As I get older, the entire moral arc of Return of the Jedi irks me more and more, even without getting to see Anakin's actual atrocities in the prequels or the fact that his act of defiance barely even mattered in the sequels.
I remember an Expanded Universe comic set immediately after RotJ where Leia tells Luke words to the effect of "Vader literally had me tortured and blew up my homeworld. What, am I supposed to feel kinship with him just because I discovered he's my dad yesterday?"
The important thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that the Emperor dies and the planet-killing superweapon gets blown up. Vader spent the last two hours of his life doing something good after 25 years of genocide, mass murder and torture, and even then, it was partly out of vengeful hatred. Vader fucking hated Palpatine for a quarter century and never had the spine to do anything about it. It was only after his own son was being tortured to death in front of him that he chose to act - and he'd cut off the kid's hand like two years before that! That's not a fucking redemption arc.
Darth Vader the fucking child-killing planet-murderer gets to stand there with Yoda and Obi-Wan as a Force Ghost, give me a fucking break.
"My father's name was Bail Organa, actually."
I have a whole other post I did about the original Star Wars trilogy that is relevant to this, but I'll try condense it:
So one, yes, absolutely it is entirely correct to take issue with Darth Vader's apparent forgiveness by the Force, there is no need for Leia to accept him as her father or to feel anything for him besides hate and contempt, redemption takes more than turning back for a couple of hours and then getting out of culpability by dying, all fair.
That said: the original trilogy is Luke Skywalker's story and the story of Luke Skywalker, on a meta level, is about being a young adult in the 60s and 70s who did not experience WWII or the depths of fascism personally, but who grew up with gaping familial wounds - family members who you never knew but who older people refer to or talk around, people they compare you to, figures who other children had in their lives but you didn't. Someone who as a child was given fantasies of heroes fighting daring battles, who was told it was all about nationhood and fighting for your people and the course of civilization, someone who internalized those principles as guiding lights for their own morality and who they want to be... and THEN finding out when you become an adult, and are permitted to know about the horrors, that it is not just honor and glory in your heritage, that you, 70s white boy, may have evil and darkness and the corruption of all your values as a potential to fall into just as your father did, the temptation to hate and cruelty and domination and atrocity. And the absences in your family are maybe not just because of death, of noble sacrifice, but perhaps instead because those people who shared your blood became monsters, severed from their family because of their terrible actions, and still live as awful hateful versions of themselves, enslaved to evil, and that could be you.
And what do you do with that? Will you strike your father down with all of your hatred, when the thing that corrupted him by his hate for its own ends is sitting there grinning and laughing, waiting to do the same to you? Is violence the answer against that creature, infinitely better at taking advantage from violence than you are? Or will you just die - and even just walking away here means death, sooner or later - and let the evil persist?
Or will you, privileged young person with ideals and hopes, with a family member who has done terrible unforgivable things but who still holds affection for you, make use of that affection to tempt them to just turn their back on that evil for a moment, the thing it will never expect from the person it made its slave for longer than you've been alive? Neither you nor he can pay back the crimes of those years, but perhaps you can stop the evil, here and now, from going on.
So you do that. And what is your reward? Is it appropriate for Luke, whose whole story has been about becoming the ideal he grew up admiring and defeating the evil that ideal had the potential to become, both halves of it embodied in the being of his father, to come back to his friends and then have the universe say to him 'your father was unredeemable, and had nothing good enough in him to deserve peace in death'? Or to say there was a darkness lifted from him, and a light restored?
The whole purpose of Darth Vader in the story of the original trilogy is to represent who Luke could be, and through Luke, the audience. He wasn't really supposed to have a character arc of his own, his redemption isn't for his own sake, the story isn't about him - or wasn't meant to be originally, in any case. How you depict the fate of Darth Vader is something that sends a very strong message, and there's a reason why it was chosen as the final message of the original movies, in the context of the world in which those movies were made and who they were intended to be speaking to. If you change that, you change the message. Which you can do! And you can take issue with the original message! But like, there was a message, that was chosen purposefully, and you have to lose the original message to add a new one.
This rebuttal is really good, but I actually think it also works as the culmination of Anakin/Vaderβs arcβ¦ when you understand the message ISNβT βone good deed absolves years of atrocitiesβ: Itβs that itβs never too late to do the right thing, and be a better person.
It doesnβt mean people will forgive you - hell no. The things Vader did were unforgivable, and he knew that. But because of that, he believed the only path left was to keep committing atrocities, to wallow in self-hatred and anger for decades and take it out on the galaxy. He says it himself: βItβs too late for me, sonβ.
But what Luke shows Vader is that we ALWAYS have a choice: To be a better person, and to choose compassion. Anakin doesnβt kill the Emperor out of hatred, or even because he thinks itβll make up for anything he did: He knows nothing ever will. He chooses to save Luke, and break the cycle of violence because itβs the right, kind thing to do.
Vader/Anakin isnβt fully redeemed by the end of Return of the Jedi: He simply takes his first step back into the light. Obi-Wan and Yoda chose to give him that second chance, but that was their decision to make. The people you hurt are by NO means obligated to forgive you - but you should still strive to be better regardless.
And I think thatβs the message of Anakinβs sacrifice: No matter what weβve done, we always have a choice to break the cycle and be better, with no expectation of forgiveness.
Vader/Anakin spent twenty years trapped in a cult/high-control situation/relationship with a malignantly evil, manipulative man who has been heavily involved in his life since he was a teenager---complete with medical control, by the way---and locked up by his guilt over things he was guided to do thinking they were necessary or righteous at the time.
And at the end of his life he took the terrifying step of freeing himself from it in a desperate effort to prevent a loved one from suffering. Should he have done that before? Absolutely. Could he have? I doubt it.
Few people---thankfully---are given the necessity of enduring their own failures at such a magnitude. It is NOT always easy to be good, and sometimes someone puts real effort into making it seemingly impossible. Humans often fail in that regard. Often.
But he saved the galaxy from the NEXT twenty years of the rule of the Sith, the absence of the Jedi, the overwhelm of the Empire, the destruction of more planets by the Death Star.
The fact he didn't save the galaxy from the FIRST twenty years of it doesn't erase that.
Leia doesn't have to forgive him, or see him as her father. But the message of Star Wars is, as stated above, that you're never too late to do better. Even, or perhaps especially, if you think it can never be enough.
Hell, sometimes the previous failure is what puts you in place to be a current success at it. Just as Han Solo's departure from the battle of Yavin let him enter the battle completely unexpectedly and land the hit that saved Luke from Vader in the trench run, Vader's presence as the Emperor's second-in-command and Sith apprentice, his loyalty to the Empire unimpeachable, put him in a position to successfully kill the Emperor---and, being the other Sith himself, to end their reign.
Sometimes your failures lead you where your successes wouldn't, and sometimes that's an important place to be.
[Image transcript follows]
"It really has to do with learning. Children teach you compassion. They teach you to love unconditionally. Anakin can't be redeemed for all the pain and suffering he's caused. He doesn't right the wrongs, but he stops the horror. The end of the Saga is simply Anakin saying, 'I care about this person, regardless of what it means to me. I will throw away everything that I have, everything that I have grown to love - primarily the Emperor - and throw away my life, to save this person. And I'm doing this because he has faith in me, loves me despite all the horrible things I've done. I broke his mother's heart, but he still cares about me, and I can't let that die.'
Anakin is very different in the end. The thing of it: The prophecy was right. Anakin was the Chosen One, and he does bring balance to the Force. He takes the ounce of good still left in him and destroys the Emperor out of compassion for his son."
George Lucas, The Making Of Revenge Of The Sith; page 221
The way to boil it down is this: Return of the Jedi works if its about Luke. It doesn't work if its about Anakin.
The prequel trilogy and the subsequent fleshing out of the old guard characters (at this point Anakin, if you count The Clone Wars, has had something like six or seven times the screentime of Luke) made a lot of people want to make it about Anakin.
And that makes sense, but if you make it about Anakin the entire thing breaks down. Luke's story is about LUKE. And the fundamental quality of Luke Skywalker is that he is so full of hope, love, and compassion that the Space Devil's right-hand-man renounces said Space Devil and all of his empty promises. That's Luke's superpower! Cutting things in two with a lightsaber is Anakin's superpower. His son is different.
Star Wars as a series has gotten away from the original trio of heroes. It's shown us the prior, failed generation that ushered in the dark times in the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars. It's shown us the complex terrorists and agents of oppression in Andor. It's given us a coming-of-age-during-wartime story of Ezra Bridger in Rebels, and delved into the fallout of the war in The Mandalorian.
But the seed from which that tree grew was a mop-haired, sort of whiny farmboy who believed in his friends and family SO HARD and loved them all SO MUCH that he saved the galaxy.
That's important. If you let that get away from you, you lose the thread of the whole enterprise.
And that's why Luke thinking about killing Kylo Ren before he turned to the dark side is such a bullshit plot development.
