Beholding the Face of the Father
Aug. 14th, 2018 01:23 pm~



He could feel it now, in the Force, could recognize the creature before him, recognize the cold, freezing dread that lived in the furnace of his heart, the Obsidian Dragon with eyes of dead starlight, walled away by flame, and held at bay by sheer force of will. The Obsidian Dragon made of fear and failure and weakness and death.
“I will not fall!” He ground out the vow from behind clenched teeth, pressing forward with the Force as hard as he was able. Darth Vader trembled in anger at the onslaught. “I am Anakin Skywalker, and I will never fall!”
Suddenly, intensely, power rushed off Anakin in waves, and Darth Vader bent under the assault, crumpling with wheezing breaths. The painful breaths of a pitiful creature.
Utterly spent from the release of energy, Anakin sagged to his knees, arms falling weakly to his sides.
“I am Anakin Skywalker,” he rasped, “and I am not afraid.”
— from The Chosen Path AU series by steelneena ( @muldertorture ) (originally posted on tumblr)
Recently, I was asked to write about ‘Anakin as a tragic hero’, and rather than attempting to tackle such a broad topic from scratch, I decided to compile a masterpost of excerpts from (and links to) my previous posts on the subject.
In my personal view, ‘Star Wars’ (as in, the Skywalker saga) is, at its heart, Anakin’s story, and as such, his tragic fall and ultimate redemption forms one of the main, underlying themes of most of my SW analysis in general. And so, the selections below include everything from in-depth character analysis, to overviews of Anakin’s role in the saga as a whole, to explorations of themes of slavery vs. freedom, death vs. immortality, personal attachments, fear of loss, and perhaps most importantly, unconditional love.
( Read more... )“The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.”