Re: Kathleen Kennedy to step down from Lucasfilm?
Again it's all audience perspective, Luke taught himself to use telekinesis in the Wampa cave, we clearly see him concentrating on the attempt. I didn't get any sense that any outside influence was making him do it. Anakin made all his own choices in the PT, I can see how Palpatine was manipulating him with clever suggestion but none of it even required mind tricks. Anakin was a really unsympathetic character for me, he comes off as a whiny brat without much depth. That's likely a combination of poor writing, acting and directing though. It's why I don't pay much attention to the PT except as fan fiction. The continuity issues with the OT make it hard to line the stories up.
I think Anakin makes sense overall, I just find his story to be....not the story I want to see about a character in his position.
The PT does a decent job of illustrating that he has SERIOUS unresolved separation anxiety. Like, super-duper deep-seated stuff. It makes sense. He grew up a slave, however well-treated he might've been. He left his mother to join the Jedi order at age 9, when he was too old and had already formed attachments to his mother. He had to leave her as a slave, as well. Then he comes home, finds out she's been captured, goes to rescue her, she dies, and he LOSES HIS DAMN MIND and kills every creature in the entire village of sand people. Women and kids, too. Then he's sad about it, but hooray! He gets to transfer all his anxiety to Padme! Also he marries her. In spite of the fact that Jedi are forbidden to marry (which we were told...uh...in the trailer). Anyway, he turns to the dark side to save Padme, and then when she rejects him, he gets mad at her and "kills" her because he thinks all the bad stuff he did was for nothing.
So, basically...massive unresolved separation anxiety issues lead to the downfall of the Jedi.
He's a much more interesting character in the Clone Wars cartoon, because they actually take time to develop him.
You ask me, the seeds of a much more interesting idea are present in two lines of dialogue about him. AND you could still include the attachment disorder thing without making it be the sole reason for his turning. Basically, showcase Anakin getting attached to fellow Jedi, Clone troopers, civilians, whatever, all int he course of the Clone Wars. They get killed, he's furious, but he's told to hold back, and/or the bureaucrats in the Senate stop the Jedi from saving people because of the larger picture or something. ("Acceptable losses.") Anakin decides to go to the dark side because he believes that it's his duty to stop anything like the Clone Wars from EVER happening again, he thinks that can be done through the exertion of force and strength, and he's arrogant enough to believe he can control his fall to the dark side and bend it to his will. All of that would tie back to his hinting at a benevolent dictatorship in AOTC, and his desire to bring "order to the galaxy and end this destructive conflict" in ESB. I'd find that a lot more interesting than "I miss my mom and so I WILL KILL EVERYONE!!!!!!"
