LAST EDITED ON Nov-24-24 AT 09:58 PM (EST)
 
I was watching some clips of Darth Vader's various appearances in newer Star Wars things I haven't seen, and a common thread about both them and his original appearances suddenly dawned on me. Upon reflection, I think it's my favorite thing about the character. (I'm talking about the OG here, not the one in UF.)

Pretty much every single time he appears, from the climactic scenes of Revenge of the Sith on down to his duel with Luke aboard the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, there are two universal truths about Darth Vader, to wit:

1) He is always the coolest, baddest-ass guy in the room, just an absolute force (as it were) of nature, utterly terrifying and implacable; and

2) He fails. Even when he appears to succeed, he's in the process of failing at whatever his actual goal is. He can even cause someone else to succeed (usually the Emperor) while simultaneously failing at his own personal goal.

The very first job he pulls under the name "Darth Vader" goes exactly like that. He succeeds in his stated mission goals (exterminate the younglings, wipe out the Separatist Council, et al.), but completely blows his actual mission (save Padmé), so spectacularly that he more or less kills her himself.

Fast-forward to the original Star Wars, in which his plan to lead the Death Star to the Rebel base works perfectly! So perfectly that the Rebels blow it up. Empire? Track down the Rebel base on Hoth on the Empire's behalf: success. (But most of them get away.) Capture someone who can lure Luke into his trap on Cloud City? Check! Convince Luke to join him or, failing that, kill him: ... ah.

And then there's his (continuity-wise) final appearance, in which he manages to lure Luke into a trap again, and then loses another lightsaber duel to him. At which point young master Anakin finally catches half a clue, realizes that nothing he has ever done for the Emperor has done him the slightest bit of good, and throws the old fucker down the nearest bottomless pit. Fortunately, Imperial architecture has a lot of those, so he didn't have to lug him very far with all the lightning and everything popping off.

His appearances in recent supporting media all seem to follow the same basic pattern, which pleases me, because it shows that the people responsible still understand the fundamental nature of Anakin Skywalker: he is an incredibly impressive... fuckup. Nothing he does will ever turn out the way he wants, but man, is he gonna look cool not accomplishing it.

I'm not even throwing shade, I genuinely think this is the best thing about his character. It almost makes me regret taking him (them?) in (a) different direction(s) in UF.

--G.
For bonus points, I'm not sure this was even intentional. It might have just sorta... happened. :)
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I haven't read the latest comics and all, but if you consider his latest (RL) appearance, in ROGUE ONE, the pattern holds:

He is UNBELIEVABLY badass but still loses the plans.

>I haven't read the latest comics and all, but if you consider his
>latest (RL) appearance, in ROGUE ONE, the pattern holds:
>
>He is UNBELIEVABLY badass but still loses the plans.

Indeed. (That final scene also demonstrates that, like a 1990s Saab, his suit's chest controls have "night panel" mode; in that dark hallway, he's invisible until he turns on his lightsaber. :)

Similar reinforcements of the theme run through his appearances in Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which, among other things, he pulls down and rips apart a departing starship at one point... and it's the wrong starship. D'oh!

He's almost lovable in his haplessness, the big dumb bastard. :)

--G.
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Forgot about that one. I tend to ignore SW TV these days.

>Similar reinforcements of the theme run through his appearances in
>Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which, among other things, he pulls down
>and rips apart a departing starship at one point... and it's the
>wrong starship. D'oh!

There's actually a moment in the final episode of that series that (IMHO) crystalizes the issue with Vader and the franchise as a whole. It's at the end of the lightsaber duel and after Obi Wan apologizes for failing Anakin only for Vader to reply:

"I am not your failure, Obi-Wan. You didn’t kill Anakin Skywalker, I did.

Once he said that, and Obi Wan replied that his friend was truly dead, it just sort of hit me that over 45 years later the writers are still trying to fix all the plotholes from A New Hope. It's the same with excusing Kenobi for thinking stormtroopers are crack shots by saying "Well, they were during the Clone Wars," which is its own kettle of fish that started life as a throwaway line in a film that was clearly not written with any grand plan besides "I hope this doesn't bomb!"

So yeah, everybody keeps writing Vader as the boogeyman, this looming force of nature that strikes terror in friend and foe alike because that's how Lucas wrote him in Hope. But...he can't win. At least not meaningfully and not for long. To borrow from NuWho, his life's a set of fixed points: Anakin Skywalker will become a Jedi, he will fall to the dark side, he's going to die at Endor. You can write Vader as so powerful that he can wipe out an entire planet on his own with just his own anger, but it doesn't matter because the Rebels still win. It would be tragic if it wasn't so cosmically hilarious.

>To borrow from NuWho, his
>life's a set of fixed points: Anakin Skywalker will become a
>Jedi, he will fall to the dark side, he's going to die
>at Endor. You can write Vader as so powerful that he can wipe out an
>entire planet on his own with just his own anger, but it doesn't
>matter because the Rebels still win.

And, on the flip side, Obi-Wan can win an obviously decisive victory against him in a 1v1 lightsaber duel 10 years before the movie... but then he has to make the manifestly unsound decision to just walk away and let the most dangerous thing in the universe crawl back to its bacta tank and start over... again... because we already know how the next decade goes.

The curse of doing shit out of order, man. I know it well.

--G.
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The author Fialleril noticed that you'd have to change virtually nothing about his on-screen appearances in the OT to write him as a double agent who is failing on purpose, and created a series with that premise.

>The author Fialleril noticed that you'd have to change virtually
>nothing about his on-screen appearances in the OT to write him as a
>double agent who is failing on purpose, and created
>a series with that premise.

I have a long-standing policy of not reading other fanfics--mostly so I can't accidentally steal from them, but in this case, our versions of those characters are so wildly divergent from the canon ones anyway (and don't interact with each other in the same ways, if at all) that I decided to give this one a go. Not gonna lie, I kinda love the idea that the offscreen sequence where we're supposed to believe that Princess Leia was being ruthlessly subjected to droid-assisted war crimes was in fact just a casual bull session.

--G.
Vader of the Floor, what is your wisdom?
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One of the things I like about their work (other than a fascinating take on Tattooine slave culture, which makes me think they ended up being Fremen) is that they make the logical choice regarding Shmi.

Back in my SpaceBattles days, one of the first things I always did in story threads involving fixing/screwing up the Star Wars universe was pop over to Tattooine and buy Shmi, only to immediately free her and set her up with a nice job somewhere on Coruscant.

Even if Yoda and the Masters (which is also the name of their prog band) say that young Anakin cannot interact with her, simply knowing his mother is safe on the planet almost always derailed Sheevy-boy's plots.

>Yoda and the Masters (which is also the name of their prog
>band)

I can't decide whether they'd sound more like Asia or the Alan Parsons Project.

--G.
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LAST EDITED ON Nov-26-24 AT 12:34 PM (EST)
 
>>Yoda and the Masters (which is also the name of their prog
>>band)
>
>I can't decide whether they'd sound more like Asia or the Alan Parsons
>Project.

Neither. They sound like Sparks.

"Big Enough For Both of Us, This Town Is Not!"

ETA: The younglings always wait for Master Windu to step away from the keyboard and dance.

>Neither. They sound like Sparks.
>
>"Big Enough For Both of Us, This Town Is Not!"

Sparks was a prog band? I always thought of them as more of a glam thing. But if Yoda and the Masters were going to be '70s glam, my brain would want them to sound like Slade. :)

--G.
on cum, the noize feel
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>Sparks was a prog band? I always thought of them as more of a glam
>thing.

Sparks is Sparks. They pretty much created their own category. :)

That's about right, yeah.

Vader has had a few ongoing comics series over the past decade or so (the first one, written by Kieron Gillen, is generally regarded as having been some of the very best Vader materiel ever produced) and it is resolutely committed to this bit as well. Every triumph Vader has ends up being, ultimately, a fuck-up.

Gillen writes one of the very best Vader lines ever; he's crashed on a planet with a Rebel base, is surrounded by an army of them, his cybernetics are malfunctioning, and the Rebels yell at him "You're surrounded! Surrender!"

And Vader replies, "All I am surrounded by is fear and dead men."

It's a great line. And then Vader kills almost every single Rebel on the planet in a supremely over-the-top display of his absolute murder-prowess.

Almost every single Rebel. Because Luke, the guy he'd actually came there to capture, gets away. Oh, and, uh, Vader's minions, the murder-droids and the morally ambiguous rogue archaeologist he'd spent months turning into his secret deniable black ops team, they all get captured by the Rebels. So he's left with... nothing. Worse than when he started. He sure killed a lot of Rebels, tho!

In fact, during some of the latter issues the Emperor himself notices this tendency and comments on it in-universe; he lectures Vader (paraphrasing) "Of course you've committed yourself to the Dark Side. That's the problem. You keep needing to do that. You commit to this path, and then three years later I find you've wandered away into the weeds and become all mopey and emo and I need to inflict atrocities on you to get you to do it again. I don't understand how someone as strong in the Dark Side as you with such an exemplary master as me keeps fucking this up."

I've unintentionally been doing this myself. I've been running a Star Wars RPG for the past seven years. (Vandal Carondan has been a major NPC in it; at some point I need to post about his further adventures here.) Vader has been kind of a looming presence in it. He sends Inquisitors out after the players. That doesn't work. He sends the ISB. This doesn't work either. The one time I've actually put my players in his presence, Vader baits them into blowing up his TIE Advanced... and then leaps through space to land on the hull of their freighter, intent on simply cutting his way in and killing them all. It's supremely badass and really quite cool.

Except that my players, who are not dummies, realized "It cannot possibly be that easy to kill Vader. Scan the wreckage. Nothing? Bullshit. He can't just have vani- oh! He's on the hull, isn't he. His stupid suit means he doesn't care about space."

And then one of them makes a piloting skill check and scrapes him off the side like a bug, leaving him drifting helplessly in a debris field. Big fail energy.

What keeps Vader from being a mockable figure like Maul in this regard (aside from simply his raw power) is that Vader is never not dignified. Anakin Skywalker was frequently a giant goober who it was hard to take seriously; Vader is always very serious even when fucking up by the numbers, which lends him a certain gravitas necessary for the "I am so cool and baddass/I am a colossal failure" dichotomy to work.

-Merc
Keep Rat

>What keeps Vader from being a mockable figure like Maul in this regard
>(aside from simply his raw power) is that Vader is never not
>dignified.

Almost never. My favorite moment in the throne room duel in Jedi is a point at which Luke momentarily gets the upper hand and kicks him down some stairs, and Vader utters the most hilarious "nyaaAaAUUuh" noise on the way down before landing in a discarded-mannequin heap at the bottom. The combination of James Earl's filtered Vader voice and that "I have unexpectedly lost my balance" noise is an unexpected little flash of comedy gold in the middle of that heavy-as-fuck scene. :)

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>Almost never. My favorite moment in the throne room duel in
>Jedi is a point at which Luke momentarily gets the upper hand
>and kicks him down some stairs, and Vader utters the most hilarious
>"nyaaAaAUUuh" noise on the way down before landing in a
>discarded-mannequin heap at the bottom.

It just occurred to me that this is actually my second-favorite weird vocalization in Jedi; the best is the epic "bleYAURGH!" noise Lando makes when the Sarlacc grabs his leg. :)

--G.
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>What keeps Vader from being a mockable figure like Maul in this regard

Not a damn thing. I will happily mock the child murdering space nazi every chance I get.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

LAST EDITED ON Nov-26-24 AT 00:10 AM (EST)
 
>child murdering

Yeah, I get that they wanted to have a real "there's no way back for him from this" moment in there, but the younglings thing seems excessive. Surely defenestrating Space Shaft was bad enough.

--G.
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Pasha and I had this conversation on one of the various microblogging sites at around the same time:

(me)

Do you suppose Darth Vader had an office? In the movies, we only see him out on various assignments, but he must have been SOMEWHERE the rest of the time. I like to think that on the days when he was on Coruscant and there was nothing much to do in the way of galactic evil, he had an office somewhere, and sat at a desk signing off on his underlings' galactic-evil paperwork.

(Pasha)

nah, I don't think he's the kind of guy who had official underlings with like paperwork and stuff

(me)

Probably not, but I think it's a great image. Vader sitting there bored with the Coruscant Gazette crossword, trying to twiddle a pen in his fingers but constantly dropping it because his robot hands are too clumsy for that kind of thing, but he always forgets. Randomly getting General Motti on the intercom to ask him if he can think of a 12-letter word meaning "unlawful killing".

(Pasha)

I more imagine that there's some long suffering O4 who's job it is to track him down for after action reports or requisition forms for his special tie fighter, and everyone feels sorry for them but can only help so much, ya know?

But I like the idea of the pen thing, and when he drops it, he looks around to make sure nobody is watching and force pulls it back into his hand.

(Seems like the kind of thing Anakin would have done, but not Anakyn, if you catch my drift)

(me)

Yeah, I assume canon Vader spent his entire adult life fidgeting with stuff with the Force, expressly because Obi-Wan told him not to that one time.

--G.
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...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

You know what would be awesome? An alternate Empire Strikes Back where Vader gets a little complacent, and Han's quickdraw straight-up deletes him in the dining room scene. Just pegs him dead-center-mass and drops his ass into eternity. Imagine how surprised everyone else in the room would be. Even Boba Fett would be like, "I didn't like him either, but damn, amigo."

--G.
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This is how my brain is wired these days:

BEN: You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

VADER strikes him down. While LUKE goes postal with his blasters on some relatively innocent Stormtroopers, BEN's robes suddenly catch fire.

BEN (rising from the deck): Hear me, Darth! No longer am I the man you knew! I am Force and Life incarnate! Now and forever - I am PHOENIX!

I've always sort of seen it as the conflict within him where on the one hand all he really ever wanted was for the people he cared about to live in safety, and on the other hand he's really effin' pissed off over the fact that everything he's ever done to try and make that happen has failed, and in the process screwed him over even worse. He's fallen to the Dark Side, he knows there's not really any way to come back, but he also just can't make himself follow the Dark Path - not because he doesn't want to, but because he's so damn insecure that nothing he ever does is going to be good enough. He wants to be the baddest, worst Sith Lord he can, but there's always that niggling little feeling in the back of his head that he's just not good enough. And while it's not always there, it pops up at just the wrong time over and over again, leading to his perpetuating the cycle of grasping failure from the jaws of victory. It's why he throws the Emperor down the shaft at the end - he realizes that nothing he ever does is going to be good enough for the Emperor, and this is one time he might actually succeed in his original goal (protect his family) by switching sides and saving Luke from the Emperor. Yes, Vader (partially) redeemed himself at the end, but it had nothing to do with the Force and everything to do with his own internal struggle.

At least that's my opinion... :)

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>