I’ve been following everyone’s discussion with great interest.

Of course, the Jedi hunt that Obi-Wan describes in the OT, with Vader hunting down and destroying the Jedi, must have happened. But in ROTJ, Obi-Wan also explicitly says that Anakin was a “good man.”

To me, that is where the real question lies: how did a fundamentally good man, someone who had once been Obi-Wan’s close friend, become a person capable of doing something so completely opposed to what he once stood for, the extermination of the Jedi? That tragic process is what I wanted the Prequels to focus on. His fall should have been something that could conceivably have happened to Luke as well, or even something that, in a less extreme form, could happen in our own lives.

And the Vader we see in ROTJ does not seem content with what he has become. Deep down, he knows that he took the wrong path. But he believes it is already too late. In his mind, he crossed the point of no return long ago.

That was the impression I had of Vader back when the Prequels did not yet exist. So I decided to try putting that interpretation into an actual story and see if I could make it work.

But, as Obi-Wan himself would say, this is only “a certain point of view.” I’m sure we all understand that, and I certainly don’t mean it as a rejection of other interpretations.