okay a) thank you previous reblog for this RIVETING information, i am absolutely filled with delight to discover a new way in which star wars has become incredibly and deeply fucked up, and riveted to discover that the radio dramas even decades later continue to totally own, and b) sorry to tag along on a post you’re already getting discussion on, OP, but this is one of my favorite things to chew on with relation to vader, and i think there’s room for nuance in this discussion i think hasn’t really come up yet, and i’ve had two redbulls in the last two hours so i’m just flying straight into it. apologies for this happening in your activity section, it was a convenient jumping off point i happened across.
i think there’s layers to this, because as everything is, this really isn’t an all-or-nothing truth. slave as a definition for what vader is comes up because that’s how vader thinks of it, that’s how vader phrases it, that’s what’s significant to his backstory; there are countless times in EU materials (of varying levels of canon) that vader likens palpatine to a slaveowner, but that’s of course going to happen, because part of vader’s character arc is this absolute inability to ever move on from anything that happened to him, his vicious childhood included. and that’s also kind of how that suffering manifests, too - like, i think obi-wan loved anakin more than anything, and that obi-wan was capable of this beautiful, genuine love for anakin that is absolutely profound and endlessly giving, but that was never going to underwrite years of childhood suffering that gets codified in the mind as instinct, and if obi-wan moved too fast, i absolutely think his padawan flinched, expecting to get hit. that’s your brain on Everything I’ve Ever Known Has Been Tainted By Exploitation And Violence disease. we largely can’t rely on vader to have an objective view of pretty much almost anything, but especially his own relationship to palpatine, a thing that is corrugated by years and years of layered abuse and manipulation and Everything I’ve Ever Known Has Been Tainted By Exploitation And Violence Disease.
vader saw himself as enslaved to sidious, but this is an inevitable follow-through of his psychology; he was always going to. in the skywalker: a family at war novel, anakin (this excerpt is from the time of the wrong jedi arc) thinks about how he wants to leave with ahsoka, but he felt he owed the jedi too much, because they had freed him from slavery. the jedi order never had to hold that over anakin’s head for him to think that way; it was an inevitable truth of a kid raised to be exploited for labor, that “i owe something my service” is an inevitable thought pattern from a guy who was raised with a bomb in his body coercing his compliance. that thought process needs no exacerbation; it’s embedded, it’s constant, it’s forever, it’s the thing anakin is chained to in perpetuity, that open wound that lets in the infection that is everything else wrong with anakin that stacked together to form the second worst guy the galaxy ever churned out. the truth is that palpatine has to pull very few levers to shove vader in this mental box of, “wow, eternal servitude until i die,” because that’s just how vader thinks, in a way that i think began before palpatine had a hand in it. palpatine can quite easily reap the rewards of pursuing a psychologically turbofucked nine year old.
i think what’s most telling, more telling than how vader approaches it, is how palpatine thinks about vader, and there are countless times where palpatine claims vader specifically as a possession. in darth vader and the ninth assassin, palpatine’s ending note in his head to vader was, “i now know that you are mine, mine for as long as i will have you.” in the ROTS novelization, palpatine has this insanely creepy paragraph where he regards vader during his Vadering Surgery, and is thinking about how vader is the crown jewel of the sith and the armor is a wicked jewel box designed to preserve him, ian mcdiarmid’s personal reading of the scene where palpatine finds vader’s roasted, miserable carcass on mustafar is that vader is one of the few things palpatine cares about in a way that even remotely approaches human. there’s this (wildly horrifying) passage from palpatine’s book of monsters:
forget thinking of vader as a person, this passage would imply palpatine barely thought of him as human, to such a point that the choice that is the culmination of the series, this great celebratory moment, the realization of this innate power of love and compassion, is simply just a beaten dog turning on its owner. vader has become at this point such a non-entity to palpatine that even killing him isn’t a choice vader makes because he is a man and therefore he has a choice about what to be, but palpatine forgetting to properly muzzle his rottweiler and getting his throat ripped out. palpatine even says that he enjoyed the turbofucking of this guy to such an extent that even knowing vader would throw him down a reactor shaft, his response was, “i derived so much joy from that torment that i would be willingly killed by him to do it all over again.”
vader can absolutely choose to stop his bloodsoaked reign of terror, and he should. i mean even under the threat of death or everlasting torment, vader should choose to stop his bloodsoaked reign of terror, regardless of any consequences there is to not going through with it, if vader were the good guy, he would lay down his weapon - but also if vader were the good guy, he wouldn’t be in this impossible position in the first place, so inevitably he was never going to cease his mad festivities until he was sufficiently convinced he could. but i do think the reality is that, if vader had somehow come to the conclusion to stop the bloodshed and refused to clock in to his 24/7 shift in the empire’s Forever War, palpatine would never have let him get away with that, because palpatine has a demonstrable, marked investment if not in vader as a person, but in vader as a monster.
if vader tried to walk away, if he somehow sustained heavy brain damage that somehow magically fixed his inability to function as a regular human person and decided Fuck My Boss, I Quit, he can’t just disappear into nowhere. there’s legitimately no escape from the hell he made for himself unless palpatine dies or he does, and this is kind of proven by the fact that in all the times in the EU (and in the films) that vader attempts to change his material circumstances, it involves either trying to off himself or palpatine through various means. in vader’s mind this constitutes slavery, because a predominant feature of that state would’ve been this idea that only extreme violence can put an end to it, in that either slaves revolt or slaves get blown up or children manage to go do Nascar But Make It Bloodsport and secure freedom via a jedi knight who gets stabbed to death a day later on the same day that this nine year old tastes war for the first time. palpatine seems to approach this with enthusiasm that’s somewhere between an evangelical adoption, a guy who bought an ex-fighting dog and now jokes about siccing it on people through facebook statuses, and one of those car guys who absolutely will not shut up about his custom modifications. i don’t think he thinks of vader as his slave but he definitely thinks of vader as strictly his, and maybe in his own horrible way even loves vader, but the kind of damage that affection coming from so horrible a guy does is just boundless. palpatine loves his stupid little sith apprentice exactly the way a rattlesnake loves the mouse it’s swallowing whole.
technically speaking their relationship only constitutes slavery if vader isn’t compensated for his labor, which gets into distressing questions like, “does darth vader have a space bank account? does darth vader pay space taxes?” but a thing need not be ‘slavery’ by definition to be all-encompassing in its breadth, because in a lot of ways, what vader has with sidious isn’t a classic abusive relationship. it’s markedly much, much worse, in pretty much every respect, in every fashion possible; vader has known palpatine since he was but a wee nine year old, but by the time of ROTJ, palpatine will have been the focal point of his life for the immense majority of it, nearly forty years of it. for most of that, palpatine has dictated not only vader’s to-do list, but also has granular control over vader’s health; and how deeply that control runs varies by how comfortable someone is with making star wars a total fridge horror, but at the very least palpatine dictated vader’s appearance, voice and body at the end of ROTS, essentially shredding what remained of the anakin skywalker before palpatine ever met him and replacing it with this new, terrifying creature that is palpatine’s creation alone. even if the armor is a livable, desirable environment, even, the fact that palpatine deprives vader of any choice in the course of choosing the life he has to live for the rest of his life is an absurd level of power over someone. i mean, palpatine got to choose whether vader saw colors for the rest of his life. that’s somewhere between your controlling, abusive father and motherfucking jigsaw from the saw franchise, and that’s not a situation that has an conceivable real-world parallel. it’s so extensive as to be obscene, and that’s before describing any further EU content that actually somehow manages to make that worse.
the truth is that i think vader felt like palpatine’s slave, and regardless of whether that is by definition the truth, it’s a bitter reality that vader was never, ever going to get away from palpatine without one or both of them dying. i don’t think “just walk away” was going to be an option for him as it was for reva - palpatine has infinite resources and infinite will to extend them, and he spent over a decade turning anakin skywalker into a Fuck-Your-Life-To-Pieces Machine, he has quite a bit of investment in this extended project. palpatine would never have let him go, vader never believed he could kill palpatine until luke burst onto the scene, and all of vader’s (numerous, and usually dramatic) attempts to off himself totally failed, and at least one of those attempts in the EU ended with palpatine standing over him like, remember, i will literally drag your soul back from space hell if you so much as consider ditching me, live laugh love babe. vader isn’t entirely free to be a lone actor and do as he pleases and there’s every reason to believe that if he refuses to carry out the emperor’s commands, the retribution for that would somehow manage to reach new levels of horror, as if vader and palpatine don’t simultaneously re-enact several gothic horror novels and at least one cronenberg-esque movie literally all the time. should vader, morally, still have chosen to stop the bloodshed, despite the raw impossibility of his situation? yeah, probably. i think he can be both culpable for his beautiful, beautiful crimes against humanity and also a guy haunted relentlessly by the shade of the emperor, placed into a situation where the only feasible solutions are “agony” and “agony 2″ and the only way out is to kill people and hope someone gets a lucky shot in later.
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