Sometimes I only want the 1977 original to be canon. Maybe I’ve soured on the long-term issues around Vader being Luke’s father, IDK.
Hahahahahahahahaha no. Star Wars would be half of what it is if Vader wasn’t Luke’s father. ROTJ would go from a beautiful story of how a father redeemed himself to save his son to a cliche, boring “Luke kills the Emperor and Vader and saves the day! Luke gets revenge on the evil bad guy who killed his dad!”. Bleh. Imagine a ROTJ without the bridge scene between Luke and Vader, Vader throwing the Emperor down the shaft and Anakin telling Luke he was always right about him. AKA the best parts of ROTJ? Sounds pretty shitty if you ask me. The entire third act of ROTJ basically becomes meaningless. Nothing.
Literally everything would have a lot less emotional depth too, from Luke’s journey to Vader’s character. Vader especially is given a shit ton more depth. It makes their relationship far more interesting and gives them an actual connection beyond just a shallow “I want revenge on you because you killed my dad!”.
And also, just from a simple screenwriting perspective, it makes a lot more sense to just lump Anakin and Vader into the same character. Having Obi-Wan have both a best friend and an apprentice just adds more unnecessary characters, and both characters would just be bland archetypes without lumping them together. Anakin is an interesting character because of the things that lead him to become Darth Vader, remove that and you just have a typical one-dimensional hero character. Anakin’s flaws are what make him work, otherwise he’s bland. What’s the point of having both a best friend character and an apprentice character when you can just combine them, leading to a much more interesting character with a lot more depth? In general, when you have too many characters it becomes harder to develop them all. The prequels already had so many characters to develop, lmao.
It also explains why Luke and Leia are the only children of any Jedi that are around. Because Anakin broke the rules, and this contributed to him becoming Darth Vader.