#darth vader comic | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sethnakht · 1 year

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everyone wants darth vader dead in greg pak and raffaele ienco's darth vader, it seems, seemingly including darth vader. no sooner has luke slipped his grasp does it strike into public awareness like a firework set off in a crowd -- vader's power, too, is slipping. the weight of that collective scrutiny -- from officers, bounty hunters, and assassins to the paper-pushers of the Imperial court and the former handmaidens of Queen Amidala -- manifests in a hunger to dismantle him physically, to wrench and tear off the armor, to see him gorged upon by giant monsters, to freeze him and puppet him, to seize control over the "softbody" and flay him of his life support. nor is vader left unaffected by this hostile focus on his physical limits -- as he slouches, limps, stumbles, crawls -- and pauses, exhaustedly, though there is no way to catch his breath -- his way through the comic, the gleaming armor is hacked, punctured, electrocuted, torn open, shattered, and burned, while his thoughts dwell on weakness, grief, and fear. such abjection, however short lived, sets this comic run far apart from marvel's previous two darth vader runs, both of which traced an upward trajectory: vader's rise to the height of his power in esb (gillen/larroca), and his journey to becoming a committed sith after rots (soule/camuncoli). the trajectory here is to the grave.

Darth Vader (2020-) #5, Pak/Ienco/et al - observing that vader is walking right into a major barrage of fire - not for the first time - the forensic droid accompanying him hints that he might have a death wish.

vader himself refuses to admit weakness, of course - at least consciously - but his arguments bear all the weakness of bad political discourse. "there is no conflict", he says, making one think of conflict; "my son is weak", he says, making one think of the father. when you tell someone not to think of an elephant, even in negation, you invoke the elephant. darth vader is very good at conjuring the elephant, and making one peer very closely into the bold and marked outlines of its supposed non-existence.

Darth Vader (2020-) #1, Pak, Ienco, et al - unable to handle that he has been rejected by his son, Vader transfers the failure to Luke, calling him "weak" for choosing to flee him, for choosing potential death over Vader's offer of power, even as he stands empty-handed before a gravesite, his own desire to punish the dead thwarted by his having made them so. The comic doesn't leave it at ironic framing - Vader too is aware of what he is invoking, and the associations brought up as he stands at the site of his mother's grave show that Vader cannot entirely suppress his own sense of failure - his own memories of his own perceived weakness.

vader's private thoughts -- rendered in the comic in startling little red boxes that, like mummy coffins, nest in larger black boxes, nearly always isolated from physical imagery, from contact with the visual world -- are as tiring and repetitive as an unwelcome pigeon on the window sill. the stunner is not what he thinks or even what he invokes, but that his thoughts are not actually private at all. there is no room to admit weakness because, as it turns out, vader's master can pick up on his thoughts from the other side of the galaxy. vader's master can croon into his black boxes, scoop out the words and spit them back out like trite poetry learned from heart in grade school. watching him from afar, vader's master reads into his actions and mocks what is unexpressed. if there's a space free from his influence -- an influence that is similar to the reader's influence, an influence that explains why we can see his thoughts at all, because we too are complicit and voyeurs -- it might only be the gutters, those gaps between panels where the mind completes the temporal and spatial relationships between the images. in the page from the first issue shown above, for example, note how the speech balloon for the remembered "I won't fail again" nearly connects with vader's head in the panel below it, linking anakin's grief-filled promise to become stronger with vader's helmeted head, all while lingering on padmé's face - his next inevitable failure. even if he cannot think it.

the humiliation is public, we're part of the frenzied mob, swiping at the armor for scraps of cursed fabric -- transgressing boundaries both mental and physical, eating up that transgression like the intimate, play-by-play accounts of a famous suicide. vader's armor is repeatedly hacked, a gag that bluntly serves to hammer and hammer and hammer home for you that shame of being mocked before the class that specially belongs to darth vader, dark lord of the sith.

Darth Vader (2020-) #13, Pak, Ienco, et al - Vader is made a puppet more than once over the course of the comic, frozen and trapped both in his mind and body.

to be honest, I was originally a little annoyed by the number of hacking attempts -- everyone gets to take their shot at controlling vader, from hutts and droids to the handmaidens to a psychic squid who puppets him with its tentacles -- because of the frequency and similarity of the attempts, because while vader does address some vulnerabilities, he still gets scanned and sliced, meaning he's overlooking weaknesses or choosing not to address them; because he doesn't seem greatly affected by the threat to his bodily autonomy, and because of the friction with gillen's run (where being hacked sends vader into a high-stakes psychosis and is a major and unusual event that he takes measures to prevent from happening again in the aphra comics). then I remembered this scene:

Darth Vader (2020), #12 (Pak, Vilanova, et al) - After losing all but one limb, being set on fire, tracking through lava on mismatched ancient droid parts, being chased and attacked by assassins, droid scrappers, an Imperial Star Destroyer, and a wall of Sith acolytes, then nearly ripped apart mentally and physically by a psychotic giant squid and a screaming kyber crystal, Vader is "repaired" on Coruscant - i.e. sawed open - before a hostile, chattering audience, the Emperor laughingly dismissing him as a threat.

which. is. absolutely. fucked. up!! and to top it off, there's this sly little sequence --

Darth Vader (2020-) #14 (Pak, Ienco, et al) - Vader's armor specifications appear to be tracked with each repair and are openly accessible to the Imperial court

-- which shows that even if vader updates his armor, that knowledge will be recorded the next time he comes in for a repair (if it's not always being transmitted automatically). anyone with sufficient credentials in the imperial machine, including the demoted sub-administrator sly moore, can access his repair logs, analyze them for untested weaknesses, and saunter off with an suit override stick. (to be sure, sly moore isn't supposed to be looking at his records and is chastised when she's found; she also tries to use the same kill stick twice, failing to account for the updates vader does make after the first slicing attempt, perhaps because she hasn't checked or been able to access the records for updates. the point here though is that vader's suit is a matter of government record, treated like imperial property; you can imagine all sorts of fun scenarios here, such as that his private upgrades are wiped each time he comes into the repair center, or that new vulnerabilities are built in each time, etc.)

even the dead contribute to this panopticon effect. in the latest issue of the comic, the skakoan jul tambor reveals that he's been collecting dismembered droids -- each of them individually sliced apart by darth vader over the years (notably, however, most of them are separatist droids, hinting at tambor's blind spot: he hasn't collected the droid corpses anakin left littered on battlefields). drawing on their recorded logs of their own demise, tambor observes vader precisely when he might feel the least concern about it -- in the act of killing, of eradicating the viewer. the now-repaired droids possess a kind of moving simulacrum of vader's battle tactics. perhaps because he too relies on a pressure suit and breathing device to survive in the same atmosphere as most humans, tambor doesn't need static blueprints of the suit -- he has no intention of shutting down vader's life support. the difference in method is only a subtle one, however: he too is targeting vader's dependency on his armor. in lieu of a direct attack, he means to target the suit's limitations indirectly, to swarm vader with the very droids he once demolished and have them target his limited mobility, his repetitious set of moves within the suit's confines. with his reliance on surveillance technology, tambor is only the latest in a long line to act on the premise that vader's demise is a given because he has no secrets left.

Darth Vader (2020-) #30, Pak, Ross, et al

if it seems a blind spot that tambor hasn't collected archival footage of anakin on a droid rampage, he's nonetheless managed to address it thanks to a chance encounter. when padmé's former body double -- sabé, vader's double in the comic, a shadow of the shadow -- arrives on vader's orders to kill tambor, then tries to convince him to abandon a plan that she fears will only get hundreds killed, he captures her. tambor rightly recognizes that sabé is more to vader than an agent skilled in deception and lies: she represents his weakness, he believes, a reading that vader himself may even share.

sabé is the bright note in this story of decline, the one character who cares enough and dares enough to consider vader's "weakness" a possible strength. like the reconstituted droids, she is in her own way a dead woman brought back to life, a ghost -- padmé back from the grave to haunt him, as she tells vader upon their first meeting. like any good ghost, she wants revenge for padmé's death and to enact her final, unfulfilled wish; as it happens, killing vader to save anakin would neatly accomplish both. (as it happens, she and vader have both seen recorded footage of padmé's last moments; tambor's recordings of vader from the perspective of dying droids is both a parallel and a contrast to padmé, shown dying from wounds inflicted by an absent vader, whispering of the good still in him.) when sabé freely enters his service, claiming she wants to help, vader is troubled -- does this make him weak? -- and yet also quite smug. here is finally someone who has chosen him of their own free will; here is someone who has accepted his offer of power; here is someone who looks and talks just like the dead wife he's convinced himself would have stood with him and espoused his cause ("order"). (indeed, she wields real power -- jealous and fearful, the assassin ochi effectively portrays her as a tiger handler who unleashes her pet when she wants someone dead.) it's a fantasy come to life.

yet sabé is not dead, present as she may as ghost or shadow or fantasy -- sabé is herself haunted: haunted by padmé, whom she could not save, and by anakin, whose mother she could not free. sabé is herself a killer whose guilt and loyalty and poisoned grief have moved her to try and execute vader "for padmé and anakin", and who gets a real chance -- closer than anyone but palpatine -- to put vader to death. sabé's attempts to kill vader have evolved with time -- a first attempt, imaginative but unrefined, made when she unequivocally thought him anakin and padmé's murderer, involved luring vader into an underwater lair, provoking him into claiming he killed anakin and padmé, and feeding him to a massive sea monster. a second, disastrous attempt led to the pointless slaughter of her ground and aerial troops, though vader left her and padmé's remaining former handmaidens alive. (unbeknownst to her, the emperor nearly killed vader for that choice, leaving him deprived of all but his arm and core suit functionality on the burning banks of mustafar, to relive obi-wan's abandonment and crawl his way through the corpses of murdered separatists, into and out of death.) she comes closest to actually killing him, however, only after she's had such an effect on him that she's moved him to confront his great nemesis (sand) to save her life and bring himself to the brink of death on behalf of a refugee camp composed of freed tatooine slaves. having fried his suit -- through the bounceback of his own hubris, ultimately -- vader lies incapacitated on the ground when sabé finds him and reveals her own fantasy involves killing him. her ghosts hold her back; padmé stays her hand.

of the humiliations heaped upon him since luke's escape, including the routine of hanging head-down and mostly naked in a bacta tank flanked by observing guards, only this -- this grave insistence from padmé there is good in him -- manages to shake vader.

Darth Vader (2020-) #28, Pak/Ienco/et al -- Vader conjures the elephant of his diminishing power as he dangles hulkingly in his bacta tank in full sight of two guards. Subsequently, he shatters the bacta tank in rage.

unlike the attacks riffed from public records, the private knowledge padmé possessed as she died is one that no one else can see. even sabé admits she can't understand why she chooses to trust it. as for vader's master, we never see him overhearing the padmé recording, he never cites it directly (though he does mock vader for "listening ... to your heart", perhaps a way of dismissing its importance). as in the panopticon the prisoners never know when they are observed, so too does the emperor presumably turn his eye away from time to time, all too certain the name "anakin" has lost all "power" over vader. as in the prison of andor "no one is listening", there is still the quality of a secret in what vader and sabé know about padmé. even if, in his fear of weakness, all vader can see in that secret is death.

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sethnakht · 1 year

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Darth Vader (2020-) #30, Pak/Ross/et al

I've written before about how often vader's armor is sliced in his own comic and how this underscores that nothing belongs to him, that he is considered property of the government. scrutinized from afar by his near-omniscient master, who slips into his mind with the casual disregard of the schoolmaster that filches and idly flips through the diary of a troublesome student, savoring the mortification of reading the maudlin passages to the rest of the class; surrounded by servant-spies who rat him out for sparing the lives of queen amidala's ex-handmaidens, by guards who attack him in one moment and keep him under surveillance while he rests in the next; caught on tape so often and predictably, his moves and strategies can be programmed into droids -- vader can seemingly make no changes to his life support suit without creating an exposed trail.

at heart is the premise that darth vader can be read. it's a meta question as much as a narrative one; comics are read and therefore so too must darth vader, chimera of the cinema, be accessible in two-dimensions. absent the eerie breathing and disembodied voice and shuddering cape and gleaming lights playing havoc, telling stories on the mask, there must be a reader to set his static images into motion, to imagine the unseen and unheard. on the narrative level, vader's story also depends on readers (who scour his two-dimensional blueprints and command codes) and viewers (who analyze recordings taken of him when they aren't observing him directly). they study records and traces to learn how to kill him. though motivations differ, there's consensus about the undertaking. for most of his slicers and analysts, vader is not just an object to be read, he's also contained in what is read. what can be seen is what matters. in the disenchanted world he has helped create, the fact that vader is a wizard -- controlling powers unseen -- scarcely registers.

the paper trail is vast; witnesses are everywhere. vader is always watched, constantly being discussed, never alone (except in his hyperbaric chamber, where we know however from esb that he can be recorded, observed maskless, and interrupted). the emperor personally oversees vader's suit repairs -- a process involving circular saws, no painkillers, and a horizontal operating table -- while flanked by members of the imperial court. (the patient has no doctor; the doctor is his master and gleefully indiscrete.) the court members can access the blueprints and repair logs for vader's armor. one of them builds a kill-switch, passing it through dozens of hands to a bounty hunter. as it happens, a kill switch was part of the original suit design. vader has built preventions against a kill switch before. because his armor is a matter of government record, however, he can never be sure someone won't find a new weakness and build another (with his master's silent blessing). nor is it clear that he can adequately prepare, since his repairs are overseen by his master. whatever the case -- whether it's because he's restored to factory settings or because new weaknesses are installed with each official repair or because he's not been paying attention or some other diabolical reason (it's a metaphor) -- vader is vulnerable. the new kill switch works, if only briefly; trapped in a body that won't obey him, vader taps into the force to free himself, then is forced to put out a remedial patch for his own armor.

but the ease with which others can access what should be confidential medical records and spaces is just one expression of the problem. the suit is exposed by design. anyone who jabs the control panel with a sharp instrument -- who conducts a basic visual scan -- can download its specs and analyze its components. all who do so, moreover, agree -- the parts consist largely of "old tech from the republic days", or more saltily put, "junk":

Darth Vader (2020-) #9, Pak/Ienco/et al. - after getting close enough to scan the suit, a droid scavenger on the lookout for top-of-the-line parts concludes that vader's core armor is "junk" and "garbage".

tapped by padmé's ex-handmaidens before his second kill switch experience, then sliced again with a quick jab at his control panel -- even though he's since built protections against the kill switches specifically -- vader's suit is embarrassingly talkative. from the first tap, the handmaidens manage to tease out nearly half of its command codes, simply by cross-checking them with old republic data, which tells you just how few updates have been performed on the suit since its construction but is also a telling metaphor. from the second tap, they obtain the activation code for his flagship's self-destruct mechanisms. vader's suit is not just government property, not just old, not just a symbol for continuities between regimes and imperial hubris and the surveillance state: it's a liability.

to dwell on indignities just a bit longer: even the reader participates in the comic's central sport, violating what little remains of vader's personal space, making him spill secrets. we are given access to vader's most powerful thoughts, the ones that frame his values and express his commitment to the dark side. (fittingly, they appear in red captions coffined into all-black panels of variable size; the size of the black panel depends, seemingly, on how persuasive the thought is, or how much vader is feeling the power of the dark.) these framing thoughts are as harrowingly banal as you might expect of a value system built around the fear and glorification of death, hollow to boot -- what vader says about strength and weakness and power and fear and what he remembers and does are often at terrific odds -- but in reading those private thoughts, in judging them, the reader also becomes complicit in the voyeurism. everyone who thinks they know vader because they can intricately describe each part of the suit that keeps him alive, each studied flourish of his lightsaber, each plodding move of his mechanical legs, each predictable because painfully limited pose, contributes to his objectification, his transformation into dully legible surface. despite and because of the mask, he seems an open book. we know his entire history, we know his stupidest, most intimate thoughts, we even know how he dies; he belongs to us. how can he possibly still surprise us?

the force, some might say, you haven't mentioned his superpowers. calculated as it is to produce shame and humiliation, warm food for a sith, vader's situation can be made legitimate, even desirable with his religion; if he resents being so easily read, so susceptible to unwanted external control, and by his own master's design, then he also possesses overflowing stores of devotional pain and anger. vader's most uncurious readers, those who only stop to consider the machine and dismiss the rest, are also quickly cut down to size -- he sacrifices them, even digests them (incorporating the parts of droids he demolishes into his own suit repairs, for example) with knowing inevitability.

Darth Vader (2020-) #9, Pak/Ienco/et al. - after Vader defeats them, members of the Droid Crush pictured here struggle to fathom how, as there is "nothing more special [in his mechanical parts]" than in their own.

the force helps explain why vader would not only tolerate this life, but also infuse it with flattering meaning: he's shown to covet the constant scanning, slicing, downloading, and otherwise hostile scrutiny. if it implies he is slipping, it also points to the threat he still represents. when random imperial officers openly discuss vader's recent brutal punishment by the emperor while he's in earshot and speak wonderingly of his survival, considering the "junk" he used to rebuild himself, you certainly don't get the sense that vader is ashamed to be gossiped about in the same context as "this junk"; on the contrary, he seems to relish the image boost:

Darth Vader (2020-) #14, Pak/Ienco/et al - not even the abject conditions of vader's dismantling punishment remain secret, becoming fuel for the rumor mill; so far as the gossip contributes to his fearsome reputation, however, vader tolerates, even glories in it.

if vader will accept any regard that amplifies his powers (all attention being good attention), no matter how mortifying, he's also shown to be jealous of the spotlight. realizing that obi-wan, the emperor, and even the imperial court have transferred their hopes from him to his son, vader's thoughts take a sharply jealous turn: "all your eyes turn from me ... to him ... you think you see my end" (#13). incensed as he is that his enemies and master are focusing on how they can use luke to replace him, however, vader seems to resent luke's friends for taking luke's attention away from him even more.

Darth Vader (2020-) #16, Pak/Ienco/et al - as he addresses his son in his mind, Vader goes from picturing Luke amongst his friends to zooming in on Luke alone. This focus in on Luke's face, on his hands -- holding Vader's old lightsaber -- contrasts with his thoughts, where he claims that Luke seems to "want to disappear" in the company of his friends. The red caption for this line about disappearing pushes outside of the black panel, as though the darkness cannot fully contain it -- the red boundaries of the caption expand into the white space bordering the images of Luke, almost touching them. Vader next speaks of how Luke seems to want to "snuff out the Force within", his "fear", and yet all this talk of snuffing out, of going dark, is accompanied by visions of Luke holding a lit saber, coruscating with light, looking ahead with calm determination.

vader is self-aware enough to privately acknowledge that he personally will "never know peace again" (#6) and that, should his son replace him at the emperor's side, "you [luke] will end up more lost than you can ever imagine" (#16). caught between possessiveness over what little he does have (what remains of the emperor's attention, the empire's attention), anger over what he does not have (obi-wan's attention, luke's attention), and fear that luke will end up just as lost as he is, vader considers crossing a line and killing luke himself. should luke refuse his offer to combine forces and destroy the emperor, vader seems to conclude, it would be better that he kill luke himself than for luke to end up as caged, as snuffed out, as he is. when given the chance to pursue luke, who again refuses to acknowledge his offer and flees, vader doesn't hesitate -- he shoots to kill. whether he'd actually go so far as to kill luke is irrelevant: his intent is alarming enough. attention snapping back to vader, the emperor orders him to let luke go and murder some hutts instead. we see, then, what vader gains from drawing attention, from letting himself by read -- by appearing ready to kill luke, vader has provoked the emperor into saving him. the emperor "has shown his hand", provided vader with a way to "measure his [fear]"; he too has become readable.

vader is constantly being read, then, but it's not all embarrassment and rejection and exchanges of power. luke may not accept vader's offer, but the ex-handmaiden sabé does, specifically because she can read vader better than anyone left alive, save his master. observing his conspicuous obsession with padmé and recognizing his vague way of equating good government with order, sabé figures out it's anakin in the suit, then appeals to what she knows anakin cared about (padmé, order, his mother) to try and maneuver vader to kill the emperor (whom she paints as an enemy, a representative of chaos). vader doesn't precisely comply, but he does arrange a meeting with the emperor that gets him permission to keep sabé at his side -- a major win for him given that his master nearly killed him for leaving her alive before. with sabé, vader gets to live out the fantasy that padmé "believed in order" and would have joined him. (in a galaxy of warring factions, vader defines "order" as having "someone to make them agree ... or deal with them all" -- essentially, this meme. chaos, on the other hand, probably encompasses this meme and resembles a sandstorm, the rough metaphor used by crimson dawn agents (vader's main target of ire in the comic) to describe their swarm approach to power: "a million stronger than one".) sabé claims to join vader because she wants "order" too. to say he's ecstatic is an interpretation, so let's just quote him saying that "sabé understands".

Darth Vader (2020-) #30, Pak/Ross/et al - confronted by Dormé and her fellow ex-handmaidens, Vader extends them the same offer he made to both Luke and Sabé: to join him in the name of order and unite or deal with the warring factions in the galaxy.

after being read and misread for so much of the comic, this isn't a small thing for him to say (even if his intentions in this scene are to manipulate) -- there's a difference between constantly being seen and feeling seen. that holds even if vader is not being totally honest (with himself and others) about the reason, even if vader is substituting the truth with a fantasy, and regardless of how good vader himself happens to be at making others feel seen (as he puts it himself, he doesn't care what other people think, just that they suit his own desires). sabé is reading vader correctly when she presents the emperor to him as a representative of things he doesn't want. while vader publicly invokes "order" to justify hunting down political dissidents like crimson dawn, in the relative privacy of his thoughts and hyperbaric chamber, he too contrasts his vision of order with the "chaos" he feels the emperor has brought. beyond the black-and-white of his political frame, vader also invokes "order" like a magical cure word, like a banishing spell against the internal disarray of his own thoughts in the wake of being punished by his own master and losing luke.

Darth Vader (2020-) #18, Pak/Kirk/et al - as Vader insists that order means uniting under one banner to force agreement, his thoughts dwell on his own failure to unite and agree with his own son. Repeating the word "order" like a banishment spell, alone in his hyperbaric chamber, he masks his face with his hand as though briefly giving in to despair.

sabé seems to understand this self-defensive shade of "order" as well. vader privately admits to himself that she's "faced the wall". we see this wall in one of vader's mental breakdown sequences, symbolically represented by the black toothed shell of the very hyperbaric chamber in which vader has allowed himself both the treasonous thought that his master sows "chaos" and the unusually emotional gesture of covering his face with his hand (while remembering luke's rejection and dismemberment at vader's own hand). in sabé's case, the wall has come down to keep vader from her and from padmé, who still insists there is good in him; but vader is fully aware the wall is fragile, and that sabé isn't daunted. addressing sabé in his mind, a crack running down from where she touches the barrier between them, vader acknowledges what she's really understood about him: "you think you're turning me back to the light" (#24). however, unwilling to admit that she's right -- though we know that she turns out to be, because luke "was right about me" -- he claims that what she's really done is the opposite. as the emperor explains it to sabé, she's merely reminded vader of what is was like to feel weak, grief, and fear by challenging his sense of power; as vader puts it to himself, "never challenge my power" (#28), or "none should forget, ever again, that I am a sith" (#29). the emperor and his former naboo mentee sabé each pick up on something real, if conflicting, about vader's internal disorder; if vader happens to prefer the emperor's read, even as he privately descries his master's "chaos", it's not because sabé has read him wrong.

padmé's remaining handmaidens add a new spin to this dynamic -- they've shown up to save sabé from vader's corrupting influence, and claim they don't care about vader at all, and yet to access her they've had to insert themselves as readers into vader's plot. like other slicers in the comic, the handmaidens have gone for vader's armor; unlike other slicers, they don't want (or know better than) to puppet the armor itself. slicing into vader's control panel, gathering the codes to destroy his flagship, they create a set up where no one has to die: vader can simply give sabé up to save his flagship, to save face. what they handmaidens have failed to take into account is that vader has been faceplanting his entire life.

Darth Vader (2020-) #30, Pak/Ross/et al - Having accessed the codes to destroy the Executor by slicing Vader's suit, the handmaidens try to pressure him into giving up Sabé. Vader's response gives them a glimpse into the abyss.

far from reacting negatively to the security breach caused by his own armor, vader eats up the threat to his flagship with hungry approval. he has already made them an offer to join him and sabé, framing it as the only way to honor padmé's legacy; if dormé and the other padmé doubles would "kill thousands for her [sabé]", then they're "ready". on one level, vader is calling a bluff here -- dormé and the others are unlikely to suddenly condone the deaths of thousands. vader may struggle to tell the handmaidens apart visually, even from padmé, but he has a sixth sense for ruthlessness. sabé has already passed the test of two sith lords: not only has she gotten vader to kill her own enemies, she has also goaded the emperor into making destructively self-defensive choices. attacked by the emperor's guards on his orders, sabé outmaneuvers both the guards and palpatine, getting the guards to shoot at him instead of her. the emperor is provoked into killing them, letting slip that he too has supernatural abilities.

Darth Vader (2020-) #28, Pak/Ienco/et al - while it's the Emperor's lightning that wraps around his guards, the puppet lines might well be coming from Sabé from behind the throne.

with dormé, who infiltrates the executor pretending to be sabé, vader sets up a telling trial: dormé as sabé is given a chance to confront two stormtroopers who have been openly discussing her "classified" mission in "public". putting a gun in her reach, then provoking the troopers into attacking her by asking if they're just going to wait for her to kill them, vader forces dormé to pick up the gun and shoot in self-defense. dormé proves she isn't sabé, vader claims, because she ends up leaving the troopers alive.

impressive as the threat of blowing up the executor may sound, in other words, dormé's response to the test indicates that the likelihood of followthrough from these handmaidens is low. and yet, vader isn't dismissing the threat -- he's encouraging it, using the very order palpatine gave anakin to kill count dooku ("do it") to frame the stakes. he doesn't want a bloodless exchange; he wants destructively self-defensive bloodshed. calling on the same enabling permission structure that led him to listen to one sith lord and murder another, vader calmly reveals that the only self-destruction mechanisms he cares about are for the handmaidens' moral qualms. (unfazed as he appears, one can imagine there's more going on beyond the mask; he's not just replaying his own induction into the ranks of the sith, he's gotten padmé doubles to threaten him with a version of his own "it's worth killing thousands to save padmé" reasoning.) dormé looks back at him in uncomprehending horror; though no lives end up being lost, vader has won the round. learning that sabé has been taken hostage by the grandson of a former separatist leader, the handmaidens ultimately see no choice but to join him in rescuing her. as he struts out ahead of them back on the executor, it's easy to imagine how this result underscores his notion of himself as a representative of unifying "order".

aided by his anonymous mask, vader emerges from the standoff as the victor simply because he could not be read (his motivations seem too insane for the handmaidens to comprehend at this point), even as he reveals to the reader a desire to turn the handmaidens into versions of padmé (or maybe at this point just sabé -- in any case, he claims they should join him to complete padmé's legacy) who can understand him (by making anakin's choice to sacrifice thousands for one: "do it"). as sabé is right in so much of her understanding of vader, vader is not wrong to understand sabé as someone who has already made that choice (beyond how she's dealt with the emperor and vader, she effectively sent a hundred naboo fighters to their deaths by trying to kill vader for padmé). what vader doesn't yet know, however, is that sabé has only been captured because she tried to prevent one person from taking actions that might seal hundreds of deaths ("you cannot do this", she says, in contrast to vader's "do it"). moved by regrets, sabé can read herself well enough to try and use the powers vader has given her to save others from making the same mistakes. and that's where this boils down. vader wants his mistakes repeated (with exceptions -- luke is better off dead than palpatine's slave, he seems to think), sabé wants them prevented. vader wants the world to read like a justification of his mistake, sabé wants him to acknowledge other readings and free himself and others in the world. we know where this is going; until then, anakin remains his own worst reader.

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