So admittedly I’ve kept out of the wider star wars discourse ever since everyone was wrong about The Last Jedi. (Instead I got on the Knives Out hype train early which was an objectively better choice.) But this feels like a particularly poor fit for the pattern because Anakin was redeemable and sympathetic all the way back to Return of the Jedi. Anakin’s story was already about a young man who was denied a healthy coping envuronment for his trauma, was promised unreasonable powers and privileges, then when denied them embraced hatred and fascism and destroyed almost everything he used to care about, but still was ultimately able to pull back from that edge and, at the last crucial moment, do the right thing because of the love of his family. Obviously it’s not a complete nonstarter because of how powerful and aesthetically dominant Vader is as a character, but ironically I think the story already invites you to see Anakin as a protofascist and to feel regret and pity for the path he takes. It’s easier to look at something like Harry Potter and invent “this bad guy was a powerful Nazi and that’s awesome!” almost out of whole cloth than to try and get there from “this bad guy is a sad, whiny, but poweful Nazi and that’s pathetic and horrible.”
And I don’t think that they don’t know this because when the prequels came out this was exactly why the same chuds hated them. Anakin was whiny and wimpy and the fallout kinda killed Hayden Christiansen’s career and broke Jake Lloyd full stop. I know this is part of the usual “fascists don’t take words seriously” thing but I think (I hope?) that in this case it weakens their propaganda because while they may be able to forget what they said five minutes after saying it the broader cultural consensus remembers.
If anything the clearest inversion would be to lionize the emperor as the embodiment of state power, but in fascist ideology the creepy old man who secretly seizes power to undermine the golden age out of allegiance to a poorly-understood insular ancient religion already maps pretty strongly to another stock character. I guess that’s probably why they used to try and cast themselves as the rebel alliance, even while venerating the love of power that the empire and Vader represented.
So admittedly I’ve kept out of the wider star wars discourse ever since everyone was wrong about The Last Jedi. (Instead I got on the Knives Out hype train early which was an objectively better choice.) But this feels like a particularly poor fit for the pattern because Anakin was redeemable and sympathetic all the way back to Return of the Jedi. Anakin’s story was already about a young man who was denied a healthy coping envuronment for his trauma, was promised unreasonable powers and privileges, then when denied them embraced hatred and fascism and destroyed almost everything he used to care about, but still was ultimately able to pull back from that edge and, at the last crucial moment, do the right thing because of the love of his family. Obviously it’s not a complete nonstarter because of how powerful and aesthetically dominant Vader is as a character, but ironically I think the story already invites you to see Anakin as a protofascist and to feel regret and pity for the path he takes. It’s easier to look at something like Harry Potter and invent “this bad guy was a powerful Nazi and that’s awesome!” almost out of whole cloth than to try and get there from “this bad guy is a sad, whiny, but poweful Nazi and that’s pathetic and horrible.”
And I don’t think that they don’t know this because when the prequels came out this was exactly why the same chuds hated them. Anakin was whiny and wimpy and the fallout kinda killed Hayden Christiansen’s career and broke Jake Lloyd full stop. I know this is part of the usual “fascists don’t take words seriously” thing but I think (I hope?) that in this case it weakens their propaganda because while they may be able to forget what they said five minutes after saying it the broader cultural consensus remembers.
If anything the clearest inversion would be to lionize the emperor as the embodiment of state power, but in fascist ideology the creepy old man who secretly seizes power to undermine the golden age out of allegiance to a poorly-understood insular ancient religion already maps pretty strongly to another stock character. I guess that’s probably why they used to try and cast themselves as the rebel alliance, even while venerating the love of power that the empire and Vader represented.
nb. andor is a very good series, and it’s probably a good thing the fash don’t have the attention span long enough to hate-watch it.
“Syril was longhoused”, they’d be split on Dedra Meero but for all the wrong reasons (gender, “too old”, etc), etc etc
they’d be crying about an abject glorification of violence as a tool of the revolution, too.