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How would you restructure Anakin's turn to the dark side in the Prequels? — Page 2

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I think you’re right that starting with him already as a Jedi or at least as Obi Wan’s young adult student would be much better. Also remove anything to do with chosen ones.

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G&G-Fan said:

Superweapon VII said:

Lucas briefly toyed with the idea of a 12-episode saga. Episode I would’ve been the prelude to the Clone Wars trilogy, with Episode V serving as an interquel between the Clone & Star Wars trilogies. That would’ve given us 4-5 films in which to explore Vader’s rise and fall.

What could’ve been. But this is why I’m partial to rewrites/fanedits which jettison the episode numbers altogether.

Where would episode 6 have gone then?

Episode VI would’ve been the film we already got in '77.

Anyway, here’re Lucas’ handwritten notes for the proposed 12-episode saga:


Couldn’t find larger copies, so you’ll have to squint. Sorry.

“The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution… There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”

― Leo Tolstoy

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Superweapon VII said:

Anyway, here’re Lucas’ handwritten notes for the proposed 12-episode saga:

Couldn’t find larger copies, so you’ll have to squint. Sorry.

Holy crap, I’ve been looking for those for so long! I remember seeing George’s original saga plans years ago, but I wasn’t able to find anything about them afterwards, to the point where I thought I had just imagined them. Thanks so much!

My preferred Skywalker Saga experience:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

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If I were in charge of a prequel story with Anakin Skywalker, I would not have him transform into Darth Vader during those episodes, at least, not fully. Instead, this would happen between the Prequels and the Original Trilogy.

Anakin in the PT is essentially Flash Gordon with a few notable changes. He comes from a farming planet in the colony worlds and is recruited to fight in the Republic Space Force by General Obi-wan Kenobi, who is secretly part of an order of Jedi Knights, reclusive warriors under the personal command of the Republic’s High Chancellor who are rumored to use a mystical energy source to achieve amazing feats. He is similar to Hans Zarkov except that instead of the magic of science, he uses literal magic that he implies is mere scientific trickery.

Obi-wan comes to believe that Anakin may be able to use this Force, and inducts him into the order of Knights, overriding the normal order of training where a Knight would be trained under a peaceful Jedi Master, one who had devoted their life to balance and tranquility. He confides with Anakin that this is not the first student he has had, and his prior attempt ended with failure. Nevertheless, Anakin agrees to the training. While training, Anakin and Obi-wan are tasked by the High Chancellor with protecting the planet of Alderaan. They are joined in this quest by a Republic translator and diplomatic envoy to Alderaan, who is to become the mother of Luke (A Dale Arden-style character). She is secretly a princess of Alderaan but she conceals her true nature from the Jedi in order that she could ascertain their true interest in the planet. For you see, even at this time Alderaan was wary of the increasing power of the High Chancellor, and they sought to protect their autonomy from the growing reach of the Republic Army and its secret service of Jedi Knights. Anakin and ‘Dale’ fall in love, but it is only Obi-wan who suspects her true identity. Having saved Alderaan, the trio go on to have many more adventures during the wars.

The wars rage on, with legions of genetically identical clones fighting the Republic forces. The Jedi are increasingly isolated since the old Jedi Masters now believe that the Jedi have become too warlike, and the Jedi recognize this as well. They distance themselves from the Republic, but even as they do so a mysterious dark warrior arrives and begins hunting down the Jedi. One by one, the Jedi start disappearing, always at the hands of this mysterious warrior. During the climactic battle for the Republic, the mysterious warrior appears in black armor to fight Obi-wan, claiming to be his prior student. He says that he is faithful to the High Chancellor, and that the Jedi have betrayed the Republic even in its time of dire need. Obi-wan say that the Jedi have given everything to the Republic, but this is not enough for the dark warrior. He strikes Obi-wan down, and it is believed that he is dead. Anakin hears of this and hunts down the dark warrior, finally fighting him above a pool of lava. They both fall into that pit and it is only at the end that we learn that Obi-wan survived. He goes to ‘Dale’ to tell her the news. he sees that she has a baby boy, and she gives this to him to be raised with Anakin’s family who are moving to the outer rim in search of a new home, escaping the war-torn desolation of their blasted homeworld. Obi-wan, seeing that ‘Dale’ is sick and not long for this world, goes to watch over the boy. The final scenes show that one of the warriors has survived the fall into lava, and returns to the High Chancellor to help rule over this new Empire that he has helped to create.

TL;DR: I don’t think that Anakin’s turn need be difficult or complicated. He was a simple man of action who fought in the wars for the Republic, in whatever form that government would take. Nobody bothered to ask him about his politics, and by the time anyone would have thought to ask it was already too late.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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That’s an interesting idea, Nev. In general, the prequel rewrites that involve Obi-Wan having two apprentices that both turn evil fall incredibly flat for me (it’s obvious who really became Vader, even to a hypothetical first-timer), but your idea obscures the obviousness enough that I could imagine a first-time watcher being almost completely blindsided by the ESB reveal. I might try contriving something like that for the saga edit that I’ve been thinking of recently.

My preferred Skywalker Saga experience:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

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 (Edited)

I’d embrace the idea of the Jedi being kind of a cult. The Jedi, on their quest to defend peace and justice in the galaxy, have tried to systematize good and evil to help them understand what their quest even is. I like the idea of the Jedi thinking Yoda was the Chosen One, so maybe he, or some other legendary Jedi who deserves that level of respect, would have defeated the Sith, established the current Republic and a new Jedi order, and came up with a perfect moral code which always illuminates the greater good. In the 800 or so years since this, the Jedi have set out on perfecting both themselves and the galaxy.

The cult-like behavior comes from their sheer commitment to the greater good. The Order is socially engineered so all of its members always prioritize the greater good. They train Jedi from birth so they never meet their family and prioritize them over the greater good of the galaxy. They don’t allow Jedi to fall in love or even have friends because the galaxy’s history books are full of Jedi who turned to the dark side for their friends. It’s dehumanizing, but the Jedi justify it because the Force gives you an immense amount of power, and if you can’t give up your own humanity for the greater good, you don’t deserve that power. Anakin, the one who wasn’t brainwashed from birth, who will fall in love and have a child, is going to be the one who ultimately destroys the Jedi Order and hands the galaxy over to Palpatine.

The Jedi are still flawed though, and if I were to actually write this I’d like to frame it to make the argument that the greater good itself is not for the greater good. The Jedi and the Republic tolerate slavery because the effort to end it would cost many times more lives than it would liberate, and (temporarily) tolerating some evils is for the greater good. But you can’t exactly tell a slave that their slavery is a good thing, and if it turned out that the Chosen One is a former slave, you’re going to make a natural enemy of him by continuing to tolerate slavery, even if he recognizes ending slavery would let out more evils than it would abolish.

Anakin’s fall to the dark side has more to do with the Jedi’s failings than his own inclination toward evil. Anakin’s respect for all the good the galaxy’s done at first puts him on their side. But as it becomes more clear to him how much evil they tolerate, he becomes disillusioned with them. When it becomes clear that he’s the Chosen One, not Yoda/whoever, and their arcane rules prioritize the greater good over him fulfilling his destiny by ending the war and defeating the Sith, he becomes radicalized against them. He embraces fear because it’s a natural reaction to danger, anger because it’s a natural reaction to injustice, and hate because it’s a natural reaction to evil. He turns to Palpatine and the Sith, not because they were the real good guys, but because in a galaxy where moral thinking is so completely dominated by the dishonest, delusional, and ineffective Jedi, the only option he really has to turn to is the Sith, who definitely do not give a damn about the greater good, but don’t force him to tolerate slavery and don’t stop Anakin from ending the war destroying galactic civilization itself. With the Sith and the Empire, the galaxy is his to shape according to his will, but radicalized against the extreme selflessness and peacefulness of the Jedi, he becomes a brutish tyrant whose will becomes just as much of an evil as what he once fought against.

I’d like to reconstruct this in the ST. If the PT Jedi’s failings were that they prioritized the greater good over the individual good, and there’s this idea that in the ST that the Force is to become decentralized, maybe Luke and/or Rey teach the galaxy to defend their own personal good. The galaxy shouldn’t have one group of people defending peace and justice, but everyone should be defending peace and justice in their own lives. The Republic, too, would have to go, because there’s no way to enforce one singular greater good over trillions or quadrillions of people in the galaxy. Someone’s always going to get fucked over for the greater good, and some people more often than others. The political status quo after Episode 9 would be a network of small, local Republics which keep order and peace on a small scale. This is bittersweet, because without the institutions that keep galactic civilization together, civilization can not exist on a galactic scale. But that scale of civilization led to the tyrannies of the Republic and the Empire, and the hell that the Clone Wars and the Empire were weren’t worth the luxury of galactic civilization.

Reading R + L ≠ J theories

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The cult-like behavior comes from their sheer commitment to the greater good. The Order is socially engineered so all of its members always prioritize the greater good. They train Jedi from birth so they never meet their family and prioritize them over the greater good of the galaxy. They don’t allow Jedi to fall in love or even have friends because the galaxy’s history books are full of Jedi who turned to the dark side for their friends. It’s dehumanizing, but the Jedi justify it because the Force gives you an immense amount of power, and if you can’t give up your own humanity for the greater good, you don’t deserve that power. Anakin, the one who wasn’t brainwashed from birth, who will fall in love and have a child, is going to be the one who ultimately destroys the Jedi Order and hands the galaxy over to Palpatine.

The Jedi are still flawed though, and if I were to actually write this I’d like to frame it to make the argument that the greater good itself is not for the greater good. The Jedi and the Republic tolerate slavery because the effort to end it would cost many times more lives than it would liberate, and (temporarily) tolerating some evils is for the greater good. But you can’t exactly tell a slave that their slavery is a good thing, and if it turned out that the Chosen One is a former slave, you’re going to make a natural enemy of him by continuing to tolerate slavery, even if he recognizes ending slavery would let out more evils than it would abolish.

That’s the way I interpret the actual Prequels as well, even if it’s not what George Lucas thinks, and blah blah blah.

“Sometimes we must let go of our pride, and do what is requested to us.”
– Anakin Skywalker

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Will never be a fan of pining the blame of Anakin’s turn on the Jedi. Darth Vader should be a villain with agency responsible for his own actions. Makes him a more powerful and badass villain.

This may be driven by the fact that I’m a Vader fanboy, but it’s just my opinion.

My Star Wars Fan-Edits

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G&G-Fan said:

Will never be a fan of pining the blame of Anakin’s turn on the Jedi. Darth Vader should be a villain with agency responsible for his own actions. Makes him a more powerful and badass villain.

This may be driven by the fact that I’m a Vader fanboy, but it’s just my opinion.

And I’m a Anakin fanboy, so I defend him a bit.
I don’t blame the Jedi entirely, of course. I blame Anakin, Palpatine and the Jedi equally. All of them were 1/3 of the problem. But we already had a lot of discussions about it when I still had my old account, so it’s better not to start again.

“Sometimes we must let go of our pride, and do what is requested to us.”
– Anakin Skywalker

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Now this is just an idea, and it might not work out all too great but hear me out: I wouldn’t even show his fall.

One idea I’ve come to like is that the prequels could have shown Anakin becoming a Jedi and end on a high note. He can have moments of struggle through the trilogy, but at the end he still seems like a good man. However, elements must still be sprinkled that in retrospect would make his transformation into Vader make sense. Maybe he looses a limb still, emphasize his allegiance to more centralized power, interest in the Dark Side, etc. Some of his personal struggles cannot be completely overcome. He still needs to be flawed. One approach to take could be to have Anakin be an underdog, one who his fellow students look down upon. Then we can have a character who struggles to rise through the ranks and achieve greatness. We can root for him. (Again, just throwing out ideas.)

The end can leave off on a bittersweet note: the Clone Wars are over, but the Republic is now and Empire. All the steps of Anakin’s fall have been foreshadowed but only when we look retrospectively. We need to feel proud and happy with Anakin at the end of the war. That way going into A New Hope, we the audience may truly believe that an apprentice of Kenobi named Vader did really kill Anakin, and the plot twist in Empire is still kept a surprise.

Another cool idea is to have Anakin start deconstructing the Jedi Order by not just killing other Knights, but by creating an ideological rift between members of the Order. Some like Qui-Gon and Mace Windu are allegiant to following the Force and standing up to the Republic (which is still slowly becoming an Empire throughout the whole trilogy) and you have those like Count Dooku who agree with Anakin, and think that more government power is necessary to end the war, regardless of the cost. Its kind of like blind patriotism. Maybe this would be too much but still, I think it’s fun to think about.

Edit: To clarify, Jedi could have multiple apprentices at a time like in 90’s EU.

Move along, move along.

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I think saving Anakin’s fall for post Episode 3 is a good idea, and is what I’m leaning towards in a rewrite. It’s also interesting to think of ending the trilogy on a high note, and would probably mean shifting the viewpoint backward in time. There’s still the issue of Anakin’s children which put some constraints on the timeline, but it may be solvable.

Doing some quick math, both Anakin and Obi-wan would be in their mid-60s by the time of ANH based on the ages of their actors, which means that they would be in their mid-40s during the birth of the twins.

Obi-wan claims that Vader was a young Jedi when he began hunting down and killing the Jedi, so he must have turned rather early in his life while also allowing for him to have become a good man before that. So how old is the average student before they become a Jedi? It must be that to become a Jedi takes more time than is implied by Luke’s training, significantly more in fact. It is also known that a Jedi begins their training before they are in their twenties, so the training may take two decades or more.

If Anakin began training in his 20s and became a Jedi by the time he was 30, that may still be quite young for a Jedi based on historical trends. This would also indicate that Luke underwent an unusually rapid course of training, and the derision he meets from Jabba and his entourage may be simply due to them understanding that a Jedi would have been old by necessity of lengthy training.

However, this means that since Anakin and Obi-wan were similar in age, Obi-wan would have been remarkably young to be a Jedi as well. Why was this? Well, the common factor here is Yoda, who significantly rushed Luke’s training by all accounts. Perhaps he also rushed Obi-wan’s training, and this is the original flaw that led to the destruction of the Jedi. Yoda may have been visited by a young man filled with a zeal to embark on a worthy crusade and fight in the Clone Wars. In fact, Obi-wan’s training may have mirrored Luke’s training where he realized that his friends were in danger and left the training unfinished, having promised that one day he would return to Dagobah to complete what he started. But in the meantime, he would train acolytes of his own to help him fight this war. Interestingly, there is evidence that Luke remembers Dagobah and Yoda seems to remember Luke, so perhaps Obi-wan did return to Dagobah to complete his training after taking Luke from his mother at the end of the Clone Wars. It fits!

Sorry for the stream of consciousness, but I seem to think best by writing.

Anyway, I’m getting the impression that Anakin and Obi-wan are peers and partners in the Force more than student and teacher, helping each other learn through a trial by fire and war. “I was a Jedi Knight, same as your father”, takes on more meaning now. There’s the tension between that statement and “When I left you I was but the learner, now I am the master”. Perhaps that is because Obi-wan was never officially made a Jedi Knight, merely claiming that he was and making Anakin a Jedi Knight after taking him through his incomplete course of training.

Or perhaps the term Jedi Knight is actually two separate distinctions. To become a Jedi is the more difficult, lengthy, and spiritual journey, and the knight appellation is similar to a Knighthood in the UK. Essentially, Yoda may be a Jedi but not a Knight since he is not in service to the Republic, and Obi-wan may be a Knight but not truly a Jedi since he may not have completed Yoda’s training, at least not before the time of the Empire.

To put all this in some order, here’s how I see a potential timeline:

Episode 1 sees Obi-wan, having returned from Yoda on Dagobah several years ago, fighting in the first Clone War at the age of 25. He claims that he is a Jedi and commands his own squadron. The Jedi are an obscure and fading image of the Republic’s former glory, with few knowing of how they were once peacekeepers in the galaxy. He recruits Anakin (also 25) and together they win the day, ending the first Clone War. At the end of the film Obi-wan is awarded a Knighthood by the Republic, and becomes the youngest Jedi Knight in the Republic’s history.

Episode 2 takes place 5 years later, at the outbreak of the second Clone War. This is a far fiercer conflict and looks to span the entire galaxy. Alderaan asks for help. Obi-wan again asks Anakin to fight, and vows to teach him the ways of the Jedi even if no other Jedi in the galaxy shall train him.

Episode 3 takes place another 5 years later, and they have a chance to end this galactic conflict. Obi-wan now has several students under his wing, and Anakin is rewarded by a Knighthood. The Republic has an unstoppable army and has brought peace to the universe, and the Jedi are ready to go out into the universe and become peacekeepers in it like they once were.

This leaves the story with our heroes at the age of 35, ten years before the birth of the twins. This also leaves a lot of the story to the imaginations of the audience, which is important in Star Wars.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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Ending the prequels with an apparent “victory” does seem like an interesting route. The only flaw I can think of is that it would make the sequels seem even more derivative of the OT, given that both trilogies would begin with the previous heroes’ accomplishments being undone in the first paragraph of the crawl. 😉

My preferred Skywalker Saga experience:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

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SparkySywer said:

I’d embrace the idea of the Jedi being kind of a cult. The Jedi, on their quest to defend peace and justice in the galaxy, have tried to systematize good and evil to help them understand what their quest even is. I like the idea of the Jedi thinking Yoda was the Chosen One, so maybe he, or some other legendary Jedi who deserves that level of respect, would have defeated the Sith, established the current Republic and a new Jedi order, and came up with a perfect moral code which always illuminates the greater good. In the 800 or so years since this, the Jedi have set out on perfecting both themselves and the galaxy.

The cult-like behavior comes from their sheer commitment to the greater good. The Order is socially engineered so all of its members always prioritize the greater good. They train Jedi from birth so they never meet their family and prioritize them over the greater good of the galaxy. They don’t allow Jedi to fall in love or even have friends because the galaxy’s history books are full of Jedi who turned to the dark side for their friends. It’s dehumanizing, but the Jedi justify it because the Force gives you an immense amount of power, and if you can’t give up your own humanity for the greater good, you don’t deserve that power. Anakin, the one who wasn’t brainwashed from birth, who will fall in love and have a child, is going to be the one who ultimately destroys the Jedi Order and hands the galaxy over to Palpatine.

The Jedi are still flawed though, and if I were to actually write this I’d like to frame it to make the argument that the greater good itself is not for the greater good. The Jedi and the Republic tolerate slavery because the effort to end it would cost many times more lives than it would liberate, and (temporarily) tolerating some evils is for the greater good. But you can’t exactly tell a slave that their slavery is a good thing, and if it turned out that the Chosen One is a former slave, you’re going to make a natural enemy of him by continuing to tolerate slavery, even if he recognizes ending slavery would let out more evils than it would abolish.

Anakin’s fall to the dark side has more to do with the Jedi’s failings than his own inclination toward evil. Anakin’s respect for all the good the galaxy’s done at first puts him on their side. But as it becomes more clear to him how much evil they tolerate, he becomes disillusioned with them. When it becomes clear that he’s the Chosen One, not Yoda/whoever, and their arcane rules prioritize the greater good over him fulfilling his destiny by ending the war and defeating the Sith, he becomes radicalized against them. He embraces fear because it’s a natural reaction to danger, anger because it’s a natural reaction to injustice, and hate because it’s a natural reaction to evil. He turns to Palpatine and the Sith, not because they were the real good guys, but because in a galaxy where moral thinking is so completely dominated by the dishonest, delusional, and ineffective Jedi, the only option he really has to turn to is the Sith, who definitely do not give a damn about the greater good, but don’t force him to tolerate slavery and don’t stop Anakin from ending the war destroying galactic civilization itself. With the Sith and the Empire, the galaxy is his to shape according to his will, but radicalized against the extreme selflessness and peacefulness of the Jedi, he becomes a brutish tyrant whose will becomes just as much of an evil as what he once fought against.

I’d like to reconstruct this in the ST. If the PT Jedi’s failings were that they prioritized the greater good over the individual good, and there’s this idea that in the ST that the Force is to become decentralized, maybe Luke and/or Rey teach the galaxy to defend their own personal good. The galaxy shouldn’t have one group of people defending peace and justice, but everyone should be defending peace and justice in their own lives. The Republic, too, would have to go, because there’s no way to enforce one singular greater good over trillions or quadrillions of people in the galaxy. Someone’s always going to get fucked over for the greater good, and some people more often than others. The political status quo after Episode 9 would be a network of small, local Republics which keep order and peace on a small scale. This is bittersweet, because without the institutions that keep galactic civilization together, civilization can not exist on a galactic scale. But that scale of civilization led to the tyrannies of the Republic and the Empire, and the hell that the Clone Wars and the Empire were weren’t worth the luxury of galactic civilization.

This is the bog standard internet interpretation right now with almost no changes.

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StarkillerAG said:

Ending the prequels with an apparent “victory” does seem like an interesting route. The only flaw I can think of is that it would make the sequels seem even more derivative of the OT, given that both trilogies would begin with the previous heroes’ accomplishments being undone in the first paragraph of the crawl. 😉

Who cares what it does to the sequels?

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G&G-Fan said:

Will never be a fan of pining the blame of Anakin’s turn on the Jedi. Darth Vader should be a villain with agency responsible for his own actions. Makes him a more powerful and badass villain.

This may be driven by the fact that I’m a Vader fanboy, but it’s just my opinion.

Yes.

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Vladius said:

StarkillerAG said:

Ending the prequels with an apparent “victory” does seem like an interesting route. The only flaw I can think of is that it would make the sequels seem even more derivative of the OT, given that both trilogies would begin with the previous heroes’ accomplishments being undone in the first paragraph of the crawl. 😉

Who cares what it does to the sequels?

You’re right, of course. I just couldn’t resist making that comparison.

My preferred Skywalker Saga experience:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

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FWIW, Sparky, I think your take’s a novel spin on the “Lucas PT, but Deconstructed™”.

“The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution… There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”

― Leo Tolstoy

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I would keep it basically the same. But have his turn to the darkside not be about learn the dark side to save Padme. Would require a total rewrite of the prequels. He would be a moisture farmer on Tatooine who gives up his farming to join Obi Wan on a damn fool idealistic crusade joining the Clone Wars. Obi Wan recruits him sensing a he has a gift for the force. Obi Wan is a general in the republic. The Enemy is clone masters and Mandalorians not Jango Clones fighting trade federation. Anakin is a great starpilot and a cunning warrior, and a good friend. He is slowly seduced to evil and a descent into madness. There is no Qui-Gon, we see Vader in the suit destroying the Jedi Temple but we aren’t sure who he is. Obi Wan thinks he killed him over the volcano they dueled over.

I’d keep Padme basically the same but have her actually be a character with something to do in II and III. She would help surviving Jedi escape the Purge, be a senator and one of the founding members of the rebel alliance. She does this in secret because she knows Anakin sees it as treason and a betrayal of his mentor the President of the Republic former Senator Palpatine.

She’s doesn’t die til later on Alderaan when Leia is very young. She is one of Queen Breha’s handmaidens to be close to Leia until she dies somehow?

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If Anakin’s fight with Dooku in Episode 3 is supposed to call back to the Throne Room fight in Episode 6, it would be cool if Dooku called back to how Vader “must obey his master.”

Anakin would be left with the question in his mind of why a Sith would do that, which would be resolved at the end of the movie when he’s in the suit, having lost everything, and still obeying Palpatine. It would also make Dooku more of an interesting character, and retroactively add something to this scene in Return of the Jedi.

Reading R + L ≠ J theories

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Have you ever seen Election and Election 2? Johnnie To not Reese Witherspoon that is. It has a very nuance power struggle with characters that are neither good nor evil, but are pushed towards power by personal circumstances and often just bad luck. Even if they don’t want it, each decision has a repercussion. Now that’s how you do a modern take on The Godfather arc. But since Anakin is barely a character in The Phantom Menace you’ve lost so much time. Really that plot could have been part of the AOTC crawl, then there should have been a movie before TROS like the Clone Wars show era. Ah well.

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I would have him fall trying to prevent the take over of the Sith, that he is not Palpatine pal, but is seduced when Sheev kills Jedi Masters in front of him and damages Anakin with Force Lightning; that its the burns from The Emperor’s bolts that makes Anakin have to don the mask and black mantels. That would make it poetic in ROTJ that he dies being hit by bolts again.

“There is a tremor in the Force.”

“Give yourself to the dark side.” -Lord Vader

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Darth Tremor said:

I would have him fall trying to prevent the take over of the Sith, that he is not Palpatine pal, but is seduced when Sheev kills Jedi Masters in front of him and damages Anakin with Force Lightning; that its the burns from The Emperor’s bolts that makes Anakin have to don the mask and black mantels. That would make it poetic in ROTJ that he dies being hit by bolts again.

I like the link to episode 6, although I wouldn’t try to recreate the exact scene.

Instead I would change the platform scene before the duel on Mustafar. In this version Anakin doesn’t choke Padmé after Obi-Wan’s reveal, but attacks him with force lightning, Obi-Wan defend himself with his lightsaber, but the rebound attack hits Padmé. Anakin is devastated, he is now at his lowest point, he wants revenge, Obi-Wan must die. But first Padmé needs medical help, however neither Obi-Wan nor Anakin can leave, so Anakin lets go of Padmé and allows 3PO to fly her out, thus opening the door to his redemption. On board the ship Padmé hands 3PO the coordinates to Bail’s asteroid base. They leave the system and the duel begins.

What do you think?

“Vader! Hologram, now!”

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Peter Pan said:

Darth Tremor said:

I would have him fall trying to prevent the take over of the Sith, that he is not Palpatine pal, but is seduced when Sheev kills Jedi Masters in front of him and damages Anakin with Force Lightning; that its the burns from The Emperor’s bolts that makes Anakin have to don the mask and black mantels. That would make it poetic in ROTJ that he dies being hit by bolts again.

I like the link to episode 6, although I wouldn’t try to recreate the exact scene.

Instead I would change the platform scene before the duel on Mustafar. In this version Anakin doesn’t choke Padmé after Obi-Wan’s reveal, but attacks him with force lightning, Obi-Wan defend himself with his lightsaber, but the rebound attack hits Padmé. Anakin is devastated, he is now at his lowest point, he wants revenge, Obi-Wan must die. But first Padmé needs medical help, however neither Obi-Wan nor Anakin can leave, so Anakin lets go of Padmé and allows 3PO to fly her out, thus opening the door to his redemption. On board the ship Padmé hands 3PO the coordinates to Bail’s asteroid base. They leave the system and the duel begins.

What do you think?

I like that, since we have seen Kenobi knows how to deflect Force Lightning in AOTC, and that in ROTS and TROS the channeling of bolts can be reflected back on the conjurer.

Yeah I would be fine with that alternative too.

Though I still like the idea of Palpatine using lightning on Vader to make him submit to the dark side, it would add gravitas to Vader’s line, “you don’t know the power of the dark side! I must obey my master.” You would then understand Vader to basically be saying, “I obey or die,” that he lives under tyranny.

“There is a tremor in the Force.”

“Give yourself to the dark side.” -Lord Vader