Chujinshu the dimensional mage

I get the preference for Aragorn. He is a strong fictional model: principle over mood, duty over self-interest, and he risks life and love without becoming their slave. But the identification with Anakin is tracking a different pattern. Aragorn knew he was the heir, was trained for it, excelled, and lived as an outsider by choice until the moment to claim the throne. He was not told he was essential and then kept at arm’s length. He was not required to renounce ordinary goods on the theory that keeping them would make him the threat. Anakin is declared the Chosen One from the start, pushed hard, and treated as indispensable to the plan. He is then repeatedly told he is not ready, not trusted with full status or full information, and that attachment itself will lead to catastrophe. The order that needs his power also withholds the ordinary trust and recognition that would make the sacrifice voluntary rather than coerced. That sequence is what many young men are mapping onto their own experience of high expectations, institutional skepticism, and demands that they forgo future and family so that others can be secure. Aragorn never lived that particular contradiction. Anakin is closer to the child in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”: the one whose private cost is treated as the price of everyone else’s moral order. Aragorn is the figure who can take the throne without needing that arrangement to continue. Yes, young men would do well to emulate Aragorn. But they feel empathy with Anakin because Aragorn is the beautiful ideal and Anakin is the experience they have had. It is the job of older men to stop the shame-scolding and give the young men a real opportunity to become the Aragorn.