I was a 1980s kid. Darth Vader was one of those peak villains one sees in childhood, the ultimate bad guy. He killed indiscriminately. He had space wizard magic to find you and read your mind and choke you remotely. He had the evil (red) version of the coolest weapon in the universe. He was so scary his own soldiers on the bad guy side were afraid of him. He tortured the princess. For some reason he was part robot, had a deep commanding voice, and even his breathing was scary. And to top it all off, it turned out he was the good guy’s father. Fathers are supposed to be safe, not scary!

I had many, many childhood nightmares about Darth Vader. I watched the movies an incalculable amount of times, I cheered when the good guys beat him, or at least escaped him with their skin intact.

Then I grew up, and the prequels happened. I don’t know if any retroactive backstory could have matched the feelings my childhood mind had generated so many years earlier, but I was at least curious about what they’d come up with to explain who Darth Vader had been and what made him that way… only to learn that apparently the ultimate scary badass was apparently just some dull and whiny guy who somehow was randomly lucky, smart, and magical, lived a really nice and comfortable life with lots of support and encouragement, but was just all “no I wanna be bad now because some easily-resolvable life stuff made me angry waaaah.”

So disappointing.