Just to touch on the whole "I am your father" thang...
Why is it when Vader says that, Luke's reaction, and ours, is that Darth is actually Anakin? Up until that point, we've been told Darth and Anakin are two different people and we have no reason to believe otherwise. Based on that perspective, wouldn't the logical conclusion be that Darth is saying that he, as Darth Vader: seperate entity from Anakin, is actually Luke's father? I find it very interesting that in a split second Darth Vader actually ceases to exist because of one little sentence, yet there's no real reason for that to happen. OK, so we make the leap and decide Darth is actually Anakin behind the mask...why did we automatically assume then that Darth didn't exist at all as a seperate person? We didn't find out for sure until ROTJ that that was the case. Maybe it's just hindsight, but were these questions fans were wondering at the time? It really seems like Luke is reacting right away as if this means Darth is Anakin, not that he's possibly Darth Vader: seperate entity's spawn.
I guess the mask is the key factor here...if my maskless arch-enemy, who I had been told killed my father, suddenly says that HE'S my father, is my first assumption really going to be, "oh, that must mean it's actually my dead father who got plastic surgery and has been living under an assumed identity for 20 years now"? I think not.
Good point. There's no reason we couldn't have guessed that he was told all along that "Anakin Skywalker" was his father when REALLY Darth Vader was his father (who had KILLED Anakin Skywalker).
So it's like if he was raised thinking that Alexander Hamilton was his dad, when really it was Aaron Burr.
But most of us are so used to thinking of it as "Anakin = Vader" because we've grown up with the series as a trilogy. Not all of us are old enough to remember seeing ESB in the theater and spending time speculating about what was going to happen next, three years down the road in Jedi.
This post has been edited by KurganX: 02 August 2007 - 01:05 AM