When the Prequel Trilogy was first released,
its portrayal of Anakin Skywalker was one of its most controversial elements, with many
older fans unable to reconcile the Prequels’ depiction of Anakin with the Original Trilogy’s
depiction of Darth Vader. Even though popular opinion of Prequel Anakin has softened, many
still struggle to reconcile Anakin and Vader, so much so that they consider the hero of the
Clone Wars and the black-armored Sith Lord to be separate personalities. But as dissimilar
as they might seem, Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were indeed the same person. The character
of Anakin Skywalker was complex and tortured, at once a valiant hero and a heartless
murderer, incapable of fitting almost any character archetype. Today, in our first
long-form video, hopefully among many more, we’ll be giving Anakin’s character the
attention it deserves as we work out an answer to two deceptively simple questions: who
was Anakin Skywalker, and what made him tick? Before we begin, we’ve got a quick reading
recommendation for you. In this video, we’ll be quoting a lot from Matthew Stover’s
novelization of Revenge of the Sith, which we’ll be referring to as the Novelization hereafter.
If you like Star Wars content and have a few dollars to spare, please go buy the novelization
once this video’s over. We can’t stress enough how fantastic it is. It’s better than the film -
hell, it’s better than all of the films - and it will give you a new perspective on Star Wars
and the characters of the Prequel Trilogy. With that out of the way, let’s begin. There were many ways to describe Anakin Skywalker.
He was brave, arrogant, cunning, quick to anger but deeply compassionate, and flippant but deeply
concerned with what others thought of him. But we’re going to start with how the galactic
public described him - as the Hero With No Fear. It was the HoloNet News that assigned him
this nickname during the Clone Wars, and it was a fairly surface-level summation of Anakin’s bravery
and audacity in combat. To the general public, Anakin Skywalker was the greatest of the Jedi. He
was a warrior who could and would defeat entire armies singlehandedly, a fighter pilot with an
unprecedentedly long list of confirmed kills, and a commander whose battle strategies strode
the line between genius and insanity. The galaxy looked at what Anakin Skywalker did and could
only conclude that he was completely fearless. Of course, in those days, Anakin was also seen as
a hero. He was a constant champion of the Republic and its professed values. Those who knew him
personally saw him as a deeply compassionate man, hellbent on saving the day whenever he could.
Then there’s Darth Vader. Vader was fear itself, a terrifying presence that few dared defy. He
was totally devoid of compassion and humanity, an utterly ruthless being who cared
little for the lives of those around him. Few would guess that he had once been
Anakin Skywalker, the Hero With No Fear. But Skywalker’s heroism and Vader’s ruthlessness
ultimately came from the same place. What some see as different personalities were, in reality,
different aspects of the same core essence, a collection of values, attitudes, and
personality traits that Anakin held from childhood to death. The development of
these traits, naturally, began on Tatooine. The fact that Anakin Skywalker started life
as a slave doesn’t get nearly enough attention during discussions about his personality.
During the formative years of his life, Anakin was treated as property, as subhuman, by everyone except his mother and a handful
of friends, of whom most were also slaves. He was owned first by the ruthless Gardulla
the Hutt and then by Watto, and he suffered abuse under both masters. That sort of thing
sticks with people for life. Anakin’s enslaved years had profound influences on his personality,
though they were often subtle and easy to miss. By the Battle of Coruscant, Anakin was
thirteen years removed from slavehood, and in the films, it might even seem like he’s
put his life on Tatooine behind him. But a quick line from the Novelization, which
details a sequence in which Anakin uses trauma from his past as a weapon against
Count Dooku, tells a different story. “When Count Dooku flies at him, blade flashing, Watto’s fist cracks out from Anakin’s childhood
to knock the Sith Lord tumbling back.” Anakin left Tatooine with plenty of scars,
most of them psychological. Firstly, his experiences there had a profound
impact on how Anakin saw himself. As a slave, Anakin wasn’t seen as a person,
and he was deeply conscious of this. It didn’t help that, upon joining the Jedi, Anakin
suddenly went from being seen as property to being seen as the Chosen One. Suddenly, he found himself
surrounded by powerful Jedi who saw him as a being of prophecy. Now, Anakin was given respect - but
he could also sense that many Jedi Masters didn’t trust him. Some of those who believed he was the
Chosen One treated him like a ticking time-bomb. His own master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, was
among them; Obi-Wan was never confident in his ability to train Anakin, which Anakin
sensed and interpreted as a personal failure. This gave Anakin some serious self-esteem issues.
He was very arrogant and overconfident in his abilities; he was powerful and he knew it. But
at the same time, he was very self-conscious, and how he believed others felt about him
had an outsized effect on how he viewed himself. This was one of the reasons he grew so
close with Palpatine as a Padawan. The Supreme Chancellor showered him with positive
affirmation, which the Jedi rarely did. In addition, slavery left Anakin with a pivotal
character trait - his fear of losing others. Anakin and his mother stuck together during
their time enslaved, but a great many enslaved families weren’t so lucky. The children of slaves
were often taken from their mothers and sold, or the other way around. Anakin’s childhood on
Tatooine was overshadowed by the ever-present threat that Watto would sell his mother, something
that Watto occasionally threatened to do when his profits were on the decline. As a slave,
all Anakin really had in life was his mother, whom he grew fiercely attached to. The thought
of being separated from her terrified him. Of course, Anakin ended up leaving his mother
anyway, one of the hardest decisions he ever made. That act haunted him for the next decade, so
much so that, during his time as a Padawan at the Jedi Temple, he avoided making friends, not
wanting to suffer loss ever again. It didn’t help that the next time he saw his mother, she died
in his arms. This only intensified what was, by that point, a defining part of
his character - his stark refusal to lose the people he cared about.
We’ll talk about that more in a bit. All of this brought a real intensity to Anakin’s
relationships. Due to his experiences growing up, Anakin had serious attachment issues.
When he started to care about someone, he got really protective of them, as much as
he’d been with his mother as a child. The people Anakin were close with were all he really
had in life and all he really cared about. They were also the source of his self-worth.
He built his world around his mother, Obi-Wan, Padmé, and Palpatine. Beyond the small circle
of the people who meant everything to him, nothing else mattered. Nothing else even
made sense to him. To quote the Novelization: “Yoda and Mace exchanged glances, both
thoughtfully grim. Obi-Wan guessed they were remembering the times Anakin had violated orders
- the times he had put at risk entire operations, the lives of thousands, the control of
whole planetary systems - to save a friend. More than once, in fact, to save Obi-Wan. ‘I think,’ Obi-Wan said carefully,
‘that abstractions like peace don’t mean much to him. He’s loyal to people, not to
principles. And he expects loyalty in return. He will stop at nothing to save me, for example,
because he thinks I would do the same for him.’ Mace and Yoda gazed at him steadily,
and Obi-Wan had to lower his head. ‘Because,’ he admitted reluctantly, ‘he
knows I would do the same for him.’” Anakin’s worldview was extremely simplistic.
He stood by the people he cared about and would do anything to protect them. That
was really the extent of his motivations; he theoretically believed in things like
peace and justice as well, but those sorts of concepts didn’t really register with him. To
Anakin, all things like peace and justice meant were the people he cared about being treated
well, and viewed any threat to his loved ones as unequivocally evil, which was an incredibly
black and white approach to morality. To him, there was only good and evil, nothing in between.
Even as a Jedi, Anakin hated those he saw as evil, those he saw as the enemy. Anything that
threatened those he cared about enraged him, often driving him to commit acts of brutality unbecoming
of a Jedi. He was always perfectly willing to kill or torture anyone who threatened his friends; to
him, they were evil, and that meant they deserved everything he did to them. This aspect of his
worldview was what drove him to massacre the Sand People, to torture Poggle the Lesser and
other Separatists during the Clone Wars, and ultimately to butcher younglings in Jedi Temple.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves there. As is usually the case, the
anger and hate Anakin felt towards his enemies stemmed from
fear. To quote the Novelization: “HoloNet features call him the Hero With No Fear.
And why not? What should he be afraid of? Except - Fear lives inside him anyway, chewing
away the firewalls around his heart. Anakin sometimes thinks of the dread that eats
at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside
the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that
power everything from starships to Podracers. But Anakin’s fear is another kind
of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind. Not long after he became Obi-Wan’s
Padawan, all those years ago, a minor mission had brought them to a dead
system: one so immeasurably old that its star had long ago turned to a frigid dwarf of
hypercompacted trace metals. Anakin couldn’t even remember what the mission might have
been, but he’d never forgotten that dead star. It had scared him. ‘Stars can die-?’ ‘It is the way of the universe, which
is another manner of saying that it is the will of the Force,’ Obi-Wan had
told him. ‘Everything dies. In time, even stars burn out. This is why Jedi
form no attachments: all things pass’ That is the kind of fear that lives inside
Anakin Skywalker: the dragon of that dead star. It is an ancient, cold dead voice within
his heart that whispers all things die… The dragon reminds him, every night, that someday he will lose Obi-Wan. He
will lose Padmé. Or they will lose him. All things die, Anakin
Skywalker. Even stars burn out…” Anakin was never really afraid for his own life,
but he was terrified about losing others. Obi-Wan, Padmé, Palpatine, Ahsoka, Rex, and even R2
meant the world to him; he depended on his attachments to them for his sense of self,
and everything he did, he did for them. To lose any of them would be to lose a part
of himself. This was what made Anakin push himself so hard, to endlessly yearn to be the
best in everything. Part of it was trying to please the people he cared about, and part
of it was a lack of self-esteem, but it was also because he wanted to be able to save
everyone he loved. Especially after Shmi died, he became determined to never lose anyone
else again. To return to the Novelization: “That’s what makes him a real hero.
Not the way the HoloNet labels him; not without fear, but stronger than fear. He looks the dragon in the eye
and doesn’t even slow down. If anyone can save Palpatine, Anakin
will. Because he’s already the best, and he’s still getting better. But locked
away behind the walls of his heart, the dragon that is his fear
coils and squirms and hisses. Because his real fear, in a
universe where even stars can die, is that being the best will
never be quite good enough.” As Yoda predicted it would, Anakin’s fear of
loss led to anger, then hate, and eventually to suffering. What Anakin feared was inevitable,
no matter what he did, but he could never bring himself to accept that. He could never come to
terms even with the idea of his loved ones dying. This, as we all know, let him down the path to the
Dark Side. You see, there was a reason the Jedi forbade emotional attachments, why they recruited
only young children and raised them in a secluded temple. It was because attachments could lead
to possession - seeing another person as yours. Anakin is the perfect example of this. Consider
his relationship with Padmé. He loved her, obviously, and he was extremely attached to
her, more afraid to lose her than anyone else. When he began having visions of Padmé’s impending
death, it terrified him so much that he refused to sleep and became hellbent on finding a way
to save her. But what’s often overlooked is that Padmé didn’t share his concerns at all. She
didn’t think she was going to die in childbirth, but she was perfectly willing to
accept death if it came for her. Her acceptance, however, did nothing to affect
Anakin’s judgment. This was because he wasn’t afraid of losing her for her sake, but for
his own. That wasn’t love, but selfishness. It’s a common misconception that
the Jedi were forbidden to love. In Attack of the Clones, Anakin
actually says the opposite: There is, of course, a difference between love
and attachment. Note that, in the sense the Jedi would use it, “attachment” is just a synonym
for “possession.” In more conventional use, we might deem any sort of shared love an
emotional attachment, but the Jedi would not. For the Jedi, the difference between love
and attachment was one of selflessness versus selfishness. Love was pure and accepted
whatever was best for the other person, whereas attachment usually involved a refusal
to let go of the other person. At the extreme, attachments led people to prioritize their
wants above the other person’s needs. For normal people, emotional attachments
in the Jedi sense weren’t inherently destructive, though obviously any
possessive relationship is toxic. But Jedi weren’t normal people. They were
Force-sensitives, and that meant they had to maintain constant vigilance against the Dark
Side. The Jedi worked so hard to avoid attachments because they were the easiest path to the Dark
Side. If you’re not willing to let someone go, it’s easy to let others suffer to save the people
you care about. Anakin Skywalker was perhaps the best possible example of why this policy
was so important. To quote the Novelization: "Anakin has no interest in serene
acceptance of what the Force will bring. Not here. Not now. Not with
the lives of Palpatine and Obi-Wan at stake. It's just the opposite - he seizes
upon the Force with the stark refusal to fail. He will land this ship. He will save his friends. Between his will and the Will of
the Force, there is no contest." In case you were wondering, this was
what using the Dark Side was like. That was the real dichotomy between Light and Dark -
Lightsiders surrendered to the Will of the Force, accepting whatever was best for the universe,
while Darksiders rejected it, pursuing their own selfish desires. Anakin did this a fair bit,
even before falling to the Dark Side completely. Truth be told, Anakin was never really cut
out to be a Jedi. He should’ve been sent to a therapist after the Battle of Naboo, not
the Jedi Temple. But fate had other plans, and while Anakin Skywalker walked the path of
the Jedi, the Dark Side loomed over him. As a Padawan, Anakin did his best to stick
to Jedi doctrine and avoid attachments; as we mentioned earlier, for the early years of
his training, he tried to avoid making friends, in part for this reason. But attachment
was something that, by that point, was hard-baked into his psychology. He ended up
becoming attached to Obi-Wan and Palpatine, and he remained attached to his mother and Padmé, even
though they weren’t really in his life anymore. When heand Padmé reunited during the events
of Attack of the Clones, Anakin’s efforts to be a good Jedi fell apart. After the outbreak
of the Clone Wars and his marriage to Padmé, everything spiraled out of control. He gave
up on trying to control his attachments, and in doing so, he fed the dragon in his heart,
to use the Novelization’s metaphor. The stronger his attachments grew, the more he feared for the
people around him, and the more afraid he became, the more attached he grew. Over the course of
the Clone Wars, this eternally escalating cycle started to unravel him. He drew increasingly
on the Dark Side until, one day, he snapped. The Dark Side was addictive. It brought instant
gratification, but of an empty sort that left the user wanting more. For Anakin, the Dark Side
promised to save the ones he loved, whereas the Light Side meant simply accepting their deaths.
The thing about saving someone, however, is that it’s impermanent. You can save someone’s life a
thousand times; they will still eventually die. Because of this, it wasn’t enough for Anakin to
draw on the Dark Side once to save his loved ones; he would have to do it again and again. After
he started having visions of Padmé’s death, he began craving more power so that
he could save her life indefinitely. This was how the path to
the Dark Side usually went. The details differed, but the pattern was the
same - Jedi would reject the lessons of the Light Side and charge down an empty road to hell
in a vain quest for increasingly greater power. Truth be told, Anakin could have won the
battle with his dragon. Victory would have meant acceptance. At the end of the day,
his fear was right - he would, one day, lose everyone. If he accepted that, if
he had let go, it would have been hard, but it would have ultimately been the better
path, as Yoda told him in Revenge of the Sith. In the moment, it would have destroyed Anakin
on a fundamental level, but it was a wound he could have recovered from. Sometimes, when
a broken bone heals improperly, you have to break it again and set it correctly.
But that wasn’t the path Anakin took. Unfortunately for Anakin, Yoda wasn’t the only
one who offered him advice after he started envisioning Padmé’s death. Palpatine did as well,
and this secret Sith Lord echoed the promises of the Dark Side. Palpatine offered an easier way,
a quicker way, a means of attaining the power to keep Padmé alive forever. In other words,
Palpatine offered Anakin a lie - one Anakin believed. By that point, Anakin had all but fallen
to the Dark Side, as he was desperate to save Padmé and win his battle with fear, whatever the
cost. To Anakin, the choice between Padmé and the Jedi wasn’t a choice at all. Once his shock and
the last tattered remnants of his belief in the Jedi were gone, it was a simple matter for him
to accept the title of Darth Vader. To Anakin, that name, that new identity, was a promise of
victory over his fear. To quote the Novelization: “The Sith Lord who once had been a Jedi
hero called Anakin Skywalker stood, drawing himself up to his full height, but
he looked not outward upon his new Master, nor upon the planet-city beyond, nor out
into the galaxy that they would soon rule. He instead turned his gaze inward: he unlocked the
furnace gate within his heart and stepped forth to regard with new eyes the cold freezing dread of
the dead-star dragon that had haunted his life. I am Darth Vader, he said within himself. The dragon tried again to whisper of failure, and weakness, and inevitable death, but
with one hand the Sith Lord caught it, crushed away its voice; it tried to
rise then, to coil and rear and strike, but the Sith Lord laid his other hand upon it and
broke its power with a single effortless twist. I am Darth Vader, he repeated as he ground the
dragon’s corpse to dust beneath his mental heel, as he watched the dragon’s dust and ashes scatter
before the blast from his furnace heart, and you- You are nothing at all. He had become, finally, what they all called him. The Hero With No Fear.” Of course, that wasn’t true,
as we’ll get to shortly. Furthermore, becoming Vader meant destroying his
relationships with the people he cared about. It was easy for Vader to abandon the Jedi ways, and
it wasn’t much harder for him to turn against the Jedi Order. He didn’t have attachments to most of
the Jedi, and due to Palpatine’s manipulations, he quickly started to see the Jedi as an
enemy. The Jedi were a threat to Palpatine; they had tried to assassinate him, after all.
More importantly, they were a threat to Padmé. From Vader’s perspective, the Jedi sought to deny
him the ability to save her life. Because of this, they became Vader’s enemies, and because they
became his enemies, they were subjected to the full force of Vader’s anger and hate. It didn’t
matter that most of them had treated him well for the past thirteen years, nor did it matter
that many of them were younglings. To Vader, they had become evil, a threat to the people
he loved, and that meant they deserved death. The slaughter of the younglings is something a
lot of people see as a real heel-turn moment for Anakin, but it was something he was always capable
of. When it came to groups he saw as the enemy, any one member deserved death, period. This
was why he slaughtered a whole tribe of Sand People on Tatooine, and this logic drove his
slaughter of the younglings as well. For Anakin, either you were with him or against him. As
Obi-Wan pointed out, this was a Sith perspective, but it was one that Anakin had held
all along. When Anakin became Vader, this absolutist mentality drove him rapidly
down the path of the Dark Side. He slaughtered the Jedi, he slaughtered the Separatists,
and then he turned on his loved ones, too. Vader believed that the Dark Side would
grant him the power to save his loved ones, but he quickly found that it instead destroyed
his relationships with them. First, Palpatine manipulated him into believing that Obi-Wan
had betrayed him. Then, when Vader became convinced that Padmé was working with Obi-Wan,
he believed that she had betrayed him as well. By the time he realized that Palpatine had
been the one dogging him the whole time, Vader had destroyed all his relationships
with the people he had done it all for. In doing so, he had destroyed himself. By the time
Vader realized what he had done, it was too late. To pull one last passage from the Novelization: “‘Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right?’ I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she
died. It seems in your anger, you killed her. This burns hotter than the lava had. ‘No… no, it is not possible!’ You loved her. You will always love
her. You could never will her death. Never. But you remember all of it.
You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember
the cold venom in Vader’s blood. You remember the furnace of Vader’s fury, and the black hatred of
seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth- And there is one blazing moment in which you
finally understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there
was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker. That it was all you. Is you. Only you. You did it. You killed her. You killed her because, finally, when you could
have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking
about her, you were thinking about yourself. It is in this blazing moment that
you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith- Because now your self is all you will ever have. And you rage and scream and reach through the
Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but the power you can touch is
only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids
around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters,
and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow. In the end, you do not even want to. In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow
forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself- And within your furnace heart,
you burn in your own flame.” This was the inevitable end of a fall to the
Dark Side. Darksiders started out down the path of attachment, looking for power to save the ones
they loved, but the cost of that achieving power drove all their loved ones away, leaving the
Darksider with nothing but an empty quest for more power. For Darth Vader, his fall to the
Dark Side destroyed everything he cared about, everything he’d been. He had done it all to
save Padmé, but as his lust for power and his fear and hatred of his enemies grew, he killed
her. The Dark Side was a path of selfishness, and sooner or later, it destroyed all the
relationships its users tried to maintain. Anakin saw becoming Darth Vader as a way
of defeating his fear, becoming someone who could slay the dead-star dragon. In reality,
Vader brought the dragon’s prophecies to pass, taking away everyone Anakin cared about.
But worst of all was Anakin’s realization that it was all his fault, that he had never
really become Vader at all. Vader was him. The name was different, but the person
was the same. He had destroyed himself. This leads us back to something we mentioned in
the beginning - the division between Anakin and Vader, or the lack thereof. The only difference
between the two was what Vader had lost. Vader was Anakin with no one left to care about,
nothing to keep living for except destroying his enemies. As we’ve said before, Anakin’s
transformation into Vader was just a dramatic expansion of the pool of beings he considered
enemies. He was no different as a person. With that said, Vader maintained otherwise. He
kept his true identity secret, and when confronted with it, he maintained that he was a different
person and that he’d killed Anakin Skywalker. Of course, as the earlier Novelization passage
suggested, he knew that this wasn’t true. It was an excuse he wanted to believe. It
was easier for him to believe that he, Vader, was a monster that had killed the
old Anakin, rather than to accept that he’d always been that monster and that
he’d let himself do terrible things. As a Sith Lord, Vader was full of hate. He hated
the Jedi, who he still believed had betrayed him, and he hated anyone opposed the Empire, deeming
these beings Separatists and Jedi collaborators. The politics of it never really mattered
to him. He still held no principles beyond a vague sense of justice. By that point, of
course, his idea of justice was warped; it was no longer about protecting the ones he loved,
because he didn’t have anyone to love anymore. Rather, “justice” to Vader meant
the destruction of his enemies. Truthfully, that was always part
of how he had seen justice anyway. More than any of his enemies,
though, Vader hated himself. While he would never admit it, he knew deep down
that everything that had happened to him was his fault. He understood how his choices led him to
ruin, and he despised himself for making them. This, not his barbequing on Mustafar, was what
made Vader less powerful than he’d been during the Clone Wars. For a Sith, anger and hatred
were powerful tools; by manipulating Vader into destroying all his relationships
and leaving him with nothing but hate, Sidious hoped Vader would become the most powerful
student the Dark Side ever had. Though, while hating other people is conducive to the Dark Side,
hating yourself is not. If you hate yourself, then it diminishes your capacity for selfishness,
in a way, which is the root of the Dark Side. Vader was obviously still a Darksider,
but he was weaker for his self-loathing. During the reign of the Empire, Vader was mostly
driven by inertia. As we mentioned earlier, Anakin wasn’t just extremely attached to his
loved ones; he also relied on their approval. Without anyone to care about, Vader lost most of
his motivation. Like any Sith Lord, he constantly sought greater power, but just as he had never
really been a good Jedi, he was never really that strong of a Sith, either. Unlike his master,
he didn’t feel drawn to power for power’s sake, nor did he take pleasure in cruelty. Vader sought
greater power only because he wanted to destroy his enemies, the Emperor most of all. If he had
been successful, he would have been completely bereft of motivation. Darth Vader was a shell
of a man, a creature of hate without reason. Vader was aware of the miserable nature of his
existence, but for decades he made no attempt to change it or atone for his sins. This was
because Vader believed he was irredeemable. The Jedi of his time believed that Sith Lords
could never truly be redeemed, after all, and Vader reasoned that, since he couldn’t even
forgive himself, there was no way he could ever atone and be forgiven by others. As he saw it,
there was no other path for him but the way of the Sith. He kept going not because he wanted
to but because he didn’t think he could go back. This, alongside Vader’s hatred of his
enemies, was why he became so cruel. He saw himself as a monster and believed he
had no choice but to be a monster, so he acted like one. He saw himself as Darth Vader,
who had murdered Padmé and Anakin Skywalker, even though he knew full well that he was
still Skywalker. He rejected the idea of trying to become a better person because, in
his mind, that wasn’t something Darth Vader was capable of. His excuses became a delusion,
which trapped him on the path of atrocity. Then Luke came along. At first, Vader only saw
Luke as a key to victory, a way to defeat the Emperor and take revenge on all his enemies.
He wanted to train Luke as a Sith Apprentice, but Luke, of course, refused. To Vader’s
disappointment, Luke remained loyal to the Jedi. However, Vader kept trying to turn
him. It wasn’t just because Luke was powerful, but because Luke was his son - or
rather, because he was Padmé’s son. Luke, to Vader, was a part of Padmé, in a sense,
and perhaps the only thing he hadn’t lost. After his first encounter with Luke, he became
committed to protecting him, though at first he didn’t really understand why. That was why
Vader kept pressuring Luke to turn to the Dark Side - he believed it was the only way he could
protect him from Sidious. Vader, by that point, believed Sidious was pretty much unstoppable.
Everything happened as he foresaw, and his power was far beyond Vader’s. Destiny was on the
Emperor’s side. This was why Vader hesitated to move against him, even when Luke offered
himself up to Vader during the Battle of Endor. During the Battle of Endor, Vader kept
trying to turn Luke to the Dark Side - only to be taken aback as Luke tried to redeem him
instead. Despite everything Vader said or did, Luke was adamant that there was still good in
him and refused to kill him at every turn. But Luke also rejected the Dark Side. Even after his
battle with Vader in the Emperor’s throne room, Luke continued to defy Sidious, affirming
that he was a Jedi like his father before him. It’s important to note here that this ran
counter to what Sidious had foreseen. That alone had a massive impact on Vader.
He had seen Sidious as infallible, and believed destiny was set in stone. It was his
destiny to be Vader, Sidious’s destiny to rule, and Luke’s destiny to follow in his father’s
footsteps. But Luke rejected his destiny, proving it wasn’t set in stone. If Luke
could reject fate and defy the Emperor, then so could Vader. But it was also immensely
impactful that Luke not only affirmed his loyalties to the Jedi but affirmed that Vader
was still a Jedi as well. Despite everything Vader had done, despite threatening Luke’s
sister, Luke still saw him as a Jedi at heart. That was all Vader needed to cast aside the
delusions he’d built around him. In that moment, he accepted what he had realized decades ago -
that he was and had always been Anakin Skywalker. As much as he had been Vader, he had
always been the hero of the Clone Wars and a Jedi. And if Luke could choose
to reject the darkness, to reject fate, to be a Jedi like his father, then his father
could choose to be a Jedi like his son. Darth Vader was never truly loyal to the
Empire or the Sith. As Obi-Wan once said, he was loyal to people, not principles. Aboard
the second Death Star, he realized he still loved his son in spite of how far he’d fallen, and
he immediately knew where his loyalties lay. As much as he had been willing to abandon the Jedi
for the sake of Padmé, Anakin Skywalker abandoned the Sith for the sake of Luke, and his own life
in the process. Unlike with Padmé, however, when Anakin slew Sidious, it truly was for Luke’s
sake, not for himself. It was a final act of selflessness, and in that moment, he returned
to the Light, becoming one with the Force. Luke Skywalker was the hero we’d all like to see
ourselves as, the one who makes the right choices and saves the day. But more often than not,
Anakin Skywalker is who we are. From his trauma, to his battles with fear, to his cataclysmic
mistakes, he’s perhaps the most human character in Star Wars. Most importantly, though, he’s
a reminder that no matter how far you fall, no matter how badly you fail, your future set
in stone. You can always try to make amends. But what do you think? What are your thoughts on
Anakin Skywalker? Remember to go buy the Revenge of the Sith novelization, and feel free to
post your thoughts in the comments below.
To say Anakin was always Darth Vader defeats the entire purpose of The Phantom Menace and the Return of the Jedi Anakin Skywalker. The makings of Vader were always there, but that doesn’t mean he was destined to become him.
Even the dragon was trying to make Anakin see reason.
The dragon was begging him to let go, just as his mother did.
It took until the moment Anakin decided to save his son that he finally let the dragon rest.
No