Nearing a year ago, an incredible analysis was shared with the community by DeathTrooper100. This essay compared two individuals, one being Atton Rand from Star Wars and the other being, Paul the Apostle. However, while it was wonderfully written and a joy to read, something else jumped out at me for a different reason, and it was an element of Rand’s story. In her paper, Trooper worded it like this: “He believed that he’d loved killing her, but, really, he’d killed her because he loved her.” My friend, if you loved someone, truly loved them, why would you ever kill them? And not just kill them, but kill that person for the reason of none other than your love for them? My sincere curiosity with Atton only increased with what Trooper explained to me all that time ago when I asked her about this line in her paper. She relayed to me a quote straight from Rand in Knights of the Old Republic II, and I’ll share its entirety with you here.
“I did what I did with all Jedi. I hurt her. I hurt her a lot. And then, when I thought she couldn’t take any more, she showed me the Force in my head. And I felt everything that she felt, and I heard an echo of what the force was, and how what I was doing… I think I loved her, but it wasn’t that kind of love. It was the kind of love where you are willing to give up everything for someone you don’t even know.”
After reading what you just read, I was softly astonished by Atton’s story, because it was as though I was reading myself. Let me explain what I’m talking about. First off, what are we gathering from this Rand fellow based on what I’ve just read to you? Many would say that he is doing the worst things you can do as a human: torturing, killing and finding pleasure in them, and, truly, this is all he knows. However, this behavior changes with one action. He has an experience. He is exposed to the force, and, because of this, he finds that he loves this Jedi woman that showed it to him, and this was one of DeathTrooper’s main parallels to Paul as, he too, found a love for God through his “exposure” to God like Atton with the force. But Atton Rand is not just exposed to the Force… but love. He can feel it, but… it’s not her love for him… it’s his love for her, and it is for this reason that I can pretty confidently say that Rand killed her because he did not want to love her. Why else would you kill someone because you love them? However, I left out the thing that stood out to me the most. It’s this small detail in what Rand says when he’s specifically describing the feeling he had towards the Jedi: “It’s the type of love where you are willing to give up everything for someone you don’t even know.” What Atton is describing is a feeling that I know all too well. It’s a perfect way of describing the irrational, abrupt, uncontrollable surge of caring for someone that I have been plagued with, and that, like Rand, I wanted nothing more than to be rid of. It's an uncomfortable feeling. In a way, it’s painful, at least, for me it is, and, I’m not going to jump to conclusions, but, perhaps it was for Rand as well.
I don’t know if you’ve seen it; I certainly don’t recommend it since it is, quite possibly, one of my least favorite movies that I’ve watched in a long time, this movie being, Thor: Love and Thunder, and, I won’t lie, there were some elements that I really liked, like the use and removal of color, but, mostly, I just watched it for Christian Bale and the character he portrays in the film: Gorr, the god butcher, and, while I feel like his character could have been executed much better, he had a solid motive for doing what he does, even though it is, by all means wrong. Going into the movie, (by the way, this is just my preference, obviously) but I was expecting it to be a bit worse than the last Thor movie: Ragnarok in its tone and overall presentation, however, what I was not expecting was the opening. Compared to what the rest of the movie would become, it was brutally serious. Unlike the neon promo for the film, the desert we are put into is uncomfortably dull, and the characters in that desert, Gorr and his daughter, have so much sand on them that they look as though they are a part of the desert. This is to say, the desert stripped them of any of their own characterized color. As some time passes, Gorr’s daughter, to Bale’s heartbreak, dies in his arms, and when he finds an oasis in the desert inhabited by the god he worshiped, he finds that the god he had suffered for was actually a bit of a jerk and didn’t care a thing for Gorr or his daughter. So, what is the only thing a character in Gorr’s position would do? He takes the sword of revenge and kills the god, vowing to do so to all gods. Now, where am I going with all of this? Well, because of all of the trauma he faces, in a monologue later on in the movie, he gives further insight into his motive, and I forget exactly what he says, but what I do remember is him bluntly saying “Love is Pain.” as if it was nothing else but pain.
Maybe a part of it was that it was something ok in the sea of torment I was enduring to keep watching, but that line, that delivery, hit me hard. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Gorr was right, and I suppose that that was the whole meaning of the film that, with love, comes the inevitable truth that pain will follow. Coming back to our franchise, look at where love takes our characters. Anakin: bondage, Padme: heartbreak, Obi-Wan: suffering, Satine: death, Luke: torture, Andor: heartbreak, Ahsoka: despair, Mando: loneliness, the list goes on seemingly infinitely. With love comes loss, always, whether through the inevitability of death, the possibility of separation, the sharing of other’s loss through love and it brings up the question of why? Why not become like Atton Rand and let love die, killing it if you have to? Why does anyone love?
Love is not a choice we have much say in, is it? Think about someone you would say you love. How did your love for them come to be? I know when I was a little youngling, I never chose to love my parents any more than I did my sibling, yet I do. For me, I can’t think of a time I actively chose to love someone. A good example of this is Din Djarin’s story. Why did Mando go back for Grogu? We certainly never see Mando choose to love him. This aspect of love is best seen in Din’s character, because, as we spend more time with him, we perceive him as someone who isn’t emotionally attached to anyone, not even his Mandalorian family. He cares about them, but it feels like it is from a distance. While he may not realize it, he goes back for Grogu because he loves him. Why? Because he found joy in Grogu’s presence. We love because we find joy in their presence: in them. It was said beautifully in the Revenge of the Sith novelization that, yes, the strongest light makes the darkest shadow, but love… love can ignite the stars. It makes you feel outside of yourself, like the person you love is an extension of yourself. Love is sacrificial. John 15:13 says that, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” And this is a part of the reason why love can make us hurt, because if they are hurting, we are hurt too, and, while this seems like the curse of love, it is really it’s power, because it is the result of our care for them. It demonstrates our love in an other worldly way. It is incredible that, only because they are hurting, we hurt too along with them, and it is a beautiful thing. Love is a beautiful thing. But, the odd aspect of it is that there seems to be shades of love, Rand points this out by distinguishing what he felt, which was evidently different from “normal” love. They are all different and feel different, and there have been a few that I have experienced.
The first I would like to go over with you is perhaps the one we are most familiar with, or, at least, the one I am most familiar with which is the kind we are born into. The love we have for our families is, I believe to be, one of the simplest and most wholesome out of any. When we are children, our first introduction to the notion of love is perhaps from our parents telling us that they love us, and, because of this, we say that we love them in return, even if we might not really understand what we are really meaning by it. My conclusion is that, because our parents love us, we love our parents, it’s not what they did or made us feel, because, while we can look back and see all they did for us, we couldn’t appreciate how needy were, and while we can look back and see that they made us smile, we weren’t conscious that the joy we felt came from our interaction with them. All we knew is that they loved us, and that, somehow, it was only fit for us love as well. Adding siblings to the mix is also interesting, because, heck, they’re growing up and learning right there with you, but, without even being told to, we extend love to them, as well. Now, what I find most interesting about this type of love is that, at least as a child, it does not feel surface level, this meaning, it doesn’t feel as prominent as, say, in a romantic relationship, and this feeling could, I suppose, also be applied to our friends that, while we might not say it, deep down, we do love them, even if not as intensely or obviously as we would our family. I think this may be able to be compared to Luke’s relationship with Vader, where, yes, he doesn’t have any indication that Vader loves him, but, all the same, Luke loves his father because he knows that his dad can love, and perhaps he thinks Vader can love him. That, deep down, his father does love him. He never gives up this hope, as WriterBuddah would point out, just like his mother. As it turned out, Vader did love Luke as we see in the Darth Vader 2020 comic series. Vader, as well as parents in general, don’t really have a reason to love their children, or, perhaps a better way of saying it is that they don’t have a reason to find joy in their child, despite them finding that joy, nonetheless. In those comics, we see a confused Vader who goes to great lengths in pursuit of Luke. Why? Because he loves him, even if Vader doesn’t realize it. This can also be seen between Mando and Grogu where Mando’s parental care for the little guy drives him to risk everything he has, and pretty much costs him everything he has, with the Bounty Hunter Guild revoking him and hunting him down, his Mandalorian clan all but perishing and going as far to shed his ideology because of his love for Grogu. And the thing about it is that Mando doesn’t have a logical reason to love Grogu. Yes, you could argue that he sees himself in Grogu, which as you might point out, is a definite parallel in the show, but you would think that, if that was his only motive, he wouldn’t be so attached to Grogu after he gives him over to his “kind”: the Jedi. We hear it in his voice while attempting to of rescue Grogu, and we see it in his face as he hands him over to Luke. While Mando did all he did for himself in the beginning, Mando finds joy in Grogu by just Grogu doing Grogu things. Eventually, Grogu becomes his motive. It relates back to the idea that love makes you do incredible things, and Din Djarin’s story with Grogu is pretty incredible when you think about it.
Secondly, there is the love of pleasure and this is where things start becoming seriously blurred. While there is a love that gives everything it has, there is a love that takes everything it can, and it is something everyone is susceptible to. As I have written on before, it is my belief that Anakin really didn’t love Padme for the right reasons, because their relationship is about his happiness rather than hers. This is seen in Revenge of the Sith where, despite Padme telling Anakin not to worry about her, he makes it clear that she has no say in the lengths he goes to to save her. In fact, he goes as far as killing everyone else close to him, just in the attempt of keeping her tied to him. There is nothing he more vehemently hates than when his connection to Padme is threatened. This particularly demonstrated through Clovis, who he proceeded to molly-whop because of his intentions with Padme. However, the biggest red flag in the episode was not that, if you can believe it. Rather, it was the fact that Anakin didn’t even trust Padme to stay by him, as if he has to make her only loyal to him. The worst evidence for Anakin’s love of pleasure is, once more, in Revenge of the Sith. As he goes further and further into his hate, he also goes further and further into an indescribable surge of power that… he loves. He loves it so much that even Padme doesn’t seem that important anymore, and, heck, so what if she’s against you! You don’t need her anymore. And that is why Anakin choked her in the end. Now, I don’t think he was going to kill her, but he certainly wanted to punish her. It’s also an interesting picture of the slave becoming the slaver, because, I think there was an obvious part of Anakin that still wanted Padme around, he just didn’t want to beat around the bush anymore. However, this is all to say that, do you see that this type of love is nothing like love at all? Yes, indeed, it is a deep caring for something or someone, but not because of them, because of you. The test of true love in Anakin and Padme’s case was if Anakin could let her go, setting her free from his need of her. In other’s it might be if they continue to love someone when their bank account is empty or if their physical beauty has faded, Even if they hurt you near to your end, do you still love them?
While we have a love we are born into and an impure love, there is one that seems to be in between the two, and this is the love we have for others. Whether it be our friends or as far as a spouse, this is one we gain as we walk through our lives, and, oddly, it varies in intensity as well as feeling. It is a dangerous love because of how confusing it can be to feel so deeply that you’re right, yet to realize you’ve failed all the same. I began to question love after questioning what I felt towards certain romantic interests of mine, because I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. It wasn’t what I felt towards my family, and I knew that, that was love. Over the course of my life, my personal battleground, my inner demon is connected to this third “love” one way or another. Through the years, there will be this random girl that I’ll get randomly obsessed over, and I’ll just ask myself and God why? Why do I feel the way I do? He has shown me the reason many a time and helped me determine that it was my own pleasure I pursued, however, in that, I became confused and disillusioned by this type of love, because, everytime, it was for an ignorant reason or the wrong reason, and I deemed that anytime I felt the way I did towards someone, it was the same curse, and I constantly pushed it away, never stopping to really observe it, and the defense I used became my attacker. Instead of becoming consumed by the person, I became consumed by my struggle with my feeling, and I suffered because of it. I couldn’t rest, not in the physical sense, but just emotionally. I felt like it was all my battle, and I couldn’t accept that God might have actually given the feeling I had for a reason rather than one of my own. I tried killing my feelings, but God had other plans. I tried to deny it and asked Him to take it away, and He would sometimes grant me my wish, but it was worse than having the feeling in the first place. It was horrible, like corrupting something innocent. However, after one particularly bad day with this struggle, I really started to write this paper, and I talked with God about what about it made me so miserable. After, as I was laying down in my bed just before I went to sleep, I asked Him if He wanted me to read the Bible, and He lead me to this verse that I randomly flipped to. You know what was ironic about it? It was written by Paul! The very guy who parallels Rand in so many ways! I found it in his first letter to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1:5. He says “The purpose of my instruction is that all believers would be filled with love that comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience and genuine faith.” What stood out to me was the list that Paul gave Timothy of what elements Godly love is born from, and the one in particular that I was taken by was a clear conscience. It was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment, because it is exactly what I lacked. While, yes, I lack a clean heart, the thing that got me into this mess was nothing but a condemning conscious. You see, my friend, the real reason I did not want to love this particular person wasn’t found in any flaw in the reason I loved her; it was found in my guilt of who I am and the thought of potentially letting her down by my sin-filled-ways. How could I inflict my wicked self on someone I love? My thoughts laid on the fact that I was unworthy to love anyone in such a way, that I never wanted them to look at me, knowing just how freaking screwed up I am. I know I’m sounding as self-righteous as heck, but it's actually selfish of me to care so much about what someone else thinks of me, because, while there is a sense that I am sinful, I am not defined by that my sin. God has redefined me and says that I am dead to that part of me. If I am defined by God, why would I let anything else define me except Him? However, the reason I share this with you is because, looking back on Atton Rand, I think that this might be the real reason he killed her.
When the female Jedi opened Atton’s mind to the force, she opened his conscience to what he was doing to it, the pain he impaled into so many and the suffering he carved in those he tortured. In that, I think the guilt of his past clashed horribly with the sincerity of his love, and he couldn’t bare it, so he did the only thing he could think to escape it while keeping his own life: he killed what he deemed the source of it. The worst part about it is that, like me, he regretted it. His action didn’t make the pain better, it made it worse. I have never played kotor, so I don’t know if or how Rand overcame this stage in his life, but I know how I am. It is only by giving my love to God and allowing him to direct it in any way he wants, and accepting that love that God has given me. If I get in another rut with another corrupt love, I should observe it with God, and, perhaps, in his mercy, he will pardon me from it. All of this to say, do you realize how incredibly messed up love can be? It will always confuse me how something as understood as an I love you can turn into a tangled not that I can’t unravel.
Over my years on the earth, I’ve come to the realization that people seem to be obsessed with love. Most songs I hear that have lyrics are about love, whether it is about a break-up or trying to get into a romantic relationship with someone. It is often seen in the stories we read, watch, and listen to, and it is even regularly spoken about on social media where people joke about how their crush doesn’t notice them or some other jab at their desire for it. It’s curious to me that, as humans, floating on a speck of dust compared to the overwhelming vastness of the unknown beauty of the galaxy, so many have become engrossed by love. I mean, look at me. I’ve spent hours of my life writing this paper that, lo and behold, you, my dear friend, are reading! The thing that stands out to me the most is how confused so many are about what it is, just like me, even if they don’t realize it. It is the same tune that plays through the characters in the stories we enjoy, as they too struggle with it as much as we do. Had God not intervened, I would not have any idea about my love being wrong in any way, because right now more than ever, it seems like more and more people are interpreting love as things that don’t matter, and it’s saddening. By saying this, I don’t mean to say that “I have the only right interpretation of love.” or even that you have the wrong interpretation, rather, I think I am right there with everyone else. The only reason I know as much as I do (which is barely anything, I fear) is, once more, because of God and what He has shown me, and I’m still scared of it. The battle is never over, however, this evolution is.
There is something special about Star Wars and love. This universe seems to use it in so many of its stories in so many ways, yet often not using it to give characters joy, but give them pain, instead I can’t help but think of Obi-Wan Kenobi who walked through so much pain because of his love for so many. You would think that after so much loss due to love, he would stop loving, but he continued to through watching over Luke, which, though we know that there was nothing Obi-Wan would have rather done, was still a sacrifice. He knew that Anakin would have wanted to keep his son safe, and, because of his love for Anakin, Obi-Wan loved Luke. We see him love until his last breath, as he faces Vader, preventing him from capturing Anakin’s son. Love was Obi-Wan’s greatest burden, but it was also his greatest beauty. He loved when there was no benefit to himself. Interestingly, this is the opposite of Anakin, who seemed to only love for his own desires. While Anakin sought to bind those he cared for to his reality, Obi-Wan let them go freely. While Anakin existed for love, Obi-Wan existed to love. Their dynamic perfectly explains the complex duality of love in such a concise way. It can be so safely pure, yet so dangerously twisted. It can cause people to draw as close as the air you breathe or drift as far as the east is from the west. It can make you feel an unending euphoria or an incomprehensible depth to your emptiness. Love is joy, and love is pain.
We are at the end. This essay has been one unlike any other that I’ve written, and, perhaps unlike one you have ever read. As you can tell, this is at my core right now, and I have been troubled by it for what seems like my entire life. To think that I would find a small measure of peace through Star Wars, this community, writing and, most importantly, God. Not to mention Thor: Love & Thunder, lol. It just goes to show that God can use anything. By the way, I would like to say that I hope you know that I don’t expect for a word of what I’ve said to resonate with you like it has me, particularly about God, which, I realize many of you perhaps do not believe in as I do. However, it would both be a disservice to Him and you, if I didn’t speak the truth. I just wanted you to know that I understand that not all my views will reflect your own. At the end of the day, this is just my interpretation that has been forged by my experiences with it. If nothing else, I hope you were at least entertained by my essay, regardless of if you cringed, laughed or smiled. All that I can say is thank you for listening to me. I have no idea why you did, but I hope you were blessed by it. Also, the fact that I published this essay as close to Valentine’s day as I did is purely ironically coincidental ;).
Lastly, I would like to deeply thank @DeathTrooper100 for her essay and the small amount of time she gave to me that, though she did not realize it at the time, would be used in my life. Thank you, Trooper!
I’ll see you at the beginning, my friends.
May the Force Be Forever With You!
