Palpatine: *literally using a DEADLY force move against Mace Windu*
Mace Windu: *defending himself, because if he stops for even a MOMENT he will be killed by the lightening he’s redirecting*
Mace: Anakin this man, who is literally actively trying to kill me in such a way if I stop this defensive stance I will die, is too dangerous to live. He is currently ACTIVELY trying to kill me, right now.
Anakin: This isn’t the Jedi way.
Anakin stans and people who hate Mace for no reason: SEE Mace is BAD and WRONG, him insisting that a man who just murdered three of his fellows and is STILL actively attempting to murder him as the scene takes place means it’s just like Anakin beheading a disarmed and non-resisting Dooku. MACE IS BAD!!!1!
In RotS, does Anakin walk past the dead Jedi Masters and not even look at them?? Aren’t their bodies there? Did Lucas have the dead bodies removed without explanation?? In reality those dead Jedi Masters should still be there. Anakin should have seen them and known Palpatine killed them. Mace had every right to kill Palpatine if he had the chance.
Are we missing the whole face melting and meekly surrendering act that Palpy put up quite convincingly?
If Anakin is fool enough to believe a man who had clearly already killed three people, and attacked Mace with deadly force lightning right in front of him, and is clearly causing his own face melting by continuing his attack, that’s his own absolute buffoonery.
No one missed it. It was just neither convincing to the audience, nor should it have been to Anakin. Anakin knows Palpatine is the Sith Master they’ve been looking for this whole time. He knows Palpatine has already murdered the other Jedi sent to arrest him. He sees that Palpatine is still trying to kill Mace in that very moment.
Trying to claim that Anakin was actually sincerely convinced by Palpatine’s sudden meek-helpless act while the man continues to spew lightning at Mace’s face, surrounded by the corpses of those he’s already murdered, is putting a really, really low bar on Anakin’s intelligence level and abilities of perception. More plausible, Anakin has something he desperately wants to personally gain in this scenario (the survival of his wife, which Palpatine is dangling in front of him the whole time) and chooses to throw out all actual context of what’s going on along with any wider ethical considerations. He chooses to take the action that will most benefit himself in the end. Heck, he doesn’t even give a hoot about what Padme would want him to do in that moment (I betcha a dollar it’s not help murder folks for the guy who deceived the Senate and all of the Republic citizens for over a decade about his identity in order to amass more and more executive powers) and it’s her life that’s purportedly on the line.
He even knows he’s done wrong, he immediately says ‘What have I done?’ in the wake of Mace’s murder. But he’s made his choice and he has to convince himself there’s no going back. Anakin-as-Vader chooses to bury himself so deep into denial to be able to live with himself in the wake of his own choices that it takes him decades to dig back out.
But back to OP’s point…yeah, there’s obviously a vastly different context between Mace calling for an ally to help with a killing blow while clearly fighting for his life in open combat against an opponent literally actively trying to murder him vs Anakin deciding to behead a disarmed, kneeling opponent, entirely at his mercy, whose hands he has already sliced off. Not much point in trying to deflect from that. One would have been an act of collective self-defense, the other was the murder of an unarmed prisoner.
There’s got to be a lot of bias in place to try to claim otherwise.
