that era in vader's life immediately after rots where he's still fresh to the 'borg life and also in his early 20s is seriously so fascinating. like, mustafar was this big, identity destroying trauma for him which his already turbofucked scrambled egg brain couldn't cope with and this is precisely why he then spends the rest of his life trying to simultaneously punish himself for what he did and distance himself from the core of who he was, as a person. a completely normal self-contradictory loop of mental agony every college dropout has experienced at least once, really. and i think none of the traits he has in his vader years are new, exactly, just amplified bc the thing that IS new is his commitment to 100% knowingly getting worse and worse while still somehow finding some reason to keep on going. like, he wakes up on that table without wife, baby, friends, limbs, lungs and most of his skin and with the kind of fragile grasp on sanity that already led him from being an expectant father laughing at sex jokes and into this exact situation hes currently in. the process of rebuild after all of this wasn't shown bc you can guess the gist of it but im fascinated by it anyway. bc on one hand you have this delusional, semi-blank page of a person looking for some kind of suggestion on how to keep on being while understanding he's the worst and that his life is effectively over. and then on the other hand you have evil incarnate specifically in charge of teaching him the ways of existing as a perfect evil henchman. in my very humble opinion, this was actually the single most vulnerable period in anakin's life because he was mentally and physically fucked and completely devoid of hope and he spent it alone with palpatine. vader to me is an amalgamation of his own existing personality (in its worst traits anyway) and a series of deeply conditioned beliefs and responses and i feel like this is where they come from. like, the stuff palpatine told him in that time was soo important and its fascinating to think about what exactly it was and how it affected him. i WANT to see the evil therapy. if vader was still capable of things such as eating, palpatine would be offering candy while preaching the therapeutic powers of murder but alas, he has to reach the same effect by alluding to the times he USED to give anakin candy (not as common as he implies) despite obi-wan hating it (exaggerated) or the time he got him a toy ship model for space christmas (obi-wan actually got it for him) and the jedi forbade it (never happened). & vader w his confused sense of identity is not in the headspace to think abt any of this so he just accepts it
