ThreadSketch
Well-Known Member
You mean, Obi-Wan's an unreliable narrator because he's had to cope with the trauma of his brother-in-arms turning to the Dark Side and never got over it.
Lets talk all things Star Wars
You mean, Obi-Wan's an unreliable narrator because he's had to cope with the trauma of his brother-in-arms turning to the Dark Side and never got over it.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
Nevermind the fact that Obi Wan and Yoda were essentially trying to get Luke to kill Darth Vader/Anakin. Just as it is harder to kill people when you recognize them as people instead of faceless henchmen, it would be much harder to kill Vader if you recognize him as Anakin, your father, as opposed to Darth Vader, faceless entity of evil.
This becomes fan theory so can be shot down if there is evidence to the contrary but I do think one of the PT Jedi’s flaws was that they discouraged emotional attachment like love and family, hence the marriage prohibition that prevented Anakin from openly marrying Padme. That and their dogmatic notion that once you go to the dark side you can never come back is why they were ok with encouraging Luke to kill his dad.
Luke breaks that by taking a third option, recognizing that familial bonds should be embraced and thus is able to bring Anakin back to the light due to their bond. By recognizing Vader and Anakin as one and the same person and that Anakin’s goodness is still there, Luke can appeal to that aspect and get his father back.
So you could say Yoda and Obi Wan treated Vader and Anakin as separate entities as it would make it mentally easier to try to fight and kill him but it is Luke who recognized that Vader and Anakin are one and the same that is the true hero and thus was able to defeat the Sith.
sztriki
Sr Member
Of course. The same way Gremlins describes the Mogwai as perfect pets, Rand Peltzer said it. And Jaws describes the shark danger irrelevant until the summer season is over, Larry Vaughan said it. And Freddy Krueger is just a dream, can't hurt you, every parent in Elm Street said it.
Joek3rr
Master Member
George reinforces the idea that Anakin and Vader are like two personas. In Revenge of Sith George has Anakin's heartbeat cut out as the mask is lowered. The heartbeat returns the moment that Vader starts breathing. Anakin has died, Vader has been born. Is it the same person? Yes, but in a sense no. It's George's attempt at exploring the duality of man, in a sort of Dr. Jeckel, Mr. Hyde fashion, using a complete physical transformation to illustrate the story.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
Even if that is true that the Vader persona is separate from the Anakin persona, it doesn’t change the fact that Luke actually engages with Vader as Anakin quite a bit.
You could say that Vader is “separate” from Anakin in that Vader is a persona for Anakin to hide behind. After the suffering Anakin experienced in PT, he could have chosen to hide and create the persona of Vader while he watched from the sidelines so to speak. Vader would be the representation of the strong, unyielding force user Anakin always wanted to be (he did sort of do this during the clone wars by becoming the man without fear and a fierce warrior despite his constant fear of losing the ones he loved after the death of his mother).
This Vader mask is on full force in ANH. However, it arguably slips in ESB. Despite disbelieving that Luke is his son early in the film, he reveals himself as Anakin to Luke and asks him to join him so they can rule the galaxy as father and son. This is arguably the return of ambitious Anakin, the mask that is Vader loyal apprentice to Palpatine cracking. The reveal is also Vader essentially reclaiming his identity as Anakin, at least at that one moment.
Luke probably recognized this and with the force, was able to see the good in Vader. Hence, his insistence that Vader was Anakin and that Vader has “forgotten” who he was. Vader reveals he hasn’t forgotten who he truly is and redeems himself by destroying the Sith once and for all. While ANH was Anakin with the Vader mask fully on, Vader’s mask was figuratively and literally removed in RotJ. Hence why Luke recognized his own dad when he became a force ghost at the end of RotJ.
I'll disagree with you slightly with the bolded bit. That's a SE retconnnnntradiction. The opening crawl has stated since 1980 that Vader is "obsessed with finding Skywalker". Not the Rebels that destroyed the Death Star -- SKYWALKER. "That's it! The Rebels are there. And I'm sure Skywalker is with them." He already knows before the Emperor calls him. What I always gleaned from the timing of the Emperor's holo-call was that Vader hadn't told him yet, and it was only Luke beginning his Jedi training under Yoda that shifted things enough that Palpatine noticed, and Vader had to play dumb.
The rest is spot-on. And I always liked how, after the reveal, Luke is talking through or past Vader to Anakin. Right from the telepathic communication at the end of ESB. "Luke..." "Father." And then all through their interaction after Luke turns himself in on Endor. Ignores Vader, just talks to Anakin. One wonders if there was some Force-enhancement to that tactic. A subtler version of the mind-trick. Sort of an inverse of the gaslighting Palpatine was trying on Luke (after succeeding years before with Anakin).
Anakin was trying to make Vader a separate person, but as we seen in the movie that's not the case. As was pointed out, Obi-Wan is unreliable because he's trying to get Luke to think like he does. Yoda and Obi-Wan truly believe that once you fall to the Dark Side, that's it, you're done. They really believe it because that's what they were taught, and in a lot of cases it's probably true.
I have so many what-ifs. What if the babies had died, but Padmé lived? What if they all died? What if she successfully rebuffed him after his decade of being all creepystalker, but he still lost his mom? How much was needed for Palpatine to have enough leverage to turn him? What if Little Ani had shamed the Jedi Council with the same thing he guilted his mom with -- about helping other people -- and actually fulfilled his destiny as the Chosen One by getting the Jedi over their fear of emotion and reconnecting them to the people of the galaxy?
So yeah. How differently things might have gone for the galaxy if Vader didn't have the abrupt shock of finding out he actually was a father two decades later, that he actually had something to live for again, not just kill for. If the Rebellion didn't have Luke Skywalker. If Bail and Breha Organa had no children. Would Bail have been on the Tantive IV? Would he have been smarter than to try to lie to Vader's face about having just been seen fleeing a battle the Rebellion was waging against Imperial forces? Would he have reached Obi-Wan? Or, failing that, his message in Artoo? Would someone with the Force have been in the assault on the Death Star? And so on and so on.
So yeah. How differently things might have gone for the galaxy if Vader didn't have the abrupt shock of finding out he actually was a father two decades later, that he actually had something to live for again, not just kill for. If the Rebellion didn't have Luke Skywalker. If Bail and Breha Organa had no children. Would Bail have been on the Tantive IV? Would he have been smarter than to try to lie to Vader's face about having just been seen fleeing a battle the Rebellion was waging against Imperial forces? Would he have reached Obi-Wan? Or, failing that, his message in Artoo? Would someone with the Force have been in the assault on the Death Star? And so on and so on.
Which is also why the subtlety of Alec Guinness's performance in ANH echoes on to this day. I mean all the things you describe are likely the things that Obi-Wan had thought about after having to fight off his best friend and leaving him for dead in ROTS. Knowing the real time history of the making of the original films wouldn't have necessarily brought those ideas to light but looking at the series as 1-6 it does make you wonder if these things were the ghosts that haunted Obi-Wan while spending the next 18-20 years in the desert. All that said it's just my thoughts on the matter and not expressly said in the films, but they do seem to suggest some of those ideas and it's really fun to ponder.
HeartBlade
Sr Member
thanks for the correction on the retcon. I think the marvel Star Wars comics also has Vader run into Luke a couple of times during his search for him.
I think it depends on how you see the force and fate in Star Wars but if you assume the force as a semi-sentient being (like god or fate), it’s Anakin’s destiny as the one to bring an end to the Sith and bring balance to the force.
I do think if it was babies died but Padme lived, she would be the one to redeem Anakin instead of Luke. I think because it was always Anakin’s destiny to be the one, even as Vader, the force “protected” the children so one of them could help redeem Anakin. Like the theory that Anakin lived by robbing Padme’s life force to survive, the force may have been protecting baby Luke and Leia so they would survive the birth.
Anakin being rebuffed by Padme (assuming she wasn’t hypnotized by the force), Anakin still has his bond with Obi Wan. Although Sheev essentially pit him against Obi Wan (I think one draft had Anakin fear that Padme was cheating on him with Obi), in another world Anakin did care for Obi Wan like a brother and would also want to save him. Makes it even more tragic that Anakin was driven to kill and get cut down by his own brother and only other person he likely cared for (apart from Padme and his mom).
Haven't watched this one yet, but a friend said it's worth taking a look at:
Internal ship gravity is its own thing. See also the gunwells of the Millennium Falcon, where the gravity is rotated 90° and "down" is the forward bulkhead. The Kenner toy had the pilot chair rotate down, rather than have the cockpit window open, for some reason. The MPC model kit that came later was designed with a separate "floating" cockpit that you could have vertical, whichever way you displayed the model. The Incredible Cross-Sections book carried this forward. But the miniature was not intended for that, and the matte painting backs this up. The people who designed the ship did not mean for the cockpit to rotate, and it doesn't in Empire or Episode II:
I’ve always wondered. Thanks!
ThreadSketch
Well-Known Member
Since we're in the spirit of figuring things out, would someone enlighten me as to what the heck these things are or would be called? (Lightened up the image a bit in PS so we'd see them more clearly):
I'd like to know for...Reasons™. Since I'm pretty sure nicknaming them "convenient abyss tubes" is less than practical.
I'd like to know for...Reasons™. Since I'm pretty sure nicknaming them "convenient abyss tubes" is less than practical.
They vent exhaust gas from the reactor internally now. The Emperor can't really use the Force, he's just high as **** and so is everyone that goes in the throne room so they also believe it.
There is so much about that throne room that makes me narrow my eyes. Like... Did Imperial designers really create it to be thus? It's up on a tower on the North Pole of the station. Does it really have an open access to the entire hundreds-of-kilometers-long reactor shaft running through it into the station proper? WHY?! The elevator comes up through the middle of it. Is that, like, the main central express line or something? Those pipe caps have even less reason to be there than the uncrewed crew stations. I've been a Star Trek fan since my tweens. I'm good at spinning extemporaneous rationalizations out of nowhere. The chaser lights below the main viewscreen? Easy! But much of what's in the Emperor's Death Star throne room just makes me scratch my head.
There's more, but those are the "highlights".
And why I'm glad we didn't get the Sequel Trilogy George had drafted out. His deep delve into the nature of the Force is that, but cringe. Midi-chlorians are sort of like mitochindria crossed with chloroplasts in plants. They are conduits for the Cosmic Force, bridging that with our cells to make out Personal Force. The Whills are like amœbæ, but sentient. There are fewer of them than midi-chlorians. They enter the cells from outside and tell the midi-chlorians what to do. They were responsible for doing some hoodoo with Shmi to make her ova create Anakin -- which makes me wonder why Anakin? If it was parthenogenesis, the child would be female, possessing only X chromosomes. When one dies, their Personal Force discorporates and they re-merge with the Cosmic Force. But beings with high midi-chlorian counts can learn to retain enough of their personæ to hold their Personal Force together "on the other side". And since there are so many midi-chlorians in cells, and proportionately fewer Whills, people are, like, 85% midi-chlorians, 10% Whills, and 5% their own Human cells.
There's more, but those are the "highlights".
sztriki
Sr Member
I feel really lucky that I work within Interventional Radiology and our operating rooms are literally next to my desktop cuz I think I just got a brain aneurysm...
Big day tomorrow:
www.nytimes.com
Disney to Reveal Plans to Turbocharge Streaming Offerings (Published 2020)
Some big-budget movies will first go to theaters. Other offerings will debut online. All will ultimately strengthen Disney+.
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