I Recently Saw A TikTok Including Anakin And Plo Koon And The One Thing People Constantly Stated In The

I recently saw a TikTok including Anakin and Plo Koon and the one thing people constantly stated in the comments was how Plo Koon is the only Jedi they like, the only good one and apparently the only one who gave Anakin advice and tried to help. (Referring to the tcw scene where Anakin is freaking out trying to find a way to find Ahsoka and Plo Koon tells him that she'll find her way back with the help of Anakin's training and teaching.)

And I honestly hate looking through comments because of these never ending and ridiculous anti jedi takes that completely miss the point of the story and because of weird statements like „this jedi is the only good one and all the others suck“, „if plo koon had been grand master order 66 wouldn’t have happened.“ (yes the last one is actually smth I saw someone say.)

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore Master Plo Koon, but he isn’t better or worse than any other Jedi. He believes in the same teachings, the same wisdom and the same philosophy as every other Jedi does. Of course he’s an individual being with his own personality so he’s not literally the „same“ as everybody else, but still he adheres to the same principles or else he wouldn’t be a Jedi or part of the Order.

Additionally, he certainly isn’t the only one who has given Anakin advice. Don’t make me laugh. Are we forgetting Yoda's therapeutical sessions, as I like to call them, where he takes his time to talk to Anakin and listen to him? His advice was for Anakin to learn to let go, to not let his fears control him and that’s very good advice. Obi Wan often tried to get Anakin to open up in detail and talk about his feelings upfront, but it’s Anakin that didn’t want to. He never shared enough. And he ignored the advice and the help he was given multiple times. He didn’t wish to face his problems and his fears and that’s not smth the Jedi can force him to do. Anakin has to be willing to talk and to take the given advice to heart.

I mean just look at the fact that Ahsoka had to learn about Anakin’s past through Obi Wan. Anakin vehemently does not want and can’t be convinced to talk about his problems. He does not wish to face them. And there’s only so much another person can do for somebody. Even when Anakin tells Obi Wan about the dreams he has of his mother, he never truly tells him what the dreams are about and that they might be visions, so obviously Obi Wan is going to give advice based on what he was told and what he knows. And it isn’t uncommon to have dreams because you’re homesick or still miss your mother. It isn’t far fetched for Obi Wan to believe that such normal dreams will pass in time because he doesn’t know more than what Anakin tells him, he doesn’t know that they’re nightmares and what the dreams are about. And on top of that, even Anakin sort of brushes them aside and states he’d rather dream of Padmé. He just never takes the time to completely open up to show the seriousness of it all. The Jedi did what they could. All of them. Anakin only allowed Palpatine to get through to him, and only because Palpatine explicitly catered to Anakin's desires. He told him what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to and that’s why Anakin was drawn to him. He sort of fed into his ego. And that is also a lesson in itself that the movies try to teach the audience.

The only thing that sort of calms me down, is knowing that most of the people who write comments like this don’t even really want to understand the point of the story or really think it through. They’re mostly here because of Anakin and his edginess and handsomeness and wish to sympathize with him and romanticize the whole toxic love type of thing. So ofc Anakin cannot be blamed fully, he still needs to be made out to be this misguided man who was failed by others, so that liking him isn’t viewed as that bad. And ofc he did everything he did for love so that makes it alright, but people forget that he simply did it for "his love" and not truly for Padmé. His love for her is more important than she herself. (Selfish love/attachment vs. selfless love that the Jedi teach; another lesson the movies try to show.)

And I mean I’m not fully hating on Anakin at all, I love him as a character and I love his tragedy (or the cautionary tale Star Wars depicts) especially because he is the one that needs to be blamed.

So I sort of hate him for what he did, because I blame him and Palpatine (as one should) and do not wish to excuse the fact he helped commit a genocide or act as if the responsibility for his actions and choices doesn’t fall on him, but I still love him because he’s such a fantastic character with such a good backstory and arc.

A great villain. But that’s the point, he is the villain, there’s no arguing about this or talking around it. And it’s okay to like the villain, you don’t have to justify that by painting them in the best possible way and excusing certain behavior. You don’t have to baby them, but that’s what so many people do and it annoys me. Literally every comment I see on YouTube or any other platform will be about poor Anakin and the evil Jedi. You can love the villain for who they are with all they’re mistakes and failures, but don’t act like they’re not the villain. Don’t twist the story to favor them by villainizing the good guys instead!

ABOUT THAT WRONG THING

Here’s the analysis I promised. *** CROOKED KINGDOM SPOILERS *** WHY WAS MATTHIAS HELVAR’S DEATH JUST WRONG? 1. THE WAY IT HAPPENED 1.1. The Hand of the Author “The Hand of the Author” is an expression that indicates how much we feel the presence of the author into the story, the moments in which they intervene to manipulate the events in a forced and unrealistic way instead of following the coherency of their own plots. Now, let’s think about the sequence of the scene: a) Matthias if left alone and unarmed at job done; b) the boy has been able to follow him despite the messy situation; c) Matthias decides not to defend himself and talks to him in a kind and totally reasonable manner; d) the boy shoots him anyway. This death is absolutely anti-climatic, forced and disrespectful for such a character and the scenes from chapter 38 to 40 seem to be completely disconnected from the rest of the story. It looks like the author (despite her statements) was going to finish the book and said : “Oh, no, I cannot end this story without killing at least one main character, let’s kill the one I think the readers like less!” Even though Matthias was the worst character to kill off, as I’m going to explain in Chapter 2, if the author desperately wanted to kill him, she could at least give him a more decent death, like, for example, making him sacrifice to save someone. 1.2. Confusing sequences Matthias is shot by the young drüskelle, but he is still able to run to Nina. What does this mean? Why does the boy let him go, after shooting him? I honestly doubt Matthias has killed him to escape. Maybe he has knocked him down, but that wouldn’t make more sense to the entire context. 1.3. Fjerdan mentality Matthias gives the young drüskelle valid reasons to put his gun down: he has no weapons and cannot go anywhere. Do Fjerdans, filled with hatred but also obsessed with honour and discipline, really teach their young soldiers to be blinded by anger and kill a wanted man (“Dead OR ALIVE”) who is unarmed and willing to cooperate? The boy could have become a Fjerdan hero, if he had brought Matthias as a prisoner to his companions, rather than shooting him for no reasons and then being also unable to prove he killed him. 1.4. Double standards An author cannot build an unrealistic plot armor to some characters (for example, Kaz, a limping boy, who defeats all the Dregs alone) and kill others in a totally “random” and anti-climatic way, at job done. As I say in my small guide “Five simple rules every author should know about characters’ deaths”, double standards compromise the logic and the coherency of the story. 2. THE WAY IT BREAKS BASIC NARRATIVE RULES 2. 1. Character development Matthias’ storyline is mainly focused on two topics: his relationship with Nina and his character development. He literally spends two books to work on himself, unlearning everything he was taught since he was a child and finding a new purpose based on his change of heart. When characters are made to evolve during the story, the most logical choice is to give them an opportunity to make their development useful and significant outside of their safe zone (for example, their group of friends). And, most important thing, an author should never kill their characters if they haven’t complete their development. And that’s why Matthias was the worst character to kill off at the end of Crooked Kingdom: first of all, he hadn’t fully complete his development (he was still very insecure during social interactions and was still fighting against crumbles of Fjerdan mentality); secondly, no one out of the Crows has seen his development, since the author made him fail during his first real attempt to demonstrate something. I think people would need practical demonstrations to make a change possible, it can’t really be enough for them to hear his story from Nina. It’s just not realistic. Killing Matthias in that way and in that moment, made the character uncompleted and his entire development vain. I’ll conclude the subchapter with a simple example: why do you think it was Jack to die in Titanic, instead of Rose? Because Jack was a complete character, while Rose was still completing her development and had to put it into practice. The criterion is the same. 2.2. Characters’ deaths and their impact on the story Authors owe respect to their characters and have to build their paths properly from the beginning to the end, to guarantee quality to the story. Unless they’re writing a story about random events of human life, they should kill characters only when their deaths make sense to the plot and can give a valuable contribute to other characters’ storylines. A story lacks of quality when characters (especially main characters) are killed just for shock value, to add unnecessary angst and suffering to other characters or because “I cannot give a happy ending to everyone, happy endings are for children”. Matthias’ death was anti-climatic, useless and has so little impact that, if a reader jumps chapters from 38 to 41, it almost seems nothing has changed. 2.3. The failure After everything Matthias did to change and evolve, the author made his first attempt to put in practice what he learnt a huge, undeserving failure. First of all, even though he is unarmed, Matthias is fully able to defeat the boy but he doesn’t do that, that means he chooses not to defend himself. He wants to give the boy a possibility, he wants to demonstrate that there’s still hope for Fjerda. And his faith is repaid with death. These kind of plot choices SOMETIMES (and not in this case) can make sense if written at the beginning or in the middle of a story, not at the ending, when everything seems to be resolved. What is the author trying to suggest us? Fjerdan people are hopeless? If Matthias hasn’t been able to persuade a young boy, who, despite his anger and hatred, should have a more “elastic” mind, how could it be possible to convince older people in Fjerda, who have lived with their beliefs for decades? Does the author really think it is realistic that Nina’s words will be heard by Fjerdans? I’m starting to think her and Matthias’ dream is just destined to fail… * SPOILER FROM NIKOLAI DUOLOGY * (Please, don’t mention me the Nikolai Duology, which I tried to read but I abandoned due to several reasons, one of them, I consider the Crows’ arc closed, after that ending, and I don’t like the idea of using the group only as a “passage moment” for both a character and a major plot. And to be honest, I think it’s just not fair that the work Matthias started to change Fjerdans’ mentality would be finished by a character who is just similar to him (well, even too much similar) but hasn’t faced everything he went through with Nina. It sounds like Bardugo is trying to replace him and this is bad. 3. THE AUTHOR’S STATEMENTS And now, in the third and final part of my work, I’m going to report some statements the author said during interviews about this choice and explain why I cannot help but strongly disagree with her. 1. “Matthias didn’t deserve a happy ending because he spread too much hate, he had to pay.” Okay, first of all, Matthias didn’t just wake up one morning, deciding to spread hate for no reasons. Do we need to think about his background? 1. He had always been taught to fear Grishas and see them as monsters; 2. A group of those monsters killed his family and he has been taken by a man who took advantage of his trauma to turn him into a weapon. He received bad teachings (and not only from Jarl Brum, but also from Grisha people who burnt his family alive), he has also been able to unlearn those teaching and decide to do something to repair and make things better. About the “he had to pay” stuff, excuse me, but he has been tortured in Hellgate for a year, being forced to kill wolves, that were not only sacred to him, but also reminded him of his own pet wolf, and living with the belief that the girl he fell in love with had betrayed him. Wasn’t that enough? And, last but not less important, here we go again with double standards: Matthias, who understood his mistakes and was determined to fix them “didn’t deserve a happy ending,” but Kaz Brekker did? Kaz is a great character, but he also did terrible things and I’m sure he’ll never do anything to fix them because he’s too broken and rotten inside. That’s okay, not all the characters are made to have a great development, but statements like this, when we compare the two characters, just sound a bit incoherent. 2. “He has been killed by the younger version of himself” Does the author really think this is a great symbolism? Doesn’t she know that being killed by a younger version of yourself, especially after you went through a great redemption arc, just means “Regression”? She’s basically saying that it doesn’t matter if you worked hard to change and to fix your mistakes, you don’t deserve to be forgiven, you are your past and you’re destined to be destroyed by it (unless your name is Kaz Brekker). Past is a part of us, of course, we cannot change it and we can be hurt by it, but we cannot let it “kill” us. The message the author gave is just wrong and filled with extremist, unnecessary moralism. It definitely doesn’t fit the atmosphere of a Young Adult novel, which should promote progression, instead of regression. As I said, she also seems to be willing to demonstrate that Fjerdans are just evil and will never change. I wonder if Bardugo has ever seen “The Lion King”, because Rafiki would be very disappointed by all of this. 3. “I knew from the beginning I would have killed him off” Even though the way she killed him seems to demonstrate something different, Bardugo has always stated that she wanted to kill Matthias by the moment she created him. Okay, we can believe it, but I can still speak against this statement. How? I’m sure this thing has happened to many writers: we create characters and decidespecific endings for their storylines, but, while we’re writing, those characters “come to life” into our hands and they sometimes evolve out of our control and start to lead us to a different path. Since the story is made by our characters, we should follow the directions they take, for the sake of the plot: we shouldn’t listen to fanservice or to old plans, we should listen to our characters. That’s why it can happen we end up saving a character we were meant to kill of at the beginning, as well as killing a character we hadn’t plan to kill off. It is just wrong to stubbornly follow an old idea that doesn’t fit the story anymore, that’s why authors cannot use it as an excuse to justify their mistakes. (The finale of “How I Met Your Mother” is a great example to explain this concept). 4. CONCLUSIONS “Geez, what was that for?” - It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past. “Yeah, but it still hurts!” - Ah, yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or… learn from it. (“The Lion King”, 1994) Matthias wasn’t even running away from his past. He faced it. He wanted to do something about it. He was ready to rise from the ashes of his past and work for a better future. And those are all the reasons his death is just wrong from every kind of perspective: narrative, logic, symbolism. Matthias Helvar deserved better. Not only from his life, but also, and especially, from the author who created him. *** Hope you agree with me. Haters stay away, I won’t change my mind. Don’t make flame under my post. If you agree with me and like my work, feel free to share. Thanks for reading!

Obi-Wan and Cody

Uyuni Salt Flats, Walking On The Sky

Mentally I’m still here (x)

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