Honestly Obi Wan not knowing Anakin was alive the whole time changes everything. When Padme tells Obi that there’s still good in Anakin its seemingly implied that Obi Wan doesn’t want to tell her that he’s a sith now but it’s actually showing that Obi Wan fully believed that Anakin, Padmes wife, the father of the newborn babies, was dead and that he himself had killed Anakin, and couldn’t bring himself to tell her seconds before she died still believing
in canon anakin and obi are described as “two halves of a single warrior”, “closer than friends, closer than brothers”, “knew each other more intimately than lovers”, they “became men together” despite their age difference, best friends, “obi wan… always chasing after skywalker”, “if kenobi was there skywalker was never far behind”, “you were my brother anakin, i loved you!”, “you’re the closest thing i have to a father”, “neither can imagine life without the other”, erstwhile master and padawan, total equals, co-generals, brothers-in-arms, inseparable, “obi wan would want no other man by his side”, anakin is in canon the only person Obi-wan ever says I love you to, obi wan is upset bc he imagined anakin would be with him when he died, ahsoka considers them in canon her adoptive parents, obi-wan watches over and raises anakin’s kids from afar, anakin is both obssessed with and jealous of obiwan, obi wan literally longs for anakin and is undone with grief over losing him, they still have a vivid linked force connection 10 years after parting, obi wan buried their lightsabers together, anakin once ponders if he loves Obi-wan more than his wife
so literally any and all interpretations of their relationship are valid and correct, and id say their psychic/physical Force soul-bond transcends any single category and spills over into a soulmate love that is undefinable to our understanding of roles “on Earth” and is hopelessly tangled in the best of ways
darth vader’s approach through town at night when he is a waking nightmare, a vicious monster, and obi-wan stands and watches is exactly what i hoped it would be. vader kills innocents without hesitation or regret, with the act of ending of a life is so trivial to him, killing so easy and familiar. obi-wan could barely breathe the whole time, he could probably feel him in the force, feel his malice, his icy presence so near and overwhelming. when he asks what vader’s become, it’s less of a question than a rebuke, because he knows intimately what he’s become, and getting chased and burned was probably almost preferable than those interminable moments of vader’s approach, that infinity of hanging suspended in the knowledge that anakin was there, really there, just outside andthat fog of evil and pain and death was anakin. this show is dark, very dark, at times, and vader was a perfect walking atrocity, and obi-wan’s suffering at his approach was exactly right haha
i still can’t get over how obi wan physically could not tear his eyes away from him. like, even when he was telling tala and leia they needed to run, tala had to repeatedly force obi wan’s eyes away from the scene in the street because he could not stop staring at vader, at anakin, what he had become and what he had BEEN becoming these past ten years and ugh the pain in his eyes it’s just such lovely suffering
I understand Obi Wan is going through a bit of a fucking crisis at the moment, but literally how is he letting Darth Vader sneak up on him lmao, like that is NOT a quiet man! He is quite physically incapable of being so naturally!!! is Vaderkin holding his breath or something?
Vader, holding his breath and turning his light support off and back on for dramatic effect: obi-wan’s gonna be so terrified hehehehehe
*wheezes* ok one last thing, but based on their meeting it feels like Vader’s vengeance plans for the last decade have just been him furiously listening and crying to Burn from Hamilton on repeat until he can enact his fantasies in person
it just occurred to me that darth vader, master engineer, probably looked at the death star plans at some point and noticed the flaw, but didn’t bother to tell anyone about it because he despised everyone who was involved in the project
Meanwhile Vader, expert ace pilot, acts well below rank to supposedly fight off the attackers. Attackers who, as far as anyone else knows, can’t hope to do shit to the Death Star.
Convenient.
Convenient…
Lol there are some ppl on here all “oh he was feeling a little Light so he knew he had to destroy it to do the Right Thing!!!” like nah. I love my boy but he’s a bag of stinky garbagé at this point and still totally evil.
He just despised the Death Star cuz everyone was all “nyeh heh this thing can do ur job for u u LOSER” and he actively loathed every single person who was on board it. Of course he was petty enough to ignore its self-destruct button. He’s just that bitch.
this seems entirely reasonable
sidebar: apparently thrawn treason is, like, mostly Krennic and Tarkin hating each other and i have never read a thrawn book but i might just read that one
Vader is high-key insulted by the existence of the Death Star, the effort and expense thrown into making it, and the way everybody’s praising it as the new ultimate power in the universe, and probably the worst part of the whole affair?
He has no one to bitch to about it.
Even the Emperor’s jumped on the superweapon hype train. Even the tolerably-competent officers like Tarkin are all #TeamDeathStar, and then there’s smug assholes like Admiral Motti who just won’t shut up about it, and honestly?
Vader’s probably been on the email CC list for the design since the project started. Years of enduring shitty design and interdepartmental bickering and watching some smarmy asshole in an inferior cloak prance about bloviating about his special superweapon like somebody who has an anime body pillow of the superlaser housing.
And then there’s this one scientist who keeps going on and on about this thermal exhaust problem.
Just. Huge amounts of emails on the subject, going on and on and on about it.
Vader is totally the only person who actually reads these after the first, like, five of them. Everybody else just skims through them with a side of “Seriously, Galen? Another one? Force-dammit, Krennic, couldn’t you have left him on that mudball with his family?” But Vader is bored out of his skull with 90% of his job anyway, and it’s not like he has anything better to do. Besides, viciously judging other people’s design abilities is the closest thing to pass for fun when there aren’t any Rebels to slaughter or armies to curbstomp, and there’s plenty of shit design for the judging.
He spots the flaw in the reactor the first time it appears in the plans.
He’d have shit himself if it wasn’t for the suit.
He promptly makes a bet with himself on whether anybody is going to spot it.
Nobody does.
They’re a pack of idiots. Every last one of them.
Maybe he contemplates telling them for like two-thirds of a second. It would be fun to lord his actual mechanical expertise over that little shit, Krennic.
But then he considers that he can only tell them once, and what if it were after the thing blew itself right the fuck up, what if that? He can still point out the flaw, and he can throw everyone’s stupidity right in their stupid faces, but also there’ll be no more Death Star.
So when Galen Erso sends out Thermal Exhaust Problem Analysis Report #6,109 and buried in paragraph 37 is a suggestion of an extra exhaust port, and Krennic responds with “SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT YOUR GODDAMN THERMAL EXHAUST PORT, GALEN, I DON’T GIVE A SHIT!” and Erso goes, “So you approve the solution?” and Krennic goes “S***** F*** LKJDGJFKL!!!!LJF$%#$DJF! YES!” Vader saves the email exchange for posterity and is downright cheerful the rest of the week.
True, he acts in its defense, chasing down Rebels when the plans are stolen. Of course he does. They’re Rebels, and hunting them down is his job and one of the very few pleasures of his existence. But it’s not for the Death Star. In fact, if one of them were to escape with its plans, and hide them successfully, and keep their location secret through torture and worse, and if another of them were to fly a starfighter well enough to keep from being destroyed long enough to drop a torpedo through that vulnerable exhaust port and touch off that reactor instability and turn the whole massive, ridiculous, wasteful, absurd, and vaguely insulting contraption into so much spacedust …
… well …
…oops.
Vader’s only regret about the whole affair is that Krennic predeceased it and is therefore unavailable for gloating to.
It doesn’t stop him from snagging a copy of the Rebels’ footage of the Death Star blowing up and posting it anonymously to the holonet with the added caption “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
sorry to put this post back in your notes op but this is probs my fave text chain i’ve ever participated in and reblogging it whenever i see it always brightens my day xD
Fixing the moment in canon when Obi-Wan learns Anakin is still alive is interesting because of what it implies about Obi-Wan’s motivations in seeking to train Luke. He sees the boy as a future champion against the Empire writ large, not his father in particular. He believed in good faith that Anakin was dead, and was seeking to train Luke regardless. He perhaps believed in bad faith that he was dead after learning the truth, and the ethical debate over his reticence to reveal Vader’s identity aside, it’s just interesting to know that he wasn’t from the beginning manipulating to train Luke to slay his father. He was trying to train him to defeat an Empire. He believed in his larger potential, because no child of Anakin Skywalker could ever be anything other than extraordinary, for good or ill.
Vader always thought the Death Star was stupid anyway so we all know once he got past the initial rage at Kenobi for hiding his child from him he was extremely proud that the rebel pilot who blew the dumb thing up turned out to be his own son.
