ST Did Luke reveal that Anakin had been redeemed?

Lucas said that Anakin...

Hate using an iPhone

 

He doesn't. Not in that sense.

"It really has to do with learning," Lucas says, "Children teach you compassion. They teach you to love unconditionally. Anakin can't be redeemed for all the pain and suffering he's caused. He doesn't right the wrongs, but he stops the horror. The end of the Saga is simply Anakin saying, I care about this person, regardless of what it means to me. I will throw away everything that I have, everything that I've grown to love- primarily the Emperor- and throw away my life, to save this person. And I'm doing it because he has faith in me; he loves me despite all the horrible things I've done. I broke his mother's heart, but he still cares about me, and I can't let that die. Anakin is very different in the end. The thing of it is: The prophecy was right. Anakin was the Chosen One, and he does bring balance to the Force. He takes the one ounce of good still left in him and destroys the Emperor out of compassion for his son."

--George Lucas, The Making Of Revenge Of The Sith; page 221.

"You learn that Darth Vader isn’t this monster. He’s a pathetic individual who made a pact with the Devil and lost. And he’s trapped. He’s a sad, pathetic character, not a big evil monster. I mean, he’s a monster in that he’s turned to the dark side and he’s serving a bad master and he’s into power and he’s lost a lot of his humanity. In that way, he’s a monster, but beneath that, as Luke says in Return of the Jedi, early on, “I know there’s still good in you, I can sense it.” Only through the love of his children and the compassion of his children, who believe in him, even though he’s a monster, does he redeem himself."

--George Lucas, “Star Wars: The Last Battle,” Vanity Fair, 2005 .

Anakin cannot make up for his sins, but he can repent for his crimes and do the right thing, which is to save his son and the galaxy by killing Palpatine. He dies as a good man again, not as a Sith Lord like Palpatine and Dooku did.

 

Well, I stand corrected.

 

If the force allowed him to be a force ghost, I'd say he redeemed himself.

 

In terms of the Lucas's official canon, and now Disney's as well. Anakin was redeemed. The end of ROTJ shows that, there's no real way to argue that it didn't. Now is every single viewer obligated to buy his redemption, certainly now. But that is the official "company line" for now.

And yes, I do believe that Luke told his closest friends/allies about what happened onboard the second DS. But that doesn't automatically mean that they bought into the "redemption" thing like Luke did. After all, Luke was looking at it as some kind of pseudo-spiritual/philosophical form of "redemption" that a Jedi would have. His loved ones, don't really have that perspective. And Han & Leia's comments in TFA make me suspect this even more.

But I also think that fact that Anakin Skywalker was Darth Vader was kept a secret from the Galaxy as a whole, at least as far as Luke and co were concerned.

 

I think Luke would have revealed what happened to his close friends, but the rest of the galaxy wouldn't have enough evidence to believe this. Luke was the only one who saw Vader's redemption, and there wasn't any evidence of it. If by the time of TFA Luke himself is a myth, then events that he was the only witness to wouldn't have been well known and accepted. I know from the TFA novelization that Snoke and Kylo are aware of what happened, but it's possible that Snoke knew because of sensing it in the force.

Either way, I expect we'll find out more on this exact topic in Bloodline when we see how the galaxy takes to knowing Leia is the daughter of Vader (and if they know she is also the mother of Kylo Ren.)

 

Actually Luke is only a myth to Rey, the poor scavenger girl who grew up very isolated on some backwater desert planet. The rest of the Galaxy very much knows that Luke is real. Even Finn, the deserting Stormtrooper, knows that.

 

in the old EU (or the new one for that matter) - who knows about Vader / Anakin , his relationship to Luke and Leia etc. ?

did more people than Luke and Leia know ? I always wondered if in the time post- ROJ if the truth was out it would seriously affect their positions in power - "hang on your dad was Darth Vader!!? we don't want you running things "

 

In the old EU, while Luke and Leia were fairly open about being siblings and being Force Sensitive as early as The Thrawn Trilogy, it took a little longer for them to be open about being related to Vader. In I, Jedi, it's portrayed as a big reveal, from the point of view of one of Luke's students, that Luke is Vader's son.

The Empire, on the other hand, seem to know earlier - but it's not widely known - in the Glove of Darth Vader trilogy Trioculus knows Leia is Vader's daughter, but in The Thrawn Trilogy, Thrawn doesn't seem to know this, and in Luke Skywalker & The Shadows of Mindor, one of the Empire's better spymasters, a powerful Force-Sensitive, gets a big surprise when he probes Leia's mind and discovers she's Luke's sister (he already knows Luke is Vader's son).

In the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy - Leia's political opponents do bring it up - suggesting that she's going to follow Vader's path.

 

Something I never really thought of... Anakin telling Luke to tell Leia that Luke was right maybe was Anakin knowing that Leia would have a harder time accepting him as a father given all the atrocities he committed. Maybe it goes a little beyond him simply wanting his daughter to know he was redeemed in the end. He thought Luke would be able to convince Leia that there was still good in him even after the torture she and Han had endured at his hands and the destruction of Alderaan.

 

Just because someone is redeemed doesn't mean that there aren't consequences and there isn't fallout from 24 years of terrible decision making and doubling down on being a monster. The Force accepted Anakin back into the Light but the force isn't human and doesn't have human emotions. Vader's actions led to his wife's death, the torture of both his children (force lightning couldn't have felt pleasant), the destruction of a planet, and how many countless atrocities in service to the Emperor.

It would be a logical conclusion that Leia and everyone else had complicated feelings about it. It would be terrible storytelling if "he's redeemed, end of story" was the final verdict and it was never mentioned again.

That being said, I hope the "Vader Force Ghost" concept art was more Kylo's hallucination than an actual change to the canon "Anakin Force Ghost" in ROTJ.

 

The Anakin/Vader ghost idea is something I can't imagine was ever going to make it through to the finished product. Both because that was not at all reflected in the Force ghost that appears at the end of ROTJ, and because it has been asserted that the Sith cannot become Force ghosts. The trials that Yoda had to undergo to even prove his worth in learning how to Force ghost were all based around rejection of the Dark Side and sacrifice. I don't think "Vader" would have been able to exist as a Force ghost. Only Anakin.

That would have been one hell of a retcon, had that idea been approved, IMO.

I'm not sure to what extent Luke would have told people what had happened. Leia and Han surely would have known, because I trust Luke would have told them. But Snoke knowing is curious.

Because the line about the historians having it wrong implies that the Historians cite strategy and overconfidence as being the Emperor's downfall. So either Luke had publicly shared his side of the story and the historians dismissed him. Or he never publicly revealed what had happened.

Which means either Snoke believed Luke while the historians rejected Luke's story (provided Luke's story was common knowledge), or Snoke somehow knows very private information (if Luke only told a select few).

 

Bloodlines spoiler

Spoiler

Up until when this book takes place (~20 years post- ROTJ), it seems that only Luke, Leia and Han knew who Vader was and that he was redeemed. Ben Solo didn't know, and has to find out in a rather traumatic way.[/spoiler

 

It's quite possible that Snoke, as a Master of the Dark Side, saw the final confrontation over Endor in a vision subsequently. Yoda does say that it's possible to see flashes of the past through the Force. Snoke seems to be very attuned to the currents of the Force, as he senses the "awakening" that is Rey.