Thinking Too Deeply About The Scene Where Palpatine Just Goes, 'well, If You Want To Save Your Wife From

thinking too deeply about the scene where palpatine just goes, 'well, if you want to save your wife from dying, you have to go murder a bunch of kids. it's okay, i know this has nothing to do with prenatal care, but trust me on this one.' like, i know it's just shorthand for 'he's evil now', but what purpose does this serve? what is the reason for murdering children? is it just for palpatine's shits and giggles? does he want to check to see if anakin is really that desperate? why tamper with useful apprentices that could be used as an army, and could eventually serve as viable replacements for anakin lest something happen?

like, lucas went with child murder, and didn't do anything interesting with it. like, at least do something useful with the dead children, like, use their souls to keep luke and leia alive and that's why they make it through childbirth. make anakin drag them up to the top of the jedi temple to show dissenters to the new empire, this is how we deal with traitors. use the dead souls to purge the light of the temple and shroud it in darkness. do something creative!

or, at least, let the dead babies haunt people. every strike vader lands, he can hear a child's cry at the end of it. they sob loudly, and he rips his eardrums from his mangled ear to dull the pain. they whisper in luke's ear as a child, avenge us, and luke wonders if he's gone insane. everytime padme cries out in her birthing, she can hear fifty echoes of babies and children crying with her. and when she turns her head to her daughter and son, the voices that so fervently cried out for help were silenced in eerie quiet, and then she knows.

i don't know where i was going with this. anyway, uh, utilize the child murder properly!

imagine: palpatine makes anakin skywalker biopics and forces vader to watch them on weekly sith lord movie nights.

Can you even imagine the number of Chancellor Sheev Palpatine biopics you would have to coexist with if you lived in the galactic republic. I wish i could see them. Sheev Palpatine played by a flatteringly cast actor with a completely fictionalised, sympathetic life story.

God i wish i could see them

the odd1sout video on buying clothes.

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i know that this was probably meant to be funny, but this just made me really sad. vader really was fucked over by the emperor. it's fucking scary and tragic that he genuinely loves the emperor because he's all he has.

how do you think luke would factor into this plan with leia? personally, i think it'd be funny if he declared luke emperor, and leia just flashbacks to that time he told her that taxation was stupid.

How do you think Darth Vader would react to Palpatine dying before he turned back to the light? Whether randomly (probably the most funny option, old man falls, breaks his hip, dies of complication) or an alternate ending to ROTJ where Luke doesn't go to Vader and they remain on Endor as Death Star Jr. blows up, I think he would lose it tbh

i've actually always wanted to write something about this because it's fascinating to me the levels of Ungood vader's brain achieves when he has nothing left; in my horribly self-indulgent visions, vader senses palpatine's death and essentially shuts down entirely for a period of time because his brain genuinely cannot process it. the executor shuttles back to coruscant and vader hasn't said a word. he's shuttled through the motions of actually having to fulfill that formerly mostly ceremonial role of heir to the empire, mostly at the behest of tarkin, who i wanted to toy with as someone who might see this as an opportunity to have someone he finds easy to manipulate on the throne. this is about when that inability to comprehend what's happening snaps and vader goes essentially ballistic, and falling to his default move when he's gone ballistic, he murders everyone in the jedi-temple-turned-imperial-palace, barricades himself inside with palpatine's corpse, and tries to entreat the Dark Powers into reanimating palpatine. essentially the imperial powers that are still alive spend weeks trying to figure out how to get in the palace and subdue vader, because, you know, he's the emperor technically and empires are stupid.

in my Grand Vision TM, vader's terror at the idea of a life without even his master - and all of the reality warping he's attempting to do with his evil wizard magic - begins to have a profound and disturbing effect on the palace and the area surrounding it, coruscant's weather, even the citizens surrounding it. it is genuinely like Magic Nuclear Meltdown, except vader is totally unaware that he's bending reality around his stupid broken brain, and kind of begins to completely fucking lose it as the architecture of the palace warps impossibly under magic onslaught. the hallways become winding and press in closer and mold grows in the walls, the wood rots, the stone erodes, the lights break and fizzle, rooms shift and bend impossibly until the world narrows to the one room palpatine's corpse is in. insert disturbing Wrongness Imagery like portraits beginning to lose their subjects, decorative trees leaking blood instead of sap, any animals in the nearby area spontaneously mutating, deforming, etc. people having waking nightmares about burning alive or being locked in what feels like a coffin, etc. everything goes very wrong essentially. i haven't figured out how i'd plan on ending such an idea, but probably i'd want to find a way to introduce obi-wan into the narrative and either have him finally deliver on killing vader or trying to rehabilitate him or..... something. i just think obi-wan would be fun.

Ahsoka needed to break open Vader’s mask to understand that he was Anakin.

Obi-Wan needed to break open Anakin’s mask to understand that he was Vader.

Neither of them could reconcile with the truth.