Bringin this classic back

@coriander ok but like… why DID vader turn to the dark side

@Lady That's the beauty, he's literally giving a straight answer here

@coriander no but like

i understand the arc of anakin wanting more power and being frustrated with liberal democracy and betraying them in a way which allowed fascism to take over

but like, there's a difference between that and being an outright fascist who believes in racial superiority and blows up planets because they displease you

prequel anakin is sometimes racist but he doesn't really have THOSE vibes to me and it's not clear where/when/how he gets them

at the end of episode iii palpatine has successfully USED anakin to overthrow the jedi but i'm not convinced he has actually signed on to the empire's ideological program at all; he just hates the jedi

@Lady That's a fair assessment and honestly part of why he was able to come back to the light in the end. For the most part he was just an extremely emotional person who didn't know how to deal with those emotions and was being sold an extremely toxic and twisted form of a once-healthy ideology dealing with attachment and emotions where the only person in his life who had the knowledge and experience to properly coach him (Obi-Wan) was dealing with so much of his own problems that he couldn't adequately fulfill the role Anakin needed him to fill.

Basically, Palpatine did a lot of extremely effective and subtle emotional manipulation until Anakin truly believed his was the only way forward. This, coupled with the popular dogma that "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny" basically led him to sink deeper into his own negative feelings once he realized that he had Fucked Up. The Big No that everyone memes at the end of Episode 3 because it's honestly pretty poorly-executed is SUPPOSED to be that moment of realization; he betrayed everything he knew and for nothing.

After the destruction of the Jedi, he really wasn't driven by much of anything except a vague and generalized anger and hatred. He just relied on Palpatine to give him direction, to continue to tell him where to point that hate, even as he hated the man he was serving. He kind of sunk-costed himself into being the #1 enforcer for a fascist government because he had literally nothing else left except violence.

And this all ties back to Luke because when Luke looked at Vader and said to him "I know who he is, I know what he's done, but I've been around him and I could feel the good within him," Anakin was finally able to return from the darkness that had consumed him because he WASN'T a dyed-in-the-wool fascist. He was just a vulnerable man who had been taken advantage of.

@Lady WOW that was a lot of words!