Does anyone else ever think about how comparatively hard it was to get Anakin to turn to the dark side?
It may be partly because we see every step of Anakin’s journey, but… Count Dooku had spent decades as part of the Jedi Order, was raised as a traditional Jedi, and still turned to the dark side within a few years after Qui-Gon’s death. Yes, he was friends with Palpatine, but Palps was twenty years younger than Dooku. Palps probably wasn’t that huge of a deal in his life initially. And when Dooku was in the Clone Wars, he was already a Sith.
Then there’s Krell. Krell has visions of impending doom, and that’s all we have in canon. However, Krell, like Bariss and potentially Nadhir, is implied to have gone dark due in part to the pressures the war and the questions it raised. However, there is no reason to believe Palpatine was cultivating their mindset personally.
Then there’s Anakin. The guy who has at least one mental illness (A French psychiatric or psychological academy- I forget which- diagnosed him with Borderline Personality Disorder, and there are others disorders he could have), a traumatic background, and was denied contact from his mom. He has rocky relationships and more issues than a star has photons. He’s had a Sith lord and master manipulator subtly grooming him for darkness for thirteen years, putting as much effort into it as into conquering the galaxy. He was on the front lines of one hellish war at the ripe old age of nineteen, and had a ton of responsibility. And it still took the Council and Palpatine using him as a double agent, visions of someone he loved dying, and a bit of trickery to get him to turn to the dark side.
That’s actually pretty impressive resilience.
And really, if the Jedi hadn’t been so ‘once you give in to the dark side, forever will it dominate your destiny,’ all anti-redemption and putting forward this belief that there is no way to come back, he probably wouldn’t have felt like, after Mace’s death, Palpatine was his only option. But he’d raised his lightsaber against another Jedi, against a Jedi Master, even though Palpatine was the one who blasted Mace out the window to his death, and knew that the Jedi wouldn’t accept him after that.
If the Jedi had given him any reason to believe they’d listen, accept him after that happened, he probably wouldn’t have given himself over to Palpatine. But he felt that he had no one else to turn to who would accept him after that. Padme still loved him, of course, but the Jedi, the institution that he’d devoted his life to would turn its back on him, and he didn’t have anywhere else to turn to but Palpatine.
^This. Yoda claims that people turn to the Dark Side because it’s a quick and easy route to power, but Anakin turned to it because he literally felt he had no choice. He stayed with it because he felt he had no choice. Then Luke came along and said, “Guess what, Dad? You have a choice.” And Anakin chose to turn from the Dark, to turn back to love, and to do the right thing.