What I said was really simple. The Darth Vader we know and love today is basically Kane Starkiller and General Vader combined into one character. Kane was a rogue Jedi cyborg and Annikin Starkiller’s father (who became Luke). Darth Vader in the original drafts was simply a general for the empire. The final incarnation of Darth Vader is second in command of the emperor, a cyborg and Luke Skywalker’s father.
So yes, from a certain point of view, Vader was always gonna be Luke’s father. Or at least, there was always an element of “rogue cyborg Jedi is the protagonists dad”.
I’m assuming when Lucas said it was about Annikin and his kids, he probably either misspoke, mixed up the characters, or he said that for convenience because he didn’t want to have to go on and explain who Kane was.
George in the interview you reference says:
“the very very first script it was about, um, Annikin Starkiller and his two kids. And, er, he was a rogue Jedi, and, um, there were remnants of that that sort of found its way into the final Star Wars.”
As demonstrated in my previous post, this is obviously not so: Annikin is not a rogue Jedi at all in the “very very first script” (the 1974 rough draft). Neither is he rogue, nor a Jedi, but he is the son of a Jedi. Nor does Annikin have kids.
So it is far from your claim, based on George’s quote above, that:
“Vader was always gonna be Luke’s father. It was just discarded but then we ended up getting something that more resembled the original idea.”
It never was “the original idea” that Vader was Luke’s father. “The original idea” had Vader, Valorum, Kane, Annikin, among many others. They are 4 completely separate characters, as they appear in “the very very first script” I linked to.
In my previous post I do list these 4 completely separate characters and their attributes in the early scripts that the Vader character merges with and becomes over time. But is it not simply two characters you refer to combining into one character. And it certainly did not happen in the “very very first script”.
Can you provide a link to this “very very first script” that George is talking about? Are you referring to the 1974 rough draft, which has the 4 completely separate characters, as I describe above, and in the previous post?