LogFAQs > #962430365

The thing about Darth Vader is that the more they show him in later Star Wars media, the less believable it is that his immortal soul got saved and got to become a force ghost.

Like in video games alone, you can see Darth Vader slaughtering dozens of people at a time. Any time they bring him back in a movie set between episodes 3 and 4, you see how brutal he is in murdering people and the carnage he leaves in his wake. When all you have is the original trilogy - hell, even the first six movies - the majority of what he actually does is off screen and all you know is that he's an intergalactic tyrant. That makes his redemption, him saving his son and saving the galaxy after spending so long terrorizing it, impactful as an emotional story beat.

When you have an image of Darth Vader stabbing a man through the back, whose only crime was to hamper his quest to commit planetary genocide, it makes that redemption much harder to swallow. And the more you encounter Darth Vader as an unstoppable force of malice and destruction, watching him cut through characters you've grown to love and appreciate in video games and movies - good, heroic characters whose deaths can only be described as cold-blooded murder - chucking an evil guy down a pit (who doesn't even die) and saving his own son's life hardly seems to justify him being admitted to Jedi Heaven.

More than anything, especially after episode IX, it seems to me that the Force favors blood relations and familial dynasties over actual balance.