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Luke didn't "choose the lesser evil in Vader and persuade him to do the right thing"
The entire POINT OF RETURN OF THE JEDI is that Vader WASN'T WHOLLY EVIL! HE WAS REDEEMED!!
And, realistically, Luke didn't do SHIT to persuade him of anything, he tries for an entire movie to be like "Dad you're a good guy" and every time Vader goes "Nah, son." It's not until Palpatine begins fucking torturing him that Vader realizes he can make a stand, that he doesn't have to be like this anymore. Luke is just there writhing on the floor literally begging Vader to do SOMETHING.
Also Return of the Jedi is a Vietnam war movie, this is a known fact
@coriander maybe i’m just too cynical but to me, the takeaway was that vader cares about his family and nothing else, and i don’t actually respect that
@coriander granted the prequels recontextualize the events of return of the jedi pretty dramatically, which is why i read it this way
@aescling @coriander yeah i mean fair read i think, but i do still think vader has an arc of giving up his own identity and becoming what the Emperor wanted him to be, and then in the end reasserting agency over his own choices
but that doesn’t make him a good person so much as it just means he stops being an utter tool
@aescling @coriander anakin never really learns to see other people as people, but some people are His and he strongly feels the need to protect those ones, including Luke
his whole fall to the dark side is him either realizing people he thought were His aren’t actually, or him freaking out because there are people he thinks of as His but can’t protect. at the end of ep 6 he is like “this person is Mine and i CAN protect him (unlike padme/etc)” but this revelation does little to fix his fundamental problem of being a child slave who was forced to command an army of clone slaves as a teenager and prevented from ever learning how to see other people as people by his jedi training
@Lady @coriander if anything is to his credit he does just die immediately so really his redemption is an open question; maybe he could have started to get over his shit in the future. but i’m not exactly hopeful that he would have lol