RicOlie_2 said:
What if Anakin and Darth Vader were two separate pupils of Obi-Wan (this way we don't suspect Obi-Wan is lying when we get to ANH)?
I plan on going this route myself with my PT rewrite.
Basically, my plan is that in the last months of the last Clone War -- shortly after Anakin fell to the dark side and left Obi-Wan -- Ben rescued an orphaned infant named Darth Vader and decided to adopt him as his own son and raise him as a Jedi.
As the years passed, Darth grew to become a skilled Jedi apprentice. For one reason or another, however, he also grew to lack confidence in his own abilities; his greatest fear was that he had failed to properly digest the training and teachings Obi-Wan had given to him, that he was a disappointment to his adopted father.
Eventually, Anakin -- now the Lord of the Sith -- resurfaced and became aware of Darth. Preying upon the young Jedi apprentice's fears, Anakin gradually convinced Darth that he could only realize his full potential and prove himself to his father by embracing the power of the dark side. Thus, Darth Vader left the Jedi to become one of Anakin's Sith apprentices.
Sometime later, Anakin and Darth confronted Obi-Wan on Sullust and engaged him in a lightsaber duel. As the duel progressed, the two Sith beat Ben down, defeating him. Just as Anakin prepared to slay Ben, though, Darth refused to let his father die, and intervened by slicing Anakin's right hand off, disarming him of his lightsaber.
Calling one of Darth's lightsabers to his remaining hand, Anakin turned on his new apprentice, and the two engaged one another in a fierce battle which took them to the edge of a canyon leading down to a violent lava flow below. With a massive eruption, the edge they were standing on crumbled, and Anakin and Darth both tumbled into the magma river.
By calling on the dark side of the Force, Anakin created a protective shield around himself which prevented the intense heat from completely incinerating his body, and he escaped the lava flow with his life. Most of his body has been horribly burnt away, however, and that damage extended to his brain; he had lost most of his memories, including those of his own identity.
Since he had been engaged in battle with Darth when he plummeted into the magma, however, the name "Darth Vader" imprinted itself upon his mind, and Anakin came to believe that that was his own name. Palpatine soon found him and decided to use the Lord of the Sith's near-complete amnesia to his own advantage; using his own dark powers, Palpatine reshaped Anakin's mind, imprinting him with a completely new identity -- that of Darth Vader, unquestioning enforcer of Emperor Palpatine and his New Order.
As the years passed, most of Vader's memories returned to him and he recalled his own true identity. Yet out of a desire to keep this knowledge secret from Palpatine -- and out of a subconscious effort to disassociate the man he once was from the monster he had become -- he continued to use the name of Obi-Wan's second apprentice as his own.