Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Watto’s Story?

The Star Wars neighborhood was rocked final month with the information of the seemingly inevitable death of Watto, the Toydarian junk supplier and former slave proprietor of Anakin Skywalker. However now the second is upon us, and as with all good tales, issues are slightly extra fascinating than they first appeared.

The second difficulty of Legacy of Vader, out this week from author Charles Soule, artists Luke Ross and Nolan Woodard, and letterist Joe Caramagna, takes a younger Kylo Ren to Tatooine on the primary cease of his new “let the previous die” tour, a scorching collabo with Darth Vader’s former attendant Vaneé as the 2 discover Vader’s titular legacy. The theme right here, because it was all through the primary difficulty of the sequence, is much less about Anakin’s life and his legacy: it’s about an consciousness of narrative, a factor totally different from fact, and the facility that may be held in projecting and presenting that narrative.

That is the place Ren and Vaneé differ. Kylo, nonetheless within the throes of tumult he went via in the course of the occasions of The Final Jedi, is intent on controlling his story, and the story of those who got here earlier than him, in a distinctly harmful method: he tells Vaneé continually that issues about Vader’s historical past as Anakin Skywalker must be eradicated and erased; he actually takes his lightsaber and makes use of it to carve an obfuscating gash over Anakin’s identify in an inventory of winners of the Boonta Eve Basic. To Kylo Ren, any historical past that doesn’t make his grandfather the imaginative and prescient he has of him in his thoughts—the imaginative and prescient he wants on this second of doubt—ought to merely not exist, simply as he lies to himself about his personal upbringing.

Vaneé, then again, wields the facility of the particular narrative of Vader’s historical past, revealing to Ren that he is aware of a lot of Vader’s historical past as a result of he’s been snooping on secret information Palpatine saved on his apprentice. At the same time as we all know that Vaneé is misinterpreting what that previous meant to Vader—that he held onto it for the ache and anger he derived from it, moderately than it being the hyperlink that will in the end see Anakin redeem himself—he once more makes the case all through right here to Kylo Ren, that somebody’s historical past simply can’t be erased from our understanding of them.

It’s this ideological push-and-pull that takes us and our gamers to the second Star Wars followers have waited for because it was previewed final month. Looking for to seek out out who dared to enslave the mighty Darth Vader, Ren has Vaneé take him to Watto’s junkyard, discovered empty and in a state of disrepair. It’s right here we get the panel glimpsed in final month’s previews: imagined via Vader’s eyes, however certainly imagined, as Ren surmises the imaginative and prescient he has of his grandfather in his head. The junkyard is deserted as a result of Vader should have come again, on the apex of his management of the darkish aspect, and slaughtered Watto. He will need to have completed this, as a result of that’s what Kylo Ren needs Vader’s legacy, and thru it his personal, to be about (to be honest to him, it’s a honest guess to make about Vader as an individual, albeit for very totally different and much funnier causes than Ren could ever contemplate).

However that’s not the case, a minimum of in response to Vaneé. Vader had different issues to do than be so beholden to his previous in the best way Kylo Ren imagines, apparently, and so, Watto lived. Maybe nonetheless lives, even—Legacy of Vader #2 doesn’t definitively inform us somehow, simply that Vader didn’t kill him. Watto might’ve died, he might’ve deserted the junk commerce and moved on elsewhere, we don’t know. Which is the purpose.

Star Wars followers love info. Who’s lifeless, who’s alive, who did what, when, the place, and the way. The canonical interpretation of its story has pushed reams of debate evaluation, it has, in some ways, particularly within the decade because it was overhauled and reset to be stuffed up with info anew, formed the consumption of that narrative above all else. The actual fact of Watto’s loss of life was arguably extra vital than Watto himself, merely for the mental curiosity that we didn’t know it. He by no means acquired a “canon” loss of life within the previous Expanded Universe, Legacy of Vader #2 teased that he may. And that mattered, as a result of, properly, Watto is a truth. He’s a determine of benefit within the info of Anakin Skywalker’s life, an information level who stood out for the little we knew of and round him, and that mattered as a lot as regardless of the story that will ship these info. I’d think about only a few individuals truly cared whether or not or Watto was lifeless or alive earlier than Legacy of Vader teased his destiny, in comparison with the quantity of people that craved the the what, the when, the the place, and the how.

And but, the truth that we have no idea the destiny of this character, one seemingly so vital to the tapestry of a personality who’s life we have now spent almost 5 many years being fascinated with, is way extra fascinating that the regurgitation of “Darth Vader went again to Tatooine and killed the uncomfortably antisemitic stereotype that owned him as a child”. It’s not the primary time Soule has completed this sort of factor when writing about Vader, both—the “canon” of how his lightsaber got here to be was given a banal origin story the place individuals might need imagined some grander fact, to push again in opposition to this concept that each side of Star Wars‘ story will need to have some predestined, highly effective, vital truth at its root.

It’s the very factor that sits on the coronary heart of Legacy of Vader, a narrative that’s, thus far, much less about that legacy and extra about the best way we inform tales—the methods they are often chopped and adjusted, the methods they are often obfuscated to suit right into a preconceived assumption, and most crucially above all, that some components of a narrative simply aren’t as grand and vital as we’d have imagined. Typically a lifeless Toydarian is only a lifeless Toydarian. Besides after they may be alive—and possibly the truth that we’d by no means know the truth is for one of the best.

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