Is it one of these?
Star Wars prequels were mapped out in 1981, only nothing like the way they turned out - from Rinzler’s Making Of ROTJ book.
That thread has an excellent post by a user named CP3S (from 10 years ago). It pretty much sums up my feelings as the definitive critique of Anakin’s botched tragedy:
Somewhere in the depth of this forum we have a thread discussing good characters turning bad, and whether or not it is possible for it to be done convincingly. That was a fun thread, I thought of it sometime back while watching Breaking Bad.
You start off with Walt, an easy to sympathize with character and you grow attached to him. They put him in a dire situation and make him do bad things for a noble reason. So you still sympathize. As the show progresses, his dire situation turns around, and his bad actions slowly cause him to lose the noble reason for doing them. Eventually, when you take the time to think about it, you realize Walt is just a bad guy. But you still can’t shake that sympathy for him that was built at the beginning. He continues to do these bad things, but is now driven by greed and pride, rather than the intended selfless sacrifice for his family that started him off on that path. It is the best story of a fall into evil that I have ever encountered.
I don’t think it is impossible, or even necessarily that hard, to make a beloved character sink into becoming the villain. We all loved Darth Vader before, but imagine how we’d feel about him now if George had managed to make Anakin a character we loved and sympathized with as much as Luke. Instead he was just a bitch from the beginning that you couldn’t wait to see Obi-Wan smack around a bit before he finally grew a pair and donned his leather suit.
Well said.
My only criticism would be that Walt’s descent into evil was spread over 6 seasons of television, whereas with Anakin you only have 3 movies. Plus, the starting and ending point of Anakin’s arc (selfless hero to mass-murdering fascist cyborg) is more of a wide gap to cross than Walt’s journey from mild-mannered chemist to meth kingpin. So writing Anakin’s fall is definitely MUCH harder. It would be hard for even the best of screenwriters to pull it off. Lucas didn’t stand a chance.
But at the same time, Lucas also made it WAY worse than it needed to be, making tons of bizarre mistakes, like wasting the entire first film by not even including adult Anakin in it.