thinks arthur is under a love spell and literally SLAPS him and runs away to gaius is pure gold. whoever thought of this deserves a gold medal

arthur: *kisses his cheek*

merlin: 🧍🏻

merlin:

arthur watching him run away:

Small painting for the Avatar AU, I will draw the other characters at one point I swear

yayyyy ok i made a ref sheet for my f1 au ahsoka. someone on twitter said this was the weirdest crossover they’ve seen and you know what Yes but also Im the drawer so if i want my favourite character to drive expensive and extremely breakable cars around in a circle then that’s what I will draw. Also we are pretending mclaren cars are actually good for the sake of the lore