G&G-Fan said:
NeverarGreat said:
In the OT, Vader only ever directly kills enemy (and sometimes allied) combatants.
Not only are they not all combatants, but once a combatant is unarmed and you go any further then you have to, there’s no difference, at that point.
He kills Captain Antilles when he’s defenseless and completely at his mercy for no reason other then lying to him and participating in a plot to save the galaxy from a planet destroying weapon.
What Vader did to Leia when they “discussed” the location of the Rebel base (another thing he makes a sardonic joke about), the music, editing, set design, slow buildup, shot choice, was clearly implying it was pretty sinister. It clearly wasn’t a “discussion”. It’s not just a truth serum droid, it’s a torture device. This is an imprisoned politician, not a combatant.
He kills Captain Needa when he apologizes and makes a sadistic joke about doing so.
He leans towards Han Solo, a defenseless prisoner, when he’s being tortured as if he’s enjoying it and sardonically says, “He will not be permanently damaged”, as his screams echo across the hallway. He was chill with the idea of Han dying if it meant using him as a test subject.
He takes pride in trapping Lando in a really unfair deal, with no intent to hold his end at all, taking over the city to subjugate the innocents of Bespin no matter how much Lando complies.
He was gonna torture people working on the second Death Star to “motivate them” despite the workload being seemingly impossible for the number of men they have.
He sadistically gloated about using Luke’s friends as leverage and turning his own daughter to the dark side to use her as a tool for his own ends. He straight up goes, “Yessss”. Not to mention, yeah, trying to do that to your son is also pretty bad.
Han, Leia, Luke, and Antilles are all members of the Rebellion, so I assume that Vader, like the Empire, is treating them like unprivileged combatants (spies and whatnot). Lando is harboring Rebellion fighters and is also running an illegal gas mining operation that has military uses, so it makes sense that the Empire would crack down on that.
Compare Vader’s actions in the OT with Thrawn’s actions at the end of Rebels, where Thrawn holds a city of innocents hostage and begins to destroy them to prove a point. Vader in the OT never indiscriminately kills civilians merely because one of them might be a Rebel.
NeverarGreat said:
Sure, you could argue that he killed Owen and Beru, but he never stepped foot on Tatooine and those executions were probably the purview of his underlings.
Vader is above them. Everything they do goes through him, especially these people who are critical to an important mission. It would’ve been his call to take them prisoner, kill them, etc.
I am 100% certain we were never supposed to get the impression that a grunt stormtrooper is worse then the dark lord of the Sith that is one of the main villains in 3 movies. His very first shot has the stormtroopers submit to what the visual language of the movie is making obvious to us is the bigger bad. He’s taller, darker, scarier mask. The visual language of Star Wars is very deliberate and on-the-nose, which is why it appeals to the most primal sensibilities.
Sure, presumably Vader could have given the order and their deaths are ultimately on his hands, but it’s notable how we don’t see him do this. The movie doesn’t show their deaths, and I think it’s effective in conveying that the Empire killed them, which is all Luke needs to know in order to join the Rebellion.
NeverarGreat said:
Similarly, the Death Star was Tarkin’s project, a project which Vader clearly disliked on a deep and fundamental level. Of course at some level, everyone who supported the Empire had Alderaan’s blood on their hands, but to say that Vader had some unique and singular responsibility for Alderaan seems to be a stretch.
He disliked the Death Star because he feared it could replace him. Vader was the Empire’s ultimate enforcer up to that point. There’s a reason he basically goes, “The Death Star is nothing compared to my power”, instead of, “The Death Star is too much power for us to wield” or something. It was about his ego. Nothing to do with any sense of morality. Which is why Motti basically calls him out on it.
Your previous points are debatable, but I think this one is just wrong. Vader says that ‘The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.’ Vader isn’t saying that he feels threatened by this station, but just that the Force is so much stronger than anything the Empire could produce. His statement is a (prophetic) warning against the Empire’s hubris and a statement of his religion’s faith, which is why the officer rebuts him by calling out his ‘sad devotion to that ancient religion.’
He was in the room with Tarkin when he did it. He held Leia back when she was attempting to stop him. He could’ve used the force to snap Tarkin’s neck and then take command of the station, as he was already second-in-command as is. He’s like a demigod to everybody on that station. He made his choice to do nothing.
This is another instance where the prequels do a disservice to the OT. In the original film, Vader was clearly subservient to Tarkin, who was himself subservient to the Emperor. Leia even cracks a joke at how Vader is Tarkin’s lap dog.
In the OT, there is a somewhat implied growth of Vader in prominence throughout the trilogy, because after Tarkin dies Vader goes from commanding a regular Star Destroyer to commanding an entire fleet and reporting directly to the Emperor. Before ESB, Vader may have been merely a strange curiosity, a holdover from another age. In fact that’s how Vader was seen before the prequels came out, as the Visual Dictionary explained. Vader only became a demigod badass in retrospect after his entire character arc was flattened into a single, static set of attributes that never changed over the course of his life.
Regardless of whether Vader could have physically done anything to stop the Death Star, there’s no indication that he had the influence with the Emperor to survive that action. Saying that he was responsible for Alderaan is the same as saying that Reactor Control Technician #4 was responsible for Alderaan. They could both have thrown a spanner into the works, but their culpability is far superseded by that of Tarkin and the Emperor.
NeverarGreat said:
To then suggest that it was in fact Anakin who was monstrous long before the corrupting influence of the Empire even existed is to strike at the core of everything Anakin is in the eyes of his son. If Anakin committed genocide before the Clone Wars, if he killed children before the Empire was formed, then there is no good man for Luke to save. Anakin didn’t become a monster when he became Darth Vader; Anakin was himself a monster, and the apparent dichotomy between Anakin and Vader in the OT simply doesn’t exist. Anakin as a man was always Vader, and Vader was always a monster.
We’re told he betrayed his brethren, knights that fought for peace and justice, because was seduced by the dark side. Not lied to or fed propaganda, he wanted power. And Vader agrees with this.
“If you only knew the power of the dark side! Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” = “The power of the dark side is so great, even your father was seduced by it.”
He went from being a good man to a bad one by making his own selfish choices. Just because he became a bad man doesn’t mean he wasn’t ever a good one.
But that’s just the point; it doesn’t matter how he was corrupted or seduced, it only matters that he was at one time a ‘good man’, and the prequels show that is just not the case.
He didn’t commit genocide before the Clone Wars. If you’re referring to the Tuskens, that wasn’t genocide, and I disagree with that creative choice anyway, at least if it extends beyond the ones responsible for killing his mother (and even then, that pent up anger could be used as a plot point, if one chose).
Genocide is defined as (among other things) the systematic killing of many people of one race or ethnicity, and often specifically because of their race or ethnicity.
“I killed them. I killed them all. And not just the men, but the women, and the children. I killed them all. They’re animals. And I slaughtered them like animals.”
I don’t think the children had anything to do with killing Anakin’s mother. The point of the scene is to show how Anakin went out of his way to kill everyone in that tribe, specifically because they were Tuskens, a group of people that he viewed as not worthy of being persons. I’d call that genocide.
He killed children after he became a Sith, like a day before it was officially the Empire, when it was already the Empire in all but name. At that point, it’s a semantic argument. I understand the sentiment, as it’s absolutely rushed in ROTS, but when he’s christened Darth Vader, he’s supposed to be like, 90% Vader already.
Again, you’re proving my point. You seem to view any actions taken by Vader as understandable because he is Vader, while I’m saying that the killing of children is not understandable even after Anakin became Vader. Vader at the height of his villainy in the OT never killed children, yet Anakin in the PT kills them on two separate occasions, in both cases before he ever puts on the mask. The prequels give us a bizarre situation where Vader actually reaches the height of his evil as a teenager and then he gradually gets less evil as he gets older, at least when measured by his actual deeds.
