(no subject)
So, uh, here is the section dedicated to Anakin's relationship with Obi-Wan. It's a long, probably confusing read. Enjoy!
Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Obi-Wan Kenobi
Note: I am bad at my own canon, so if you spot a mistake, TELL ME. I won’t snap at you, srsly. Also, a lot of this was influenced by Shoiryu's character pieces on Anakin, because she’s far better at explaining him than I am. Go read her stuff.
So it’s fairly obvious from the get-go that the situation Anakin has found himself in at camp is extremely unusual with regards to Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Anakin I’m playing was originally taken from a period roughly five months after Attack of the Clones (Episode II); so he’s twenty years old, married, and has been fighting in the Clone Wars for quite a few months. More importantly, his master, Obi-Wan, is thirty-six, a Jedi Knight, and at some point becomes a General in the Clone Wars efforts.
Then we have the Obi-Wan who has arrived at camp. CFUD!Obi-Wan is twenty-one, a Jedi padawan (apprentice), and still under the tutelage of Qui-Gon Jinn, who’s also still alive at this point. Most importantly, Obi-Wan is still (canonically, anyway) four years away from meeting Anakin during the events of The Phantom Menace (Episode I).
Clearly, this creates extreme problems when it comes to Anakin’s relationship with Obi-Wan. But before I get into that, I’ll do some background work to explain how it should be, with the “real” Obi-Wan, as it sometimes occurs to Anakin.
Rewind back to Episode I. Anakin is nine years old, a slave boy living on some shithouse planet beyond law and order. Along comes Qui-Gon Jinn, who immediately spots the sheer magnitude of Force potential Anakin has, and who believes him to be the Chosen One of prophecy. To cut a long story short, Qui-Gon frees Anakin and takes him aboard their ship when they’re prepared to go. Of course, Qui-Gon already has an apprentice: Obi-Wan. And the fact of the matter is that Obi-Wan, from the outset, doesn’t particularly like Anakin. He thinks he’s just another one of Qui-Gon’s pointless projects (much like Jar Jar Binks, but we’re not going to dignify him with another mention) and really would rather not have him with them. Throughout the movie. Obi-Wan barely speaks to Anakin directly, apart from meeting him briefly and during Qui-Gon’s funeral. Otherwise, he doesn’t talk to him. He does talk about him, however… whilst Anakin is standing two feet away, even. And what does he say whilst Anakin is right there? He says that he’s a danger and he doesn’t know why Qui-Gon can’t see this. It’s safe to say that Anakin heard this loud and clear, and he would have known that Obi-Wan didn’t like him.
Then Qui-Gon dies, and things do - or have to - change. With Qui-Gon gone, there’s no one to look out for Anakin. He had planned to take Anakin on as his apprentice, but that’s no longer an option. When he was dying, Qui-Gon made Obi-Wan promise to take Anakin on as an apprentice. And he does so, because Obi-Wan was dedicated to his master. Thus, Anakin becoming Obi-Wan’s apprentice was an act of obligation, not kindness or interest in him. You could probably say that Obi-Wan did feel sorry for him, or whatever, but the fact remains that he promised his master that he would do it: part of their relationship will always be based on this solid fact.
So now we have Obi-Wan, newly appointed to Jedi Knight, and Anakin, a padawan learner under him. There’s a tonne of Extended Universe stuff out there about the eleven years they spent training together, but I haven’t read most of it, so I can’t really speak about that with any authority. Instead, I’ll skip to Episode II. Anakin is now twenty, Obi-Wan thirty-six. And, for all intents and purposes, they have a much better relationship than they did at the start. You can safely assume they’re best friends and love each other (even without the rampant gayness in the Episode III book :D). It’s true that there’s a lot of friction between them, what with Anakin’s arrogant “o fuk u I can do anything I want” attitude and Obi-Wan’s calm persistence, but they trust each other completely and would do anything for each other. At one point during the movie, Anakin says that Obi-Wan is “like my father”, and proceeds to defy every Council member to go save him. He might have failed miserably, but it’s the thought that counts. During the Episode III novel, Obi-Wan also says something along the lines of Anakin not being loyal to principles, but to people. And, considering the amount of time they’ve spent together, Obi-Wan would surely be at the top of the list of people Anakin is loyal to.
All right, so that’s my shoddy attempt at background. Now for my personal spin. Bear with my incoherence and probable inconsistency, because I don’t generally think these kind of things out too much; I just wing it and change as I go. And we’re still on the “real” Obi-Wan here.
Anakin’s entire world, for the most part of eleven years, has been shared by Obi-Wan. As master and apprentice, there is probably not much that they don’t do together. As such, Anakin’s probably come to an extremely deep understanding of what Obi-Wan is about, how he reacts to things, what he likes, doesn’t like, thinks about, and so on. The same probably goes for Obi-Wan’s perception of Anakin. When you spend that much time together, it’d be hard not to know everything about a person. They have their fights, and they probably have them fairly often; whether it’s just a minor disagreement or the kind of screaming match they had when Padme fell out of the spaceship that time, they would have them frequently. But their relationship doesn’t really suffer much for it. Anakin probably knows, deep down, that Obi-Wan is right about most things. His personality won’t allow him to admit it or accept it a lot of the time, but he knows this. And he respects him, despite all outward appearances.
In regards to a more sexual attraction, I think it’s highly probable that Anakin could and would feel this way about his master, at least sometimes. The way I see Anakin’s take on love is that it’s very chaotic and freeform; he doesn’t know how it works, or when it’s going to strike, or with whom. For instance, he fell in love with Padme upon sight and was obsessed with her for over ten years without even seeing her. This does not indicate, to me, someone who really knows how love works or knows how to temper his own feelings and impulses. So Anakin, having spent years and years with Obi-Wan, would surely have at least considered the possibility of loving him in a manner beyond that of a brother or a father or a mentor. For the longest time, between having to leave his mother and meeting Padme again, there was no one closer to him than Obi-Wan. That kind of bond of deep affection would undoubtedly lead to less PG-13 thoughts. Whether the two of them have actually done anything is kind of an ambiguous area for me. They’ve probably slept together quite a bit, in the way that Anakin sleeps with Athrun at camp, but as for sex, I don’t know. I prefer to leave things in the grey area with sexual relations (because I suck at porn and smut, woe).
Fast forward again, now, to Anakin’s time at camp before the younger Obi-Wan showed up. Considering the amount of time Anakin spent with his master back home, on missions, and so on, he now finds himself alone at camp. He’s the only one there from his world, and he’s had to watch most everyone else have their friends and family arrive from the sidelines. He went five months by himself (and from a certain point of view, he still is the lone representative of his world, but I’ll get to that later) in a strange place with people who have very different values to those of the Jedi. How he feels about this is pretty obvious, since he angsts about it fairly often. After the last batch of counselors arrived, Anakin was in serious danger of falling into depression over this fact. When you’ve been told for half your life that you’re important, that you’re going to do great things, that you’re vital to saving the balance of the universe, how exactly are you going to feel when, five months after you should have been due back, no one’s come to find out where you are yet? Not even your master, who you thought loved you? Naturally, you start to think that they don’t care. This is despite the numerous - and quite logical, you know this - reasons why it might have been impossible for them to retrieve you, or send word that they’re worried. Because Anakin’s perceptions and feelings are volatile. He’s paranoid. If they haven’t come to get him, it means they’ve forgotten him or they don’t care. Maybe they didn’t want him to start with. After all, all of them, including Obi-Wan, said that he was a danger and that his future was clouded, despite being the Chosen One. So, after the pretty crushing experience he had when Athrun turned into Obi-Wan during Halloween, Anakin stopped waiting. He gave up. He decided that they weren’t coming to get him after all. He figures it hurts less that way. In effect, a little part of him broke, and he can’t fix it. Whether he’ll be able to fix it or not remains to be seen, but as of writing this, his hope and some of his belief in the Jedi has just disintegrated.
Enter Obi-Wan Kenobi.
So imagine, if you will, that you’ve just come back from a really stupid accident with your hyperdrive engine that sent you madly jumping across planets trying to get back to this infernal camp. You got injured badly along the way, but that’s all right. Nothing new. During this time, while you were working hard at trying to get back to camp, you decided that it was pointless to hold onto your hopes that someone was coming to get you. Before you even make it back to camp, you’ve shut that part of yourself down. You’re not going to let it hurt you anymore. You’ll just live, and learn, as you have been doing for the past five months. You return to camp, and get a brief respite, and you’re welcomed back by people who were worried about you. It’s a relief to know they noticed you were missing to begin with. You apologise to the person you care about most in this place, and things look like they’ll get better.
Then someone new arrives, calling themselves Obi-Wan Kenobi. A padawan learner. Twenty-one years old. Is there a precedent for this? Absolutely not. You know that other campers have experienced time slippages and discovered three or four year gaps between themselves and their friends. But you never thought it would happen to you. And what’s more, this is no small time gap. This is fifteen years. That’s more than half your life. Even further to this, the time gap is so immense that this Obi-Wan Kenobi who’s arrived… doesn’t even know you. He hasn’t met you yet. He has no idea who you are. And for him, he’s meeting you for the first time. What are you? You’re the very result of the next two decades of his life. What are you going to do about it? What can you say? What should you say? You think about it more and more, start panicking, because the more you think, the more horrible things you know about his future come to mind, and you can’t stop yourself from being scared. Because this is wrong. Wrong. Wrong on so many levels that it’s tempting to just run away from him and scream and destroy something in the hope that something will click into place. Or that he’ll go away. Because this is going to ruin you. You can see it already.
And okay enough of the second person POV. You get the point. Anakin, upon meeting the Obi-Wan who arrived at camp, panicked. Very badly. It might not have seemed like it, but he was screaming in his own mind about why this was happening and why it had to happen to him. This isn’t something Anakin ever thought to prepare himself for. And he still doesn’t know what to do about it.
After the first night, Anakin decided to tell Obi-Wan most things about the future they share because he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand keeping it all to himself and pretend nothing was wrong. So it was as much for his benefit as for Obi-Wan’s. The things he didn’t tell him mostly either slipped his mind as unimportant or he just forgot to mention them. Except, of course, for how Obi-Wan felt about him when he first met him. Anakin really does not want to tell him that he disliked him in the beginning. He already feels like he’s on the knife’s edge every time he talks with Obi-Wan, he does not want to add that Obi-Wan hadn’t always liked him. If there’s one thing he really doesn’t want, it’s to have Obi-Wan dislike him again. It would be like being shunted back into childhood, where very few people thought he was of consequence or worth.
At the moment, Anakin and Obi-Wan have something of a tentative friendship. Anakin knows Obi-Wan is trying to get to know him better, and that’s confusing of itself, since Anakin knows a great deal about Obi-Wan already. Anakin can’t seem to stop himself getting emo when he talks to Obi-Wan, though, which he hates because it makes him feel hopelessly out of control, particularly now that he has another Jedi around to remind him how he should be acting. Even the act of calling Obi-Wan by name is making Anakin anxious. Every time he goes to call him, he ends up saying something different, whether it be Master, Master Kenobi, or Obi-Wan. So he pretty much avoids having to use his name wherever possible, partly because he knows it makes Obi-Wan uncomfortable, but mostly because he mentally flinches when he calls him anything and is forced to realize that this Obi-Wan does not equal his Obi-Wan.
And therein lies another problem. Anakin cannot logically make these two different Obi-Wans align into the same person in his mind. He knows, rationally, that they are the same person and fundamentally the same, but of course it’s not that simple. To his mind, this Obi-Wan can’t be the “real” one, because he doesn’t know him. Also, the “real” one acts differently, is older, more experienced, and currently on the other side of the galaxy. Anakin has given some thought to the repercussions of camp’s Obi-Wan returning home and changing the future, given what he knows, but since Anakin still exists here in his current form, he’s also considered the diverging universes idea that the FMA cast sort of has. He still worries that this could affect his other self in Obi-Wan’s universe in some way, such as his never being rescued, but he tries not to think about that too often or his head’ll explode he’ll get too confused and frustrated.
Anyway, I can’t say for sure how their relationship is going to progress. I’m pretty certain that they’ll have a massive argument once Obi-Wan figures out that Anakin is sleeping in bed with Athrun. But apart from that, everything is very precarious. Things could go any way at the drop of a hat. Which is my way of saying that I didn’t know how to end this essay thing properly. Damn it.
Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Obi-Wan Kenobi
Note: I am bad at my own canon, so if you spot a mistake, TELL ME. I won’t snap at you, srsly. Also, a lot of this was influenced by Shoiryu's character pieces on Anakin, because she’s far better at explaining him than I am. Go read her stuff.
So it’s fairly obvious from the get-go that the situation Anakin has found himself in at camp is extremely unusual with regards to Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Anakin I’m playing was originally taken from a period roughly five months after Attack of the Clones (Episode II); so he’s twenty years old, married, and has been fighting in the Clone Wars for quite a few months. More importantly, his master, Obi-Wan, is thirty-six, a Jedi Knight, and at some point becomes a General in the Clone Wars efforts.
Then we have the Obi-Wan who has arrived at camp. CFUD!Obi-Wan is twenty-one, a Jedi padawan (apprentice), and still under the tutelage of Qui-Gon Jinn, who’s also still alive at this point. Most importantly, Obi-Wan is still (canonically, anyway) four years away from meeting Anakin during the events of The Phantom Menace (Episode I).
Clearly, this creates extreme problems when it comes to Anakin’s relationship with Obi-Wan. But before I get into that, I’ll do some background work to explain how it should be, with the “real” Obi-Wan, as it sometimes occurs to Anakin.
Rewind back to Episode I. Anakin is nine years old, a slave boy living on some shithouse planet beyond law and order. Along comes Qui-Gon Jinn, who immediately spots the sheer magnitude of Force potential Anakin has, and who believes him to be the Chosen One of prophecy. To cut a long story short, Qui-Gon frees Anakin and takes him aboard their ship when they’re prepared to go. Of course, Qui-Gon already has an apprentice: Obi-Wan. And the fact of the matter is that Obi-Wan, from the outset, doesn’t particularly like Anakin. He thinks he’s just another one of Qui-Gon’s pointless projects (much like Jar Jar Binks, but we’re not going to dignify him with another mention) and really would rather not have him with them. Throughout the movie. Obi-Wan barely speaks to Anakin directly, apart from meeting him briefly and during Qui-Gon’s funeral. Otherwise, he doesn’t talk to him. He does talk about him, however… whilst Anakin is standing two feet away, even. And what does he say whilst Anakin is right there? He says that he’s a danger and he doesn’t know why Qui-Gon can’t see this. It’s safe to say that Anakin heard this loud and clear, and he would have known that Obi-Wan didn’t like him.
Then Qui-Gon dies, and things do - or have to - change. With Qui-Gon gone, there’s no one to look out for Anakin. He had planned to take Anakin on as his apprentice, but that’s no longer an option. When he was dying, Qui-Gon made Obi-Wan promise to take Anakin on as an apprentice. And he does so, because Obi-Wan was dedicated to his master. Thus, Anakin becoming Obi-Wan’s apprentice was an act of obligation, not kindness or interest in him. You could probably say that Obi-Wan did feel sorry for him, or whatever, but the fact remains that he promised his master that he would do it: part of their relationship will always be based on this solid fact.
So now we have Obi-Wan, newly appointed to Jedi Knight, and Anakin, a padawan learner under him. There’s a tonne of Extended Universe stuff out there about the eleven years they spent training together, but I haven’t read most of it, so I can’t really speak about that with any authority. Instead, I’ll skip to Episode II. Anakin is now twenty, Obi-Wan thirty-six. And, for all intents and purposes, they have a much better relationship than they did at the start. You can safely assume they’re best friends and love each other (even without the rampant gayness in the Episode III book :D). It’s true that there’s a lot of friction between them, what with Anakin’s arrogant “o fuk u I can do anything I want” attitude and Obi-Wan’s calm persistence, but they trust each other completely and would do anything for each other. At one point during the movie, Anakin says that Obi-Wan is “like my father”, and proceeds to defy every Council member to go save him. He might have failed miserably, but it’s the thought that counts. During the Episode III novel, Obi-Wan also says something along the lines of Anakin not being loyal to principles, but to people. And, considering the amount of time they’ve spent together, Obi-Wan would surely be at the top of the list of people Anakin is loyal to.
All right, so that’s my shoddy attempt at background. Now for my personal spin. Bear with my incoherence and probable inconsistency, because I don’t generally think these kind of things out too much; I just wing it and change as I go. And we’re still on the “real” Obi-Wan here.
Anakin’s entire world, for the most part of eleven years, has been shared by Obi-Wan. As master and apprentice, there is probably not much that they don’t do together. As such, Anakin’s probably come to an extremely deep understanding of what Obi-Wan is about, how he reacts to things, what he likes, doesn’t like, thinks about, and so on. The same probably goes for Obi-Wan’s perception of Anakin. When you spend that much time together, it’d be hard not to know everything about a person. They have their fights, and they probably have them fairly often; whether it’s just a minor disagreement or the kind of screaming match they had when Padme fell out of the spaceship that time, they would have them frequently. But their relationship doesn’t really suffer much for it. Anakin probably knows, deep down, that Obi-Wan is right about most things. His personality won’t allow him to admit it or accept it a lot of the time, but he knows this. And he respects him, despite all outward appearances.
In regards to a more sexual attraction, I think it’s highly probable that Anakin could and would feel this way about his master, at least sometimes. The way I see Anakin’s take on love is that it’s very chaotic and freeform; he doesn’t know how it works, or when it’s going to strike, or with whom. For instance, he fell in love with Padme upon sight and was obsessed with her for over ten years without even seeing her. This does not indicate, to me, someone who really knows how love works or knows how to temper his own feelings and impulses. So Anakin, having spent years and years with Obi-Wan, would surely have at least considered the possibility of loving him in a manner beyond that of a brother or a father or a mentor. For the longest time, between having to leave his mother and meeting Padme again, there was no one closer to him than Obi-Wan. That kind of bond of deep affection would undoubtedly lead to less PG-13 thoughts. Whether the two of them have actually done anything is kind of an ambiguous area for me. They’ve probably slept together quite a bit, in the way that Anakin sleeps with Athrun at camp, but as for sex, I don’t know. I prefer to leave things in the grey area with sexual relations (because I suck at porn and smut, woe).
Fast forward again, now, to Anakin’s time at camp before the younger Obi-Wan showed up. Considering the amount of time Anakin spent with his master back home, on missions, and so on, he now finds himself alone at camp. He’s the only one there from his world, and he’s had to watch most everyone else have their friends and family arrive from the sidelines. He went five months by himself (and from a certain point of view, he still is the lone representative of his world, but I’ll get to that later) in a strange place with people who have very different values to those of the Jedi. How he feels about this is pretty obvious, since he angsts about it fairly often. After the last batch of counselors arrived, Anakin was in serious danger of falling into depression over this fact. When you’ve been told for half your life that you’re important, that you’re going to do great things, that you’re vital to saving the balance of the universe, how exactly are you going to feel when, five months after you should have been due back, no one’s come to find out where you are yet? Not even your master, who you thought loved you? Naturally, you start to think that they don’t care. This is despite the numerous - and quite logical, you know this - reasons why it might have been impossible for them to retrieve you, or send word that they’re worried. Because Anakin’s perceptions and feelings are volatile. He’s paranoid. If they haven’t come to get him, it means they’ve forgotten him or they don’t care. Maybe they didn’t want him to start with. After all, all of them, including Obi-Wan, said that he was a danger and that his future was clouded, despite being the Chosen One. So, after the pretty crushing experience he had when Athrun turned into Obi-Wan during Halloween, Anakin stopped waiting. He gave up. He decided that they weren’t coming to get him after all. He figures it hurts less that way. In effect, a little part of him broke, and he can’t fix it. Whether he’ll be able to fix it or not remains to be seen, but as of writing this, his hope and some of his belief in the Jedi has just disintegrated.
Enter Obi-Wan Kenobi.
So imagine, if you will, that you’ve just come back from a really stupid accident with your hyperdrive engine that sent you madly jumping across planets trying to get back to this infernal camp. You got injured badly along the way, but that’s all right. Nothing new. During this time, while you were working hard at trying to get back to camp, you decided that it was pointless to hold onto your hopes that someone was coming to get you. Before you even make it back to camp, you’ve shut that part of yourself down. You’re not going to let it hurt you anymore. You’ll just live, and learn, as you have been doing for the past five months. You return to camp, and get a brief respite, and you’re welcomed back by people who were worried about you. It’s a relief to know they noticed you were missing to begin with. You apologise to the person you care about most in this place, and things look like they’ll get better.
Then someone new arrives, calling themselves Obi-Wan Kenobi. A padawan learner. Twenty-one years old. Is there a precedent for this? Absolutely not. You know that other campers have experienced time slippages and discovered three or four year gaps between themselves and their friends. But you never thought it would happen to you. And what’s more, this is no small time gap. This is fifteen years. That’s more than half your life. Even further to this, the time gap is so immense that this Obi-Wan Kenobi who’s arrived… doesn’t even know you. He hasn’t met you yet. He has no idea who you are. And for him, he’s meeting you for the first time. What are you? You’re the very result of the next two decades of his life. What are you going to do about it? What can you say? What should you say? You think about it more and more, start panicking, because the more you think, the more horrible things you know about his future come to mind, and you can’t stop yourself from being scared. Because this is wrong. Wrong. Wrong on so many levels that it’s tempting to just run away from him and scream and destroy something in the hope that something will click into place. Or that he’ll go away. Because this is going to ruin you. You can see it already.
And okay enough of the second person POV. You get the point. Anakin, upon meeting the Obi-Wan who arrived at camp, panicked. Very badly. It might not have seemed like it, but he was screaming in his own mind about why this was happening and why it had to happen to him. This isn’t something Anakin ever thought to prepare himself for. And he still doesn’t know what to do about it.
After the first night, Anakin decided to tell Obi-Wan most things about the future they share because he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand keeping it all to himself and pretend nothing was wrong. So it was as much for his benefit as for Obi-Wan’s. The things he didn’t tell him mostly either slipped his mind as unimportant or he just forgot to mention them. Except, of course, for how Obi-Wan felt about him when he first met him. Anakin really does not want to tell him that he disliked him in the beginning. He already feels like he’s on the knife’s edge every time he talks with Obi-Wan, he does not want to add that Obi-Wan hadn’t always liked him. If there’s one thing he really doesn’t want, it’s to have Obi-Wan dislike him again. It would be like being shunted back into childhood, where very few people thought he was of consequence or worth.
At the moment, Anakin and Obi-Wan have something of a tentative friendship. Anakin knows Obi-Wan is trying to get to know him better, and that’s confusing of itself, since Anakin knows a great deal about Obi-Wan already. Anakin can’t seem to stop himself getting emo when he talks to Obi-Wan, though, which he hates because it makes him feel hopelessly out of control, particularly now that he has another Jedi around to remind him how he should be acting. Even the act of calling Obi-Wan by name is making Anakin anxious. Every time he goes to call him, he ends up saying something different, whether it be Master, Master Kenobi, or Obi-Wan. So he pretty much avoids having to use his name wherever possible, partly because he knows it makes Obi-Wan uncomfortable, but mostly because he mentally flinches when he calls him anything and is forced to realize that this Obi-Wan does not equal his Obi-Wan.
And therein lies another problem. Anakin cannot logically make these two different Obi-Wans align into the same person in his mind. He knows, rationally, that they are the same person and fundamentally the same, but of course it’s not that simple. To his mind, this Obi-Wan can’t be the “real” one, because he doesn’t know him. Also, the “real” one acts differently, is older, more experienced, and currently on the other side of the galaxy. Anakin has given some thought to the repercussions of camp’s Obi-Wan returning home and changing the future, given what he knows, but since Anakin still exists here in his current form, he’s also considered the diverging universes idea that the FMA cast sort of has. He still worries that this could affect his other self in Obi-Wan’s universe in some way, such as his never being rescued, but he tries not to think about that too often or his head’ll explode he’ll get too confused and frustrated.
Anyway, I can’t say for sure how their relationship is going to progress. I’m pretty certain that they’ll have a massive argument once Obi-Wan figures out that Anakin is sleeping in bed with Athrun. But apart from that, everything is very precarious. Things could go any way at the drop of a hat. Which is my way of saying that I didn’t know how to end this essay thing properly. Damn it.