One of the biggest mistakes people make in the world of fandom is assuming we’re supposed to like prequel-era Anakin Skywalker.
Now, this isn’t to say he can’t be your favorite character, or that you can’t appreciate the nuances of his journey to the dark side. I don’t mean he can’t be a character you like—I mean, we’re not supposed to look at his arc (most notably during the prequel period) and come away thinking he’s a pleasant person or possesses any good moral judgment.
He’s just not a person anyone is supposed reasonably judge as “likable.”
The prequels, after all, tell the backstory of the villain. We’re supposed to show how a nine-year-old boy, who gave his help without any thought of reward, turned into the right-hand enforcer for a genocidal tyrant.
Needless to say, he probably became a little unpleasant along the way.
Part of the problem is that numerous characters throughout recent decades, regardless of the moral atrocities they committed, are judged within their narratives for being ultimately “good” (think Severus Snape or Tony Stark). There’s an emphasis on passing a final moral judgment—and the push from the writer(s) for that judgment to be “regardless of what sins they committed, they were one of the good guys.”
So Anakin Skywalker came along—and people didn’t know what to think.
But George Lucas wasn’t trying to craft a morally grey character, nor to justify Anakin’s actions in the eyes of the fans. He was trying to explain how a kind child turned into a brutal, violent, selfish killer.
It’s honesty baffling how anyone could think Anakin’s whiny behavior in Attack of the Clones was somehow unfounded. Let’s take a look at all the forces at play to set up Anakin’s character development by that movie.
First off, he was nineteen. Have you ever met a nineteen-year-old who doesn’t possess an abundance of emotional imbalances? That’s a turbulent time in anybody’s life—when your body and mind are changing, and you’re pushing back on authority in the beginning of a lifelong quest to figure out who you are and what you believe. Teenagerhood is hardly a calm, uneventful transition in anyone’s experience.
Second of all, Anakin’s environment has changed drastically from that of his youth. Growing up, he was able to naturally express his emotions. He experienced jealousy, anger, love, passion, disappointment, sadness, and anything else along the gamut of the human experience—but he was never shamed for any of it. He was allowed to express himself as any child would. And he had his mother and his friends to lean upon when he needed it.
But when he’s taken in by the Jedi—suddenly, the perfectly normal upbringing he had was a weakness. It crippled him; set him back on his arduous journey to become the Jedi he’d long dreamed of being. He was almost rejected for being too old, after all—too in tune with the feelings he should’ve long been able to suppress.
And there was no one around to even understand what he was going through, let alone explain to him that the way he’d lived, even if it was different from the path of the Jedi, wasn’t necessarily wrong.
Obi-Wan meant well, and there’s little argument to him being a poor mentor or a neglectful father figure. But Obi-Wan didn’t understand Anakin in the least. He was raised since infancy with the tools to tune his emotions towards selfless compassion and self-denial. (The actual emotion health of which is an entirely separate discussion in itself…) Even if he’d wanted to help Anakin, he couldn’t have. He was used to the process of setting aside his own feelings and desires in order to focus on the greater good. He didn’t know even remotely what it felt like to go from the emotional reality you and I experience every day, to a sudden and severe self-denial.
So Anakin lost the open, non-judgmental, and empathetic support of his mother; and received instead someone who, while he did care for the boy and wanted to help him, wasn’t equipped in the least to deal with any of Anakin’s issues. The best Obi-Wan could do was keep drilling into his padawan’s head how he was supposed to behave, as had probably been done to him all his life.
And let’s remember that Obi-Wan had been trained practically since birth to operate within that system. To him, the reminders and chastising weren’t necessarily grating or strict or ill-intentioned. He knew them as the words of his mentors and caregivers. He framed them in the context of good people who loved him and wanted to help him.
Whereas Anakin, who was used to an entirely different method of emotional support, only saw a suffocating environment where he’d been branded as broken from the beginning.
We also have to remember that Anakin was born a slave. His life had never been his own. And even though he’d long dreamed of becoming a Jedi and returning to save his people, the reality of recruitment was, in a way, a betrayal of everything he’d ever hoped for. Anakin had assumed Jedi were free, powerful warriors who used their abilities to do whatever they wished and help whoever they wanted—but in reality, they were still servants under a strict and repressive system.
Add in the mental and physical trauma of heading off on life-threatening missions every so often—and you have a recipe for a pretty spectacular emotional disaster.
By the time we reach AotC, Anakin hasn’t seen his mother in ten years. He’s been living between an emotionally neglectful environment that doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to deal with him; and situations that thrust him routinely into mortal peril. It’s no surprise whatsoever that he acts the way he does.
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