My absolute LEAST. FUCKING. FAVOURITE Star Wars discourse ever is “Well, Anakin and Shmi live in an acceptable house and have food and sometimes have free time, so how can they possibly be real slaves? Fuck these characters for claiming an oppression they don’t have/fuck Lucas for writing slavery as something not instantly recognizable on first glance.”
I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. What the hell sort of attitude must these people have towards real slaves if they think ‘being provided with a house and food’ discounts the dehumanization???!
#and….you know…it says RIGHT THERE IN THE MOVIE that slaves will be murdered if they ever try to leave #and it also says RIGHT THERE IN THERE IN THE MOVIE that anakin is forced to risk his life podracing against his mother’s wishes #(even though he likes doing it) #but SO MANY PEOPLE apparently just saw the (not even that great) house
Yeah, and we do see on screen the working conditions Anakin is forced into.
Honestly it’s weird how people take the tiniest things to mean everything’s alright, when usually it’s more practical than kind. Anakin and Shmi have a house and food, not because Watto is nice, but because he spent all that money on two slaves and that money would be wasted if they died due to exposure or starvation.
People seem to be under the impression that a slaves exist to be abused. I mean, they are, in the sense that their human rights are being violated, but slaves are PROPERTY. You maintain property because otherwise it’s a wasted resource. Even then – EVEN THEN – it’s canon in at least two of the three novelizations that Watto is physically abusive, at least toward Anakin.
Beyond that, OF COURSE Watto isn’t going to beat the shit out of Shmi and Anakin when he was customers – especially one who clearly comes from the Republic core and likely totes along its “liberal” values. Plenty of people are willing to ignore slavery or suffering when it’s in the background, but most will find active shows of violence distasteful or off putting.
That’s literally the entire reason why Anakin and his mother are slaves to begin with – they live in a part of the GFFA where crimes against humanity can be swept under the rug and overlooked entirely by the wealth core worlds.
Anakin is taught from a very young age that power is gained violence and control. Why nobody thought to address this with a psychologist after he came to the Order, I have no idea, but the Clone Wars certainly do nothing to dispel that notion for him.
One of the
most horrifying things I’ve ever witnessed in the SW fandom is “slavery is not
that bad” discourse. Not only for the obvious lack of empathy but for the complete
misunderstanding of what slavery means. This
particular sentence will be forever burnt into my brain: “[Anakin] had it all, a
loving mother, a home to call his own, friends, a job, he had his own droid!”. WTF, sw fandom?!But, you
know, it’s not really surprising. Slavery in the GFFA was an issue even before
the Prequels existed. A big part of the ROTJ involves sexual slavery in
Tatooine but hey, trust the fanboys™ to complete ignore the issue and turn a
horrifying situation into nothing more than a sexual fantasy.
It was one of those discourses that just went round and round every few years and was always terrible. A tiny portion of it is burnt into my brain, too, on a message board (theforce.net, probably) someone referred to Anakin’s status as a child slave as “not that bad a job” or something along those lines, and someone exasperatedly snapped back with “A job where you get blown up if you try to leave is by definition A BAD JOB.”
(This was all ten years ago, by the way. I can’t believe ‘is slavery still slavery if occasionally nice things happen to the slaves’ is still a question people are asking.)