Man. People on here get mad when you feel bad for the villain, too.
Isn’t it weird how this works? In one fandom, you have an absolute flood of Loki fans who’re perfectly happy to unapologetically woobify the guy or just outright heel-face turn him, and in another fandom you have a fierce resistance to the idea of showing compassion for a guy who’s basically a child soldier, and whose grandfather did worse but got redeemed.
The dynamics of stories are weird, and so is the way fandom culture varies from fandom to fandom. 😀
Yes, and also, people are cranky that this post is sympathetic for Anakin/Vader’s realization of just how badly he fucked up. Like, there’s plenty of family tragedy to go around here, people. The man broke a galaxy to get the one thing he never got.
Hell YES there’s some serious horror in realizing that the guy that tortured you, that you saw in your nightmares for years, turned out to be your father. But I can also spare a little horror for the guy who made a mistake of galactic proportions to save his family only to turn around and do terrible things to that family without knowing.
Oh man, that post is hardcore. Angst for everybody. Bring it on.
Seriously, though, this is why it’s so hard for people who have really, truly fucked up to admit it–not just in stories, but especially in the real world. Facing the truth of your responsibility for something like this is unfathomably hard, and it can crack you in half. Small wonder so many people are willing to do whatever it takes to hide from it, even if it means perpetuating the damage they’re doing.
In Star Wars, I think that’s the point of the Dark Side. Even most Dark Siders aren’t like Palpatine, cackling over doing evil for the sheer joy of it. More often they’re drowning, and they can’t bring themselves to admit it. It’s why the bad guys always try to drive characters to an action they can’t take back, something terrible enough that they can’t bear to face what they’ve done. And it’s why it had to be Luke on the Death Star–not because he was necessarily the only person who could kill Vader, but because he was the only person (well, one of two) Vader was willing to confront his own history for. And maybe he needed someone who would look him in the eyes and say, “You can still be forgiven for this. I still love you.”
(I always thought it was funny that Yoda and Obi Wan never apparently missed this. They seemed to know that Luke had to confront him, but not how or why. They assumed it meant fighting and killing. How oddly un-Jedi, but I guess that’s what happens when you let cool-ass laser swords proliferate.)
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1LwZWNC