>Come the second film, and he just as clearly answers to no one but the
>Emperor. Sure, some of that may be simply because Tarkin is dead (and
>presumably so are those other guys), but still, that seems odd in
>retrospect. Being the highest-ranking survivor of a cockup like the
>Death Star operation is usually not a path to career
>advancement, and yet Vader seems to have come out of it in a better
>position than he went in.

The current Darth Vader comic is very much about answering that problem. Vader's kinda on the Emperors shit list after the Death Star blew up, and he's working to improve his standing... and then gets started on working out how to kill and replace the Emperor, because he has officially run out of patience with this crap :lol

>He's wearing Darth Revan's mask, but his character
>actually reminds me a lot more of Revan's erstwhile sidekick in
>Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Malak, who similarly never
>managed to give any impression of significance despite all the
>linchpin-of-plotline stuff he did.

No, see, unlike Malek, Kylo at least has some excuses, in that he's a kid who's had an asshole messing with his head for years with the goal of... well, actually, I think it's the old X-23 strategy. "Yes, I shall emotionally torture him into a soulless weapon of mass destruction that does what he's told! That never goes badly!"

Malek is just an idiot.

>And if you're right and it's not a mistake—the creators of
>the film actually did want their Big Bad to be actively,
>unmistakably pathetic—that's even worse in my mind, because
>what the fuck. :)

I think it's less 'pathetic' and more 'incomplete'. TFA is very much setup for the rest of the trilogy, because that's how movie series work now (And at least they manage to still put an ending in, unlike some movies that try the series approach). At this point, Kylo is pretty Anakin not long after he fell to the Dark Side, with a bit more emotional instability because Snoke has him convinced he's supposed to be something he's not, leading to the old 'square peg, round hole' problem. Now he's killed his dad, believing that this will cure him of all his emotional problems (When it's probably gonna do the exact opposite), and then spent about ten minutes with Chewie, Finn and Rey beating the absolute shit out of him in a variety of ways that were very enjoyable to watch.

Now he's even more messed up, probably to the point he's gonna be needing some cybernetics (Just what Snoke needs to convince him 'oh look! You're more like Vader every day! You go, you little Han-killing loony!'), and his Master's talking about completing his training. I'm really curious to see what he's like in episode 8.

Which, I fully admit, doesn't make him any less pathetic at times in TFA. At least he gets a few nifty moments.

The fun part though, is that the fandom isn't going to want him to get redeemed now, even if, like Vader, he dies immediately afterwards. After all, he just killed Han. That's got a lot more emotional impact than anything Vader did in the original trilogy, even killing Obi-wan.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter